KMWR: I’d love to know where and how this story came about. Can you tell us about what it was like writing “orca”?
SG: If I remember correctly, I think “orca” came about after reading a really beautiful and electric poem. Knowing my obsession with her work, it was probably by the writer Jasmine Ledesma (you can find most of her poetry on tumblr: @candiedspit!) I went into her blog to try and find which piece inspired me and found these two wonderful snippets, which I’ll share with you (even though I can’t quite remember if these were the ones that did it!): (1) (2) 

Outside of the initial inspiration, I knew I wanted to capture something really nostalgic: the feeling of wonder at a county fair, the way everything was simply loud. The smell of the animals and the shove of the crowd and the hay beneath your hands. It was the type of experience that was absolutely sensory torture, and yet, every car ride back home, I’d just lean my head on the window and be caught in an absolute dream remembering how bright and amazing everything was. I turned this up a notch and considered the circus – I had read Geek Love by Katherine Dunn not long ago, so I was really fascinated by the concept of ramshackle stardom: being adored while on stage and a busy, clumsy nobody while off of it; always traveling and tearing down what you just built. 

Everything else just sort of fell into place once I was working with that concept. I loved thinking about all the things both majestic and messy: huge dogs, a first love, an isolated farm, the creaking mouth of an old dummy, glamorous shows built on the backs of exploited labor (of humans and animals). 

I feel like it’s important to tell you that when I was a child, I always said I wanted to grow up to be a writer. But there were many brief periods where I dreamed about being a ventriloquist. Writing this story was nostalgic in more ways than one. Most importantly, it made me realize that writers and ventriloquists both have the same job: inventing a story and inventing a mouth to tell it.

KMWR: In your piece, “Silk Moths Don’t Have Mouths” published over on Miniskirt Magazine, a character expresses, “Sometimes I wonder if I don’t know what falling in love feels like.” I found similar sentiments and preoccupations being expressed by the narrator of “orca” and wanted to know your thoughts on if your characters (or we as humans generally) ever can truly know what love is, or does our tendency to create metaphors actually get in the way of it?

SG: I’m so glad you read “Silk Moths”! That was the first ever piece of writing I published – I think it very obviously carries my last grip on teenage angst while still simultaneously being one of the most impassioned things I’ve written. I also love the way you phrased that last line – I do think our tendency to create metaphors gets in the way. Massively.

I think, since we’re born as blank slates and we’re taught very rigorously on how to live and what to recreate, our very definition of romance has been skewed. Not that there was ever an honest definition of romance: in the beginning, it was probably just primal hormones, and then just an excuse made up to justify marriages and living situations and family structures. Now, arguably, it’s a way to sell products and keep people distracted. 

I think the greatest problem is that we’re taught the experiences and associations of love, romance, and happy unions through media: couples kissing in commercials to celebrate the purchase of laundry detergent, star-crossed lovers kissing in the rain during blockbuster movies. Unfortunately, these pieces of media hardly leave space for the weirdos. So, if you’re what society deems unattractive for the screen, you develop all these associations: you’re undeserving of romance. You’re not compatible with the hunks and starlets. This is really horrific for the mind, but it’s only marginally better for the people who are deemed attractive for the screen – then, you have to worry about maintaining a beauty standard, accepting the love, reciprocating the love, all of which is still a manipulation of and a simulacrum of the real thing. 

Basically, what I’m trying to say is this: we are taught from a young age (and generally just compelled to, by the power of good storytelling and the hunger for validation) to recreate the love on screen, but not only is the love on screen is generally unwelcoming of most of the population, it is also just an inherently scripted, measured thing, often poorly scripted and poorly measured. As a human being who isn’t cut out for that perfect, suffocating cinema love, I find it very interesting to subvert it and show a closer approximation of real love – which, for me, is often a rejection of the thing entirely. 

There is no greater declaration of love than “I don’t know if this is love because I don’t know what love even is or if it’s real, but I’m willing to stick beside you anyway, no cinematic conclusion, no chocolate box advertisement, just because I enjoy you so much.”

KMWR: I really loved this line: “Unfortunately, we are all madly in love with the spectacle.” I like how the line can be taken to be about several themes underlining your work, love of course being one of them, but also writing and storytelling in general. Can you say more about this?

SG: I was partially inspired by Jordan Peele’s film NOPE when it came to dissecting the theme of spectacle inside “orca”. I think spectacle kind of exists at the core of everything I write, though – I like writing anything that is gruesome, unfortunate, or sad while simultaneously being colorful, theatrical, or absurd. I think that’s all of what spectacle is about: transmogrifying the ugly into something worth looking at, trying to build immunity to the poison by ingesting more of it. 

Specifically, with love, or more widely, with human beings, I do think we’re kind of motivated to do things “for the plot” – subjecting ourselves to interactions with miserable or unhelpful people, because we believe they might somehow add a dimension to our lives, whether through complicating it or brightening it up. We’re always so resistant to just living; we want some kind of story to tell, we want to be able to identify the foreshadowing leading to this moment, we want every character to have clear cut motivations. But life isn’t a narrative that weaves perfectly around us. Sometimes, people just suck, or things just happen, but we can’t accept this because they don’t feed our desire for spectacle. 

As for spectacle’s relationship to my storytelling, I think I improved a lot when I shed the YA desire to have everything be deep, cinematic, and perfect; not every line of dialogue needs to be crisply crafted and poetic, and not every person needs a sad backstory and some kind of powerful charm. Somehow, though, as soon as I started writing more about real life, the theme of spectacle (and with it: the exploitation of a natural spectacle, the toxic dependency on mythologizing things to cope with spectacle, the desire or pressure to be a spectacle) became more prevalent than ever. I’m sure there’s a really wise lesson in there somewhere. 

KMWR: Can you describe your ideal writing session—what do you like to have close by and how do you stay motivated?

SG: My most successful writing sessions always follow a great big stampede of motivation or inspiration that I literally cannot resist. Normally, this inspiration surfaces after I finish reading a really moving piece – no matter what I read, I think I briefly become possessed by it, and I can’t tell if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that it shines through in my writing.

I’ll grab my laptop and ignore the rest of the world for god knows how long, until I finish the entire piece (or a sizable chunk of it!) in one manic sitting. I deal with chronic back pain, so a typical writing session requires me to switch into a more comfortable position one, two, three times; when I look back on the memories of writing my best stories, I remember moving from the bed to the floor to the desk as quickly as I can, so I can keep my fingers on the keyboard with little interruption.

Motivation is such a tricky thing for me, because I either have it or don’t – and it’s challenging to write when I don’t. This is something I really want to work on as I move further in my writing career. I think I have a bad habit of picturing motivation as some kind of mystical, wild thing, that I either miraculously tame on the first go around, or I lose forever. 

KMWR: What have you been reading recently? Anything you might recommend?

SG: I’m always so excited to recommend writing to others! 

First and foremost, I’m currently taking a creative writing class at my college, and my professor has done a wonderful job of connecting us with great short stories I would’ve probably never discovered otherwise. “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” by George Saunders was our most recent read, but “Extraordinary Miraculous” by Molly Gutman has probably been my favorite.

For poetry, again, I have no choice but to recommend Jasmine Ledesma – I think she has a dazzling, one-of-a-kind voice, the kind of writing that’s almost too bright to look at directly.

The novel I’m currently reading is Middlesex by Jeffrey Euginedes. I definitely recommend that as well. 

KMWR: Finally, are you working on anything new? Could we, perhaps, be expecting a story collection or novel from you in the future? I don’t know if you could tell, but I’m a fan of your work.

SG: It’s definitely a dream to publish a short story collection and a novel! Hopefully more than one of each! I’m the type of person who has hundreds of ideas, dozens of unfinished stories, and maybe one or two finished drafts, so it’s been difficult to make any concrete strides towards getting professionally published. 

The novel I’m currently working on follows the pretentious, intellectual members of a college theater troupe who find their self-obsession taking a backseat to their newfound obsession with one another. The last novel I wrote was about an immortal, magically regenerating young woman who hires herself out to murderers and sadists, hoping to satiate their violent urges and prevent them from hurting humans. Maybe one day they’ll both be published. 

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 Sav Gripshover is a writer and student living in Louisville, Kentucky. Their work has previously appeared in Miniskirt Magazine, Crab Apple Literary, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Their debut poetry collection "White Trash Warlock" is available through Bottlecap Press.

Read “orca” here.