Christina D'Antoni Interviews Kalani Pickhart

Photo by Sydney Cisco

Kalani Pickhart is the recipient of research fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center and the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Intelligence for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies. I WILL DIE IN A FOREIGN LAND (Two Dollar Radio) is her first novel. Kalani currently lives and writes in Phoenix, Arizona.

From Web Editor Christina D’Antoni: On October 20th, I interviewed Kalani at her book launch at Changing Hands Bookstore for I Will Die In a Foreign Land—her debut novel. We talked a lot about the structure of her book, displacement, grief, and the contextualization of both historical and personal tragedies. What follows are the questions I didn’t ask—questions that felt like “deep cuts,”—too specific to my writerly interests, or too narrow for an in-person audience. I hope you’ll devour her responses like I did, when they popped up weeks after the event in my inbox.*

CD: I’ve been wanting to ask you about the chapter, “How to Make Love to a Man Not Your Husband,” which is the only section told in second person in the entire book. It feels so distinct from the rest of the book’s powerful restraint, with such evocative prose. It reminds me of Sheila Heti’s chapter “Interlude for Fucking,” in How Should a Person Be? Can you tell me more about writing this chapter? 

Kalani Pickhart: Second person is always a difficult perspective to write in, and I think there’s good reason why we don’t see much of it. Very seldom does it “work.” I think there’s something about the presumptive nature of the “you” that’s being addressed—most of the time, writers are having a voice address the reader, not necessarily a voice directing someone else in the book. Here, though it doesn’t say anything about the Kobzari, at this point the reader is used to the Kobzari slipping in and out of the narrative and there being an omniscient or knowing voice in the book. 

I’m not sure exactly if it’s the Kobzari speaking directly to Katya in this scene, though, because they tend to speak on a grander, wider and all-seeing scale. I think it’s actually Katya’s knowing-self speaking to her unknowing-self, if that makes sense. The voice is maybe how she’d write it down in a journal or a diary if she were recanting everything completely uninhibited. 

So much of Katya’s life is about the body—she’s a doctor, her son died of a heart defect, and so on. But rarely is Katya’s awareness ever in her body. In the first half of the book, Katya is also mostly surrounded by bodies in pain, bodies near the brink of death. In the second part, particularly this moment, she’s enraptured and she feels for a moment the joy of being with Misha for the first time—I think it’s a break for Katya. She’s in Pripyat, everything is radioactive, and yet she’s eating the food, gardening, and having a satisfying sexual relationship for the first time in years. She becomes pregnant again, and the whole experience of being at Maidan and Pripyat leaves her enlightened. I think this is the primary moment where there’s a shift for Katya because she’s realizing part of her grief isn’t just about Isaac—it’s that she’s felt she’s had no control over her own life. I think in this scene with Misha, she’s the one in control of her life, no one else is. 

CD: While “How to Make Love to a Man Not Your Husband” may be the most erotic chapter, I also felt a shift in the text, or a loosening, in scenes that take place in interior spaces—for example, Slava and Misha’s apartments, moments at St. Michael’s, Misha’s mother’s home in Pripyat. These interior scenes feature hot tea, soup, scalded tongues, and are often where characters reveal their inner thoughts. They also starkly contrast these cold exterior scenes of protest and war at Maidan, and in Donetsk. I wonder if you could talk about the different settings and how they’re functioning.

KP: The two main locations I had in my mind while starting this book were the St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, and the Charles Bridge in Prague. The church behaves as a hospital and is a refuge, but there’s always a draft—from death, from the door being opened and closed with bodies coming in and out. At Maidan during the protests, I thought it was important to convey a sense of landmarks—St. Michael’s, Independence Square, Hrushevsky St. and Shovkovychna St., the various apartments they enter, the Trade Unions Building, etc. It gives the reader something to hold onto and understand, and because these events were real, it’s a way to pay tribute to those significant moments and places. The other part of this, though, is that these are places that are not being used in their idealized function: the Trade Unions Building becomes an organizational hub for the press and the main kitchen, the church becomes a hospital, Independence Square becomes a war zone. They are cold places because they are transient places in a Ukrainian winter. People are literally taking shelter—from the violence and from the weather. 

The other plot line with Aleksandr and Jara has even fewer moments for privacy, and that was intentional due to the work that they’ve found themselves in with the KGB. Some of their most important scenes take place on the Charles Bridge. There is no sense of safety, and the bridge itself is emblematic of that: there’s nowhere to hide, you’re vulnerable on all sides, and below is the frigid Vltava river. It’s different than Maidan, and the Donetsk Airport, but it’s not—there’s a danger to keep moving, to not be still, that the tide can shift at any moment. 

When the setting does drift into a home, it feels warmer and safer, though we are never in those places for long. Milan’s apartment in Prague. Slava’s apartment is a safe haven for her and Dascha. The cottage in Pripyat. Slava’s father’s home in Odessa. Anna’s home in Los Angeles. The people in the book are all going through tremendous internal shifts while also dealing with having to move locations often, so when they land in the home of someone who is trustworthy, it provides comfort and warmth against a number of unknowns and fears.

I’m a minimalist, which means I am often asked to go into more detail while other writers are often asked to cut. I would say I am more interested in what a character or narrator doesn’t say instead of what they do say. There’s what people say or don’t say, what a building is or isn’t, who a person is or isn’t. There’s a matter-of-factness, maybe even a simplicity on the surface, but underneath there are all these questions—a grayness that’s steeped in interpretation and subjectivity. Something that I appreciate about older Ukrainians and Russians, besides their grim sense of humor, is that they’re direct. If they don’t want to speak to you, they won’t. If they do, they’ll say it straight. At the same time, they have very rich traditions steeped in mysticism and faith, where an object or a song can bear such profound, unsayable significance. It’s a beautiful paradox, and I had hoped to achieve that while writing this story. 

CD: As someone fascinated by water, I have to ask about your use of water imagery to portray grief. You seem to reserve water exclusively for moments of loss. Katya repeats, “we’re all underwater here,” throughout the book, and characters experience grief as a drowning. Can you speak to this choice?

Photo by Two Dollar Radio

KP: When you look at some photos of these ornate, incredible, Byzantine-style, orthodox churches in Kyiv, it looks like a fairytale. Especially St. Michael’s, St. Sophia’s, and St. Andrew’s, which are walking distance from one another, topped with golden details and roofs. The novel starts off in winter: snow falling around these churches reminded me of a snow globe —perfectly encased and untouchable. From your own work, Christina, you know how dangerous and unpredictable weather patterns can be—there’s a terror in not being able to escape it. Just yesterday there was a flood in the building where I work, and the student worker I supervise said, “I hate floods because you can’t control it.” Being caught in a snowstorm without power, or a hurricane can feel akin to being lost at sea, or swept in a current: there’s a sense of helplessness. I think Katya feels acutely aware of that helplessness in Kyiv.

On a personal note, I’m not a strong swimmer, so the thought of drowning is terrifying to me. It’s the most terrifying death I can imagine. I grew up in Arizona where we sadly hear stories about kids drowning every summer in swimming pools. Monsoons and floods are unpredictable and our urban infrastructure wasn’t built with them in mind. Still, I am in love with the ocean—I love the sand, the smell. I love being near water, and I’m fine being in it as long as I don’t wander too far. I think I’ve always had a deep reverence and fear of it.      

CD: I want to talk about cassette tapes! Aleksandr records tapes for his long-lost daughter Anna, and Vera records them for Misha while he’s away at the mines. There is of course so much to the content of these tapes, but I also want to talk about them as enduring physical objects—how they travel through coat pockets, taped inside envelopes—and are inevitably listened to by unintended ears. How do you see these tapes working within the larger narrative?

KP: I think overall the cassettes are both an object that is archaic, or of a different era, so they’re something rare. Depending on who receives them, they’re either precious or nondescript—a captivating piece of history or old trash. I have always loved mysteries and finding something secret in plain sight—I grew up with those I Spy books which trained your eye to find hidden items. It just felt like you were tucked in an intimate little world, and if my sister and I looked at the book together, it felt like we were sharing a secret. As a kid I loved scavenger hunts, puzzles, discovering treasure. I was a rock collector and I had a little box of stones I liked, even though they were plain to others. I think I’d like all of my books to have some of that unsuspecting magic within them, a little bit of mystery—if only because I enjoy it. I loved writing the breadcrumbs in this book, knowing it was all for something greater.

CD: Is there anything else, after our original conversation and now this one, that you’re thinking about, or would like to share? What’s occupying your mind right now? 

KP: Right now I’m thinking about my second book a lot. I have ideas, but it’s been difficult writing this past year, with IWDIAFL coming out, and the pandemic. My focus is off, and everything takes a great deal of effort. I think the only thing more challenging than writing your first book has to be writing your second book. 

*If you liked this interview, I recommend Kalani’s interviews with Electric Literature and Chicago Review of Books. 

Christina D’Antoni is a writer born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is currently an MFA Candidate in Fiction at Arizona State University, and Web Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review. She is at work on a collection of short stories about the lives of people from the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.