In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Kim Blaeser
When was the moment you realized you needed to write “Wars and Small Wars,” your nonfiction piece in V. 28 of Water~Stone highlights the violence that women face on a daily basis? When did the war comparison develop?
Honestly, the essay sneaked up on me. Old incidents niggled. Conversations played and replayed. If I had considered writing about the violence women face, I would have expected to do it in fiction or to allude to it in poetry, not to write about personal experiences in creative nonfiction. When putting the essay together, I began with just the scene of conversation with the car full of boys. But it came tangled with other details and made sense only in the context of the era and my small-town culture.
The war comparison grew out of the weight of the emotional struggle I realized we had lived in. Tensions and the strategies we devised for dealing with them, the making and breaking of alliances, together with the violence itself, felt like an ongoing battle. Perhaps it existed as a subterranean battle whose hidden nature intensified as we tried to keep it secret.
There’s such a focus on interpersonal relationships and the unsaid: the community has an unspoken rule of rarely locking its doors; R.B. covertly warns the narrator that she shouldn’t get in the car. How do you think this subtle communication plays into the themes of the piece?
Amongst the unacknowledged and unsayable in small towns, people develop other ways of communicating. This is especially true for teenagers who already feel disenfranchised from the adult language of status quo.
Adolescence equals befuddlement. Teenagers constantly try to puzzle out relationships, to find where they fit in school, friend groups, their family, the community. Amid the rules and the pressure of other people’s sometimes unstated expectations, they harbor their own longings and dreams. They send and receive all kinds of nonverbal signals from dress to body language to rebellious behaviours. Sometimes the signals misfire; sometimes they become a beacon.
Most inhabitants of small towns develop an awareness of the unsaid. Social skills (for better or worse) require the unraveling of each muted meaning. Taboos create tension in the piece and the various characters’ responses to them come more often through action than language.
What did you think about when crafting the setting of a teenager’s world in a small town in the 70s? How did you bring it back to life?
First I tried to reinhabit the place and time myself and then to select details that might help the reader feel that reality. To characterize the remoteness, I describe the boarded-up train station. I introduced landmarks but also perimeters like the three-block main street. I employed sense-laden details such as the smell of sweat and liquor in the car, and the fringed leather jacket of the era. To place the reader in time, I mention pooling change to buy gas for an entire evening’s driving around. I include the beginning of girls’ athletics as another time marker, but also to signal the layers of struggle women faced in that era. I relied on accumulating details—the pies spinning in the pie carousel, the long phone cord, cars left running and unlocked—to create an alive sense of place.
The idea of losing trust in one’s own judgement runs deep through this story. How did you emphasize this as you wrote this piece?
One important way I underscore this loss of trust in one’s judgement is by letting the essay invalidate its own statements. For example, the narrator first declares “Cars with people we knew were safe.” But in the next paragraph, she contradicts herself: “Except when they weren’t.” The “rule” she had absorbed didn’t hold.
But, in order for this idea of self-doubt to come across as more generally “true” in the story, it had to be the experience of more than just the narrator. So the essay literally names the “we” group as also having their “confidence” in their judgement shattered: “They were just having fun. We should have known better.”
What is your editing process?
After drafting, I let the piece sit. When I return to a short piece like this, I read the whole thing out loud as I revise. The distance from which I evaluate varies. Sometimes I get stuck for days tinkering with one sentence or phrase. Other times I focus on the larger story arc. When it feels finished, I like to again let it sit and return to it, reading as if it were someone else’s work. This latter step works best if I have been writing something else in the meantime.
Of course, I love to have someone else read and comment, but that is a luxury not often available.
What genres and themes do you write in?
I have published six books of poetry, so I am known primarily as a poet, but I have published in many genres—from drama to scholarship to journalism. My debut collection of short fiction, Red Ants, is forthcoming in October 2026.
The preoccupations of my writing remain similar across genres. I explore our connections to place, culture, and history. I’m interested in justice issues. As an Anishinaabe writer, Indigenous values and ways of beings remain my lens. As someone who grew up in northwestern Minnesota, many of my works have a connection to that watery landscape. Ideas of reciprocity with and responsibility to the natural world remain a backbeat, and I love tracing intergenerational stories. I also remain interested in the ferocity of our human search and our frailties, especially in the way this sometimes creates comical outcomes.
What are you working on now?
Just a week ago, I turned in my short fiction collection. In the next months, I will be seeing that through the publication process. I am in the early stages of expanding one of the stories from that collection into a novel or novella. I am also beginning to assemble poems for another poetry collection. I have more than enough poems, but I see gaps in the arrangement. I’m dreaming up those poems.
Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin poet laureate, is the author of works in several genres. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light, Copper Yearning, and Résister en dansant/Ikweniimi: Dancing Resistance. Blaeser’s honors include the Poets & Writers Writer for Writers Award, Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction, and Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, a professor emerita at UW–Milwaukee, and an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts. For more information, visit kblaeser.org.
