Interview with Karen Kao’s husband, Frans Verhagen
CS: Do you have a story that comes to mind when thinking about what the writing process meant to Karen?
FV: She’s always been a writer throughout her whole life. I have a booklet with poems that she wrote when she was in college. I think her father talked her into studying law, into going to law school.
When we met in Washington, she was a lawyer, and she practiced law in Holland until 2011. But, really, she always wanted to be a writer, so she finally stopped being a lawyer and started writing.
I think the lyrical essay was a relatively late discovery. She was mostly writing short stories and novels. She still has two that are lying around, and I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with them.
She was writing every day. She was mining her life to turn it into writing at the end, which is very different from what she did when she was writing her novel.
The lyrical essay gave her the option to write about her own life, and that’s what she did. And, as the husband of a writer, I know that I’m occasionally part of the story, too.
CS: How does it feel to play a role in her nonfiction work?
FV: I’m used to it. It’s not embarrassing, it’s part of our lives. We are a family of writers. My older son is writing a book, and the other one has done his PhD. We’re all writing.
I was not familiar with the lyrical essay format until Karen started writing that way. What I find interesting is that the writing process is really condensed. She used her background in poetry to make the images strong.
The lyrical essay — she actually concentrated on it after she got sick because she knew she couldn’t finish a novel. I think her best work is from the last two years.
In terms of me being a participant… there’s a 750-word piece she wrote called “Album.” It starts with our first meeting. The piece is made of little blocks — paragraphs of three to four sentences, that are little pictures of the scene.
It starts with our first meeting in Washington, going out for a date, having a drink, and sitting on top of a building with a sushi restaurant, with Frank Zappa next to us.
I sort of leave her in the dark. We went to her apartment, I drank a lot, and at three o’clock, I decided I wanted to go home. She was confused, ‘Did I say something wrong? Why is he going home in the middle of the night?’
Two weeks later, I came back from Mexico. I was a foreign correspondent, so I traveled a lot. I came back with some earrings and went up to her apartment. She describes the whole scene with, ‘We never made it to the bedroom.’
I think that’s the power of the lyrical essay. That you can get the reader to see the scene with a few words. That’s one of the stories I’m proud to be a part of.
CS: Did Karen have any special writing rituals or places she wrote most?
She was writing in bed. It was her office, and not because she was sick. She always did that.
But I think she really honed her skills in the last two years.
CS: How has the process of publishing her most recent, unpublished work been for you?
It has not been easy. She had left behind notebooks that I was instructed to destroy, unread. I did so.
But Swimming Upside Down, because she won the Sarabande Prize for her essays, being given a publishing deal is a relief. I know the process of finding a publisher or agent is very difficult.
I’ve been trying to select pieces that she would put on her Substack, trying to put a piece out every month to keep interest going until the publication of her book. There are also short stories and other essays that are not in her book, so I may have to go through those.
It’s a lot of work. That’s why I use her friends, too. It’s hard to decide which version of a piece was the one she preferred. Sometimes, she would condense a story from 1,500 to 750 words maximum. I have been making notes when I go through the versions about which ones feel finalized, but frankly, I haven’t gone all that far. There’s still more.
CS: What do you think writing meant to Karen, on a personal level?
FV: I think it was everything to her. Actually, I think language was everything.
Chinese was spoken at home between her parents. They wanted the kids to learn English, so they spoke only in English with them, but of course, the children heard Chinese. I think this is where she developed her ear for language.
Being a lawyer, she was always dealing with language. It requires sweet-talking your opponents across the table. She was the main negotiator for really big deals.
You had to realize she was five feet something. She was small. So, when she came into a negotiating room as the main negotiator, she would just sit there and pull the legs out from under her opponents by letting them talk. Occasionally, she said something, and they all underestimated her. She knew exactly what to say to get the best contract for her client.
Language was always part of her, and writing was the essence of what she was doing.
After she stopped being a lawyer, after she realized that she’d done everything there that she could do, language was fun. I think the writing became more 24/7.
CS: Sweet will be putting some funds from the contest towards a scholarship for an international writing retreat. Has Karen ever done a writer’s retreat? If so, what feelings did she have towards this time set aside to write?
FV: She was accepted to an all-women retreat [Hedgebrook] in September 2023, but was diagnosed in June, so she canceled. I think that was heartbreaking. She had tried to get into a retreat for probably four years, and she was really looking forward to being isolated amongst women.
