Kait Gets Lit

Last week, the wonderful new women’s online magazine  LUNA LUNA published my short story “The Fiction Student, or the Mystery is Gone.”

I’ve found that a lot of times when I write stories, particularly those that involve sex, people become fascinated with wanting to know the story behind the story. Even if you say it’s fiction, they say “Really?” I can’t figure out why it matters whether or not the story is true or based on something that happened in real life; it’s the story that matters to me.

This inspired “The Fiction Student, or the Mystery is Gone.” I took a very simple premise of a college student having a brief encounter with a famous older writer visiting her college–a story as old as time–and sandwiched that in between the telling of the story itself. As a fiction writer, I like to play with these lines between fiction and non-fiction, between the act and the telling of it.

When people ask me where the ideas for my stories come from and whether they happened to me, I say, “Isn’t it more fun to wonder than to know?”