In Process with: Peter Kispert
"When the writing is coming, I feel guided and even in control, supported by the mantras and advice of my MFA and teaching years."
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Today’s In Process With… brings us to the late night writing room of the editor and writer Peter Kispert. It didn’t surprise me at all to see that Peter’s submission was itself a whole world; he’s one of my favorite writers of flash fiction, which is interspersed in his unputtdownable collection, I Know You Know Who I Am.
Reading his latest story, 404, at The Sewanee Review, I was reminded of how so many of Peter’s characters are double agents in their own lives, working for and far more often, against themselves. In this story, a young man holds a job at a drive through with as little effort as he can muster, testing the boundaries of what he can get away with, of the attention of others, while also running phishing scams with a partner, Charles. It all works, for a while, till it doesn’t, but not in the way you might imagine.
My job was simple: bait the hook. I thought of his questions: Who I wanted to help, and who I felt sorry for.
“Maybe not me,” I said. “Someone down on his luck.”
I felt him agree, leaned back while I typed. Sensed him watching me write it out. All this want or need, as if it was coming from someone else.
There’s an uncompromising honesty to Peter’s work. He never shies from characters making bad choices, but he always shows them compassion, adoration, even. They’re never jokes or villians or one note. He never lets us forget the clock will run out and consequences will arrive—in this story, the retrospective voice here lets us know they are absolutely coming, are already weighing—but we don’t want them to; we want to stay in the space of maybe it’ll work out after all, in the space of maybe it will be different this time, in the space of Peter’s gorgeous sentences and nuanced truths.
Peter is also an accomplished editor, currently an Assistant Editor at William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. I first encountered Peter as an editor on a smaller scale, when he was editor-in-chief at Indiana Review. The story we worked on together was short, under 1500 words, and Peter managed to improve it tenfold with his clear vision and thoughtful suggestions. I have no doubt that Peter continues to put in his time with his authors as he did for me, making me excited about possibilities for my work beyond what I could see. His attentions to the power of a line and the understanding of a larger story at work are my standard for being edited.
And I’m excited about Peter’s possibilities for his own work. The novel he talks about here. More short stories. (I 100% subscribed to Sewannee Review to read past the paywall on his story; it is that good.) I’ll never tire of watching Peter’s characters hope and get pierced by the arrows they have aimed at their own centers. I’ll never stop rooting for them.
Peter can be found on X and Instagram as @PeterKispert, and if you drop his name into a search engine you’re in for a real treat, for luckily for us the internet is full of his essays and stories and he’s still working on more, which I’ll let him say more about below.
-Danielle
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