The internal logic of a speculative fiction story has a strange mathematics of its own. The rules of its world deviate from the rules we follow, but are usually consistent with our expectations about how rules operate. More than two thousand years ago, Archimedes of Syracuse speculated he could move the earth itself, if he had a long enough lever and a place to stand. Similarly, writers in this fiction genre are always seeking a level spot, located halfway between the known and the unfamiliar, on which to build a fulcrum.

In the stories of Kristina Ten, the writer conjures vast and foreboding landscapes, domiciles that are rarely sheltering, bizarre challenges that throw characters emotionally and physically off-balance. Recurring themes include the struggle for personal autonomy, and the ways in which language both defines and fails us. 

Kristina Ten’s debut collection, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, features surprising intersections and combinations of elements. The stories are frequently constructed like an escape room maze, a test of a character’s resilience, with blind alleys and unexpected exits. Happy endings aren’t the goal, but rather, the creation of a new vantage point from which to contemplate the ancient paradoxes of human life.

I had a rare opportunity to trade ideas in depth with Kristina before the publicity cycle for the book launch accelerated. Over the course of eight weeks, she made time for several long conversations by email on a wide assortment of topics. Join us now for a sample of our discussions.

—K. Roberts 

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K Roberts: This might seem a strange way to pay a compliment, but an indirect indicator of the range of your talent is the number of extraordinary tales that didn’t make the cut for this volume. For example, the frothy and delightful satire “When It’s Over (No Tears Shampoo),” which features a character who speaks in advertising slogans. The poignant, absurdist romance “All The Arms We Need,” where the narrator transforms into a starfish to satisfy their loved one’s desire to be held tighter, closer, longer. I’m hoping we’ll see more of your humorous side in the future. Until then, I’m curious how you move so deftly between genres and emotional tones. Have you gone through artistic phases, like Picasso’s paintings, or have you always liked to mix styles?

Kristina Ten: I approach each story collection as a discrete project. Rather than looking through my existing oeuvre for stories that might work well together, I start with a linking force or theme and write into it. Usually it’s something about the world I’m wanting to understand better, or some ghost I’m hoping to exhume and breathe new life into. With Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, that link was games, particularly the strange games and rituals that make up the shared folklore of our childhoods. Schoolyard divination practices, locker room superstitions, summer camp mythologies. That sort of thing. I wondered what power this folklore gives us, and how it falls short as we grow up.

Since most of my stories teeter on the ledge of the dark, the weird, the uncanny, that feels less like a switch and more like a half step into neighboring territory. They might register as opposite extremes, but horror and comedy have a lot in common. Jordan Peele, a master of both, once said “the difference between comedy and horror is the music.” Both genres rely on pacing, mounting tension, and timing: a punch line, or jump scare, coming at just the right time. And both have that visceral, audible moment of relief when the tension breaks. Bill Hader, star of SNL’s funniest skits and the Stephen King adaptation It Chapter Two, pointed out both genres aim for that “big reaction” from the audience: the laugh or gasp (or, if it’s really scary, the scream).

Horror needs comedy, too. Being edge-of-your-seat terrified for the full length of a movie or book would destroy one’s nervous system. You can only stay elevated for so long before your body maxes out and the scares barely register—you’re desensitized. That’s why horror has its peaks and valleys. The valleys give the audience time to settle down. Feel comfortable again. Feel safe. Then when the next scare comes, it’s sky-high, stomach-in-your-shoes terror all over again. All my favorite horror hits the comedy hard. Clay McLeod Chapman is great at this. Jennifer Thorne’s Diavola, with the humor of its family dynamics. And Barbarian: that scene with Justin Long and the basement measurements.

I’ve been steadily leaning more heavily into horror. I’m guessing I’ll keep going in that direction.

 

KR: In past interviews, you’ve mentioned two methods you use to begin a story. One is to pose questions, such as “how do we navigate personal tragedies?” Another is to choose pairs of words—contradictions, like relaxation and danger, vitality and deterioration. You also read scholarly research on topics like childlore. This sounds like an intellectual approach, but your finished stories are anything but abstractions. They’re entertaining, visceral, full of personality. How do you bridge the gap between thoughts and embodied actions? How do you get the story “up on its feet and moving,” as my actor friends would say? 

KT: For me, it’s all thinking. Researching a topic and writing are just two different modes of trying to see it from as many angles as possible. Often, I don’t know quite what I think about something—the nuances, anyway—until I’ve written about it. That’s why I’m writing about it, to dig my snout into the nooks and crannies of thought and feeling.

When it comes to resurfacing from a deep research rabbit hole, a deadline definitely helps, knowing that someone somewhere is impatiently drumming their fingers waiting for an email. I can spend a lot of time buried in library materials. I love lists. Love school. I’m a completionist and a tryhard. I have a difficult time “reading around” in texts, something I was told early on in grad school I’d have to do in order to survive. I wouldn’t recommend my approach, honestly. It’s not terribly efficient. I also have a poor memory, so I read all these words knowing I won’t retain a quarter of them. 

I wrote Tell Me Yours on a deadline. This book was my MFA thesis project. I was lucky enough to have Stephen Graham Jones as my thesis advisor, and I was thinking: Here’s a writer who can write a tremendous book in ten weeks. If I can’t finish mine in a year—that’s not going to fly with Stephen, or with anyone else on my thesis committee, or with me.

I like playing in the space between what we imagine as opposing poles. For Tell Me Yours, those poles were probably play and survival mode. I’d been thinking of them as opposites, after seeing the concept articulated beautifully by the artist Britchida, but they’re not. Beyond the world of books, there’s proof they’re not. You see kids in a genocide-ravaged Gaza playing games with aid-drop parachutes, the same games I used to play in gym class growing up. Other poles that interest me are isolation and community, alienation and belonging, obedience and disobedience.

 

KR: You’ve described yourself as a “hyphenated” writer of Siberian, Georgian, and Korean background. I’ve noticed, in your stories that draw upon Russian folklore particularly, an implied desire to feel closer to the past. You discuss ancestors no longer present, traditions no longer observed. Through imagination, you visit locations you’ve not yet seen. How has drawing upon your family’s experiences with diaspora affected you? Has that brought closure, resolved inner conflicts, opened up new possibilities? What do you hope for going forward? 

KT: My mom is Russian with Siberian roots, and my dad is Russian-Korean and lived in the country of Georgia until university. Of our extended family, only the three of us now live in the States. I’m not sure I want to feel closer to the past so much as I want to feel closer to my family. We are—geographically, logistically, culturally—very far apart. Writing into Russian folklore and fairy tales has helped me feel connected to my cousins, my aunt and uncle, my grandparents, and to the family that came before. Baba Yaga, Koschei the Deathless, Snegurochka, the Noon Witch: These are figures in the stories we grew up with. They’re our common ground. At the same time, subverting these tales has allowed me to be true to myself, to be observant of the ways my life is different from, for example, my grandmother’s life. My Baba Yaga lives with too many roommates in San Francisco. My Noon Witch goes to music festivals. My Snegurochka melts at the heart of a queer love story.

I’ve not found closure, nor resolution, and if anything, all this has only opened me up to deeper and more lasting inner conflict. But that’s being human in 2025. Yes, I’m interested in the past: I’m fascinated by the migratory patterns each of my family members traveled (some by forced displacement, others of their own volition), the culmination of which led me to where I am today. It feels so unlikely to me, all of us being exactly where we are at this present moment. But I’m not devoted to the past. I think of my cultures in the present and future tense, as living things. When you’re a person of Russian extraction living in the States, two empires in an uneasy, often adversarial relationship since before the Cold War, that means constant reckoning. It means having a personal identity that’s constantly being shaped and reshaped by political narratives and agendas. 

I’m the only writer in my family, and one of a small few who speak, read, and write in English. I feel some responsibility to tell my family’s stories, even if they’re slanted through a speculative lens. At the same time, I struggle with the task of representation. I feel I can only represent myself, existing at the intersection of many identities, of which “Russian” and “American” are only two. What business or authority do I have to represent the Russian perspective, or the American perspective—same goes with Russian-American, or female, or queer, or, or, or… I am all of these things, but none are monoliths.

Through my writing, I conduct that reckoning. If the internet is where nuance goes to die, a book-length project is where it may bloom. One of my favorite things about the form is that there’s room for exploration. The best piece of writing advice, and just life advice, I’ve ever received was this: People will flatten you (sometimes with good intentions; with catchy, bite-size descriptions meant to help sell your work), but you should work very hard not to flatten yourself. Do not allow anyone’s othering of you to work itself under your skin, so that you find yourself thinking like them, and othering yourself. 

 

KR: Many of your stories have an intriguing quality of material plasticity. Even the aspects of character, plot, frame of reference, are very pliable and likely to shift at any time. Do you have a sense of shaping a story like soft clay, pulling it in one direction and then another? Or is your inner experience of the writing process better described with some other metaphor?

KT: Thing is, clay hardens. Even before it’s fired in the kiln, it hardens: first to what’s called “leather hard,” at which point the shape is fixed but you can do some trimming, or maybe give your pot a foot, then to “bone dry” (or “greenware”), at which point it’s ready for firing. I don’t think my stories ever feel set like that. What you read in them, that’s just you and me being in the same room with those characters, with all the lights turned on. But when we turn away from the page—leave that room, turn the lights out—I have to believe those characters go on living. Getting up to some mischief we don’t see. I’m drawn to folklore, and folklore is fluid and collective. It isn’t a fixed work belonging to a single author, but rather is built by a community creating, sharing, responding to, and evolving a large network of stories over time.

 

KR: The title of the book, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, promises the reader secrets will be confided and conversations will happen. There are topics we don’t talk about enough—for example, body shaming and anorexia. Am I okay in sharing you’ve drawn on personal experiences to some extent? What are the special challenges when writing into difficult memories, and how do you detach enough to revise as ruthlessly as a story sometimes requires?

KT: There’s some of me in all of my protagonists, though maybe not always what the reader expects. Sometimes it’s not the most obvious character trait but some smaller, tougher, deeper-down kernel. Speculative fiction can be incredibly useful when it comes to writing about difficult topics. Not only are you writing at the remove of fiction, you’re writing at the double remove of the speculative. Now the abused and the abuser (in “Keep Tabs on You”) aren’t just two characters I’ve made up; they’re a living doll and her collector—two beings that don’t exist in our natural world. Kate Bernheimer and Matt Bell have talked about the benefit of fairy tale and myth in creating distance from violence, such that it becomes more bearable to write and to read. I’d say the same can be true with speculative fiction, sometimes. Not always. Think “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies” by Bo Bolander. The violence there is intentional, and brutal. 

 

KR: “Bunny Ears” scared the socks off me. That was the only piece I responded to as horror, rather than as fable or fantasy. It describes a tribe of feral children, but it’s not just about the kids. It’s about what Rob Costello calls “the worst-case scenario” and the fears of parents and caregivers, that despite our best efforts we can’t keep our children safe in an unsafe world. I know horror entails a set of craft techniques specific to the genre. Therefore I wonder if you planned the story arc with forethought and deliberation, with those techniques in mind? Or did you proceed on instinct and feeling, focusing on what frightens you personally, hoping the reader would react the same way? Also, can you share a horror piece by another writer, text or film, that affects you on a gut level, and say why? 

KT: “Bunny Ears” started as an experiment in super-close third person. I’d recently read Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart Is a Chainsaw, and the voice of the protagonist, Jade, was still rattling around in my head. We’re taught in writing classes that every point of view has its own lane in terms of intimacy: first person affords the most intimacy, and third person the most distance. But I have this theory that an extremely close third is no less intimate than first, and I wanted to see for myself. “Bunny Ears” was that testing ground. I didn’t outline the story. If I know how a story is going to end before I write it, what’s stopping readers from knowing too? So, yeah, I followed the fear. The fear of misunderstanding, or overestimating, someone’s love, and loving them more than they love me. The fear of public humiliation. Oh, and the fear of mosquitoes, who can’t get enough of me. That all went into the story. 

To answer the second half of your question: There’s a passage in Paul Tremblay’s Horror Movie that does something I’ve never seen another book do. I won’t give it away—it’s toward the end, in one of the “movie script” chapters. It toys with what we were talking about earlier, expectations and timing in horror. Like any genre, horror has its beats: the strange world, the first contact with the monster, the sacrifice… By following these beats, the work holds up its end of the contract that we, horror audience, and it, horror media, enter into. It adheres to the rules by delivering on our expectations, and we adhere to the rules by reacting appropriately. There is safety and comfort in all rules being peaceably adhered to. Horror Movie asks: What if the expectations aren’t met? If the tension never breaks, relief never comes. 

That and Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. I started having dissociative episodes a couple days after finishing it, and kept having them intermittently for the next two or three weeks. Then they just stopped. I don’t know how to explain it.

 

KR: Fiction authors at CRAFT provide an author’s note when their stories are published to discuss creative influences. Kelly Link has been mentioned several times. Karen Russell, who has an essay at Tin House on “Engineering Impossible Architectures,” is referenced in our craft articles. Both Russell and Link write fabulism, and both are female. You shared with me an essay by Brenda Reynaldo suggesting that’s not a coincidence. How does the speculative approach to real-world problems come together in ways that work better from a storytelling point of view?

KT: This year at Brooklyn Book Fest, which I couldn’t attend but which various friends recounted to me, there was a panel called “The Surreal Next Door,” moderated by Melissa Lozada-Oliva with panelists Marie-Helene Bertino, Ananda Lima, and Debbie Urbanski. They talked about surrealism feeling like the realest landscape from which to write, and that it’s realism that often feels false and alien. I get that. Those of us residing in the United States live in a society constructed for straight, cis, wealthy, neurotypical, American-born white men. They’re the “norm” our society is built around, and if those adjectives don’t describe you, you fall outside of that norm. Having to engage and survive in that world designed for someone else to succeed in feels uncanny. Like a key not quite fitting into a lock, because that lock wasn’t made to accommodate you. The lock was in fact made just a little bit off, so you might feel like if you changed one tiny thing about yourself, you could suddenly fit perfectly. Which is always a lie. 

Speculative fiction is interested in this slippery boundary between “normal” and “abnormal.” It can defamiliarize the familiar, and familiarize the unfamiliar. It interrogates what we think of as strange and what we think of as ordinary, comfortable or uncomfortable—and why. So it can be fruitful to turn to speculative fiction with personal matters, particularly issues that aren’t discussed widely or openly enough, thus we don’t realize how common they are. My stories want to know: This thing that’s happening to me, to us, is it typical or atypical? And even if it’s typical, does that make it okay?

Too, there exists the sort of reader who needs to relate to the viewpoint character at a superficial level in order to engage with the work. If the character is, say, an exoticized woman and that reader can’t relate, maybe they feel alienated, and they bristle. But if the character is a water dragon, that might be less objectionable, because water dragons are sheer fantasy. Same with “The Advocate,” in which a woman’s battle with medical gender bias becomes a knight’s battle on the jousting field. Suddenly, that reader might find themself empathizing with a character whose lived experiences are very different from their own—and not just because the character is a figure of myth or legend. 

In her memoir The White Mosque, Sofia Samatar writes, “To be very close to the very foreign is one definition of haunting.” That’s my kind of ghost story.

 

KR: Continuing with our discussion of marginalized perspectives, I’m thinking of the quip sometimes attributed to William Gibson, “The future has arrived, but it’s not evenly distributed yet.” Brazilian educator Paulo Friere talked in the 1960s about “the banking model of education, where teachers are depositors and students the depositories.” In the 2020s, Felicia Rose Chavez said more needs to be done about writers feeling silenced in workshops. When you talk with other writers, do you hear the situation is getting better regarding inclusivity and structural obstacles, or are there still challenges? 

KT: Certainly some organizations are working to improve in those areas, and certainly there are still many challenges—especially with the culling of arts funding nationwide, which has put more pressure on already resource-strapped individuals and resource-strapped spaces like writing workshops, residencies, conferences, and so on. Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World (2021) spooled up a necessary conversation about equity in current models of teaching and workshop facilitation. I’m a Clarion West alum. When I attended in 2019, we followed the same model I’d learned in undergrad: the workshoppers took turns giving feedback while the workshopped sat in silence, receiving. Now Clarion West experiments with different models and prioritizes flexibility based on each class’s needs, and has also moved partially online. One model asks the workshopped writer to submit several questions/areas of concern ahead of time, to focus the conversation.

Not all workshops, residencies, or conferences are created equal. Some are fully funded with a generous stipend and travel coverage. Others have application fees and steep attendance costs. Those costs might have to do with the type of program: Is it an undirected program meant to give the writer uninterrupted time and space to work, or is it a densely scheduled program where multiple instructors and panelists must be paid? A lot of scholarships have recently been cut, and rates increased, to keep the lights on. The United States is a big place, and some states allocate more funding to the arts than others. Still, there is definitely stuff out there that feels exclusionary in terms of price, time commitment, etc. Our society by and large does not value its writers and artists—or if it does value them in an abstract sense (wanting to be surrounded by “culture” and understanding that this is how culture gets made), it does not show that with material support. Many writers pay impressive sums to participate in opportunities in the hopes of building a career which guarantees no monetary compensation. I’m willing to bet ninety-five percent of my favorite writers have day jobs. Because, despite it all, writing is still the most worthwhile pursuit. 

 

KR: On the horizon for you are a second story collection and revisions to a first novel. What new Kristina Ten creations can we anticipate in the near future?

KT: I’m in the midst of launching Tell Me Yours, so I’ve been doing a whole lot of essay writing: deeper dives into, and offshoots of, the book’s preoccupations. I’ve written about nostalgia as a weapon of political regimes, and Mariana Enriquez’s particular blend of supernatural and societal horror, and about what in children’s folklore taps into our greatest adult fears. You’d think after writing an entire book on these topics, I’d have turned them inside out and backwards, and run out of stuff to say. But turns out there’s no bottom to this well. These essays have taken me to a lot of interesting places, crystallizing lines of thought and opening sinkholes. I haven’t been in a nonfiction writing mode in a long time, and it’s felt good to return to that voice.

 

KR: Magazines including JMWW, Lightspeed, and Witness have hosted readings of your stories on their podcasts. Have you gained insights from hearing your work performed? Any advice for writers thinking of making audio recordings or doing public readings?

KT: Mostly, I think audio narrators and podcasters are sorcerers. It’s cool hearing my work read aloud by anyone other than me, especially by a pro. I’ve probably read that particular story a dozen times, some of those times aloud. All of a sudden it’s brand new to me, just by being in a different voice. Kind of like how I draft a story in one font, then edit it in a different font, to try to trick myself into believing I’m editing someone else’s work and not mine.

I used to be pretty hardheaded when it came to performing my work. I’m not a natural performer, and anything on or remotely near a stage is going to freak me out. So I told myself that my natural flat, buzzy delivery was just fine—that the words mattered, not the delivery. I convinced myself, conveniently, that the delivery wasn’t my job. Now I know it’s all my job. You spend so much time getting the story just right, trying to make it say precisely what you mean, and you have to keep doing that work when you get up on stage. Do the story justice in the telling. In the everything, really. That’s how I rev myself up to post on social media, or go to certain events, or do any of the stuff that scares me. The story doesn’t end on the last page. It has a longer tail than that.

If you’re thinking of recording or performing your work? Do it. I’ve always loved spoken word, poetry slams. I love the texture of language. I love when it sounds good. My advice would be to go out to a lit show or an open mic, and listen to how other people do it. Watch any of the many videos available on YouTube. Story Hour has recordings of speculative fiction, if that’s your thing, and Button Poetry is the place for spoken word.

 

KR: In keeping with the games motif of Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, let’s do a quick version of a game-show staple, the lightning round. Earlier, you gave me a list of writers who were influences on this book. In one word, or a short phrase, describe what you admire or what you’ve absorbed from each role model. 

KT: 

• From Brenda Peynado: the power and possibility of fourth person (or “Greek chorus”) POV
• Stephen Graham Jones: if you’re not scaring yourself, you’re probably chickening out
• Paul Tremblay: go ahead and verb that noun
• Kelly Link, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Helen Oyeyemi: storytelling itself can be the story
• Karen Russell: trust the kids when they tell you about the monsters they’ve seen—and the miracles, too
• Kevin Brockmeier: a story is better with an animal’s blessing
• Kij Johnson and Kim Fu: go forth into strange worlds confidently, and the reader will follow
• Isabel Yap: Google exists so you don’t have to translate every bit of non-English on the page
• Nathan Ballingrud: check in with that messed-up kid sitting alone in the back of the diner
• Mariana Enriquez: if the ending felt too easy, there’s probably a reason
• Louise Erdrich: love the world enough to pay attention to its darkest corners
• Vladimir Nabokov: assume your reader is smart enough to solve the puzzle

 

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KRISTINA TEN is the author of Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine (2025, Stillhouse Press). Her stories appear in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, and elsewhere. She has won the McSweeney’s Stephen Dixon Award, the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award, and the F(r)iction Writing Contest, and has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Locus Award. Ten is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and the University of Colorado Boulder’s MFA program in fiction, and has received fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.

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K ROBERTS is a Pushcart Prize-nominated essayist with recent work published by Soundings East, Axon: Creative Explorations, and the international travel journal Panorama. Roberts interviewed Amy Stuber, winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, for CRAFT in 2024.