Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest, Maggie Kast author of SIDE BY SIDE BUT NEVER FACE TO FACE.

Maggie began writing in the 1990s, following a career in modern dance as founder, director and principal choreographer of Chicago Contemporary Dance Theater. She is also the author of a memoir, The Crack Between the Worlds and a novel,  A Free, Unsullied Land.

She and her husband had five children, of whom three are now living, and she has three grandchildren, four step grandchildren, and two step great-grandchildren. 

Norm; Good day Maggie and thanks for participating in our interview.

Why do you write and how did you get started in writing? What keeps you going?

Maggie: I write for the same reason I used to make dances (choreo-graphy = dance writing) and really from the same motivation that once yielded babies and still yields bread. As long as ingredients are available, whether words or gestures or gametes, flour and yeast, my desire to make things keeps me going. 

Norm: What helps you focus when you write?

Maggie: I write best when I first wake up, before talking or listening to speech. I go straight from dreams to my work before daily events can distract or preoccupy me. 

Norm: How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing? 

Maggie: I am a white woman of a  certain age raised by liberal parents who came from the Midwest. Inevitably this background colors my writing in many ways. In memoir it determines my personal story of discovering dance at a grade school my parents helped found. In fiction my parents’ coming of age in the 1930s gave me the time and place for my novel. The narrow aspects of my background led me to marry someone very different, and his upbringing and point of view are responsible for some of the stories in my collection. Likewise, my interest in “otherness” led me to research the animist religion of a Hmong family for my novella.

Norm: What's the most difficult thing for you about being a writer? 

Maggie: The necessity to dig deeply into self and other in terms of emotion and motivation. You don’t always like what you find!

There’s plenty of “eye of newt and toe of frog” lurking in the pre-conscious, along with secrets, fantasies and dreams, just waiting for the writer to dredge them up. 

Norm: Why have you been drawn to the novella? As a follow up, are there aesthetic advantages and disadvantages peculiar to the novella? Does it even have a form?  

Maggie:To me the novella has no more specific form than the novel, which can take as many forms as there are writers. The term really just refers to length (longer than a story, shorter than a novel), though writer Ian McEwan considers this length “the perfect form of prose fiction.”

I read or re-read many great novellas while I was working on my forthcoming book: Camus’ The Stranger, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and my favorite, Ian MacEwan’s On Chesil Beach. I found each one good in its own way. 

Norm: In fiction as well as in non-fiction, writers very often take liberties with their material to tell a good story or make a point. But how much is too much? 

Maggie: Norm,what do you mean by “liberties?” In fiction all characters and all events are possible. Sometimes, if one writes about a well-known historical time or place, the elements of fact should be correct. But in general, fiction is a free-for-all. The more invention, the merrier!

Non-fiction is different. Since the category of creative non-fiction was defined, in the early 1950s, it has become required that writing in this genre be fact-checked, like journalism, down to the smallest detail. No liberties here!

Norm: What served as the primary inspiration for  SIDE BY SIDE BUT NEVER FACE TO FACE?

Maggie: The book began with the novella, inspired by my confrontations with “otherness” in the forms of my Austrian refugee husband and much later, my psychiatrist.

I realized that we can live very closely, side by side,  with those we care most about, while never knowing them truly face to face.

Norm: How did you decide you were ready to write the book? 

Maggie: I never decided I was ready to write the book. As writing teacher Natalie Goldberg tells her classes, there’s only one way to write (she mimes it in the air on an imaginary pad) 

And that initial writing is followed by endless revision, critique, and more revision. However, after I finished the novella I put it together with stories I’d written over 20 years and some new ones, and that process was intuitive and quick.

Norm: What do you hope will be the everlasting thoughts for readers who finish your novella?

 Maggie: I’ll let Greta speak to that one:

“I don’t hold that one way of life is more or less advanced or more natural or peaceful than another. Rather I find that difference in itself can strip away the vanities, revealing what makes us human.

If I eat with a fork and you eat with chopsticks, these customs can cancel each other out, revealing a shared truth: we both eat. Though I dance to make the rain fall and you seed clouds from a plane, we both seek water. If you come from the sky and I come from a god, we both need a tale to explain our short time on earth. From worlds apart, we see each other face to face.” 

Maggie: Greta is based largely on me, but no one says she has to tell my truth. This is a work of fiction. I started with memory and took off from there, hoping to explore her deeper, perhaps unexpected truths through the pleasures of invention, of “what if?”

Norm: What was one of the most surprising things you learned in creating SIDE BY SIDE BUT NEVER FACE TO FACE? 

Maggie: Most surprising was what I learned from Garth Greenwell at Writing X Writers Manuscript Boot Camp: that the work is more a novel than a collection, that the characters can and should run through all the stories, that a book can be both a novel and stories and it might be best just to call it “a fiction.

Maggie: My new WEB SITE, has an extended informal bio with pictures as well as links to interviews, videos, and other essays and stories. 

Norm: What is next for Maggie Kast?

Maggie: I’m writing food essays, essays about food that combine memoir, history and cultural criticism.

A longtime home cook, I’ve used food a lot in my memoir and fiction, but except for a short stint reviewing restaurants for a neighborhood newspaper, I’ve not done explicit food writing.

Norm: As this interview comes to an end, what question do you wish that someone would ask about SIDE BY SIDE BUT NEVER FACE TO FACE, but nobody has?

Maggie: Someone: Where can we learn about Hmong culture?

Maggie: Ideally, from the burgeoning volume  of Hmong literature in English. I would suggest, How Do I Begin?: a Hmong American Literary Anthology, edited by the Hmong-American Writers Circle; Bamboo Among the Oak: Contemporary Writing by Hmong Americans, edited by Mai Neng Moua (who also kindly edited the Hmong material in my book);

The Latehomecover: a Hmong Family Memoir, by Kao Kalia Yang, and The Bride Price: a Hmong Wedding Story, also by Mai Neng Moua. The Hmong Studies Journal https://www.hmongstudiesjournal.org/ is a peer-reviewed scholarly online journal with excellent discussion of Hmong history, Hmong culture, Hmong people, and other facets of the Hmong experience in the U.S., Asia and around the world.

Follow Here To Read Norm's Review of SIDE BY SIDE BUT NEVER FACE TO FACE