Kira Leigh on Feeling Your Story Deeply

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Kira Leigh author of the upcoming debut series, Constelis Voss, a queer, anime-inspired, psychological sci-fi trilogy.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book? 

As I’ve been writing CONSTELIS VOSS in various forms for over 3+ years—and I’ve had the characters for far longer than that—it’s really hard to pin down an origin point. It comes from a lot of places: real-life challenges I’ve faced, my love for 90s anime, the hardships of my friends, and wishing that we could all just cut through the arbitrary bull of hegemonic life and start really caring for each other as the messy, imperfect people we are.

To get to that point, I worked backwards: to tackle a problem, we have to identify it, analyze it, find its weak points, and destroy it. It’s a literary exercise in expelling demons on many fronts. Societal demons, personal demons, and the phantoms of what boxes constrict so many.

It’s so many different things, but I guess the easiest to package answer is that its origin is a contemporary absence, in many ways. 

I didn’t see many characters like me, stories I could relate to, or concepts I thought important to touch on. I knew they were out there, but they were in different genres. Different media pieces. Different time periods, even. The execution of what I want to see is so rare right now.

I had to write what I didn’t see happening, now. All passionately made art comes from defining what isn’t and what you want. It’s desire and longing. I wanted to read characters like me. Complicated, messy, imperfect, queer as the day is long. So I wrote them. I gave them important challenges to tackle—probably far too big for them to be honest—and hoped they’d succeed. 

It’s in that seed of absence, that origin of longing for reciprocity and true progress, that CONSTELIS VOSS was born. It’s messy. It’s not perfect. But it was created as a solution to the lack of something in contemporary media. I think I succeeded.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I’m a notorious pantser when it comes to writing. I more or less let the characters react to obstacles in play, concepts I find vital, or events that have to happen, and if it pans out it pans out.

I had an initial throughline because this story started as a DnD-esque roleplaying game. Think: group storytelling with multiple characters and writers. But as that story quietly fell away into the night, and I still had so much more I wanted to tackle, I started writing it all on my own.

I started with that basis, carried my ideas through, and it fell into place. It wasn’t a difficult concept to plot around, because it’s incredibly important to me.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

I don’t think meaning-making is generally static, so the notion of the plot/concept changing isn’t really a thing that I think about or something that bothers me. What I mean to say is that, well, there really aren’t any new ideas.  

There’s nothing inherently conjured that hasn’t been touched on before, in various media. Because of this, our stories and our concepts are often borrowed from the cultural and world-level tapestry of collective creativity. Moreover, the only actual true change we make as creatives in adapting the language of all the art that’s come before us is execution. Execution is everything.

Combining the prior ideas together; if meaning-making isn’t static (like life is ever-changing), and all ideas have been done but not quite in our way as individual creatives, change is natural and expected. Adhering to a rigid structure is foolish.

If the story had to diverge from the initial concept, there was a reason. Be it being inspired by a different form of media, a feeling, wanting to chase a beautiful/tragic idea, or otherwise.

In the end, if you’re good about truly staying in character and your concepts are as alive as your blood, you’ll never really lose your plot. Because it lives inside your bones.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by? 

I am constantly inspired by everything and create on a daily basis. Either paintings, 3D animations, short stories, articles, or songs—you name it, I make it on a daily basis. Fresh material is easy. Having the energy and focus to devote to one specific thing? That’s challenging. Inspired by too much is a good problem to have, but I only have one brain and two hands.

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How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

It’s moreso about what would benefit the whole of the work most of all. I’m a true believer that form and function must be married in art, and that art is a conversation between the artist and the audience.  

The form of CONSTELIS VOSS needs to be married to what I’m intending to do; which is very many conceptual things. When I say this, I mean to say I have to look at the work as a whole and decide what the best next play is. For myself, and for prospective readers. 

Would they like to know more about the individual characters? Perhaps a segmented novella is in order. Would they want to see what happens next? Then a sequel, which I’m already working on. 

I’m working on both, to be honest. A prequel novella told from multiple perspectives in systematic chapters, and a fun sequel that breaks even more barriers.

Depending on reader feedback, and depending on how I feel about what the strongest conceptual next step is, the choice will be obvious upon the release of the third book in the CONSTELIS VOSS trilogy.

I take my next choices in art-making very seriously, especially considering it’s aiming to be a long-standing IP.

I have 3 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

Cats are lovely. We only have 1. I love him, but earnestly he is very vocal, and I have focusing challenges. I find it pretty distracting to have a ‘writing buddy’ but I do like reading my work to people, or just asking for feedback as I’m making it, so I know the form and function (and concepts) are working well.

I don’t need complete silence or anything like this—I actually write chapters to music, specifically chosen to color the writing and give me a good pace to create at, much like real-life exercise. But if there’s too much outside interaction, I tend to lose my spot. Not unlike losing your place in line.

I’d love to just sit with my cat Rolly on my lap and type away, but he likes to meow and paw my nose if I spend too much time doing anything other than cuddling him. Which I love doing...but I’d definitely never write anything ever again if he was my writing buddy. He demands constant attention and he’s adorable enough that he’d get it :)

A Long-Haul Woman Writer Finds Her Way to the Light

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

by Dawn Newton

When you daydream at a young age about being a writer, you anticipate rewards. Book publication, certainly, and a clear validation of your efforts. The brilliant accompaniment – the spotlight, the limelight, the footlights, YOUR NAME in lights. Yet winning an award for the writing you do in junior high, high school, or even college is not indicative of whether book publication will be on your horizon as a writer.

Although I was a first-generation college student of limited means, I determined at Michigan State University that I wanted to pursue a graduate degree in writing. I was overjoyed to receive in my senior year an offer of admission to Johns Hopkins University, along with a teaching fellowship and tuition waiver. The year I spent pursing my degree brought thought-provoking lessons from professors, opportunities to share ideas with my colleagues in the fiction workshop each semester, the experience gained from serving as an instructor of writing and literature at a young age, and lasting friendships with people from across the country. I met literary greats John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Raymond Carver, all notable for their distinctive and innovative prose styles.

My return to Michigan a year later was less exciting from an educational perspective. I worked a day job at a stock brokerage firm while still writing in my “spare” time. I perseverated over how I might ignite my writing career, knowing that I needed to keep getting to the page while determining what my next day job might be. And though the pace of my writing was slow, it did keep moving. At one point I relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and was able to drive to the University of Wisconsin’s campus to discover a copy of my first published short story in the reading room of the college library. As I viewed the magazines on the shelves, my story in a special supplement with its own illustration, the hush of the room and the subtle hum of the lights overhead spun me into a moment of wonder.

In another search for the perfect day job, I joined my significant other in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I pursued a Masters in English Education. I continued writing while finishing the degree, learning new writing prompts in my classes. George Garrett allowed me to take his writing workshop for two semesters, and I once again had the privilege of learning from a gifted writer and workshopping stories with other students in addition to hearing readings from Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, Ann Beattie, Rita Mae Brown, and others.

During my time in Virginia, I wrote a short story collection, which I sent out to literary publishing houses. I came home one day to a blinking light on the answering machine. I’d landed an agent I’d read about in Poets and Writers and queried. In the subsequent year, she tried to place a few of my stories in major glossies. After several months, she suggested that I keep working on the novel I’d begun so we could eventually pursue a two-book deal. Her approach made sense. I was pregnant with my first child, and my husband and I were returning to Michigan. Hope filled the air.  

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Yet a few years later, my parents had died of unrelated causes just thirty-six days apart. I carried another child. Grief and parenting consumed me. When I finally completed that novel in early 2001, the market for fiction had changed. The work was too quiet. I dumped the manuscript pages into a tub in my basement and started another novel. I’d landed a job at the local junior college teaching composition and a class on “Writing the Novel.” Even though writing wasn’t my bread-winning job, it was always the project I turned to next.

During this period, I signed up for an afternoon workshop offered by the University of Chicago. Stuart Dybek, a Chicago native with Michigan ties would select up to four stories to use in a discussion of craft. Before I made the trip to Chicago, I learned that my story had been selected. Would the story and I withstand the scrutiny?  

On the day of the workshop, I sat in the large lecture hall. When my story was up, Dybek pointed out several positives. He asked me to identify myself and talk a bit about the story. Then he led the class through a discussion of why the story worked. When my husband met me to celebrate at an Italian restaurant later, I was exuberant as I recalled the moments under the lecture hall lights talking about my story.

After I was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in 2012, I had to make much more strategic decisions about my writing, and I was able to do so with the help of two women writers. During a weekend writing workshop with the University of Michigan’s Bear River Writers Conference, I talked with Valerie Laken, a writer I’d studied with the previous summer. When she learned about my diagnosis, she offered to sharpen the first twenty pages of my old novel, to make it more marketable, and she gave me a list of a dozen small presses to which I could submit it.  Her willingness to help provided me with energy to move forward on more submissions as well as a new project in memoir. The following summer I worked with Anne-Marie Oomen at the Interlochen Writers Retreat, transforming the journal entries I’d logged during my first few years of cancer treatment into linked essays for a memoir. I published Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages in 2019.

At the age of twenty-one, I’d begun a Master’s degree in Fiction Writing at a prestigious university. At the age of sixty-one, forty years later, I published my first novel, The Remnants of Summer. While I have not made any money from my writing or garnered long-term critical acclaim, I’ve earned my own rewards: moments of success, albeit small, intellectually challenging conversations, perceptive students, compassionate colleagues, mentors, and friends. Mesmerizing poems, stories, and essays to think about and explore with others.

The past eighteen months have demonstrated how bleak the world can become, but there are still sparks and flashes – even the sputtering flame of a recycled Mickey Mouse birthday candle my family saves for celebrations, melted near its base, black iconic shoes nibbled by hot wax – brings some measure of triumph. It’s not perfect, this world of the long-haul woman writer, but it’s as real as anything else out there.

Dawn Newton wanted to be a writer when she was younger and aimed during elementary school days to write a book about asthma. During summers, her mother drove her to the branch library in Waterford every two weeks and waited an eternity in the car without ever complaining, smoking Tareytons while Dawn filled out library slips inside for a stack of books.