KMWR: I always love to know the origin of a story. Can you tell us what it was like writing the first draft of "Ethics of Care"? I read on your Substack that you dreamed this story into being! Do you often have such dreams that can become the next best short story?

LK: I wrote the first draft of “Ethics of Care” in the summer of 2019. It’s come a long way in six years. I woke one morning with the central image, originally two massage instructors sharing a concerned look about a young, pregnant, transmasc student. A deep level of care, but they were in uncharted territory. I did go to massage school in Albuquerque, but this story is wholly a work of fiction. I wrote the first draft very quickly, and workshopped it with my small writing group in Vancouver, BC, where I was living at the time. In 2022, I brought it to my MFA workshop at Eastern Washington University, and later that summer to the Community of Writers conference, where I was encouraged to include a sex scene on the page, not just fade to black style. “Ethics of Care” was rejected 14 times before being picked up by Feign. The most recent edits I made right before submission, adding details about the philosophies and practices at the massage school. But I do not regularly dream stories. More often I come across a striking image – a photo on @sceneinbetween, a personals ad on @longlostpersonals – and I’m like, I have to write that story.

KMWR: I was really struck by the love that morphs, latches, and detaches onto several people in Claude's orbit throughout this story. You write, "Home was different now, without Mick to watch over, without the fantasy of my domestic future with Parker. I asked myself if I'd really loved him, or just loved the idea of him. I didn't feel like an adult, more like a mopey teenager." Can you discuss more about how you worked with the theme of love, and with that the duty that Claude feels we owe a loved one, in this story?

LK: Claude experiences what she considers love through the framing of herself in different roles, what the beloved makes us feel capable of, whether that’s a heteronormative futurity or feeling like a “good person” for what you can offer. Her sense of duty only extends as far as the parameters of that imagined role. She becomes aware of this tendency over the course of the story, pointing back at herself what she has judged in others. Her identity as a queer femme has been oriented toward the idea of caregiving, but when she’s given the chance to step up, other ethical implications come into play, and she’s disgusted. Real love would part the veil of disgust into deeper intimacy, but an age gap rightfully prevents her from going there.

KMWR: Expanding upon the question above, I love how from the get-go we are met with Claude's preoccupation with appearing as an adult. Can you speak more to Claude's preoccupations and anxieties with adulthood (and--almost--parenthood)? To me, it felt so relatable as a millennial to see Claude wrestle with these images and fantasies of our "destiny." It was hilarious how Claude even thinks the right pants will make one an adult! 

LK: Yes – this is essentially my artistic statement. I’m interested in thinking with queer temporalities, defined by queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman as “the privileging of delay, detour, and deferral.” Millennials might be the last generation who expected to experience clear markers of adulthood: marriage, home ownership, career, procreation, promotion, retirement. I see people I love doing life-planning acrobatics in order to achieve these outcomes under late-stage capitalism. I want to offer new stories of aging, gesturing toward the uncelebrated joys and unspoken disappointments of the everyday as a necessary alternative to individualized decay and regret. In the end, Claudine acknowledges that she doesn’t see anyone around her ticking off the boxes of adulthood. When she says, “We were all a bunch of assholes,” I hope that’s taken by readers as a comfort: everything is unfolding in its own time, and we’re all failing together because the conditions for success do not exist.    

KMWR: Can you tell us about your current projects? 

LK: I would love to! I just completed a first draft of my linked short story collection, also titled “Ethics of Care,” which carries out themes of queer domesticity in the American west, from 1904 to 2024. I expect it will need a lot more work before it is ready for contests and querying, but having everything in one place is awesome. Right now I’m doing #1000wordsofsummer, writing 1000 words a day for 14 days, for the fourth year in a row. I’m using it to get back into my novel draft about a gay draft resister in the time of the Vietnam War, and the woman who loves him. I’ve realized I wrote it more like a long short story, and I’m learning how to slow down and spread out a narrative.

KMWR: What have you been reading recently?

LK: I just finished The Listeners by Leni Zumas, from 2012. The narrator recounts parallel stories of a family tragedy and the demise of her punk band, with unconventional use of language creating a kind of surreal atmosphere. Other recent favorites have been Stuart Murdoch’s Nobody’s Empire, a novel about chronic fatigue with a deliciously different pace than most current fiction, and Dryland by Sara Jaffe, which gave me the biggest crush on a supporting character I’ve experienced in years. I am looking forward to her forthcoming short story collection, including “Earth to You,” one of my all-time favorite short stories.

KMWR: Finally, what's your ideal writing (or, perhaps, now as you are in editing mode, an editing) session like? What do you like to have nearby to keep you motivated?

LK: My spouse is a lecturer at Smith College, and the students have gone home for the summer, so their big, beautiful library is practically empty. I’ve been working in a carrel on the ground level across from floor to ceiling windows open to a small, tree-filled courtyard. It’s so quiet. I’m not a person who can work at a coffee shop; I love eavesdropping too much. For my 42nd birthday last month, I bought myself a new couch for the first time in my life, so that’s where I work at night. During the day I set a timer so I work uninterrupted for 45 minutes, then get up and move my body, for as many “units” as I can. At night it’s more free-form, I’m often reading online lit mags, letting the cat cuddle up to the keyboard, or playing Spider Solitaire, while writing/revising in bursts. My astrologer told me to pull all-nighters if I have to, but luckily the work rarely requires that.

♤♡
♧♢

Liina Koivula's fiction celebrates queer relationships and subcultures of the North American West. They co-run Local Smoke Press, host a fake radio show by the same name, and write the Substack Lifeguard of Love. Liina holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and a BA from The Evergreen State College. A winner of the 2023 AWP Intro Journals Award, their short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Right Hand Pointing, Room Magazine, and The Spokesman-Review.

Read “Ethics of Care” here.