Kristen Iskandrian
Kristen Iskandrian is the author of Motherest. She is the co-owner of Thank You Books, a newish independent bookstore in Birmingham, Alabama.
Kristen Iskandrian—
What’s the one story you keep writing over and over? I don’t mean revising. I mean the aesthetic or emotional or dream-fugue house that all of your stuff keeps trying to break into. What does it look like? What is its essence?
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From BEWARE OF PITY by Stefan Zweig
He pities the fool who pities the fool.
But to my own astonishment I found the requisite strength again and again. In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has been given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering, acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal. […]
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Batter my heart, third-person omniscient god
Unicorn Mask print by Matty8080
What is your preferred point of view? Your go-to voice when you write, if you write, or the one you’re happiest to see when you open a new book? Can you use second-person without feeling like a wanker? Do you love “I” for its accessibility, its steadfastness, its immediacy–the narrative fuzzy bedroom slippers ever at the foot of your crafty little bed? Because I can be “me” but “not-me,” whereas you is always only you, and third-person, well, forget it. That actually starts to feel like work.
Kristen Iskandrian—
I really want to call someone “the Santana of the literary world,” but I don’t know whom.