Transcript

Jared McCormack

Welcome to MFA Writers, the podcast where we talk to creative writing MFA students about their program, their process, and a piece they're working on. I'm your host, Jared McCormack. Today I’m with Mackenzie McGee. Mackenzie is a speculative fiction writer from the Midwest. A winner of the 2021 PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, her work can be read in Porter House Review, Nat. Brut, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Cease, Cows. Mackenzie earned her MFA from the University of Arkansas and is currently a second-year PhD student in English-Creative Writing at the University of Kansas. Mackenzie, thanks for being here. I'm so excited to chat with you.

Mackenzie McGee

Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

Jared McCormack

Well, I want to start by talking a little bit about your process because I know that you write a lot of speculative fiction. And I think a lot of people read Spec Fic and they think to themselves, how the hell do people come up with this stuff? So I'd love to hear you talk about how you come up with ideas, how you start writing stories and how they end up where they end up.

Mackenzie McGee

Yeah. So I think part of the reason I like the label of speculative fiction is because it's so broad.

I think it works as an umbrella word for weird. There's something funky going on here and maybe it's clear in terms of there being like a magic system or we're in the future or we're in space or something. But sometimes it is more subtle and there's maybe a question of whether or not what's happening is physically possible. But either way, I think there's a range of having this feeling of oh, I think something interesting is happening. There's sort of the little whisper of intrigue all the way up to, oh my gosh, I am in a place that I never could have imagined, which is fun. So I think I don't necessarily set out to write any particular kind of speculative fiction. I think it really depends on the idea. Often what happens is maybe I'll set out to write something that I really think is realism. realism. And then as I'm writing, I sort of, something's just not clicking for me. I'm just not excited about it. And I realized that I think I need something, I need that X factor. I need that sort of like a wrench to throw in there. And that's really what keeps me interested. I think part of what's exciting for me is the challenge of saying, if I want to write something that feels literary or adult, but also there's a talking dog in it or something. I haven't written a talking dog story, but I always use that example and I'm definitely going to do it someday. But yeah, I think at some point, I think when things are really clicking and exciting, that is the point in the story when I have figured out what is that weird speculative element.

Jared McCormack

Yeah, it's interesting that those things show up later in the process sometimes. It's not necessarily something that you start with at the beginning of the process.

Mackenzie McGee

Yeah, yeah, I think I will often start with not necessarily even a very full picture of what the story is going to look like. But all I need is like an image or maybe a premise or a line. Like I started with the piece that I read for today, I started with the line, which is the title. I just liked the rhythm. I thought it was fun and bouncy. And I think There are pantsers and planners as writers, and I think I'm usually a planner, but I always have to pants at least a little bit at first and just sort of play in the sandbox to see if I'm having a good time in the sandbox. And if I am and I feel good about it, then I can really go for it.

Jared McCormack

How long does your drafting process usually take? Because I hear some writers that say like, I really need to like finish the first draft in one sitting or or some people will say like, oh no, I like very slowly work through a draft. It takes me weeks. So what's that usually look like for you?

Mackenzie McGee

It does depend on the length of the piece. Something I like about flash fiction is that, especially during the semester, I can sit down and maybe all I have is an image or a character or a feeling, but I can sit down and just get a thousand words down and feel like I have something that is somewhat cohesive. that I can come back to later and I don't feel like I've only made some kind of incremental choice that I have forgotten about or something. A lot of the time I think I really like getting as much down as possible early on so that I have that like material to work with and so I will, I think if I'm drafting I like to sit down and write for at least a few hours. And sometimes that's not a great choice in the sense of I will come out of a fugue state and be so thirsty because I've been writing for hours and I just forgot about you having a body I was in the story. But yeah, I think there's something really satisfying about that part. And I think I like leaning into maybe a little bit of the attentiveness and the obsession of the initial drafting process. And that's fun. And it's also really kind of relieving and pleasing and meditative to do the redrafting, editing, that kind of work.

Jared McCormack

My partner has gotten really used to being with a writer. So often she'll come home, especially on days when she knows that I'm writing a lot and she'll say, did you remember to eat lunch today?

Mackenzie McGee

Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Absolutely the same. I will be sort of like sat in here writing. And if Landon comes, he's my partner. If he comes in and says something like, ask a normal question, like, have you taken the dog out this afternoon or something? And I just like either say nothing or just make like a noise like, no, then he's like, okay, eventually she'll come back, but she's busy. She's out there.

Jared McCormack

Um, okay. So yeah, that gives me a sense of your drafting process. I'm curious about your revision process. Since you don't know always what the story is going to be when you start drafting, how much does that material change from that first draft to the final draft?

Mackenzie McGee

Sometimes when I'm sat down sort of in that writing furiously zone, I can get a lot done in terms of finding out what happens or what the final shape is gonna look like when I'm in sort of like the magic space. Whatever that sort of initial or first couple of initial sort of writing sessions looks like, really affects things. But I find that even if I feel like I really know what's going on in this first draft, and I'm thinking like, man, this is a really mature first draft, I often find that actually, I think I have a habit of just like throwing everything in, like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks or whatever. And then I'll come back to it later and see, or especially if I have somebody else who reads it for me, which having like a few close friends or like Landon, who will read out for me and say, this stuff is interesting, but I don't know if it's, this is that story. I think maybe you're writing two and a half stories right now. And I think they're right, usually.

Jared McCormack

But it's always easier to pull back than it is to do the opposite, right?

Mackenzie McGee

Yeah, absolutely. And I find that yeah, even in the pulling back process is really fun because now I can sort of say, okay, I have, I've narrowed my focus, but now I can take whatever is on the page further than maybe just sort of the initial sort of seeds I'd planted or been playing with in those early drafts. Now it's like I have culled my garden a little bit, now I can really grow what's here.

Jared McCormack

All right, so you've written a lot of flash fiction, which we are talking about now in short fiction, but I hear that you're currently working on your first novel. In what ways does your process change when writing something like flash fiction versus writing a longer form thing like a novel?

Mackenzie McGee

Yeah, a bunch. And I think I started out, I think as a child, I mean, a lot of writers have stories of being kids and writing just their little stories, maybe on the computer or in a notebook or something. I did that a little bit too, but I had never finished anything. Then when I started writing more seriously, in college, sort of like giving it a real shot. I was just writing stories. And so I think that I, in a lot of ways, am maybe inclined toward writing stories or chapters, if that makes sense. And this took me a while to figure out as I was sort of attempting to write a novel for the first time, because it felt so unbelievably intimidating, because I really hadn't done it before or hadn't done it to the point where I felt like I had something that I could call a manuscript. The nice thing about Flash especially, but also often stories, is that you can sort of hold them all in your head at once in terms of I can see sort of the characters, the themes, the shape of the story on the page, all of that stuff. I can hear the language at one time, but I don't think, I don't know if anybody's head is big enough. My head isn't big enough to hold a novel all at once. right once. right And so there's a lot of faith in the novel writing process, which is really scary, but also I think really exciting because it's like, When I'm drafting, and especially if I'm trying to get a first draft done in just one or two goes, it's like, I don't even really need to have faith in future me to bring everything home in terms of getting that done. But with a novel, I absolutely have to trust in the process. Yeah, and I think that's been really exciting.

Jared McCormack

A lot of your work explores ideas of gender, systems of power, and love and family. But you told me that you rarely start with those dynamics in mind. At what point in the process do you usually realize what a story is about? And is that something that you use the revision process to kind of hone in on?

Mackenzie McGee

Yeah, absolutely. I think I like to start with something that feels fun as in pleasurable or engaging or just delightful or exciting. So I think that those sort of premises, they get me onto the page and I think I'll have something that feels that way that is really not, I don't know, it just doesn't feel necessarily serious at the beginning in terms of like, yes, this is my literary short story or like my capital and novel, capital N novel. But I think I want to start with something that feels not like I'm trying to please anyone or prove anything. It's just me in the story. If I take that as seriously as possible, and I'm trying to sort of see characters with as much nuance and grace as possible, and I'm trying to let the world keep surprising me, even as I learn more about it, then what'll happen is like the human element will really develop through that process. I think if I start out too abstract or with too much of a worldview in mind in terms of themes, often I'm less satisfied with that work because I think I'm doing more. It's like I am trying to manifest something through the story rather than letting the story manifest as it is.

Jared McCormack

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for me, when I'm drafting a story, theme is like a dirty word. I try not to think about it at all. I try to just completely block it out because I find as soon as I start thinking about what the story could be about or what it's trying to say about the world. It starts to feel false in some way. And so I really try to block that stuff out and just let the story, let those elements kind of rise up in the story on their own and let the story be about whatever it wants to be about. I really think about it as like, my job is just to hold the mirror up and reflect the world back. And then the reader can figure out what it all means. Or when I get to revision and I notice, Oh, that's what it's about. Then I can tweak a little thing here, tweak a little thing there. And then suddenly it all clicks into place. So yeah, but it takes a lot of trust, doesn't it? You have to trust the process and it's so hard.

Mackenzie McGee

Yeah. And I feel terrible sometimes as a teacher, as a writing teacher, because I mean, some of the, language language that we're using if you have never written a short story before or you're like 19 and you're like what on earth could I possibly write about I think it comes across as pretty abstract and I mean I absolutely believe in it use it think that it's true but I think I'll have students be like oh come on give me something like tell me what to do tell me how to plot a story or something not that that's not something that we talk about but um I think that That's an instance where I think Samuel Delaney has an essay in The JewelHinged Jaw called Thickening the Plot that is really excellent. And basically it's an essay that I think describes the process that we're talking about of being in the story and letting it surprise you, and then you are writing, and then you're sort of responding to what's on the page, sort of that back and forth that leaves infinite room for the story to change. that breaks it down and makes it feel like an actual process that people can use to make stories

Jared McCormack

right all right so we've been talking a bit about speculative fiction which is the thing that you write a lot. There's a long tradition of writers who use speculative fiction to write about big political ideas from Nikolai Gogol back in the day to George Saunders today. What is it about this genre, do you think, that lends itself to exploring big political ideas?

Mackenzie McGee

Dana Haviano, who's a Cuban writer, who's living in the US now, gave a guest of honor speech at the…I'm not gonna remember, but she was talking about how growing up at a point when there was sort of a cultural crackdown in her country, that was when more sort of fantastical stories really started taking off or writers really started engaging with that in a way that she noticed. And she's talking about how that is a, it's almost like a survival mechanism. when there's like an imaginative lack of oxygen is how she describes it that you have to sort of push into these new places to be able to live. And again Samuel Delaney I think articulates this really well in saying that speculative fiction because on the surface it is something that is quote unquote not real then powers that be they may look at it and see like, well, this is a story about a dragon or this is a story with like aliens in it and not be worried at all. And it's like this protective layer for talking about ideas that can be dangerous and sharing them publicly in some other way would be a lot riskier. I mean, part of what I really like about speculative fiction is that when you, I think this is true of all fiction actually, is that when you leave the real world in some way, shape or form, which is what you're doing when you're writing a story, you have entered this like true space of possibility and that you are speaking, even if you are really clearly speaking to something, some sort of like dynamic or something that does exist, You are also in this space where you can see other things, like a possible mode of being, a possible future, a possible solution.

Jared McCormack

Well, you've been in grad school for a long time getting an MFA before enrolling in the PhD, so you've spent a lot of time in creative writing departments, English departments, and workshops. Do you think that these spaces lend themselves to exploring big political ideas?

Mackenzie McGee

Yeah. I mean, I think it absolutely is going to depend on the department, on the school. But I do think what's nice about a workshop or a university workshop, at least with sort of a leader who can just make that space for people to explore truly whatever idea, however, like, dangerous or unfashionable or sort of bizarre that idea is. And I do think part of what's nice about what I appreciate about academia as a setting to do writing in is that it is in its best iterations, a space where people just have the room and the time to do their work and feel sort of Yeah, like they're away from the world in some so sort of way. But yeah, I think I had a mentor who said that, this is at the undergrad level, I know you want to apply to an MFA and you should, but if you don't get in or you change your mind, you don't necessarily need to go to an MFA. And of course, I, as an undergrad, am like, of course you would say that. I want nothing more than to go to an MFA. And I know you're just trying to make me feel better. And now here I am perpetuating that, I guess. But saying that I really do think that on some level if you just sort of put somebody in a room for, I don't know, two, three years and they have enough money and whatever resources they need to eat and sleep and just sort of live their life. and they have the time to write. They're going to get better. They're going to make stuff that's exciting to them and to other people. If the writing program should exist for any reason, it's to give people the space and time to take risks.

Jared McCormack

So having been in workshops for many years now, what advice do you have for listeners for getting the most out of the experience and avoiding pitfalls?

Mackenzie McGee

What a great question. Okay, I will say I've been really lucky in terms of, I think I've had overwhelmingly positive workshop experiences on average. And a lot of that was due to factors outside of my control in terms of being really lucky with cohorts and stuff. But I do think that things that are within your control are sort of understanding that there is always something to learn in a workshop. Even if none of these people are really my readers, whatever I'm doing is just not their thing. But they're still readers. It is useful to know what the people who aren't my readers are going to think about my work. So just even on that level, that is useful. So that's sort of like maybe from when you are being workshopped. But I also think that just participating in the workshop as in getting to be a reader for someone else is almost always a useful experience in terms of, even when it's a great challenge for whatever reason, you are making the choice to be in community with these people who are in your workshop and learning how to do that and just exercising whatever like practices you have learned to be in community with people and maybe having to learn new ones. But I mean, another thing that's great about workshop is that I think that writing is not a solitary process in a real way in terms of if you're going to have a reader, if you're going to have somebody who you can just like sit down and chat with about like something that you read or something that you're working on, then writing is a communal process and you do need a community. And so the workshop is a sample of a tiny iteration of the grander writing community.

Jared McCormack

All right. So as I mentioned, you're currently in the second year of your PhD in English creative writing at the University of Kansas, a program that's known for being particularly open to speculative writers. Was that a big reason you chose that program?

Mackenzie McGee

Oh yeah, absolutely. Um, I think that I, from what I can tell, I think we are in a really good spot overall for speculative fiction writers. I think that it's being taken pretty seriously at this point. But Kansas in particular I knew with the James Gunn Center for Science Fiction with the faculty, with people who have graduated from here. It's really, really excellent to be in a space where the assumption is that speculative fiction is something that is exciting and cool and maybe even isn't particularly novel in the sense that there are other people here doing it. And so it feels like a normal way to write in this space.

Jared McCormack

So you mentioned that there are people there writing speculative fiction. I assume you mean not just students, but also professors. Like are there classes that are offered at the University of Kansas that are geared towards speculative fiction? Are there particular professors that that's their thing and they're like bringing speculative writers there to work with them?

Mackenzie McGee

Yeah. So I think a recent addition to the English department, to the creative writing faculty,

is Sylvia Park, whose novel Luminous is coming out this spring. And here I am plugging Sylvia's book. But they're a really, really incredible speculative fiction writer. On the literature side of things, Giselle Anatole is a scholar of speculative fiction and young adult fiction and black speculative fiction in particular. And then there are, I think other professors who have at least sort of a leg in that world where they have some affiliation with the Gunn Center or now there is an annual symposium that is called the Sturgeon Symposium that's named for Theodore Sturgeon, the quote unquote golden age speculative fiction writer or science fiction writer, I should say.

Jared McCormack

You've mentioned the James Gunn Center for the study of science fiction a couple of times. Can you tell us more about that?

Mackenzie McGee

So the James Gunn Center is in part an archive of or a collection I should say of a lot of historically it has been science fiction as the name entails but in recent years they've been making a real effort to incorporate a lot of fantasy and they have everything from like a giant backlog of like old pulp novels to papers by various people and letters between various people and they work in collaboration with the Spencer Research Library on campus. And that is where they handle maybe the more delicate materials. So you have a place where you can go and maybe look through paperbacks from the 50s and 60s, but you can also go to the research library and look at workshop drafts of stories that are maybe more precious and that you have to work a little harder to sign out and look through. yeah, those resources I think are really incredible. I think the care and attention that is given to them is very consistent here and is very, I think it really shows. The other exciting thing in addition to the archive is the Sturgeon Symposium, where it will be themed every year. Scholars will come in and talk on the theme and they'll have panels. This year, the theme was honoring Samuel Delaney. It was centered on Samuel Delaney's work. We did get Samuel Delaney to come to campus, which was so cool. And honestly, really delightful to see people sort of like standing up and talking about Samuel Zalini's work. And there he is in the audience sort of like watching and maybe like nodding along. Yeah, but he was so lovely and gracious. And yeah, it was an especially really cool experience this year. But yeah, it's great every year.

Jared McCormack

So as we talked about earlier, you already completed an MFA at the University of Arkansas, which is one of the few four-year MFAs in the country. What made you personally want to continue your education and pursue the PhD? And what in general do you think is the benefit of the PhD if someone already has an MFA?

Mackenzie McGee

So there are a few things that made me want to go get a PhD. One was the fact that lockdown and quarantine happened kind of in the middle of my MFA. And that was one of the reasons that I, I mean, I was definitely, that made me really grateful for the length of my program, because I started in 2018, graduated in 2022. And so about three-ish semesters in there was online. That was one of the factors. Another factor was, as I was wrapping up my MFA and thinking about what was next, I realized that I was not done reading literature and writing criticism and reading criticism and learning from the scholar side of things. Honestly, I really wanted to go take exams and write a thorough critical component for a creative dissertation. That was something that I was really eager to do. I mean, a big thing was time that, you know, sort of looking at my options and thinking that like, I'm not done learning. And also if I go to this program, I will have summers off more or less. I will be teaching two classes a semester, which is something that I've been doing for a while, so I know that I can be in that rhythm and writing and that that's going to give me the space to keep working on my novel project and then start working on another one as well.

Jared McCormack

Well, I did an MFA that was three years long. And I have to say, it was a lot of work. But everybody I talked to, students and professors, say that the PhD is even more work. So how do you balance the academic work of the program with your writing and your personal life?

Mackenzie McGee

I mean, I feel like the short answer is you kind of don't, to be perfectly, perfectly honest. But I think that there are ways to make it work. I think it does depend a little bit on maybe what your goals are in the short term in terms of your personal life and your career and your writing. Like I came to the PhD already partnered knowing that I wasn't gonna be sort of like looking for a romantic partner knowing that I was going to have someone who lives with me at home who has also been through grad school and was going to be very supportive. That's one of the elements is that I knew that my personal life was going to line up with what I was doing in my PhD. This is true, I think, of the MFA and the PhD, that if you let things like teaching and coursework take over, you can lose your writing time, which is supposed to be the whole point of going to this program. And so I've had to get good at putting my work first, literally just like in the course of the day saying like, the first thing I'm going to do when I sit down to work is write for an hour or read for an hour. And then I will check my email and talk to all my students and do, you know, other coursework. But really prioritizing my stuff regularly as part of my routine really does make all the difference. And then the other thing has been learning to say no to things, which is very, very hard, especially when you want to do things that maybe are offered by your program or that other people are doing. But that was something I maybe even struggled with more in my MFA because I had the sense of, I want to write, but I also want to do all these other things and have this really well-rounded experience, which was great. And then coming to the PhD, I thought, I know for sure that I'm going to say no to doing more things than I did in my MFA.

Jared McCormack

So most PhD programs like MFA programs provide funding in exchange for teaching while in the program. Can you tell us a bit about teaching at KU, like what classes you teach, how many, how you're enjoying it?

Mackenzie McGee

Yeah. So at KU, it is a 2-2 teaching load. So two courses in the fall and two courses in the spring and there are some opportunities for summer teaching. And the way that it works is when you start, you teach, there's like a freshman writing sequence that is 101 and then 102, and those are the two required courses. And then your first year, you teach 101 in the fall and 102 in the spring. And then at that point, you have more choice. At certain points in your program, in the MFA or the PhD, get opportunities to teach creative writing classes or like an intro to fiction or poetry class. And I definitely, while I was in my MFA, I got some chances to teach other classes beyond composition. And even between my MFA and my PhD, I got to teach an undergraduate, like an upper level undergraduate fiction workshop. And that was honestly life changing because it is like a completely different job teaching those creative writing classes to creative writing students and one that was extremely validating and eye-opening in terms of do I really want to go into academia? Am I sure that this is what I want to do or is this just the thing that I've been doing while I was in my program is teaching? But yeah, through teaching for money so that I could write, I did learn that I really do love teaching. And I didn't necessarily, I was not somebody who grew up wanting to be a teacher, partly because I think my concept of a teacher was very gendered growing up. And so I knew that I didn't want to be anyone's caretaker or something in the classroom. That was not one of my goals. But teaching, I've learned that it can look very different. It can be, I think especially at the university level, you do hopefully have a lot of freedom to be the kind of teacher you want to be, to teach the kind of class that you want to teach. I think one great thing about teaching at KU for graduate students is there's a lot of teacher training support here. The pedagogy class sequence for graduate students is really very good. And I think part of that is because we do have some excellent rhetoric and composition faculty here. And that was a really good experience.

Jared McCormack

Well, you mentioned money in there. What is the funding like at KU?

Mackenzie McGee

So at KU the stipend is, it just changed a little bit, but it was between 18 and $19,000, which is more or less livable in Lawrence. I mean, that is one of the reasons that I came here is because the sort of stipend to cost of living ratio was really pretty good. And I think that that is in large part to the fact that there is a graduate student union here that has been running since the 90s and has been doing a lot of work on that front. Having been at an institution where there was no graduate student union and now being at one where there is one, it's really incredible the kind of work that they can do, that we can do.

Jared McCormack

Yeah. And I think that cost of living to stipend ratio thing is a, it's a good thing for our listeners to think about because making 40,000 in New York city might actually be less money than making 20,000 in Lawrence, Kansas, right?

Mackenzie McGee

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. All right.

Jared McCormack

Well, before we wrap up, I want to ask you one last question. What is one way in which the PhD experience has been different for better or for worse from your expectations when applying?

Mackenzie McGee

Applying to PhDs, knowing that I was going to be in more literature courses and coming from an MFA where I just had such a lovely cohort, but I wasn't spending very much time with people who are not in the creative writing program terms of graduate students. I was a little nervous how it was going to be being in all these lit classes as someone who is also a creative writer, sort of has a foot in each world. But one of the great pleasures of this program so far has been being in community with the department at large in terms of really getting to know people whose primary research interest is literature or rhetoric and composition and sort of broadening my academic circles that way. That has been just really exciting.

Jared McCormack

Well, it's been really nice getting to know you. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy, busy PhD schedule to come chat with me. I really appreciate it.

Mackenzie McGee

Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. This is so much fun.

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