Kathryn Harlan
Kathryn Harlan writes genre-bending fiction, usually about queer people, and when she’s not doing that she teaches both academic and creative writing. A lot of her writing is about the stories we tell ourselves to understand life, how narratives shape our societies, relationships, and identities, and what happens when those narratives begin to deteriorate or come into conflict with each other.
She grew up in Southern California, in a distant suburb of Los Angeles, and received a BA in English from CSU-LA. From there, she moved to Wisconsin for an MFA in fiction from UW-Madison. I graduated in 2020 and taught writing there until 2022, when my short story collection, Fruiting Bodies, was published by WW Norton.
Q: How did the idea for the Fruiting Bodies collection come about and what was the process like in creating multiple short stories to be featured together?
I’d drafted about half of Fruiting Bodies before I really started thinking of it as a collection, so I was only conscious of writing the stories together for the last few of them. While I did know some were in conversation with each other — “Algal Bloom” and “Endangered Animals” have always felt like mirrors, for example — most of the connective tissue I cultivated during revision. Some of it was just a natural consequence of having written the collection over a continuous period; in the roughly four years I wrote the stories, I only drafted two that didn’t end up in the book. So there are thematic and stylistic connections I didn’t plan at the time, but could identify with a year or four of hindsight (and the help of various editors) to elaborate on in a more intentional way.
These Sapphic Stories Book Club author profiles are compiled by founder Aliya Bree Hall. Aliya is a freelance journalist and author who founded the book club in 2021 to uplift sapphic stories and celebrate LGBTQ+ authors. This excerpt has been lifted from an interview Aliya conducted with our December 2024 author. You can read the full Q&A by joining the book club.
