CONVERSATION: Kyle Seibel & the Off-Limits Path

"You really see that no one is all one thing. And if they appear as one thing to you, then it’s your limitation, or maybe they are hiding other parts of themselves for whatever reason."

I met Kyle Seibel at an AWP in Seattle a few years back. We read together at a Taco Bell Quarterly / Clash party for the release of Sam Heaps’ Proximity.

The microphone situation was garbage, but the turnout was remarkable, and Kyle loomed large over the other performers—hollering about twins and working at a theater and Diane Lane so that everyone could hear him.

I sorta fell in love with his charisma and demeanor, and I’ve kept up with him for the past few years because I find his style of writing to be charming and smart, and I admire his ability to entertain.

His prose, to me, seems to evoke the wit and irreverence of something like Donald Barthelme’s “Chablis,” while his characters are drawn with the same reluctant empathy that one might encounter in Jesus’ Son.

His debut collection Hey You Assholes has been out for a year, and I decided to interview Kyle about reading and writing and Trainspotting and St. Louis.

Brian Allen Carr: When was the first time you thought about being a fiction writer?

Kyle Seibel: I was going into the fourth grade the summer that Jurassic Park came out. I was a complete freak for those dinosaurs. This fixation led me to the Michael Crichton novel, which I read over and over again. I remember feeling like the book captured a depth of feeling the movie didn’t. In the novel, John Hammond gets eaten by these tiny dinosaurs but he survives in the feature film. I remember being shocked by his death in the book. Not necessarily by outcome, but by the power of story to kill and to resurrect, to distribute consequences, to be an agent of fate. And I wondered if I could do it too.

BAC: Did you read a lot at that age?

KS: I did. I was a big reader as soon as I learned how. Lots of YA stuff. Goosebumps and other Goosebumps-flavored series. I think I also read a couple Grishams during this period. The Pelican Brief and The Client, I think.

BAC: Did you think about those books as YA back then? Or, like, did you see a distinction between what Goosebumps was doing and what Grisham or Crichton were doing as being different than what RL Stine does?

KS: Part of the allure of the Goosebumps books for me was that my parents initially forbade them. The connection to Grisham was that my parents also didn’t want me reading those books, The Client especially ( this was frustrating to me because my older sister was not only allowed to read it, but was celebrated for her ability to discuss its themes with my father, a lawyer). I believe the concern was that the exposure to things like the supernatural and subjects like suicide and political corruption would pollute my mind.

Both kinds of books were associated with danger in my boy mind.

BAC: The “Off-Limits” make sense to me. Did that eventually go away or segue into something else? Were there other “Off-Limits” media through the course of adolescence/teenagehood?

KS: No, I think my parents somewhat consciously ceded the book space to my discretion in middle school. I also think I got better at hiding the stuff I knew they wouldn’t approve of and avoiding a confrontation entirely. Probably more movies than books at that point. I definitely remember secreting a VHS of Trainspotting in the attic.

It might still be in the rafters of my childhood home.

BAC: Did you read Trainspotting?

KS: I did not. I don’t think I was aware it was a book.

BAC: But have you read it since?

KS: Not yet. On my list!

BAC: It’s written in phonetics. It’s strange to me that a book written in phonetics and about heroin could be such a hit that it was made into a movie that launched Ewan McGregor’s career. Do you think such a thing could still happen? Is there a Trainspotting-secreted-VHS of now?

KS: That’s wild. I didn’t know that about the book. Bizarre that something that seemingly impenetrable was this huge mainstream success.

But I wonder if the internet hasn’t made that kind of relationship with media obsolete. The heroin and dead baby on the ceiling stuff probably seems quaint by today’s standards, though probably besides the point. As an evangelical midwestern preteen, I was quite shocked by Trainspotting, but that’s not why I loved it. I loved the music, the story, the grimy magic of it all

I hope there’s still a version of hiding Trainspotting in the attic. I don’t know what it looks like, but I have to imagine it exists—just not as I would recognize it from my own childhood.

BAC: Agree on the music. When Renton slips through the floor and Lou Reed starts singing….it lit a part of my soul on fire.

KS: Gives me brain tingles thinking about that scene now.

BAC: You referenced the internet as maybe being the place where The New Trainspotting might now live. You have also been very prolific in internet publishing. Do you think that “off limits” feeling draws you to that?

KS: Yes, that’s probably part of it. I would reject any attempt to label my writing as transgressive, but I’m drawn to spaces where people are pushing against conformity with a DIY ethos. I was able to connect with some online lit mags that embrace that kind of storytelling.

BAC: Well, I’m gonna push back a little, because here is how I see your work as currently transgressive—clearly you care about style. You have a remarkable ear, which I think is partly why you’re such a revered live reader—people at live readings primarily care about cadence and one-liners. But here is how you are transgressing—people who care about style aren’t usually supposed to be entertaining. They’re supposed to be kinda erudite. Like Ocean Vuong or Ben Lerner.

Is “entertainment value” something you think about?

KS: I don’t think about it in those terms, but I am aware of wanting to tell a good story. That often comes at the cost of personal expression or accurately depicting an event objectively. There is a project I am working on now where I was too faithful to that year of my life that I spent attached to the Seabee battalion. But since starting the project over and letting myself fully fictionalize the experience, I find the writing is getting at something much truer. I am telling a better story.

BAC: It’s been a year since Hey You Assholes dropped. It’s a super fun collection. It’s almost linked. Not by character but by vibe. Were the stories written in a specific period of your life—or in a certain writing mode? And, if so, were you aware of the mode at the time?

KS: They are absolutely linked by vibe. They weren’t written during a certain period of my life, but they are about a certain period of my life, or more often the case, life as I observed it in others around me in my hometown, the year I spent roofing, various military installations, corporate America, etc. Among all those settings, you can find a very American kind of loser, marked by a gleeful self-destruction I found very seductive as a younger man. When I started writing, I wanted to explore different dimensions and perspectives of that identity.

The more I wrote, the clearer this kind of vision and intention became.

BAC: What were the visions and intentions that inspired you toward your own visions and intentions in this regard?

Did you have books or other media that you wanted Hey You Assholes to sort of be in conversation with?

KS: Absolutely. Redeployment by Phil Klay—both the story and the collection it’s from—was a critical inspiration to me. I often think of that as the standard by which military fiction (specifically GWOT) should be judged. So the stories in Hey You Assholes that center on the Navy are very much my take on that tradition.

BAC: Have you had many service members reach out to you about your writing? There is definitely a great tradition of writers who have discussed their service. And several contemporaries, though I see your work—specifically in the comedic eye you bring to stateside service—as unique among them.

Are there many readers in the service, though? Were you an oddity in that regard? Did other service members see you reading on the base and ever say something like “What are you reading for?”

KS: There is so much of life in the military, especially the navy, even during deployments, that is about dealing with boredom. You develop friendships with people you would never hang out with ashore. You do things in port that you would never do back home. What I’m saying is, being a reader was a very common way of passing the time. I don’t think everyone was checking out The Caine Mutiny and Chuck Klosterman books from the ship’s library, but it didn’t mark you as some outcast either.

BAC: That actually doesn’t surprise me. I’ve met loads of service members who read. As you know, I go into houses for work, and many of my military customers have some semblance of a library, though I don’t think that would be the general assumption.

Do you think your service will always inform your work? And is there a kind of amalgamation in that regard—the service-member you and the kid who read books to (for lack of a better term) spite your parents?

KS: I think my time in uniform will be a persistent element in my writing. It’s foundational to how I understand other people. My Navy experience taught me a lot of humility and empathy. In normal life, you’re lucky if someone shows you one true side of them.

The forced intimacy of living conditions at sea means you confront someone’s best and worst traits, the full spectrum of who they are, pushed to the extreme by the reality of live combat operations. And you’re exposed as well; you to them and them to you. You really see that no one is all one thing. And if they appear as one thing to you, then it’s your limitation, or maybe they are hiding other parts of themselves for whatever reason.

I think that complexity exists everywhere in everyone, it’s just that the military reveals it in stark relief. Or it did to me, anyway. And it’s something that informs all of my writing, not just the stories that happen in uniform.

BAC: You recently moved back to the Midwest from California. Do you think the change of venue will have an impact on your writing moving forward? Do you have a next project in mind?

KS: For a lot of reasons, moving back to the Midwest feels like getting a fresh start and not at all like defeat. I admit that I’m going through something of a honeymoon phase with St. Louis. Not sure how long it will last, but several times in the past couple of weeks I have mentioned how much I love this city.

Every place we go here feels connected to some personal history. I was watching My Dinner With Andre this week and in Wallace Shaw’s voice-over at the end of the movie, he says something similar about watching the city go by from his taxi window. In contrast, Santa Barbara, to me, feels isolated and insular. My wife and I didn’t have deep roots there.

Too early to determine the impact of this Midwest renaissance on my writing, but I am at work on a novel-shaped object. Unlike in other previous projects, I am enjoying the daily discipline of working on something long-form and not worrying too much (yet) about what it’s going to ultimately be.