Interview with MK Sturdevant

Meet NUNUM's Summer 2020 contributor: MK Sturdevant

8/7/2020

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Interview with MK Sturdevant

MK lent a very literary touch to

our Summer 2020 issue and we've been seeing things differently ever since. Recently we were lucky enough to get a little bit of MK's time and by now it feels like I don't even have to ask it, but I will, what is the first book you remember sitting down with and reading all by yourself?

Big Max by Kin Platt

Eros, Manifest words by MK Sturdevant, art by Leah Oates

I love it when an answer sends me on a search, and your just did, so I'll have to get back to you on it. What about more recently, what is the last book you read that made you think damn that was a good book?

From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

Yet another one for the list, thank you MK. What about when you are on holiday, who are your go to writers?

Anne Carson, Anne Enright, Silvia Federici & N. K. Jemisin

What about influences, were there any books or writers that influenced you to become a writer?

I never really decided, it was something I was always doing in one form or another. But I remember reading Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own' when I was a kid, while sharing a room with my sister, and thinking that was the goal, to have a place to write, and to take it seriously.

Space definitely has big influence on our lives. What about more recently, whose work do you admire these days?

Eros, Manifest words by MK Sturdevant, art by Leah Oates

Anne Carson

Eros, Manifest words by MK Sturdevant, art by Leah Oates

On holidays and not, I'll have to make the time to get into her work. I know there are a lot out there, but do you have a craft book that really hit home with you?

Steering the Craft by Ursula K. LeGuin.

Oh I didn't know she had a craft book, thank you for that. What about your writing, is there a writer who has influenced your current writing style?

The humorous despair of Thomas Bernhard is kind of infectious to me.

I like articulations of despair that aren't (merely) bleak. And the depth, terror, and beauty in Breece D'J Pancake's stories blow me away. I like the varying perspectives in Carmen Maria Machado's 'In the Dream House' so much as well. These are things I've been obsessed with lately, but I don't know about influences, I mean I hope they influence me.

I want to change directions here for a minute: pen, pencil or phone, which one do you reach for when you need to write something down?

Eros, Manifest words by MK Sturdevant, art by Leah Oates

Expo pen. An entire wall of my room is white-board paper.

Eros, Manifest words by MK Sturdevant, art by Leah Oates

Oh you just got my envy. What a wonderful idea, I've been struggling with post-it notes for years but I think you just changed that. Staying with the advice vibe for a little longer, what advice would you give someone who is just starting to send their work out to journals?

Be an avid reader, and notice what you like when you read. Rejections aren't personal. Just keep studying, aka reading. Above all, a quantity of acceptances or followers or fame can't be the only goal.

What art serves the world now? There's no reason to rush.

It's hard to make art under the demands of capital. Think about what connections your work will form, what opportunities will be created by its being read or seen.

Well said, so then in that vein, what's the point of writing these days, with everything that is going on?

In the US, I think writers (of any or no record) might want to dislodge the measure of successful writing from its mooring in sales or personal attention.

Eros, Manifest words by MK Sturdevant, art by Leah Oates

If we can write, we can chronicle what's happening,

Eros, Manifest words by MK Sturdevant, art by Leah Oates

write political letters or op eds, write about what's going on, or even just write fiction or anything else. Art-making indicates time was spent creatively, in an expression of anger, true love, whatever. That act reaffirms one's humanity. And there's another more important thing: something like 15% of American adults have "below basic" reading skills. So who's going to read your awesome creative writing? I think American writers are called to create not just work, but readers, as well as to expand capacities for working in and reading in multiple languages.

So yes, I'm smuggling in a recommendation for writers to volunteer to

to teach reading, especially in populations oppressed by carceral policies and prejudice, aka all of these United States. Teaching kids between grades 2-4 to read who are falling behind helps resist that trend, and it creates readers. And I think that thinking seriously about reading is the best way to learn to write.

Eros, Manifest words by MK Sturdevant, art by Leah Oates

MK Sturdevant is a writer, philosopher, and editor from the Midwest.

Her work appears or is forthcoming in Orion, Flyway, Alluvian, Newfound, Kestrel, Lily Poetry Review, x-r-a-y LitMag, Oye Drum, Great Lakes Review and elsewhere. She was listed in the Top 25 Emerging Writers with Glimmer Train Press, and was a finalist for the Montana Prize in Fiction in 2019. She recently completed a draft of a first novel.

You can keep up with MK on twitter.