Kate Gale on college homelessness and her book tour
by Julia Diorio
In honor of Kate Gale’s upcoming event at City Lights, we have featured her previous Instagram Live interview on the Three Rooms Press page that came out the day before her release of Under a Neon Sun. Watch the interview here. For more information on her August event with Helen Benedict and Denise Frost, click here.
Julia Diorio: Why did you decide to incorporate the pandemic when writing your novel, especially from the point of view of a homeless and poor college student
Kate Gale: Well, when I was a college student I was a very poor college student, and occasionally homeless. I was very concerned about the many California college students who are homeless and because of the high cost of living in California, are often permanently homeless. I was just very temporarily homeless, i would justbe saving up for my first and last months rent to get back into an apartment which was pretty cheap back in the 80s. But now in California, it’s much more expensive. So I taught at community colleges when I was first teaching and became aware that students were often saving up two or three thousand to get back into an apartment, and that was just too high a hurdle for a lot of students. So I’d always wanted to write about that and when the pandemic came along I had a little more time. Before that I was mostly a poet, and I write librettos to operas as well. But the pandemic gave me those dreaming blocks of space and time that are required to write a novel, and so I could dive into this subject that had been of interest to me for so long. In a way, Mia gave me a chance to visit my former self to a certain extent, but in a much bigger way, because Mia is living in her car full time. Also because the pandemic hits, then she’s really in a world of trouble because she can’t go on campus to do her homework or to shower or to use the college amenities in the way that many community college students do in California.
JD: You recently published an op-ed about California community college students having to live in their cars, why did you chose to tackle this theme through fiction and not a form of media via poetry or something else?
KG: Well, I think that for many people fiction is more enjoyable to read. I think there are parts of this book that were funny, at least I hope so, and parts that have pathos, at least I hope so. I think that fiction allows us to enter a person’s story and have sympathy or empathy for them. And maybe to think about a subject a little bit more than we do in nonfiction, or in reading in the newspaper and I guess I thought… It’s funny because I was just at the LA Times book festival this weekend and people did come up to me and say oh I read your article, but I think that my college students or fresh out of college students are more likely to read a novel than an article. I think that you reach different demographics.
JD: How do you come to develop Mia’s backstory, especially the relationship with her parents? It’s such a huge part of her character.
KG: So, I didn’t have to go too far for that. I did grow up in a cult myself and did not have much of a relationship at all with my own parents. So, I kind of worked off of that. However, the father in this story is a MAGA father who has a lot of money, and I think he just kind of came from different sort of alpha men I met over the years. He’s in no way a reflection of my Jewish father, he’s a far cry from my own. Just sort of men I’ve met over the years. But I also felt like for Mia, he would just be so challenging to know how to negotiate. Part of what I liked about him as a father is for certain people and certain personality types… there are certain kinds of men that would be very, very challenging to talk with. Mia has like no intersection points with this dad. Once she realizes who he is in the world… she comes from poverty, she comes out of this cult, she’s gay, she doesn’t have any way of intersecting with him or knowing how to have a conversation with him. She’s just on one side of a line, and he’s on the other side of the line.
JD: How has your experience writing poetry and opera helped you when diving into your first fiction novel?
KG: So, one of the things about writing opera is because you are working with another person who is a little bit bossy, namely the composer… the composer would like to see an outline before you get started because they want to know how everything is going to go. That is good practice for a novel. I’m sure there are some novelists who just wander through a book and figure it out as they go along, but I think the whole thing goes a lot faster and a lot better if you do have an outline. I had one in mind. Obviously you can change your outline, but it goes much better I think when you do have one. The opera part did help because I was used to outlining operas, and in terms of the poetry… poetry is the ballet of language. Being used to having tight language and language that is working hard on behalf of creating setting was a good thing for me when it came to working on this in terms of writing.
JD: How has your time teaching and working with students helped your own creative process?
KG: When I’m working with students, especially in the creative writing setting, we’re always talking about what does the reader wants, what does your audience want. And I think that that’s what’s important when you go to edit your own work, is you’re not indulging yourself. You’re not writing for yourself or even your tiny group of friends. You’re writing for a wider audience, so the question is what do you want to read? What does a wider group want to read? What do they want to want to hear about? You think beyond yourself. I’m sure there are writers who just think of one reader, but I like to think of the wider audience out there.
JD: What inspired you to write Under A Neon Sun?
KG: I always liked the idea of the big L.A. novel. I have a quote in the beginning from Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust.” “The Day of the Locust” and Carolyn See’s “Golden Days” are two of my favorite L.A. novels. They have all the things that great L.A. novels should have – they have an apocalypse and oranges and sex and kind of leaning into the ocean, and so I wanted to have all those kinds of things happening in my novel. I think that people come to L.A. for the American dream and the L.A. dream is like the American dream but in neon. So I wanted to kind of play with some of those elements in the story.