"To me, it’s hard to imagine that a plane isn’t a living being"

Today I’m excited to feature an interview with the brilliant novelist Kate Folk, whose debut novel Sky Daddy comes out this Tuesday, April 8.

I’ve been a fan of Kate’s for a long time; it gives me great pleasure that we’ve been friends for over twenty years. Sometimes I worry I’m too vocal about the fact that I knew she was a great writer immediately upon meeting her in our freshman writing class at NYU, but I’m just going to keep telling that story, because it’s true and I was right.

Kate Folk is an author, screenwriter, and educator based in San Francisco. Her debut novel, Sky Daddy, is forthcoming from Random House next week. Her story collection, Out There, was a finalist for the California Book Award in First Fiction. In 2024, her feature screenplay adaptation of Out There was chosen for the annual Black List. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, and The Baffler, among other venues. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she’s also received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR.

Kate is one of the most committed and inspiring artists I know, and it has been a joy to watch her receive the plaudits she deserves, first for her 2022 short story collection Out There and now for Sky Daddy, about which The Telegraph wrote in its 5-star review:

Tell me about where Sky Daddy came from. I know that you wrote in Linda‘s voice for over a year before formally drafting the book. 

I think the seed of it was my own fascination with planes. I’ve always thought they were beautiful, mysterious, and kind of charming. And I’ve always been a somewhat nervous flyer.

For me flying brings up so many feelings—excitement and fear, offset by boredom and discomfort. I’ve always been fascinated by objects and how they can seem imbued with life and even sentience. To me, it’s hard to imagine that a plane isn’t a living being. I had the idea of a novel about a woman who is sexually obsessed with airplanes, but had trouble finding my way in to Linda’s voice until I started rereading Moby-Dick. I love the playfulness of Ishmael’s voice, and how Melville anthropomorphizes whales. So I used that book as a scaffold in that early drafting, and just had fun with it, thinking of my book-in-progress as an obsessive cataloguing of planes, the same was Moby-Dick catalogues whales.

You’ve told me that when you were writing the book you were worried it was too dark for readers, but one of the most common responses you’ve gotten is praise of how funny it is. Did you feel the book was funny when you were writing it? What do you think the relationship between this perceived darkness and this perceived humor is? 

I definitely also thought it was funny while writing it—I was laughing, at least. But I know that aviation is a sensitive subject, in part because the possibility of a plane crash is so horrifying. People regard flying with a superstition and reverence that seems almost religious. There is a lot of magical thinking involved. So I felt, at times, like I was contaminated while writing it. For a while I didn’t tell anyone what I was working on, drawing from the same well of magical thinking. I didn’t want to curse the book, or myself, by being too open about it early on.

In your short story collection Out There, people are grappling with the presence of technology and mysterious interference in their lives and various ways; in Sky Daddy, technology is also a major player, but in a very different way. Was there a crystallizing experience or set of experiences that got you interested in writing on this topic? 

I think it arises from the same set of experiences we’re all living in right now—the rapid development of the internet, smartphones, and now AI. Our brains can’t handle it. Both of my books are set primarily in our current moment, and I’m not sure how to depict that moment without involving technology in some way, even if it’s just part of the backdrop (the exclusion of technology in a contemporary story would be felt as a deliberate and meaningful choice of its own).

You wrote Sky Daddy years before the highly publicized series of aviation disasters in the last few months. How has living through that news cycle impacted your understanding of this book and or what you hope readers will get out of it? 

In many ways, Linda seems the most at tuned to the high potential of death while flying, although I don’t know that I would call it a healthy awareness. I think it brought to the surface all the collective psychic energy surrounding commercial aviation. There have always been aviation incidents, but the DC crash was terrible and has understandably focused people’s attention on the occasional lapses in aviation safety. I think it speaks to the symbolic power of commercial flight, and to the reason I was drawn to it as the subject of a novel—it is such a stark illustration of our mortality and powerlessness. Boarding a flight feels like an act of surrender and faith.

Linda is a character living under a particularly grim experience of capitalism. She strikes me as someone who lives almost out of time with her incredible austerity and single minded devotion to experiencing a control version of her passion – or addiction, depending on how you see it. Did her class situation come organically as part of the development of the character, or was it something you realized about her as you wrote her? 

It made sense to me as a way of placing limitations on her character’s ability to move through the world, which provides an additional line of tension in the story. If Linda was wealthy, and could fly whenever she wanted, she wouldn’t experience such longing and anticipation for her monthly flight. It also made sense that someone with her fixation, or monomania, would not be capable of thriving under capitalism. And she has no interest in doing so, as she is just biding time until her destiny manifests.

You said you would be answering these questions on a plane. Do you have any routines when you fly? What do you like to do and not like to do? 

I never purchase the wifi. I love the rare experience of being cut off from my usual modes of communication. Historically, I’ve done my best reading on a plane.

Thanks to Kate for doing this interview so characteristically thoughtfully and beautifully on very short notice. Check out Kate Folk on tour for Sky Daddy in April!

I’m delighted to share that Danielle Lazarin has interviewed me about my writing life for the In Process feature of her super cool newsletter, Talk Soon. Subscribe here to read the piece when it publishes this week!

If you’re in L.A., please join me at 7 p.m. at Sunny’s Bookshop this Friday, April 11 for a group reading with Katya Apekina, Melissa Broder and Emma Specter in celebration of Katya’s wonderful novel Mother Doll, now in paperback. RSVP here!

Something that is not, perhaps, as known about me as it should be is that I was for many years as a teenager obsessed with Eastern European cuisines and (very dimly grasped) cultures, which is another way I saying I love varenyky, the Ukrainian dumplings I ate very many of at Veselka when I lived in New York. This week, looking for somewhere to write on a rare few free weekday afternoon hours, I went to Fusion Kitchen, on the outside an unassuming, vaguely corporate-looking restaurant which on the inside turns out to be a homey Ukrainian kitchen masquerading as a “breakfast restaurant” serving “European cuisine.” (I found Fusion Kitchen thanks to this Instagram post.)

There was something moving about the restaurant’s juxtaposition of carved wooden furniture with chilly white fixtures, and about the clientele, of whom I seemed to be the only non-Ukrainian. In the mirror above the tables I watched a teenage boy look at pictures of Val Kilmer (RIP) on his laptop. The beautiful waitstaff left me alone with my writing and my tarot for hours after I housed a bowl of excellent borscht and these beautiful cherry varenyky. Probably the best Eastern European food I’ve had in L.A. Highly recommend!

Hey, this newsletter now has over 300 subscribers. I’m very moved by this. Thank you for reading and for being here—it means a lot.

Thank you for reading. Stay safe, everyone, and rest well.