KC: You know what? That's the funny thing about revision. Things that I think it can't live without, I take out and then I don't even remember them. I had a short piece published in X-Ray, and I forget what the parameters are, but basically it's gotta be like 300 words. Really, really short. I had this 1500 word story, and I pared it down and pared it down. Like, what are the five sentences that would express this? This will just be a version of the story. This is the real one. This is a fake one for this submission, just because I want to give it a shot. I can't remember a thing from that 1500 word version. The condensed version becomes the heart.

 

14H: Another thing I love about this story is how it centers queerness: God uses They/Them pronouns, sex with God involves a vast fluidity of sexual orientation and gender. Can you speak on how important that was for you and how you approached it?

 

KC: It just felt so obvious. I mean, obvious sounds silly, but... If we're trying to take this concept of something beyond ourselves, something that's so expansive, something that is ultimate pleasure and ultimate violence and those things are the same and the fear and the love and all this stuff… to say there is a gender that feels contrived and limiting. It felt like of course this has to be the experience of sex with God because it has to be as expansive and holistic and all-encompassing as possible. And it's also like, as a pleasure-seeking human, why would you want to limit yourself? It’s that feeling of, if I could be God, I'd want all of the experiences. I'd want to be able to be fluid in every way. And I think there's something about a patriarchal God that was obviously never gonna happen, but even a She/Her felt like too much of a statement that was confining. Whereas They/Them and that expansion and the change of genders throughout—not even just the change of genders, but the change of genitals—it's like what are the ways in which we can give and take pleasure? I want that fullness of expression.

 

14H: Somewhat related, I read that you're a co-founder of Queer Soup Night. Could you share a bit about what that is and how you got involved?

 

KC: Queer Soup Night was really the brainchild of Liz Alpern. She's an incredible human being, a chef and an author and I just love creating things with her. After the 2016 elections, she said, “Okay, I think we need to gather. Let’s get all of our people together.” She had a friend who owned a pie shop, and she said, “Let’s use Pell's Pies. Let's bring everyone together. Let's raise some money for—” Planned Parenthood was the first beneficiary. The vision she had was: it has to be joyful. It can't be angry protest because anger is motivating, but it's exhausting to sustain. Joy, maybe there's less fire in it, but we can sustain it over time and it can fill our cups so that we're able to go out there in the world and do something radical. So we had this gathering, and it was so joyful, and heartbreaking too. We had Liz and a few other queer chefs making soups. Soup just felt like the material you gather around. It's comforting. It feels like home. We had a friend DJing, so it turned into a dance party. And then we had some friends saying, okay, well when's the next one? So we started putting them together and we gave it the name Queer Soup Night. It’s got this natural infrastructure, so Jen Martin, myself, and Liz started working. What do we want to carry on as we host more of these parties in Brooklyn? What are the more radical organizations we can support, beneficiaries that do really interesting work on the ground where maybe a thousand bucks would make a big difference? How do we find those organizations and highlight them? What chefs do we want to feature? What does it mean to be a part of this? We started getting more volunteers involved, figuring out the cycle. Then one of the core members moved to Florida. And their city does not have a huge queer community, but the community they found was tightly connected. So they were like, okay, I'm gonna start a Queer Soup Night here. We started to pop up in Portland, Oakland, Chicago, just all of these places, and they were having successful parties that focused on organizations that were hyper-local that mattered to them, having this gathering of community that was joyful. I can't believe it's been so many years of doing this project and letting it take flight, letting it do its own magical thing. And Liz, to her credit, was in the heart of scaling when she was very pregnant. Now being a parent of a baby, I'm like, how did you do this while you had an infant? This is insane.

 

14H: All this about how community nourishes us, and the unity of joy, grief, and creation, reminds me of what Anne Carson calls “prayer verbs” in Glass, Irony, and God: “to blue,” “to lay bare a sky”—these acts that represent a kind of prayer. Are there moments in your life where you feel that closeness to something like prayer?

 

KC: I have this ongoing conversation with two artist friends of mine, just this long conversation about art over multiple years, and I asked them both last week, how does faith work into your practice, how does God? Do either of those things resonate? And just hearing their responses was so interesting. It's about trusting one's own instincts. It's about being open to what you're seeing and hearing in the world and letting that influence you, that experience of being with your craft and your creative process. God is kind of a placeholder word for a space where, physically, ethereally, imaginatively, one can access what is outside of your normal realm.

 

14H: You don't have to share about this if you don't want to, but I'm curious about your personal journey with religion.

 

KC: I was brought up Catholic very loosely. My mom was a part of the choir in the local church. She and I and my sister would go on Sundays occasionally until we started making such a ruckus that she's like, you're no longer invited. It wasn't super emphasized in my household, and for my mom really it seemed like a social thing. But my internalization of religion was: I am bad and I need to be fixed. I think that is a common experience of queer people, especially of the 80s and 90s. It didn't even feel necessarily connected to my sexuality. It felt connected to the core of my being. Like something about me is wrong and I need to fix that before God, capital G, He/Him, notices. It was so much striving to figure out how to be good, how to fix what was broken, which translated into getting very good at hiding, at presenting a version of myself that I knew would be accepted and burying what I was trying to get rid of it.

As you can imagine, practicing that over your entire youth does not lead to good things. And I treated that with alcohol and drugs. That brought such a huge relief, where it's like, I don't have to work so hard at holding this mask up and layering, layering, layering. I can actually just relax for a second. The internal nonsense can turn down a few notches on the volume. That relief was intoxicating, for lack of a better word. And that escalated into alcoholism very quickly. And there is no religion like alcoholism for an alcoholic, or like drugs for a drug addict. The lengths that you will go to—the lengths I will go to—for the transcendent experience of relief from my own obsessive thinking is, you know, I'll go to the ends of the earth. It is everything. It is the answer in all of the ways that I needed that answer.

 

I'm extremely lucky because, in my 20s, I had this moment which, depending on the day, sometimes feels like something greater than myself, interrupting my path down a self-destructive road. I was like, oh my God, I can't go on like this. I had this clear vision of: it's not gonna kill me, it's just going to deteriorate me for the next five decades. And that is an unlivable prospect.

 

So I got sober. And sobriety programs are often about God, so over the past 15 years I’ve had this intimate conversation about what does that mean to me in my life today? How do I relate to that? Because I think the Christian-based God just feels human. Like, of course humans would have that story of God. Of course humans would write this book about a divine being. It just feels convenient, and it doesn't connect with me. But that spiritual experience, that moment of being like, oh, I am connected to something that's outside myself... I feel like many people, especially creatives, have those experiences. There’s something bigger, whatever it might be. It’s certainly not the version that we've created the bestselling book about.

 

In the heart of my alcoholism, everything was really tight. Lying to this person about where I am and this person and you have to keep all your stories straight and it's just so much energy. It feels so solid and rocky. And that's the life in this lie, right? Life in the truth is more fluid. I don't need to keep track of things. They flow through me. And if I forget, I forget. It feels a lot more flowing, a lot more changing and shifting and just doing its thing and I don't have to worry.

 

14H: A friend who did AA once told me referring to “god” was difficult until her sponsor said you don’t have to mean their version of God. You can choose anything. She chose the ocean.

 

KC: I love that. That’s exactly right. Here’s this thing that's more powerful than you. Can you live like you would drown if you went out too far? God needs to be able to hold whatever you want to give it. The ocean is so vast, whatever I give it, it can hold.

 

14H: I feel like the title of this story encapsulates all of that: God as a lover, a lover of God, both of those things being creative. How did you come up with it?

 

KC: I mean, I love a title and an opening. Often in my work, it's the opening line or paragraph or scene that feels clear; I have no idea what's going to happen to these characters or in this universe, I just let it pull me along. And the title is like the opening to the opening, right? That’s the hook. There's a thing that Steve Almond says, and I'm going to totally botch it, but basically: titles are everything. Spend time coming up with a title that feels right, especially if you're submitting work to the slush pile, because that may be the only thing someone's going to see. So make it something that encompasses what’s special about the story. This is a funny aside, but there’s this theater in our area. Each year they select six plays and perform them. I've submitted three or four years in a row, and this past year, it's like, I have a baby. I don't have time to write something new. So I just changed the title. I made some edits and changed the title to something punchier and resubmitted, and I got in. Titles matter.

 

14H: You’ve shared a bit about your process for writing fiction. How does your process for writing nonfiction compare?

 

KC: It’s slightly different because there'll be some seed that I want to express, it's coming from this central place and growing out. Versus I know the first line, or the first scene, and I don't know what happens after that, I'm going to let it guide me.

 

14H: Do you find that there's cross-pollination between your fiction and your Substack, My Kingdom for a Fistful of Cheerios?

 

KC: I think so. I mean, the purpose of the Substack was, initially, just to keep practicing, to keep the creative process in flow. No other rules aside from that. Doesn't matter if anyone reads it. Doesn't matter if it does anything.

 

I think most people, when they find out they're going to have a child, they're like, okay, it's time to put our roots in, grow up, get real people jobs, get real steady insurance or whatever. We were like, okay, we need to put our creative lives at the center of our universe and make the money thing work around that. We want this child to feel like art is a path with value in it, creativity is worth investing in. That comes from us just doing it and prioritizing our creative lives.

 

So when we found out we were pregnant, I'm like, I have no idea what it's like to have an infant. I hear it's hard and time-consuming. I don't want to lose my practice. I don't want to let this slip away. I'm imagining my life is going to be consumed by this baby. If I do a Substack, can I write about that? I'm not forcing myself to do a context switch, but I'm keeping the practice alive.

 

14H: Have you discovered anything about motherhood that you didn't know when writing this story, anything this narrator doesn’t know that you’ve now realized?

 

KC: Do you ever have that experience where the more you're engaging with your practice and your creative education, the less you're certain of, and the more spacious that actually is? Like you’re observing things for what they are rather than projecting onto them, which is how we feed our creative process. It’s all material. We're just taking it in, taking it in, and then we get to express it in some way that finds itself in our fiction. I think that's similar to parenthood. It's like the more I'm in it, the less I know or am certain of. And that creates a lot of space for this being to take shape and guide me on what he's interested in. I'm just taking it all in and watching him. And then it’s like, okay, so you're interested in… he's obsessed with my wife's guitars right now. He’s like 10 months old. He doesn't know a thing, but I'll let him mess around on the guitar. Like, yeah, if you want to do music, I'm all for it. Let’s make that happen. Let's encourage that. But yeah. I’m less sure, less knowledgeable every day that goes by.

 

14H: I've heard you're working on a novel. Is there anything you’d like to share about it at this point, like topics, timeline, inspiration?

 

KC: Very much like my short story work, what's interesting to me is this relationship to the ethereal, however that might be interpreted. Our relationship to grief and how that shapes us. It’s so in its early development though, that's kind of what I'm playing with right now, as broad as that is. I’m exploring those universes. And then it's always through the lens of sex and desire.