Interview with ​Koren Zailckas

Meet NUNUM's Contributor: Koren Zailckas

11/7/2025

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Interview with Koren Zailckas

What was the first book you remember picking and reading by yourself?

I’m not sure it was the very first book I picked out and read on my own, but I discovered In Watermelon Sugar on my parents’ bookshelf when I was still quite young. It had been a gift to my father from my favorite second cousin, so reading it felt a bit like receiving a message from beyond the grave. And even though the subject matter was definitely not meant for children—full of sex, violence, and surrealism—the stripped-down language made it strangely accessible.

Today, I’d probably describe it as a post-apocalyptic allegory. But as a kid, I just knew it felt like a perfect portrait of my family’s intergenerational trauma. I come from a long line of addiction, abuse, and denial, and Brautigan somehow captured the two most available paths for people living under emotional tyranny: compliance or self-erasure.

What writer(s) or which book(s) influenced your decision to become a writer?

Mary Karr, George Saunders, and Christopher Kennedy. I attended Syracuse University as a journalism major.

I’d been writing for as long as I could remember, but my parents had nudged me toward journalism rather than creative writing, believing it was my only shot at earning a living with words. Thankfully, in between learning how to write ledes and nut grafs, I wandered into a poetry workshop taught by Mary Karr. I had never met anyone with such electric charisma, or such a visceral grip on language that could be both brutal and tender in the same breath. She saw something in me too, I think, because soon I was babysitting her son, lingering in her kitchen to pet her cats, sip iced tea, and talk Nabokov.

When I told her I planned to graduate and follow the safe path into journalism, as intended, she didn’t argue—she just looked at me and said, quietly but clearly, “It is possible to make a living telling the stories you actually want to tell.” I still went on to work at a magazine, filing copy and chasing deadlines, but I never forgot what she said. A year later, I started writing Smashed.

Is there a writing craft book that you would recommend to new writers?

I'm an Edith Wharton junkie, so I always return to The Writing of Fiction for its meta-advice on navigating the tension between individual appetites and social order. Wharton insists that writers need perspective that is both of their time and above their time—that it’s our responsibility to rise above the moment, take the bird’s-eye view, and offer something broader and more enduring. I also highly recommend Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House, especially for his insights on the writer’s task of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.

And then there’s Elizabeth Benedict’s The Joy of Writing Sex—an absolute must-read. Too many writers shy away from sex scenes, afraid they won’t seem “literary.” But anything can be literary if it’s done well. Besides, what reveals a character more honestly than the way they touch or respond to closeness?

Is there a writer who has influenced your current writing style?

I’ll be honest—I hated the Bennington Writing Seminars when I was there.

Or at least, I hated the prevailing wisdom among some of my professors that humor and drama couldn’t coexist. That kind of black-and-white thinking made no sense to me. I had been raised in the church of George Saunders, after all—the man who teaches that the key to writing stories with depth is to complicate every sentence, word by word, until the page starts to hum with contradiction and life. Yes, life can be heavy and meaningful—but it’s also frivolous, ridiculous, awkward, bright, and wildly inconsistent.

That’s what I love about Lorrie Moore: the way hilarity and devastation not only coexist in her stories, but lean against each other like old friends. It’s an incredibly difficult feat to pull off. But it’s the kind of magic I aspire to, too.

Why write flash fiction?

I am a late-comer to flash. I only just began writing it earlier this year, when I found myself in my mid-forties--the mother of five children, ranging in age from 16 years to 18 months.

Initially, I was drawn to it as something I could write in between scrubbing jam off the walls and explaining the dangers of inhalants and musician boyfriends. But once I began, something about it rang familiar. It reminded me of an exercise George Saunders gave at the New Yorker Festival back in the early 2000s. I can’t recall the exact parameters—maybe we had to write a 200-word story using only 50 words. By the end, everyone’s work inevitably unraveled into joyful gibberish. But the beauty was in the constraint: it forced the story into a perfect narrative arc. It’s the same with flash—when you tighten the form, the story becomes its most distilled, essential shape.

What advice would you give someone who is just starting to send their work out to journals?

Don't let the bastards get you down. The only difference between a published writer and an unpublished one is delusion/persistence. Everyone gets rejected ten times more than they get accepted—it’s just part of the terrain. Take the notes. Revise like hell. Bleed into the edits if you have to. But don’t give up. Some people will get you. Some won’t. The ones who don’t? They were never your people anyway.

If one of your characters escaped the page and showed up in your kitchen, who would it be—and what would they want?

Probably Gracie/Tracy the antiheroine of my last novel, The Drama Teacher. She'd undoubtedly want me to pour her a glass of wine and watch her kids "just for a few hours," which would stretch into the next morning, and I’d agree—half-charmed, half-hypnotized. By the time she slipped out the door, I’d be pretty sure she had my credit card number, possibly my Netflix password, and definitely a new set of house keys. But I'd still miss her the second she was gone.

You write poetry in addition to prose. What's the most unusual place or moment that inspired a poem?

Back when I was dating, I wrote a poem constructed entirely of phrases I found in men's Tinder profiles. It was filled with things like: "my mustache is 100% real" and "this is a hook-up app not a church so don't @ me."

If you could rewrite the ending of any classic novel, which one would it be—and how would you change it?

Oh man—my first instinct is to change The Age of Innocence. But the truth is, doing so would ruin it. Newland Archer is a man who can’t change—not completely. He doesn’t have the nerve to stop caring what other people think, and that’s exactly what draws him to Countess Olenska in the first place. She embodies the daring and authenticity he can’t access in himself. I suppose what I really want to change isn’t the novel—it’s the ending of Edith Wharton’s own story. I wish she had known authentic, sustaining love in her life. Not just the weight of a bipolar husband or the ache of a narcissistic lover. There was something rare and tender between her and her lifelong friend Walter Berry—they’re buried side by side, after all. But I wish she’d gotten to build a real life with someone who matched her brilliance, her wit, her appetite for beauty and meaning. Someone who saw her completely.

Describe your writing practice.

I’m not precious about when or how I write. I’ve learned to grab whatever slivers of time I can—between revising students' essays or fielding a meltdown before school drop-off. I write at kitchen counters in between laundry cycles, in parked cars during my kids' music lessons, on the floor of my office while someone asks for a snack they can very much get themselves. But when I’m working on a novel or memoir, each project takes on a sound of its own. Every book gets its own Spotify playlist. I’m always adding to it, chasing down songs that crack open the mood I’m trying to capture. I listen while I write, while I rewrite, while I stir pasta, while I drive kids to playdates. The music keeps the pulse of the story alive, even when I’m far from the page.

Koren Zailckas is a writing instructor and international bestselling author (Smashed, Fury, Mother Mother and The Drama Teacher). She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
And if you are in need of more -
Instagram: @KorenZailckas
Twitter: @KorenZailckas
Website: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/165210/koren-zailckas/