Ask the Author: Christina Kapp

Christina Kapp’s Inheritance is included in the March issue. She talks with us about her buttons, drinking herself to death, rescue, and more.

1. What do your buttons look like?

Well, my most often used buttons are white and they have letters on them and much prefer the more musical moniker, “keys” as they don’t make any pretense of holding things together and make a lovely tapping sound. Perhaps that’s why I write so much. I just like the soothing tap tap tapping. The funny thing is, my kids are learning to type and when they ask me where the Q is or where the C is I find I have to really think about it to remember. It’s all muscle memory now. My brain can no longer be bothered remembering where this key or that key is, the same way it refuses to bother itself remembering where I put the car keys when I came in the door. Also, I prefer not to have buttons on my clothing as they’re very judgmental. I broke one of the large black buttons on my winter coat in half–I’m not sure how–but it’s still attached and I leave it there because children find it fascinating. Apparently buttons are not supposed to break in half. Perhaps it’s because stuffed creatures have buttons for eyes. Broken ones imply some sort of blindness and that gets into all sorts of Freudian territory which makes everyone nervous.

2. How would you drink yourself to death?

I might have a hard time drinking myself to death as I only drink red wine (and the occasional beer) and I’m not sure if you can drink wine in quantities large enough to kill you. Do some recreational damage, certainly, but death would be such a slow process that it really wouldn’t satisfy the suicidal impulse. You could probably get there faster on a death-by-Flintstones-vitamins binge. Even plain old Tylenol would be much more efficient. There was that movie where the guy tried to commit suicide by drinking. Leaving Las Vegas, I think? Did he pull it off? I can’t remember. Anyway, you’d have to be a vodka-in-the-contact-lens-bottle sort of woman (a friend of mine used that description once and I never forgot it) to really make any reasonable progress toward an alcoholic death, and I can’t even stand the smell of a margarita.

3. What do you collect?

Junk. Tons of it. God, it’s everywhere. Please make it go away. Oh and paper. Some of that is important, but it’s too hard to tell which bits so I just keep it all. Also books. We have a lot of books, but mostly they’re friendly and they can stay.

4. Why must everything in literature happen in circles? Why not a nice square or perhaps a parallelogram?

Interesting question. There are lots of ways to look at this, but first and foremost I think that writers suck at math and calculating the geometric area of a variety of shapes is just too much to deal with. Circles only require pi and we can easily confuse that with an edible pie which makes us happy and serves just as well. If I’m remembering correctly the term “narrative geometry” has been bandied about with respect to Henry James, but he was smarter than most of us. Smarter than I am, anyway. In any case, I have this funny memory of being very, very young and sitting with a pencil and making loops, one after another after another, like a long string of cursive, lowercase e’s. I remember that I was trying figure out how to write and I was very frustrated that I couldn’t make my loops mean anything the way the grownup’s loops apparently did. Nobody saw anything in my strings of e’s at all. I can’t quite place how old I would have been when this was going on, but I have a strange peripheral memory that at about the same time we briefly had a dog named Jim Croce. I say briefly because we but we had to send him to a farm because he kept leaping over the couch. The obvious solution to these problems would be to freaking sit down and teach the kid a few more letters and move the couch against the wall, but I’m not sure either of those things happened. Well, guess I did eventually learn my letters. Interestingly, however, by high school I had become slightly obsessed with copying various people’s handwriting. My 11th grade roommate at boarding school had beautiful handwriting. It was like calligraphy. I practiced that stuff all day long. I also love that boxy handwriting architects use. Anyway, I have long since lost any and all handwriting skills as it’s just so much easier to keep pushing buttons on keyboards and now I can’t do much of anything else and there we are! Back to question #1. Circles just happen that way.

5. How would you rescue someone? How would you like to be rescued?

I don’t think I want to be rescued. I am a Red Cross certified lifeguard, however, and I’m happy to rescue anyone in the water who might feel the need. However, I don’t recall ever being rescued. I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s and that was definitely a suck-it-up-kid sort of era and I think I still operate under that assumption. If you don’t hold it together and deal, no one is going to do it for you.

A story: When I was a kid I rode horses competitively. Very competitively. I mean from the time I was six or seven years old I rode five to six days a week and I was always preparing for some competition or other. My version of clean was eau de tack soap. I started with a high school riding team in the fifth grade. This went on until I went to college and, quite abruptly, gave gave up horses completely and forever. Anyway, for a while I was riding this horse that used to fall over. I know that sounds crazy (and it was) but she was a funny little horse who used to lose her legs under her sometimes and we’d both hit the ground. My coach was always blaming me for it. She said I leaned in too much around corners and was throwing the horse off balance, which, with hindsight, is pretty stupid because no other horse I ever rode fell over like that and I was a scrawny little thing anyway so it’s quite unlikely that my 100 or so pounds was going to topple over a thousand pounds of horse. Nevertheless, this loony mare had a thing for falling down. So I’m in this competition and my coach says to me, “If she falls over I’m not coming to help you,” and sure enough the horse did fall over and my coach, true to her word, did not come in to help me. She just stood there, frowning, looking at me like, “So there you are. Again.” What was horrible and mean about this is that not only did I end up with my ass (and face) in the dirt yet again, but it was an indoor ring and some of those, like this one, used an oil-based dirt that helps keep the dust to a minimum. So, not only did I have to deal with the embarrassment of having everybody watch as I tried to brush us both off, remount and finish the course, but the dirt was greasy and stuck to everything so I ended up literally covered in it for the rest of the day. Turns out, we discovered some weeks later that this horse had an inner ear infection and that’s why she kept falling over. Does that mean that anyone had any sympathy for my having added to my lifetime fall quotient by a considerable number? (It was already considerable, but I’m playing on your heartstrings here.) No. No rescues. You hit the ground, you’d better get your butt up. Let someone know if you need an ambulance. If not, get on with it. So yeah, I take the “get back on the horse” thing to a bit of an extreme.

6. What kind of name would a man need to have to be considered talented?

Oh well now this is something I am interested in. That depends on what sort of talent we’re talking about. I am quite certain that if you name a boy child properly he will become a major league baseball player. I am also quite certain that you can shove a girl child in a pageant direction with the right name. The other day, I was sitting in a parking structure outside the mall loathing the place for all the usual reasons but particularly because it wasn’t open yet and I thought it ought to be open so I was sitting in the dark attempting to read an article by Colm Tóibín who has a super cool name but of course it’s an Irish name and I would say that all Irish names are super cool except that’s not really true because my last name used to be an Irish name (Kapp is my married name) and it was as dorky as it could possibly be. This makes me wonder if maybe you need an accent to have a super cool name but I have a friend who has an accent in her name and mostly it seems like it’s just a pain in the ass because it’s hard to type and everyone leaves it out. But your question is not about me anyway, it’s about a man and I’m not a man nor do I have any real interest in being a man either with or without talent. However, as a writer I have often thought about using a pseudonym for various reasons and the name I have in mind does use a man’s first name as the last name and I do think there’s something very satisfying in that, but perhaps that’s because I go through life largely as Chris, which is genderless and perhaps not as much fun as having both a female and male gendered name used together. Would any of this make me talented? Or make a man talented? That much I cannot say. However, yes. I do think we make judgements about talent, intelligence, looks–nearly everything–based on names. For fiction, then, a name is important. If you name a character Heather or Kimberlee, you’re making a statement. If you name him Mookie Wilson or Chet Lemon, you’d better include season tickets.