Emily Hunt Kivel

Q1: You've lived in California, New York, and now Texas. How has living in these places, traveling from one to another, impacted your writing? Did you notice your writing changing in response to your current home and community?

Yes, absolutely. Although it may not be obvious in my fiction, I am often thinking about setting and place first…everything else second. Of course, the mood in each of these places—Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Austin, Houston—has felt distinct, but more than anything I think each new place brings out a different element of my own worldview, of my understanding of those around me, of what inspires me (or enrages me, or bores me, or embarrasses me, or whatever) about society. I am interested in what place brings out of people rather than the other way around. When I first begin writing, I imagine the characters more as silhouettes against the backdrop of something larger and deeper.

Q2: You mentioned that the process of writing a book can be a way to explore various sources of anxiety in a writer’s life and can even be the key to solving problems. For you, it seems like writing Dwelling was a way to examine the housing crisis, but more than that, the difficulty young people face in finding a place for themselves. What can you say about writing fiction as a means to explore one’s own preoccupations, to solve problems?

I think everyone goes to the page for different reasons, but for me, as a naturally pretty misanthropic person, I’ve found it’s a way to access the deeper and kinder parts of myself: the more empathetic, the less judgmental. I don’t think writing fiction solves problems, or if fiction itself has ever actually solved a problem, but it has allowed us to feel our own anxieties (and fears and hopes and joys) in a deeper, more focused way. It allows us to think critically and expansively. I don’t think anything gets done—no problem gets solved—without that. That’s why I believe so fully that when all is said and done, and most of us are walking around like inflated cyborgs letting AI do everything for us, writers (the ones with integrity) will still be alive. Will still have souls. Will still see beauty where others see none. Do I sound insufferable?

Q3: One of the things you talked about during your panel was applying the principle of verse to fiction, your particular sensitivity to sound in your prose and how you think of sentences themselves as important units of sound. To what extent has poetry inspired your prose, any particular poets? Additionally, to what extent do you think poetry is related to prose? What can the study of one teach about the other?

I wrote poetry for many years and some of the most formative and transcendent experiences that I had with art as a young person were with poetry. When I first read Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” my knees buckled. When I came across Robinson Jeffers and William Carlos Williams, a new world opened up to me. I’m not disciplined enough to be a poet but I do think prose writers can learn a lot from poets but also from musicians about the importance of rhythm, and about how the shape of a sentence or paragraph is often its own part of the under story. We don’t remember entire books, but we often remember our favorite lines. I can still recite the end of “The Great Gatsby” from when I first read it at fourteen, and it’s not only the content of those lines, it’s the placement of commas that really, really makes them hit. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” And now this image has stayed with me, forever. Everyone should be reading their work out loud.

Q4: You mentioned being interested in writing about both overlooked spaces and characters who aren’t explicitly special. Specialness, you said, is created via attention. What draws you to these places and characters in your writing? Do you carry this philosophy about specialness into your daily life, and, if so, in what way?

Oh yes. I don’t think specialness is what makes a good story. A dramatic and high-stakes and sexy story will be terrible if not told well. And a short piece about, say, going to the market to buy bananas but not finding any ripe bananas can be amazing if told with inventiveness. I find something hopeful and democratic in the idea that it is the very writing itself, the form of attention, that elevates mere sketches to actual characters. I love the idea that all people are capable of greatness—great evil and great good—depending on their circumstances. In “Dwelling,” Evie is a fairly disaffected and disappointing character until, under new and extenuating circumstances, we see that she has had a well of bravery and curiosity swirling inside her all along. There is something so heartbreaking and beautiful about taking characters up to the precipice of greatness and seeing how they react.

Q5: You’ve taught creative writing and composition at St Edwards University, Columbia University, and now here at the University of Houston. Has your creative writing process affected your approach to teaching? In what way? And, vice versa, has teaching creative writing changed the way you see your own process?

Teaching writing makes me believe in writing. It’s easy to descend into solipsism and neurosis as a writer, but being in community with students makes me remember that this art form is important. To be a creative writing or literature or art or humanities major in 2025 (or, really, just to be reading and writing passionately every day) is an act of serious resistance. I’m proud of my students for still believing in something, still holding faith in themselves, still doing the work to make the world rich and deep. And I’m proud of myself for still believing in something. Because it’s hard to sometimes.

It’s interesting. I also think that getting up in front of a group of skeptical young adults and talking, semester after semester, has taught me a lot about my own competency. It’s helped me take some ownership over my approach and principles that I might not have otherwise.

Q6: Is there anything you're really into right now? (books, authors, TV, hobbies, foods, etc) AND/OR Is there anything you're working on now that you'd like to talk about?

I’m obsessed with Tim Robinson and am watching his show” The Chair Company” right now, which I’m not sure is amounting to a lot to be honest, but I will basically go on any journey with him. Once an artist, author, comedian, whatever, earns my trust, it’s almost impossible to break it. I’m on a years-long journey of reading the entire catalogues of Muriel Spark, David Keenan, and Helen DeWitt for the same reason.

Emily Hunt Kivel is the author of the novel Dwelling, out in 2025 on Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her short fiction can be found in The Paris Review, BOMB, Guernica, New England Review, and American Short Fiction, for which she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. She currently serves as the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Houston. She is from California but now lives in Texas.

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