Kenan Orhan on Exile and Memory
Editor’s Note: Read Kenan Orhan’s new short story “The Renovation.”
“The Renovation” is a new story by Kenan Orhan. To mark the story’s publication, Orhan and Oliver Munday, the associate creative director of the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Oliver Munday: Your new story, “The Renovation,” opens with an absurdist premise: A woman discovers that her bathroom has been renovated into a prison. What ensues is an astonishingly moving tale of family, exile, and memory. Which came first, form or function?
For this story, it was the form. I was gripped out of sleep by a voice that kept saying the first line of the piece over and over in my head. I rarely have ideas in the middle of the night. I went to my computer and wrote the first page or so. There wasn’t much of a story there yet, but I trust my subconscious. Naturally or I won’t do it. I then let the function grow naturally around the skeletal form, which might be backwards.
