Magic in the Mundane: The Millions Interviews Kimberly King Parsons

In Kimberly King Parsons’s debut story collection, Black Light, we see the wide world of Texas, and of her character lives, drawn for us in fine and lovely lines. Their bodies and surroundings, their desires and anxieties are fully rendered, inside and out, in every story. These characters watch and want each other; they touch each other, or try to; they get so close they’re in (inside, in love, in trouble), or close as. And they want to tell you about it. They want to turn their lives over and have a look underneath. They want to see it all as best they can.

Parsons’s gifts all of them with language: beautiful, strange turns of phrase; surprising syntax; real and regional jewels scattered across every page. Everything is so specific. They are defiant, and dirty, this lot, lovers and leavers, and they are telling you the truth. In turns both wise and funny, Black Light takes your breath regularly with its elegant observations. “I don’t know if there’s a word for the ache of missing something when you still have it. I’d kiss her and taste my doom,” the narrator in the title story ruminates. And you can’t but empathize. You can’t but feel you’ve felt something near to that same truth, yourself. Or wanted to.

Not too long ago, Parsons and I had a good, long talk about bodies, secrets, the patriarchy, escaping it, revision, Amy Hempel, and more.

The Millions: The narrators in your short story collection, Black Light, all have a confessional urgency to their tone and telling, there seems to be something that they really need you to know. How do you treat storytelling as theme?

There’s a reason that someone is telling you what’s happening, right? I like when you said confessional tone. We’re meeting them at these moments that are critical moments in these characters’ lives. And so they do seem to be very urgently telling something. And not only telling, but trying to make sense and process whatever