INTERVIEW: Kristina Ten by Kristen Felicetti

Kristina Ten on her debut collection Tell Me Yours, I'll Tell You Mine and life as a writer in Rochester, New York

Kristina Ten in the South Wedge neighborhood of Rochester, New York

A few years ago, I moved to Rochester, New York, from Brooklyn. Although I grew up in a suburb outside Rochester, I had never lived in the city as an adult, so I made an active effort to engage with the local literary community and meet other writers living in the area. One of those writers was Kristina Ten, whose excellent debut story collection Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine (Stillhouse Press, 2025) was released earlier this month.

Since Kristina and I both live in Rochester, it was a treat to conduct this interview in person. We met up a couple of weeks ago to chat in the backyard of Bookeater, a beloved local bookshop. One thing we discussed was how many great bookstores our city has, considering its size. Other topics in our conversation include: how to structure a story collection, her inventive book merch, touring, and the art of landing a story’s ending.

And if you happen to live in Rochester, I’ll be in conversation with Kristina this Thursday, October 16, at The Unreliable Narrator—another wonderful local bookshop. The theme is “Slumber Party” and we have some other surprises in store.

Kristen Felicetti: So, your book is out in a few weeks, which can be an exciting time and also a nerve-racking time. How are you feeling? What’s your life like these days?

Kristina Ten: It’s a really busy time. It’s so frenetic. The transition from sitting alone at your computer, trying to put words on the page, to suddenly being out in the world and trying to get the book in front of people was a very sudden and sharp one for me, as it probably is for most writers. But it’s been good in a way, because that sheer level of exposure has forced me to confront some of the discomfort I feel in those more public spaces. And I used to like, panic reread emails before sending them. But you don’t have time to do that if you have to send fifty emails.

KF: You can get so caught up in sending emails that you forget the point is actually the book and getting people to read it.

The stories in Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine are set in a lot of different places, both real and fictional. Chicago, the Bay Area, Dushagorod, literally outer space, just to name a few. I think you have also lived in a lot of different places. Can you share all the places you’ve lived, from birth to Rochester?

KT: If I can remember them all! I was born in Moscow, and when I was very young, my family split our time between Moscow and Sukhumi, which is now in the northern part of Georgia and where my dad grew up. And then when I was still a kid, we moved to the States, just my parents and I, the whole rest of my family still lives overseas. We moved to Tucson, Arizona.

Later, I went to middle and high school in Central New York, around the Horseheads/Elmira/Corning area. After that, I went to undergrad in Boston, then moved to San Francisco for my first job. This was back when startup unicorns were a thing. I was working at LivingSocial during this era when startups were overwhelmed with money and all the meeting rooms were ball pits.

I lived in the Bay area for a long time and still really consider it home. And then I moved to Chicago, where my partner went to grad school, and then to Boulder, where I went to grad school, and then finally we moved to Rochester to be a little closer to family. We’re both big city people and I really wanted to live in a lively, queer place that is very music-forward, very indie-forward. And Rochester is the place to be.

KF: Originally, I was going to ask, “What are some of your favorite places in Rochester?” But then I thought, I also want to ask, “What’s your life like here? What do you do on the weekends?” I figured some of those favorite places would come up naturally.

KT: I’ve always considered myself an introverted person, and I think people assume that introverts are homebodies, but because so much of my work life is just me in front of a computer, I am a relentless, rabid, doer of stuff outside of that time. I love all the coffee shops here—we’re blessed with an amazing coffee shop scene.

KF: So many good coffee shops.

KT: This morning I went to Crust Pie Co. They literally just opened, and they make all kinds of pies—sweet and savory. They have a green curry hand pie. They have a banh mi hand pie. Other favorite spots? I really love Lux, my neighborhood bar. I really love Bug Jar. I love (LOVE) Crumpets on Monroe. Also Hydra (have eaten every iteration of their cheesecake bar), Pizza Wizard, Little Button, Grace & Disgrace, Flower City Arts Center, Leonore’s, Clownboy Coffee, and how extremely hard Rochester/WNY goes for fall and Halloween. And I think we have a really strong bookstore scene. The way we punch above our weight in bookstores is wild.

KF: Agreed. When did you move here?

KT: End of 2023.

KF: That’s kind of when all these bookstores opened.

KT: Yes, right around that time, every place was new. And we’re still getting new bookstores. The Siren and the Sea is opening up right near me soon.

KF: Bookeater, where we are right now, opened in 2023.

KT: It was new when I first moved here, and it was one of the first places I went. And The Unreliable Narrator and Archivist opened around that time too. There are so many now.

KF: And Akimbo Books too. All these places have opened in only the last four-ish years.

KT: And Burn Bright Books, a romance bookshop, which is cool. As soon as you get genre-specific bookstores, you know big things are happening. I’m waiting for the horror bookstore.

KF: I always like when people make unique merch to promote their books. Can you tell me about the tarot cards, how that came about? And the friendship bracelets?

KT: I’m really lucky. My publisher for Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is Stillhouse Press. They’re a small press, and they’re so enthusiastic and supportive, especially when it comes to figuring out how to expand the world of the book in a way that feels authentic, maybe a little unexpected, and hopefully delightful.

I think I actually brought the friendship bracelet idea to the table because one of the stories is set at a summer camp. It’s called “Bunny Ears,” and it’s a novelette about a loner at summer camp, and the local legends there, and how the pranks at the summer camp are even scarier than the legends. Friendship bracelets, of course, are a big part of arts and crafts hour at camp. Taylor Schaefer at Stillhouse Press designed the bracelet. It doubles as a bookmark since it’s the length of a book page. The little bunny-shaped beads stick out at both ends.

And then the tarot cards felt relevant because the book deals with games and childhood rituals and the folklore of our youth. So like, different pranks and superstitions and riddles and rhymes, and one of the game types is divination games—cootie catchers, and the Mash life predictor game. So I started thinking, how do I make a tangible version of that? I worked with an artist named Paige Wetherwax and she was really great. We worked together on three tarot cards, and each one is closely inspired by one of the stories.

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KF: That’s so cool, I love that idea. Another theme for me in the stories was language. The stories feature kids who have emigrated, and speak two languages, or people for whom English is a second language, and they’re searching for the right word. So with that theme in mind, I was curious to know, when did you know you wanted to be a writer? My guess is from a young age.

KT: I have always known. If I ever wanted to do anything else, I don’t remember. I have this really distinct memory of sitting on the floor of whatever apartment we were living in at the time. I had these pages spread out on the tiles, and I was writing an adventure story. I think it was seven pages long with, like, ten words per page, but it featured this heroine whose name was Kika Love. And Kika was what my parents called me when I was growing up because I couldn’t pronounce all my letters, so I called myself Kika, and this character went on these wild adventures. So I always knew. I’m lucky that my parents been reasonably supportive, given they both have science backgrounds. I went to undergrad for creative writing and the compromise was I got a marketing minor.

KF: And marketing is what you do as your day job now. Knowing marketing stuff helps when you have to put your book out.

KT: Honestly, it really does. There have been parts of this process of getting a book out into the world that have felt very against the grain for me or I’ve felt really out of my depth. And then there have been other parts where I’m like, actually, this is what I’ve done as my job for a long time. It’s still hard to turn that lens on yourself and make a product of this thing you spent years on, but I’m lucky that I had some experience.

KF: Speaking of marketing, you’re going on tour soon. How did the tour come together? Is there anything about tour that you’re particularly excited about?

KT: When I talked about how some parts of launching a book felt particularly difficult for me, one thing I was thinking about was tour. I moved to Rochester after I had just graduated from an MFA program. I was working remotely and working on a novel, and I was like, heads down. So, emerging from that later, I realized I hadn’t really been out in the world and socializing very much. And so I was intimidated by the prospect of having to plan all these live events, where you’re very much in community.

I’m not an event planner, but event planner is one of those occupations that you take on suddenly when you’re an author. As soon as I as scheduled one or two, everything started falling into place. I’m really lucky that I’ve had friends and connections reach out to me and say things like, “Hey, I’m the events coordinator here,” or “I’m the writer-in-residence planning an event here, do you want to do something?” Because in theory, that’s my favorite part—going up there on stage and being with other writers and connecting and talking to people.

I’ve had stage fright since I was a little kid. So, that’s gonna be a growth opportunity for me, being on tour, but any opportunity that I have to be up on stage with my friends the more comfortable I feel. And I am really looking forward to it. I’m doing so many different kinds of events. I’m doing great in-conversation events like the one we’re doing. I’m doing group readings. I’m even teaching a divination based writing workshop in Connecticut. And doing festivals. I think the variety will be really fun.

KF: I’m always interested to learn how a writer puts a story collection together. How do you decide which stories to include? Or not include? The order? That kind of thing.

KT: So, this is actually the second collection I’ve written. The first one is linked through Russian and Slavic folklore and fairy tales, and that’s something I hope to get out into the world at a later date. With both that collection and Tell Me Yours—which began as my MFA thesis project—I started with a linking force in mind. I wasn’t doing a greatest hits or pulling from existing work. Before I had written anything, I sat down and thought about what the theme or the connective tissue would be.

This is such a Virgo thing to do, but I basically info-dumped into a Google Doc all the games, superstitions, pranks, riddles, and rhymes that I could think of. Then, based on vibes, or what was calling to me most, I’d pick one and write that story. Then I’d see what called to me next and write that one.

Ordering I did at the end. And that was really hard because this collection, even with that linking force, it still has a lot of variety in terms of genre. There’s horror, there’s fabulism, there’s more fairy-tale-like stories, even some sci-fi. There are stories that are very short and a couple of novelettes in there as well.

So I spent a lot of time thinking about what to put first to introduce readers to what they’re getting into, and what they need to know by the time they reach a certain story. The stories that contain those threads needed to be early. I wanted the collection to feel cohesive, but not same-y.

KF: I think it’s interesting that you were considering linking forces and themes in a Google Doc before even writing the stories.

KT: Yeah, the linking force of the games, that was scaffolding. But the themes I actually didn’t really think about. Like a lot of writers, I feel like I’m like always writing about what I’m always writing about. I can look back on bad poetry that I wrote fifteen years ago and be like, well, I guess I was actually still writing about that same kind of stuff then. It’s really just looking continuously at these same things from different angles.

KF: I wanted to end this interview with a question about endings. I think writing short stories is hard for a lot of reasons, but I think endings are particularly hard. Your stories have great endings. Some build to a thrilling place story-wise, and others end on a beautiful line or image or even clever wordplay. Like, I’m thinking about “The Flood, The Tumble, The Talons, The Trick” and how its ending hinges on the double usage of the word “dove.” That was amazing. Do you have any tips on how to end a story well?

KT: Yeah, oh boy. By the way, quickly, I’m so excited that you caught the dove/dove thing, because that’s a very language-y thing, right? It felt almost like an Easter egg and it was actually something that I added very late in the editorial process, her name being Dove. That line was one of the very last changes I made before submitting the manuscript.

Honestly, endings don’t always come easily to me. Beginnings usually come easily to me. That’s typically where I start, and it is usually with some image. Before I wrote speculative fiction, I wrote poetry and very short, fragmented, vignette-pieces, so I’ve always felt like I’ve collected images and then stitched them together. Usually, I start with an image that came to mind.

Endings, though, were something that I was thinking about a lot while writing this collection during my MFA at CU Boulder, because I write in that in-between space of what people call literary fiction and genre fiction, which is also sometimes called “commercial fiction.” And these categories come with different expectations which I’ve mostly just ignored my whole life. But in grad school—I can’t quite remember who said it in a workshop and it’s a huge generalization—there was this idea that literary stories end softly and on an image and they’re not necessarily conclusive. Whereas commercial fiction sticks the landing hard and you know exactly what’s happened. And because I was writing a lot of horror fiction at the time, but then ending in this soft way, I felt really lucky to work with Stephen Graham Jones, because he also works in that space.

I guess my advice for writing good endings would be feel free to write a lot of them. And if it doesn’t feel quite right the first time you finish, that’s okay. It’s an area that I revisit. I’ll sometimes write like five or ten endings, and I won’t really land on the one I’m satisfied with until the tenth version, as evidenced by “The Flood, The Tumble, The Talons, The Trick” the story we were just talking about.