We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kathy Flann a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kathy, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I’d been composing “serious” literary work for years, which I loved, but there was an unexpressed side of me lurking, waiting for the full moon. It finally burst free one night when I was sitting at my desk trying to write an essay on a deadline but couldn’t concentrate because my husband’s zombie show in the next room was SO LOUD. The zombies screamed and screamed. I kept thinking, Wow, someone should really help them. They’re really bad at this. The next thing I knew – instead of the essay I was supposed to write – I was composing advice for the zombies. The piece came together much more quickly than most things I write, and it was fun. It brought back the feeling I’d had about writing back when I was a kid, the pure joy.

But then, I didn’t know what this piece was, exactly. Was it fiction? Nonfiction? I eventually submitted it to a magazine as an “experimental” piece, and it was accepted quickly. I found myself writing more short advice guides for movie monsters – swamp monsters, witches, werewolves, cyborgs, and so on. As I went back to the films in which these creatures starred, I noticed that quite often, they were just minding their own monster business when humans came along and started hassling them. So, I wrote a short piece entitled, “How to Survive a Human Attack: A Compendium of Human Repellents.” The repellents included things like bragging about your podcast, group texts, and mouth sounds while chewing.

This series of pieces naturally started to become a book. Then, after it was accepted for publication, there was this whole other fun period when I was drafting, and my agent, my editor, and I kicked around ideas. We laughed so much. Then, during the phase when the illustrator took the suggestions and did his thing with them, it added more layers to the humor. Writing had never been collaborative in this way – this felt like a writer’s room at a TV show.

After it came out, it got some great attention, even being featured in a gift guide at The New York Times’ Wirecutter. But what really makes it all worth it, of course, is that those movie monsters finally got some help.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

When it comes to literary pursuits, I’ve always been real go-getter – as a kid, I’d do whatever it took to finish the book I was reading, even if meant staying up until 4am with a flashlight. And there was no one at school who daydreamed like I did. It was easy to disappear into a world of make-believe during math and science, of course, but I could even do it during English class. From there, it was pretty much a straight shot to enrolling in college with a major of Undecided.

When the college finally forced my hand, I circled back to English because it was what I did all the time anyway – read and write. But if my dad asked, I claimed it was because Fortune 500 companies were scouting for graduates who could talk about Thomas Hardy.

I went on to get two master’s degrees, one in English and one in creative writing, and while these technically could have been completed in four years, why shoot for the bare minimum? I did them in six.

With the MFA, I was able to teach – and I found myself in the classroom with bright students, many of whom did not daydream at all while I was talking. That job has taken me all over, even to England for five years, and now I teach creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. I also enjoy doing freelance editing for clients who are working on creative projects, such as novels. A wealth of experience with imaginary worlds is quite handy, as it turns out, for supporting other writers as they bring their manuscripts to fruition.

Meanwhile, I am always, of course, working on my own writing – my short stories, essays, and humor pieces have appeared in such publications as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Slate, McSweeney’s, The North American Review, and The Gettysburg Review. I’m the author of two award-winning short story collections, a craft book, and a humor book entitled, How to Survive a Human Attack: A Guide for Werewolves, Mummies, Cyborgs, Ghosts, Nuclear Mutants, and Other Movie Monsters. I’ve been a fellow at the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Moulin a Nef Residency in France. Honors include Maryland Arts Council Awards and the Baker Artist Award. It’s odd to think that daydreaming can affect real life so much.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

In the movies, writers do their work in remote cabins, clacking away on keyboards and smoking pipes. The only sound is maybe the crackling fire or the sigh of a dog. The writer completes the novel in this pastoral setting, stands up from the chair, and then drives out of the woods, returning to the city, clutching a box that contains the manuscript. In a New York high rise, the publisher greets the writer as a returning hero. Millions of copies are sold!

It is a very hard idea to shake because it’s so pervasive. As an introvert, I so wanted this to be my life. But the notion of the lone writer, while lovely and romantic, is untrue. Writing is a pursuit that’s reliant on community.

Many writers hone their craft within the context of workshops – seminar classes in which people critique each other’s work. These might be within degree programs at universities or in non-degree courses in a community. I was no different.

Even after that, every writer I know relies on other writers for feedback. When something has been revised a thousand times, we all need readers with distance from the piece to tell us if it makes sense.

If a writer is fortunate enough to have work accepted someplace, a good editor will also collaborate to improve a piece. Even though one person’s name appears by the title of a published piece, there are always a lot of other people who were involved.

As with most complicated lessons, this one had to be unlearned many times, not just once. I would work on something and grow frustrated for a long time before remembering that I’d skipped an important step – seeking feedback. Now, though, I’ve grown to love the communal nature of the process, and I look forward to the exchange. It always amazes me how much deeper a piece can get when others share their perspectives. Instantly, new ideas open, new areas of inquiry – and problems that seemed intractable shrink or even evaporate. Other people are simply crucial to the writing process.

And hey, these days, if I wanted, I could do all of this via Zoom and still be in a cabin by myself, rocking a cable knit sweater and a pipe. So, it’s a happy ending.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

The internet is comprised of writing. When we scroll in bed at night, and we click on an interesting personal essay, someone wrote that. And the person wrote it because they wanted to connect with others, like yourself. Writers do this work out of love for the power of stories, not for the pay, which is low.

One thing that non-creatives may not realize is that it’s easy to show appreciation for a piece that strikes a chord. Just share it. This might mean sharing it on social media, sharing through email, or requesting that the local library carry a writer’s book. Sure, a lot of clicks and shares can help the writer’s credibility with the magazine or publisher, but on a more substantive level, the writer just wants to get the piece out there because that’s where it was always designed to be. Out there.

When I’ve had something out that I need to promote, I’ve reached out to ask friends and family – like, Hey, can you post about X for me? They are genuinely so happy to support my work. They just might not know that helping can be this simple.

Published writing has been crafted with the intent to connect with other people. But the nature of the medium is that it’s a one-way communication. If it were a letter or an email, the recipient could write back. But with published writing, the hope is that momentum goes the other direction — that you send it forward to someone else.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kathyflann.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/keflann/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kathy.flann.5
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathy-flann-3282525/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/kathyflann
• Threads: keflann

Image Credits
These are all my own pictures.