Gina Nutt: “Petite Mort” introduces us to an unnamed protagonist and a cast of similarly anonymous partners. What influenced your choice not to name characters? What paths did this open? What challenges did you encounter?
Anne-Marie Kinney: As I was writing this story, I felt very close to the protagonist, like I was watching her and also walking alongside her. The way the story unfolded in my head felt like when you’re people watching in public. You never learn the names of the people you’re watching, but you daydream imaginary circumstances and motivations for them. But naming characters has never come naturally to me. I always imagine myself riding on their shoulder or inside their shirt pocket; their names are immaterial to me. I’m more concentrated on the physicality and vibe. To be perfectly honest, I did not even realize I hadn’t named the main character until I read this question!!

GN: This story has the feel of an Infinity Room in which the protagonist’s present refracts moments from her past. Can you share a bit about your process of streamlining and shaping these tense shifts?
AMK: In the first draft I was just going full stream of consciousness, slipping from present into memory and back again as one does while daydreaming on a bus, the way the light changes—darkening as you pass under an overpass and then the sun hits you in the face when you emerge from underneath—that’s the feeling I was trying to evoke. And then when I went through it again, I made an effort to clarify the shifts with section breaks, to make it flow in a way that was maybe a little more graspable. Since David Lynch died, I’ve been thinking a lot about his influence on me. Not that I would dare to call my work “Lynchian” but there are so many moments from his work that are always on my mind. In some way I think I’m always trying to evoke a feeling like in Twin Peaks: The Return when Cooper and Diane are driving all night in near silence, toward an unknown future that is also past—it’s not one or the other. And there’s a line in Inland Empire where Nikki, the actress played by Laura Dern, says something like “it happened yesterday, but I know it’s tomorrow.” I’m very drawn to the idea of time and its mutability.

GN: These steadily unspooling glimpses build a portrait of how the protagonist relates to herself and others, revealing dualities of pleasure and harm, desire and dismissal, hope and loss. Is there a specific tension that inspired this piece? How did you juggle the protagonist’s proximity to these dualities?
AMK: The question that inspired this story was: If the only guarantee we have in life is that one day we’ll die, what effect would it have to take that guarantee away? If death was *not* inevitable, but still out of our control. Not any kind of supernatural immortality thing, but what if you just didn’t and couldn’t know if your life would ever end? How might a person behave under those circumstances? In what ways would it make her reckless? In what ways would it make her sad? What would she have power over, and what would she be powerless against? I don’t know where the original question came from, but I just started moving her around with that idea in mind, and every aspect of the character grew from it.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
AMK: I get a lot out of just walking around, in nature, yeah, but even more so on heavily populated streets, where I can get lost in noticing every person and every thing I see. And I like to read in the sun as much as I can. I think this story first germinated from me reading two Annie Ernaux books in a row—Passion Simple and L'Événement—one about an affair in which the narrator’s physical need for this man becomes the only thing she can think about, and one memoir about the difficult process of seeking an illegal abortion in the 1960s. Not just the subject matter, but also sitting in my back yard in an egg chair that swings on a chain, with my legs up on the wall. I always remember the physical circumstances under which I read a book and it changes my experience of it. French is the only other language I speak fluently enough to read literature in, and it really changes my brain when I’m reading a French book. I start writing in English but in French rhythms. It’s like my inner monologue becomes someone else, which feels like a good place to write from.