An Interview with Author Dust Kunkel

Jan 7

15 min read

"Dogs remind us that reality isn't just assholes. It's also love."

It is an absolute honor to talk story and craft with author Dust Kunkel. His stunning gothic, folkloric debut, Fly Stone, Fly, was the first book I read this year (last year now), and it set the tone. The book is pensive, gorgeous, abstract, and has a way of becoming deeply personal to the reader.

“All dogs are truth-tellers, sonsa bitches but still truth-tellers, Dammit, so you will understand when I tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothin’ but the truth, so help me God (God—or Gods? If they’re anywhere near—more like when they’re near—I reckon they don’t give a damn about strays). Pay attention, it matters when.”

To me, Fly Stone, Fly isn’t ‘like’ anything else I’ve read. The closest I’ve come is saying that I would put it on my shelf next to The Master and Margarita (a formative book for me). Fly Stone, Fly is a song, a fable, a nightmare, and a hero’s journey. It is the story of a dog and his boy, small town monsters, and a commentary on our broader world.

This book has gotten under my skin, into my dreams, and lurks in the back of my mind. I’m so excited to talk with Dust about the creative process and inspirations that came together to make this one-of-a-kind reading experience.

Arlo Z. Graves: Thank you so much again for taking the time for this interview. Please feel free to answer in as much detail as you wish, or as briefly. You’ve said that FSF is a song, and for people who have read it, I think we can see what you mean. There’s a lyricism, a freeform structure. A feeling of improvisation but also intention. So, did the inspiration come from music? Did music fuel the process? How do the text and song come together?

Dust Kunkel: Thank you for initiating this interview! Sometimes social media can be our own worst enemy, but I wouldn’t know you without the connection we made on socials over our love for literature, the craft of writing, dogs, the outdoors and much more! I’m thankful you reached out to ask me about my novel, and even more thankful that you read the whole thing and believe in the world of Fly Stone, Fly. It means more than I can express that my novel has found readers who love it out there. And the fact that you love it is meaningful to me. I respect you for many reasons, not the least being your love for wild Gothic fiction and your stance against generative AI. The fact that we sign off our emails with the phrase, “your friend in stories,” says a lot.

So, to your question: I lived my first 17 years in West Africa where The Blues comes from. I loved music growing up and came to appreciate everything about music especially the backbeat in music. My first instrument at age 10 was the conga drums, which originated in West Africa, what people used to call, “talking drums,” that villages would use to communicate with one another across the miles. You have a “deep” drum and a “high” drum (they call them “male” and “female”) and the combination of the sounds between the two was used as a form of communication. I grew up using the much smaller ones made out of steel, playing for a Ghanaian church choir as a boy, and here’s the thing that makes all that music so special: the beat is not on the four-count, it’s under the four-count of the rhythm, which musicologists call “the back beat.” This is the backbeat that made its way into all the spirituals and gospel music that are the foundation for The Blues, and ultimately, Rock n’ Roll. It’s in my blood; there’s no other way to say it. And, as a musician (I have written and played songs since I was a boy), I wanted to try to write a novel that captures the push and pull of the blood, the hidden, unspoken elements of what make us human. There are certainly moments in the novel that were planned that way, but the further away I am from the final edit, the more I’m noticing all the stuff that came out of me subconsciously because my formative years were lived “in the backbeat,” around Ghanaian music and Ghanaian folklore. That’s why I call my novel Western Gothic, “The Blues of Fiction.” I think I vibed naturally with the Gothic tradition of writing in America, which originates and still lives in the South, where the back-beat lives and breathes.

A final thought on a deliberate choice I made as a writer: though I grew up in Ghana, I did not want to subvert or appropriate West African folklore for my own novel. That feels really gross to me. Those are stories that others are responsible for, entire cultures that others are more equipped to write about. So, I needed to make sure, in the choice of folklores, that I was working with something from my own Northern European heritage (despite the fact that I grew up in Ghana and have that music in my blood). This is a particularly unique challenge that many Third Culture Kids (children who grew up in places where their parents are not from) have to face. I think it makes us good bridge-builders, good listeners, and good citizens of the world; but we have to be careful with the fine line of appropriating someone else’s culture. So, I’d say that the narrative and folklore are from my family’s heritage but the rhythms, inescapably, are from the people and place where I grew up. I hope that makes sense?

AZG: It does! Thank you for sharing.

What was the origin point of FSF, and did the above-mentioned music have anything to do with it?

DK: I had a dream once, more like a daydream, and it was one of those waking dreams that feels more like reality than reality itself. It was just a boy sitting in a raft on the Salmon River in Idaho, having a conversation with a very strange character about the nature of death. The dream does not show up in FSF but both characters do: they are Clay and MK. I was curious, when I came out of the vision: Why are they there? What is going on between these two? I mean, it’s our deep subconscious where all the good stuff comes from for writers, and I just wanted to pull on that thread and see what unraveled. I had no idea where it would go! In fact, most of the other characters who show up in FSF appeared as if summoned by someone other than myself, and then I had to deal with them. Dammit for sure, Mister Brown and Ms. Swan. I had to figure out what they were doing there and why they were involved in Clay’s story. It was great fun as a writer but also vexing. To connect this to the concept of music and the back-beat, I suppose I felt like these were new phrases to a melody I was working out, characters with a particular timbre and rhythm that just felt right for the song/novel. Or it was as if they joined the singing and I had to figure out if I could – or should – sing with them. I’m glad I did, but it required me learning some new techniques as a writer to make the song work. Damn those characters!

AZG: You often mention Shakespear when talking about FSF—there are characters who communicate in Shakespear quotes—but we also see many other folk myths and symbolism. I assume some of them are entirely unique to your story. Could you talk about some of your original mythologies and how, if at all, they weave together with more familiar myths?

DK: What a great question! You are astute in noticing there are at least two major streams that feed into the river of FSF. There are actually others too, but I kind of like the idea of leaving easter eggs in stories for people who are motivated to find them. My favorite novels are replete with these details and make re-reading them a pleasure. (Hint: there is an album playing in Sonofa, the pickup, that gives hints to another story that I built into the novel, for anyone interested in doing a deep dive. It’s a great album, probably one of the best of all time, and there’s a story-song on the album that even gives some names to the characters of FSF. Have fun with that, oh reader!).

The central question for me in the novel is basically, what if all the different entities that we know about in folklore and myth are, in their own way, dealing with the effects of trauma unique to their condition? What if it’s not as black and white as we like to make everything, but instead, there’s some kind of active force, a powerful relativity of mass and energy that seeks to help them find their way back to themselves? Find their way home? What if we’re all strays, and on some level, we’re all – even the weirdest and worst of the gods – trying to get back home?

So, the emergence of folklore and godlike characters in the novel is a natural state of affairs in this larger world. Clay just happens to be part of a family that was engaged in helping bring peace at times between the gods, monsters and other entities that exist out there. That’s the part that I made up, about The Convenors. I’m not sure which myths are more familiar to people and which are not, to be honest. The nature of the back-beat in my writing causes me to want to not be explicit about all of the characters that show up. To be honest, I think that’s part of the fun as a reader, and I wanted to write something that I like to read.

All that said, FSF is a very real universe with very real “rules of engagement.” I’ll offer some brief thoughts for anyone who’s read FSF and gotten this far in this interview! There’s an ancient tale in Northern European heritage about a bad wolf called Ysengrimus and his antagonist, the wily Reynard the Fox, and this is woven into the novel. There’s an old “fairy-tale” (I prefer folk-tale because of the bad taste in some people’s mouths over fairytales) about a kid named Jack who gained three magic beans and chopped down a great bean plant, and that’s at the core of the novel. There’s also the pantheon of Greek gods, a few of them show up in the novel, there’s the Selkies, there’s the local gods and monsters of the Pacific Northwest (which I try hard to not appropriate, I was really careful about how I wrote them into the novel, but since the novel is set in the PNW, they, of course, need to be there), and then there’s MK who’s an entity and strange peculiarity all to himself. I have a friend who says I put so much into this novel that it shouldn’t work, and I agree! He also says that it still does work, and I hope he’s right. I think the key here is that you never know who’s going to show up in this world in which Clay lives, because all bets are off on who’s hurting and who’s in trouble and who’s trying to get home.

I’m not sure that fully answers your question. And I’m open to a follow-up in-person interview if you want to dig more into any of this. I think I’m probably a person who gets bored with easy tropes, so when certain personalities showed up in the novel, I chose more often than not to let them stay and see what happens. A better writer would maybe have killed off more darlings before hitting “publish,” and trust me, I did my fair share of killing! But some of these characters stayed on and that’s what makes the novel interesting, at least to me. (Side note: in a world increasingly leaning to Generative AI, the best way forward as artists is to create something that no AI could ever conceive or implement. I didn’t set out to write something that is anti-AI, but I fully believe the final product is a testimony to human craft just by its existence.)

So, to summarize, my original mythology is built on The Convenors who are a family who make the peace between monsters and gods and other supernatural entities using Jack’s original axe that he forged from the bones of giants and cooled in the heart of a dying god, but all the other folks who show up tend to be some emanation from folklore that already exists. The Shakespeare stuff is literally just me going, for the fun of it, “what would it be like if a kid was left alone for four years with the collected works of Shakespeare? What would he be like? What would he talk like? And what if he had the power to tell a story that came true? What would having Shakespeare inside you do to your abilities? What kind of power would you have?”

Yes, it’s a blatant homage to the greatest writer of all time, what can I say?! I decided to double down on it, and I’m fine with that. Furthermore, the homage to Hamlet is explicit because Clay, like Hamlet, is caught in indecision about avenging his father’s murder. Trouble is, a protagonist who cannot make quick decisions can be a book-killer, as any author or editor will tell you. None of us like to read a main character who just can’t make up his mind. Why did I do it? Clay’s dad would say about me: “what a jackass.” It was a pain in the ass to pull it off, and I definitely had my days when I just wanted to write a more linear novel without all the “goddamn poetry” (again, Clay’s dad), but I’m glad I did. I also think it clarifies or weeds out who’s ultimately going to purchase or read the novel, and that’s fine too. I don’t really want to be everything to everyone. I think that makes for very bad writing.

AZG: From the front cover to the first page, we know this is a dog book. Your fans will also know that you have had special relationships with dogs. We see two primary dogs in FSF (and also beings who become doglike). I know I find my own meanings in them, but do they symbolize something unique to you? And why, if you feel like answering this question, does the dog hold such magic over humankind?

DK: I did a recent video interview with Jim at Fantasy for The Ages podcast and he asked a similar question, and I’ll stick with the first thing that came into my head: “Because I like dogs.” Always have. But there’s more there and you are putting your finger on something important. When it comes to the wounds we receive in life, they’re mostly relational. Someone caused the hurt. Someone specific. Sometimes it’s even me doing it to myself. That’s at the core of the novel, and dogs have that one absolute quality that flies in the face of all of this: they are loyal to a fault.

So, I’m an asshole? My dog doesn’t care. He loves me. They’re the face of unconditional love and I’m here for that. I’m not sure I’d be alive without unconditional love. I mean, I’m a pretty big asshole, especially to the ones I’m the closest to. I just don’t believe in fiction that whitewashes this stuff. Better to do my part to tell it as I see it and let the chips fall. Dogs remind us that reality isn’t just assholes. It’s also love. Someone once said that love will be the only thing that lasts when everything’s done, and you can count me as a believer in that. It makes for a really messy life, because with all the assholes around, what’s love got to do with it? I guess I am just hardheaded. But I’d rather be hardheaded than hardhearted, and that’s why dogs matter in this novel.

Again, happy to talk more about this at another time. I can talk dogs forever and enjoy every minute of it. To me, they represent that there’s still some good in this world, and – since my favorite dog, Denali, was a baddass motherfucker who never lost a fight -- it’s worth fighting for (thank you, Sam Gamgee).

AZG: FSF feels intentional, deliberate, and intensely driven. This book has clearly taken immense care to create. Could you discuss your creative process for fellow writers or aspiring writers who may be reading this? Do you brainstorm, outline, daydream? How do you go about writing, and when the draft is done, what steps do you go about for revision?

DK: I think some of what I’ve said already highlights my process. From my view, the writer needs to know how it ends (although even that can change), but everything else is up for grabs. Everything else is process and giving yourself the time and belief in yourself to keep writing a good sentence. And then another one. And another. And so on. Because I have a full-time job, I needed to make the consistent time (usually in mornings early before anyone in the house was up) and just write what I could. Do I dream of the day when I have 8-10 uninterrupted hours. Yes! Until then, I do what I can. In about fifteen years, give or take, I’ll have the chunks of daily time I’ve always wanted for writing and I’m looking forward to that for sure.

I’ll also say here that the first draft is nothing like what the final published draft is, and that’s because I wanted to get questioned about everything and pushed to make it better. The novel had a handful of beta readers who really made the whole thing much better. In fact, one friend would call me and read through the beta version line by line with me and bug me about everything. And yes, that made it better!

Before that, I’d already killed off some characters, chopped a bunch of fine writing, and basically wrangled the story into shape in a form that looked little like the original. It wasn’t fun, and initially, as any writer will tell you, it’s painful to say goodbye to many weeks’ worth of writing – some of it good writing. But then you fall in love with the chopping and tightening and that has its own atmospheric pressure upon your sense of destiny for the novel. I don’t know a lot about this, other than what works for me. I tend to write too much and then it needs to be chopped. I also write really slowly, which pains me, but at my age I don’t think that will change.

AZG: While reading, I could instantly place myself into Idaho and Montana just from the vibes. How, if at all, is setting a character in Fly Stone, Fly?

DK: Yeah, Tolkien was the first one who did this for me. Some people hate that about his writing. I love that he will take a whole page off from the plot and just draw you into the natural world. I understand the draw of pure drama, and that’s what makes a good story, ultimately, but don’t we all want to pause along the way and wander a bit? Don’t we love the adventures that meander and give us something deeper along the way? So, it’s purely selfish, I wanted to write something that I’d enjoy reading again, and I wanted to describe the setting in such a way that I could be there again any time I picked up the book. And Idaho and Montana have been places that have healed me just by being there: you ever just sit in the presence of a mountain range and feel its depth of character? Its longevity that has been there long before me and will be there long after? If you sit long enough, you can feel its roots under your feet.

Another concept which I hold deeply is this: I believe being outside heals us of our wounds in a profound way. Just being outside. I’m not sure how else to explain this other than to say that I once walked almost the entire coastline of Oregon with Denali and it was the most healing experience I’d ever had. There was no agenda, just walk and explore with my dog and be open to what the day brings. The healing, as healing does, did not happen in a flash. It just worked on me, and later on, I looked at my soul and saw that it was better. I don’t think enough of us talk about this, and I don’t think enough writers are given the chance to do this in their writing. It’s probably why FSF did not get picked up by an agent or a publisher (I did try with 100 query letters to agents in 2024), but I’m not sore about that. Ultimately, I just want the novel to be read, and that’s one way to get it out there. As an indie author, the path is longer and harder, but I’m hopeful that the novel will have lasting energy out there in the world among readers. I hope it wins readers over simply for being what it is: a story about the power of stories to change us, the beauty of the natural world to heal us, and the love of dogs and grandmas to bring us home.

AZG: For readers who don’t know, what is a stone fly and how/why is it crucial to this book?

DK: Ah, now there’s a question that brings us full circle to my last comments about the natural world. Stoneflies are a crucial part of the natural ecosystem in the rivers of the West. They live most of their lives underwater in the nymphal stage, but then, in Spring and Summer, they crawl out and shed their husks and fly up to find other stoneflies to mate and start the process all over again. As a fly fisherman I know stoneflies intimately because they are a prized source of food for trout. They’re a foundation building block in the life-cycle of the entire world. Ecologists use stoneflies as an indicator species to determine the health of a system. All this and more is built into the metaphor at the heart of the book: a boy named Stonefly is learning who he is, and why he exists, and maybe, just maybe, as he heals and learns himself, he will also be part of the solution to the healing of the earth. After all, isn’t that what we all want to be part of? What bigger adventure do you, dear reader, want to be on than this one?

So yes, the setting is a character in the novel, if you believe the earth is worth taking care of like you would care for your mother when she’s sick, or your best friend when he’s had a bad day.

Thanks for asking really good questions. I’m honored by the invitation, and I’m looking forward to more: with you and with any readers or booksellers who are into these kinds of conversations. I’ve thought about “success,” and how we define it for ourselves. I’m most content with claiming success when the art I create functions like a bridge or doorway to good, deep conversations with others. Thanks for being that kind of colleague in writing. We tend the fire by doing these little acts of communication, and the fire is what keeps us warm.

Your friend in stories.