It’s always interesting to see what draws an author to write. This motivation often dictates the author’s genre. For author Karl Kristian Flores, he focused on emotion, thought, and philosophy to craft his book of poetry and short stories, The Goodbye Song. Below is my interview with Flores about his book, his writing process, and his motivations for writing.
About the author and book
Author links (links will open in a new tab)
Book Title: The Goodbye Song
Genres: Poetry/Short Stories
The Goodbye Song book summary
The Goodbye Song is a powerful volume that “tightens your throat.” Author, Karl Kristian Flores, masterfully guides readers across a stunning collection of thought. This book is like an important adventure that carries you everywhere. In today’s world, penetrating one’s heart may not work with an axe, a shout, or a lecture, but rather a haiku, a recipe, and a dialogue. Flores gazes on the complexities of our time here on earth. Its unique form targets the depths of soul-shattering topics including but not limited to: humiliation, morality, friendship, intuition, manual labor, and loneliness.
The Goodbye Song book excerpt
“There will always be more exciting things. Casinos will blink with avenues of exhilaration and offers to be devilish. The shelf of alcohol behind the bar looks like it may have a good read for you. A Chinese restaurant will buzz with customers and ticket orders. A booming concert may scream it has an extra spot, with strobe lights to hide your human. Partying people do not look like people who weep. You’ll think literature has no relevance to them. But eventually, the light will die down and the world will need to return home again. The fire will give out and the coals will glow and when the rising smoke clouds our vision, we will look for what we need: hearth. And there, the ignored is seen again. Asked for. There are exciting days, but the moment our flames die and we shiver honestly in our freezing universe, we will return to our homes, coming to what we need to, like mothers, like old love poems, like stringed instruments, like heroes.”
Review excerpts
Finalist for the 2020 American Fiction Awards – Award-Winning Poet in “Contemporary Poetry” [AFA]”The subjects Flores chooses to focus his gaze on are surprising… It sits in a liminal territory that too few poetry books inhabit…” – UK’s Neon Books
“Brilliant.” – Kirkus Reviews
“Delicious and fresh… his words equal such a precise and complex feeling… absolutely soul shattering to read in the very best ways.” – Writer’s Digest, 28th Annual Self-Published Book Awards (Judge’s Commentary, 5/5 outstanding rating)
Talking Shop
What do you want readers to take away from your book?
Initially, I’d want to say that I expose my reader to such tragic characters and severe situations that they are softened. For a long time, I wrote with the intention of turning that knob of sensitivity so we can be more attentive, embracing, and most importantly, alive. But that changed pretty quickly.
I think when you open a book, you are already soft. It is so vulnerable to sit down on your couch, hold a novel in your hands, and be open. Even the image of someone reading makes me emotional because of how beautiful that is. And what is means. So because of this pre-condition, I hope readers get another side of my writing—which is less of softness and more philosophy, ideas, and an urgent plead to examine our lives. I’m not into shock factors or overly creative ideas but rather introductions to specific thoughts and the timeline of complications that happen throughout our time here on earth.
What’s the best review/compliment that you’ve received about your book?
“I understand.”
Someone said that and it was everything.
While it is nice to hear that someone likes your writing or thinks it’s incredible you wrote a book, the work has nothing to do with me. It’s not about my achievement—it’s about what page 183 says about “x-y-z.” I’d always rather someone have a connection with the text than to applaud me.
I find myself so irrelevant. It was a compliment, in the deepest way, when someone told me that they understand one of my poems. They got my mind in not just comprehension, but complete transference. It’s not that my reader “related” to it, or that it made them emotional, but merely that they were presented with some line that they can visibly grasp and experience.
Personally, I have always held onto those kinds of lines. I am a walking collection of my favorite moments in plays and novels. I’m so lame!
What is a fun or strange source of inspiration that ended up in your book?
Upon publication, I was feeling confident about my plans for release. Then, I walked into a Chinese restaurant and immediately heard the buzzing of the kitchen, smelled the food, listened to the speed and quickness of conversations and thought: “How the hell could my book reach these people?”
I thought there was no place for my writing. It seemed their lives were too busy. And it saddened me because my work is really for those people. Pedestrians. Grandfathers. The cold bodies that shiver beneath bus stops. Employees working at a no-name restaurant. Juvenile detention centers. Hospital lobbies. That’s why one of the final changes I made in the book was its dedication. On the third page, I wrote: “for the busy.”
If you don’t make a living exclusively writing, what is your day job? How, in any way, does it relate to your life as a writer?
I’m an actor who recently finished training at university. Acting is why I continued to write. Due to the nature of our job, actors have no jurisdiction on a story’s ending or purpose. They are handed scripts and select which is the best one to pursue and that’s that. But our hearts only want to share!
I felt a link between so many art forms while studying acting— between music, painting, filmmaking, and writing. We all want to communicate and so choose a different way to do it.
There were ideas I wanted to explore as an artist, places I wanted others to see, and I didn’t want to wait for a movie script to do that, which may never even exist. I had to! I wrote three books in college, thanks to all the lonely nights and difficulty finding friends. I act, and when I am me for too long, I write.
Do you have a writing ritual, odd habits, or superstitions?
Okay, this is kind of weird, but it helps me. Every time I print my manuscripts for revisions, I always choose a different font each round. Times, Baskerville, Georgia, Garamond. It helps me read my writing for the first time.
What skills have you acquired or information have you learned from writing?
There is a recipe called “Lechon” in my book. Lechon is a roasted pig, which is a metaphor for a human being cooked by society. For the recipe, I wanted to research how much a person is worth through lens of governments, hospitals, agencies, and schools. It is terrifying to discover how people calculate and put a number value on human life. The results I found made the final recipe in the book.
What is your most stereotypical writer trait? Your least stereotypical?
The most stereotypical is that I write best at night.
The least stereotypical is that for some strange reason, the best poems I wrote were ones written in one go. For those, I didn’t return for a second round of revisions at all, which stressed me out.
I love editing and need to edit, but I found myself not able to touch certain poems because something happened at its first contact between pen and paper; I could never find a different word, a better sound, or a needed cut. A few stayed the same way since their time of creation.
“What If” Scenarios
If your book ever becomes a movie and you get final say over the cast, which actors would you hire to play your characters?
There are ten one-act plays in this book! And I’d be interested to see it performed on stage, or on camera.
Upon editing these scenes, I had some professional actors get together to do a reading for me. In these sessions, I found rhythm errors and improved pacing. Some lines didn’t work. Some characters needed to be fleshed out. It was a great part of the process and I’m lucky to have such smart, intuitive friends to help me bring the stories to life. But if they were to be performed, imaginatively, I’d say for the scene ‘The Pier,’ where two sensitive souls meet in the middle of the night—there’s nothing better than the young Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp duo.
If you could have one person that you admire, living or dead, read your book, who would it be?
A stranger who I based one of the poems on (Guadalupe). I’d want to know if I got them right.
A wealthy reader buys 100 copies of your book and tells you to hand them out to anyone you wish. Who do you give them to?
Ha! I actually do this thing where I order a bunch of author copies and just drop them around Los Angeles. I put them in these little places that might find a reader, and it always makes me smile. In this case, I’d love to send the copies to a low-income high school.
If you inherited a library, what would it look like, and what kind of programs or events would you hold?
And the award for best question goes to… this one! Wow, how fun. Hm… Sure, it can be gigantic and feature amazing collections, but one of the most heartwarming things is being welcomed into a library by a librarian who loves to be there.
I’d have a staff who loves not only literature, but people and history and film and music. I’d want families to feel at home and for there to be a reading section on every floor dedicated with a different landscape.
The first floor would be a reading area that has those vintage hooded-cane chairs and nice rugs. The second would be a cozy warm floor with modern couches, a cafe, blankets, and a fireplace. And a grass floor that you can lay down or walk around barefoot beside plants and birds. And some miscellaneous rooms for gaming, computers, movie screenings, and book clubs.
What famous artist or photographer would you want to create or capture your book cover image?
There was this artist I found on Instagram called @ugurgallen. Very moving and exact.
Just for Fun
Your favorite childhood book or story.
There’s a poem, This is Just to Say, by William Carlos Williams. I remember reading it in middle school and feeling how cold the plums were. I was mesmerized too at its size, it being only a few lines. I always find it so funny how much I enjoy that poem. I’m not sure what the world thinks of it. Am I crazy?
Favorite time of/part of your day.
I like breakfast because of the types of food that go with it, as well as the silence. For some reason, I don’t add salt or pepper to my food because I like too much the taste of the bread, fruit, or dish.
Usually, I’ll have to change the kind of breakfasts I eat once I tell people what they are because once I do, I think about them every morning! And so I have to change my routine because, while I love people, I don’t want to think about them every day (either because there’s a sadness to it or that I feel like they stole a private part of me by knowing).
Food you’d like to win a lifetime supply of.
Berries. All day, every day. It’s the little things, right? I wrote this poem called Tapioca, and it’s about a speaker who is so alone and hurting that the only thing keeping him alive are tapioca pearls a.k.a. boba. And he drinks this honey milk tea which “sews his weak” and while the character sounds fictional and dramatic, it’s certainly rooted in truth.
I can’t tell you on how many dark days the simplest sensorial experiences have made me reconsider life can have beauty. Sometimes, these snacks, flavors, places, and sounds are, for a time, the only thing worth living for.
Your favorite genre to read.
I love plays! It’s the format I annoy all people to read. There are these lines in great plays that are enough to think about for five to six lifetimes. Plays and the theatre, done well, are always so clear and touching. It cuts to the core of us and live performances make you so grateful. You know exactly what to do after watching a play and Thornton Wilder said it best—we go to the theatre to get a “sense of what it is to be a human being.”
The activity you’re doing when you’re not writing.
I think it was Zora Neale Hurston who I heard was a vibrant human being. I might’ve been in class one afternoon and read this somewhere, totally shocked.
Previously, I’d see writers as these dull, boring folks who live quiet lives. But then I read Hurston was a charming woman who won rooms. She was witty and a force during her a life. I found this to change my perspective immediately, and for that, I’m convinced that writers should have an extraordinary quality in some area of their character.
Why would people take advice from a person who has only ever been stuck writing in an office? Writers must be anything but uninteresting!
I am usually making a fool of myself trying out other art forms—guitar, painting, or piano. I’m an adrenaline junkie too. I skateboard and recently passed my motorcycle safety course this summer.
There isn’t a single building at my university that I haven’t either broke into, slept in, or admired the rooftop of. On the softer side, I recently invested in a birdfeeder outside my window. I love to see the different colors of little guys that come in the morning. As I write this, there’s a huge one right in front of me. Charcoal feathers and black eyes that don’t blink.
The topic you can’t shut up about and the topic you wish everyone would shut up about.
I can’t shut up about Star Wars. It is cool, don’t get me wrong, but also so meaningful and generous.
I wish everyone would shut up about LOTR (uh-oh).
Your most unrealistic dream job.
If I wasn’t an actor, I’d tattoo my body and live in another country where I can be totally forgotten and free from the worry of needing to call anyone back home.
I dream of an area that is busy and moving. I’d work at a bodega, volunteer in the current country that needs the most help, and attend every show available to me—opera, theatre, poetry, ballet, and fine art. My living conditions growing up have never been whole, so I adjust well to anything with a roof, some food, and a place to walk.
I wish I wasn’t allergic to animals, so I would try to take medication more seriously to be around them. I’d ask a chef and an astronaut if I can study them for a year. Then I’d try to buy the restaurant or space station. Fail. Laugh and find the theatre again.
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