Writing on the Edge of Longing
A Conversation with Featured Author Kaylyssa Quinn
We published Kaylyssa Quinn's time-traveling and steeped-in-yearning story "An Hour in 1996" in our Fall issue. I had a chance to get one hour in 2026 with her to discuss obsessions and habits, including nostalgia and its utility, sources of inspiration, and perspectives on automobiles.
Dina Dwyer: The ending of your story we published, “An Hour in 1996,” made me ugly-cry. A good thing, of course, and probably due to it being around my birthday which brings all kinds of longing and anxiety about the inexorable passage of time. If we’re lucky, we get to grow old and miss things. I think what I’ll miss in 30 years, if I’m lucky, is being able to believe my own eyes given the rise of artificial everything. What about you?
Kaylyssa Quinn: I am in a particular phase of life right now, that of raising young children, that is comprised of sometimes equal parts hell and beauty, monotony and crisis. People always say, “You’ll miss these years; enjoy them!” and it makes me angry, because the days can be so intense and unforgiving, and in many ways, suck. But everyone is probably right. I’ll probably miss it.
DD: I think it’s natural to miss certain phases of life, even if they were on balance traumatic/unpleasant, because it was a form or version of yourself that has since either gone away or been subsumed into your current one. I think about who I was twenty years ago and can barely recognize her, but man, I’d love to have that gumption, that energy, that viciousness sometimes!
KQ: Oh SAME. I think about my past selves constantly; I’m obsessed with them? There are so many and they are all so different. Speaking of past selves from twenty years ago, when I think of the narrator of “An Hour in 1996,” she is probably that.
DD: It sounds like you also spend a lot of your dreamlife in a state of remembering. Speaking of longing, it’s a mood I pick up in your other works, specifically in “Almost Like a Penance” and “Walking Simulator.” What draws you to this special kind of feeling?
KQ: I think it is my favorite feeling. I love writing about love and romance, but there has to be an edge of longing, yearning, or sadness there for it to hold my interest. All my favorite books and movies have this theme as well, Wuthering Heights, La La Land, Call Me by Your Name, The Great Gatsby, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. There is just something about a lost love, or an almost love, that fascinates me, in media and in my own life and work, as well.
DD: Might as well put those old Lord Byrons to use, right?
KQ: Indeed! I was like a magnet to ill-fated romances in my younger years, perhaps as an accidental manifestation of my favorite genre.
DD: This feeling of longing and remembering is often directly connected to nostalgia. Often in stories and films, nostalgia is implemented for its own sake and does not transcend the shallow pond it describes. But your story does, and it was one of the main reasons we wanted to publish it. Can you talk a little about how you conceived this piece, developed and refined it, with nostalgia being thematically contributive instead of simply decorative?
KQ: Like maybe a lot of millennials, I have this idea of the 90s as being this golden age—the time before the internet and smart phones and AI that we are uniquely capable of remembering, and that coincides almost perfectly with our childhoods. We have had our lives bisected by this Before and After of the internet. For that reason, for me, the 90s has this sweet nostalgic pull. So I had the idea to write a short story where I got to act out, in my mind, walking through a mall from my childhood. It was a fun daydream of an idea.
I am not usually a writer of short stories, and if I do write them, they are based on my own life, so “An Hour in 1996” was a bit of a new venture for me. I’d just read Stephen King’s On Writing and learned that he does not map out plots of his books in advance; he says, “...stories are found things, like fossils in the ground.” He simply digs them up. So the idea I had that I decided to excavate was this nostalgia-fest of walking around the mall. And, as I mentioned earlier, its narrator is maybe some version of my past self, but I wanted her to be unburdened—I imagined her as myself in my early 20s maybe, no kids. I followed her around the mall and recorded what happened.
And what happened was that everything she saw, of course, brought back these reckonings from her present-day life, her regrets and longing.
DD: I think this kind of exercise can be deeply therapeutic (and actually often used in guided-visual therapy). Do you often let yourself mentally wander and just see what happens?
KQ: I do, and in fact I have been trying to do this more and more as I’m fighting a near-constant battle to use my damn phone less and scroll less. I keep remembering how FUN daydreaming can be, how interesting it is to walk around your own mind—as a side note, one of my favorite ways to fall asleep is to walk around old apartments and houses I’ve lived in in my mind. So yes, I am definitely a mind-wanderer.
DD: I do the same thing before sleep, actually. But it’s usually not places I’ve ever been, more of a giant hallway with infinite doors and sometimes I just open one and see what’s going on. Problem is, I’ve conditioned myself so well to fall asleep like this that I rarely get to see what’s on the other side.
KQ: Ok I love that idea and I feel like it could be a good premise to a story! I might try that tonight and see what is behind my own doors…
DD: I’ll bet it’s something you need. Hey, let’s talk writing habits. I write when I have a deadline, whether it’s for my writing group or a class, and almost never any other time. And at odd hours with no predictable pattern. I imagine your life now is a bit more regimented with little kids around. Tell me about it.
KQ: You guessed right! I have a morning ritual I am pretty militant about. I wake up, have coffee and do Connections, and then I do Morning Pages, which is handwriting three pages in a journal, a stream-of-consciousness brain dump. This is from the Artist's Way, which I have actually never read, but I love my Morning Pages. My one-year Morning Pages anniversary is coming up in a few weeks. After Morning Pages, I read poetry, slowly working my way through a collection by reading 1-3 poems every morning. Finally, I write, perhaps ironically, in the Notes App on my phone. If I get out of bed, it wakes the baby, so I just type it all out with my thumbs. I’m usually composing a new draft of a poem or story, or if I’m truly out of ideas, I’ll do some kind of quasi-poetic freewrite, but I try to write something new every day. That’s my morning routine.
There are usually a few hours during the week when I can get to my actual computer. I use this time to transcribe what’s in my notes app. For poetry I type up every word, revising as I go, but for stories I will allow myself a cut and paste. I do all my editing, revising, and submitting on my computer because I am just too old to do that on my phone. But overall, yes, I am very regimented about writing on a near-daily basis, completing my morning routine, and just squeezing in any spare moments I can to get a little writing-work done.
DD: The Artist’s Way probably saved my life years ago. I recommend the rest of it! It’s a wonderful resource. Have you thought about writing your poetry and stories long hand as well? It tends to activate a different part of the brain.
KQ: I used to do a lot more longhand writing of poetry—I think I still have all these math-like notes for a sestina I wrote in my teens somewhere—I should really get back to it. It’s hard to find time where things (pens, notebooks) aren’t grabbed out of my hands as I use them, but definitely in calmer times in the future I would like to experiment more with longhand writing and revising, too, and with doing things like printing out poems, spreading them out on the floor, cutting out words with scissors, stuff like that. Some day!
DD: In a formalist poetry class in college we were talking about the worst words to use in a sestina. Let's see if I can remember any of them. Hm, crankshaft and filibuster are the only ones I can pull up. At any rate, I took the challenge and wrote the damn thing and I have to say, it was a memorable and useful exercise in creativity.
KQ: That is hilarious, I totally want to try the same challenge. I feel like really good things could happen with “filibuster.”
DD: It was a depressing tale of an alcoholic son of a senator, I think. Ah, I just thought of another thing I might miss in the future (and by the way, I do not miss the future; cf. this Achewood comic) and that is being able to drive my own car. As a child of the Midwest, car meant early freedom. Car meant exploration. Car meant boundlessness. Car still means that to me and I love car. You do not. Tell me why.
KQ: OK but before I get into all that, ACHEWOOD!!!!!!!!!! I was a huge fan!!!
DD: Isn’t it just great? I think about something from it pretty much every day.
KQ: “I’m the guy who sucks. Plus, I got depression.” So good.
Ok so cars. Well, first of all, I live in Atlanta but I grew up in Charlotte, NC: car meant freedom to me as well, and honestly, I do still enjoy a good road trip. But growing up in Charlotte, my parents actually had to force me to go to driver’s ed, because my big dream was to go to NYC and be a writer (?) (step 4: profit!), and you don’t have to drive in NYC. Once I got my license I was like, oh yeah, driving myself to shows is cool, listening to music with the windows down while driving through downtown at night is cool. Cars can be romantic. There are cars and highways in “An Hour in 1996;” cars show up in my work all the time, and not always as villains. But, as is the tagline of the War On Cars podcast (which I highly recommend checking out, as well as their book Life After Cars), CARS RUIN CITIES.
I have always romanticized trains, and almost since I can remember, I have felt drawn to Paris and other cities in Europe, and to American cities like NYC, but I never really knew why, or saw the connection between the cities I loved and their infrastructure. A few years back I read a book called Walkable City by Jeff Speck, and it just blew my mind. All of the connections between a good city and its walkability were suddenly so clear and obvious. Once you start seeing how cars have taken over our environment, how they ruin cities and landscapes, how they KILL US VIOLENTLY ALL THE TIME FOR NO REASON, you can’t unsee it. And that’s not even getting into how every single major city in America has at least one highway plowing through its center literally because the builders of the highway were racists. I feel like I should cut myself off because this is, obviously, my soapbox, and I could go on and on.
DD: Hey, I asked. But let’s split the difference and say that the real problem are the city planners?
KQ: Yes, I will concede the problem is not the car. Cars have uses. But cities should be for human beings. I should be able to choose between taking a car, walking, taking public transportation, or riding a bike to get somewhere. I’m lucky to live in a neighborhood where I actually do have a lot of those choices, but most Americans do not. They have one choice: Car. And that’s when car is bad.
DD: Totally agree. Changing tracks completely: you’ve mentioned that your father was a stand-up comedian. The several I’ve known have been deeply weird people. What was it like growing up with one in the house all the time? Do you find yourself doing anything like it?
KQ: He is absolutely a deeply weird person. It was not always easy growing up in a house with him, but also, I kind of didn’t, because he was traveling so much. The best part was when we traveled with him. Those were the times that made my childhood truly magical—we traveled all across the US, to Hawaii, and all over the world with him as he worked. Today, I feel lucky to have grown up with a parent who was in the arts—I saw him work on his craft, watch his own tapes obsessively, write down jokes on his legal pad, and get out there and actually support his family by telling stories. I don’t know that I ever put it together when I was a child or teen that we do the same thing, but I definitely see that now and have a lot of love and gratitude around it. At the time, though, it could be really tough to have a parent who was so different than everyone else’s.
Beyond us both being artists, I also love humor, it’s like, the hardest thing to pull off, and I find myself going for it a lot in my writing, as if it’s in my blood.
DD: Yes, I definitely saw it in “1996” and “Penance.” Very dry stuff, which is great. I try to push for more humor in the editor’s room when we’re making our final decisions, because, like you said, it’s the hardest thing to pull off but when it works, it’s amazing.
KQ: Exactly. When I am reading fiction, I’m always thinking what I’m going to rate the book after I’m done, and if either makes me laugh or makes me cry, that’s five stars no matter what the flaws.
DD: What’s your first memory of realizing you were “good-weird” which is the kind where you weren’t bullied or ostracized?
KQ: As a former nerd/bookworm child, my answer would be when I read books and related to the good-weird characters in the books. I’m thinking specifically of Harriet the Spy, which was life changing for me when I was 11, and then a little later, discovering Francesca Lia Block and her Weetzie Bat books. Reading those books made me realize that you could be weird, and come from a weird family, and that was not only okay, but cool—and that you could also write about it. And then when I hit 13, I became full-on goth, so that pretty much settled it.
DD: I always like to ask my authors to name three fun facts/attractions/off-the-beaten-path kinds of things about where they live. Besides its walkability, what can you give us about Atlanta?
KQ: I think maybe a lot of people don’t even know that Atlanta has a subway system! This is not exactly off the beaten path, but the High Museum of Art is one of my favorite places in the world. And best of all, there is a train stop across the street. So my first tip is to take the train to the High.
Atlanta has recently connected the south and east segments of its pedestrian path, the Beltline, so you can now walk or bike through dozens of amazing and unique Atlanta neighborhoods, with tons of cool bars, restaurants, parks, and shops along the entire route. Highly recommend checking out the Beltline.
And finally, in Decatur (a small city in the metro area), inside the children’s bookstore Little Shop of Stories, there is a playroom decorated to look like the bedroom from Goodnight Moon.
DD: Love it. Thank you for those. My
one memory of Atlanta was being stranded overnight in the airport, and I’m working on a flash piece about it, so, like Byron, it will be useful.
Finally, because I’m doing my own yearlong project of watching a film every day, what is a film you return to again and again, and what are you seeking in it?
KQ: Besides Clueless? Haha. Hands down it’s Call Me By Your Name. I am seeking—what else?—the longing.
DD: Oh, that ending tho. I felt that in my bones.
KQ: SOBBING / FIVE STARS
DD: Thank you so much, Kaylyssa, for this hour in 2026. I look forward to reading more of your work in the future.
KQ: Thank you so much! This was really fun.
Kaylyssa Quinn is a writer of poetry and prose, public transportation enthusiast, and stay-at-home mother of two living in Atlanta, Georgia. As the daughter of a stand-up comic, her home is on the road, but she spent many formative years in suburban hell, North Carolina. Her writing has been published in Thimble, Propagule, tinywords and elsewhere. She can be found at kaylyssa.com.
