Kyle Seibel is not a veteran writer or a magical realism writer, but he is a veteran and his writing has magical and realistic attributes. He is still breaking into the literary world even though he seems to have a hang of it. He’s witty on a website we used to call Twitter, and can write a hell of a short story. Rarely does he add quotes when his characters are speaking and he doesn’t capitalize his story titles. Seibel is based in Santa Monica and lives with his wife and dog named Snacks—who also has an established internet presence now. In this interview, Seibel and I chat over the phone, discussing what it means to be a “break out writer,” the literary industry, crafting a story cocktail of real-life anecdotes and surrealism, and his short story collection Hey, You Assholes (Clash Books, 2025).
Naya Clark: The nuance in the situations and the characters you write sometimes make your short stories feel surreal. Do you consider any of your work magical realism, or is that just happenstance?
Kyle Seibel: No, I don’t know if it’s intentional, and I don’t know if I could say it’s magical realism. I think that comes with its own audience, parameters, and guidelines. I read that kind of stuff, so I imagine that it’s had some impact on my work. I think there’s that feeling of uncanniness to something that’s normal. I really love art that does that. It’s the normal stuff, and that’s subverted by something absurd. Those contrasts and that tension make really interesting stuff happen in art. And that’s the kind of stuff that I’m drawn to. David Lynch is the really big kind of tentpole in this kind of stuff. But then also, I think of Denis Johnson. There’s a book called Jesus’ Son. One of my favorite stories in this book [called “Work”]—these guys are ripping copper wire out of a house that’s been destroyed by a flood, and sell it for money to do drugs. And while they’re getting all the wire out of the house, they see a naked woman in the air, and she’s parasailing, being pulled by a boat down the river, and it’s this guy’s ex-wife. It’s never explained, but I love that. There’s this crack in reality, where something extraordinary comes through, and it throws all of what preceded it into a new context. I think that’s a trick that I try to bring to my writing.
NC: I feel it’s the same with life. Sometimes there is no understanding of reality, or justification for why something happened, or why you, in particular, saw a part of someone or a situation. I’m particularly thinking of “Be Gentle”.
KS: That one, especially, is such a special story. It’s one of these stories where I was kind of writing it and putting it together and had an idea of how I wanted to have the basic idea that a veteran gets a job at a computer lab and befriends a weirdo student. I started to really think about the idea of the weird kid in class. So, I would ask all my friends about their stories about their weird kid from class. And everybody has this story of that kid from class. I started to put them all together. This character of E.J. started to take shape, and he just became a very real person to me. So I developed the story over a couple weeks, and edited over a month or two, and I got very attached to it. At the end of the story, I think E.J.’s fate is pretty tragic, and I wrestled with it, because I think what I really wanted to do was to give a really happy ending to this kid, and I knew that wouldn’t be honest to the story—wouldn’t be honest to what this character has seen in my mind. You get the fast forward of what happens to E.J., but what I wanted to leave the reader with is the feeling of what anyone is capable of doing—to be gentle enough to hold a bee.
NC: It’s one of those things that has no explanation. I feel it’s more realistic that this character didn’t have a happy ending. You said E.J. was a culmination of people’s stories of this kind of kid in school. Is that the same for most of your characters?
KS: Several real anecdotes braided together to form some of the characters in the stories. There’s a story [called “I Suppose You’ll Want To Know About My Life Now”] that is about a guy who, on the day his grandma dies, goes for a run along the beach and almost gets hit by a car, gets a boner, and then gets stopped by the police…so that story is several stories kind of all rolled into one. I think what it ultimately becomes is a love letter to this guy’s wife, and I think I use part of it in my vows. So part of my vows are enshrined in that story. There’s some language that’s pulled from that. And then my last grandma died. I was on a bike ride in Santa Barbara. I don’t run, so the running part was fiction, but I almost got hit on my bike by this woman in a car. This was years before I even wrote the story. It was kind of funny that it was not written in the moment it happened—it was only in reflection, years after. The first line of the story came to me and the rest wrote itself. I mean, the first line of the story is the title of it. Then I would realize that I was writing about my grandma. Then I realized I was writing to this woman that I dated in the Navy who had died. And then I realized that was all to my wife, Ali. So it was just a bunch of different things. That was how I drafted it. Then as I edited it down and made it more digestible, it became what it is now, which is a little bit tighter of a narrative. But yeah, that’s how it starts: taking from anecdotes or these shreds of memory or something that sticks in my mind, or I’ve written down for whatever reason, and then just kind of slamming them together on the page and seeing if anything jumps out. I think that’s…a chaotic approach. Maybe other people will have something more intentional, but that’s how I’ve been doing it.
NC: Something I appreciate about your writing is that it’s complex, but not flowery. I feel everyone can read your stories. How have you developed your distinct voice, and how do you edit to ensure it comes across how you intend it to?
KS: I think a lot of the stories in this collection are representative of this style. Stories that feel like they’re being told to someone. I feel that makes it feel so intimate. So an occasional second person is addressing the reader. I think that it can be effective. And feeling like a story is being told to you personally is a big part of the guiding style of the voice. There’s a lot of first-person stories in this collection. They are not all me, thinly veiled, at all. I try to let the characters speak in their voice in the stories. In doing so, you’re understanding a character, but also why they’re telling their story. It gives a sense of urgency, and I think that makes them feel readable. I think sometimes you can be reading a story for five or six pages and think this is beautiful, technically proficient, but why is this story being told to me? What’s so important about this story? That’s something I really try to center on. Is there a reason this person is telling you this story? It’s because they can’t help themselves but tell it. This is this person’s one story to tell, they’re telling it to you right now. Hopefully, that’s the kind of energy some of these stories bring.
NC: I do think that is the energy they bring. I don’t know what’s been up with people hating first-person stories lately.
KS: I thought people were mad at third-person stories.
NC: Whichever number story perspective they hate this week, I don’t know. But I feel how you do it is very effective. I think it makes it more intimate. Like a story that you hear when you’re grabbing a drink and you meet a friend of a friend, and they start telling you a story. I will admit that your book was my plane read. I’ve been traveling a lot lately. So it’s what I read when I’m on a plane to stay up. Your stories feel like meeting someone while traveling and they start telling you a story. Another thing that makes it feel that way is the rhythm of how you write your stories. The character always has a goal, they’re on their way to do something, then there’s these characters that are just so fucking stupid. I could imagine these being my friends because of their decisions and personalities.
KS: “Newlyweds” is definitely a story. Those guys are boneheads. They just can’t help themselves.
NC: That’s one of those rules in writing: make your characters do something that when you’re reading it, you go “God, no, why are you doing this?” Again, a lot of the rhythm is because there is a goal. How do you maintain rhythm when you’re writing a short story?
KS: I hate to shout out my experience as a copywriter at an ad agency, but I’m gonna have to. I’m gonna have to give it up to the absolute boot camp of writing that being a junior copywriter is. You have so little time. Not just in an ad, but of your creative director’s time and of the client’s time and attention. There’s something about being a copywriter that you innately understand how media — regardless of whether it’s art or just dog shit — is a competition. It is a competition for your attention. Knowing that as a copywriter, and being able to bring that sense of attention and competition is just something that is very useful. You understand about attention span. You’re just not gonna keep people around forever if you don’t hook them immediately. So that’s always on my mind when I’m revising things and tightening things and going back and rewriting. I ask how big is the hook of this story? What is the sentence that someone will read and have to read the second one? Those are the stakes really, especially when a lot of this book was previously published online. The rule of digital media is they must be hooked immediately. Obviously, it’s different for literature, and I think that the immediacy applies. I think that ended up giving my voice a real distinctive quality, especially in these couple stories.
NC: Yeah, I will agree. That feeling of I need to get to the point quickly, or something else needs to loop around to almost give the reader whiplash from what’s going on in the story…I do feel it is great training. I’m not saying that most writers should be copywriters at all, but it is an exercise in brevity. My background in journalism is another thing. So much of my writing is about getting to the point. How do you get this information across quickly? But bringing in that creative, surreal element that you bring feels like breaking the rules.
KS: I will read some stories—of the kind you would read in The New Yorker or a big publication like The Paris Review—where the stories are almost mysteries to be solved. In some ways they’re to be figured out, and their value is to be assessed by the complexity of the process in which you have to figure them out. I think there are exceptions to this rule. I’m generalizing, but when we were submitting Skylarking [novel] there was just no interest. We kind of had to let Skylarking go. I don’t know what’s happening with it now. So that was my big bummer this summer. I was waking up in the morning thinking “Do I want to do this anymore?” I feel all the stuff with the collection has been going really well, and all the stuff with the novel is just tedious, and I feel frustrated. I think there’s just really strong headwinds in publishing right now in general. Publishers are tightening budgets and doing layoffs and stuff like that. So the tendency is towards safe bets. It’s not really a climate where people are taking huge swings on new voices.
NC: Do you consider yourself a new voice? When do you think being a new voice and being an up-and-coming writer, or being someone deep in the literary world, starts?
KS: Well, I think that you can have an infinite amount of debuts. I think everyone’s a new voice until they’ve really broken out. That term, “breaking out”—I’ve heard a couple of writers recently use it without any hint of irony, and it’s just strange to me. I don’t know if it exists anymore. I mean, I think it’s rare that people talk about breaking out. It feels to me like a term of antiquity. It was just funny how we people can have three or four debuts—if the last one didn’t reach that threshold of audience, or whatever. “Oh, it was just a chapbook. It was just a mixtape” kind of attitude. Does that make any sense?
NC: It’s when you can start breaking rules in what you do. Although you consider yourself a writer, that’s just breaking in. I do feel you break a lot of rules in your writing style and your grammar. I feel you’ve maybe gotten to a point where you can say “Fuck grammar.” For instance, your lack of quotations when characters are talking—what is the choice behind that?
KS: I’m trying stuff in the collection. A lot of them are new, and then a lot of them are from when I first started writing fiction. I’ve had a change of heart about quotation marks. There is something about when I remove quotation marks from a particular story, I always tend to think that means the entire story is in quotation marks. They could almost be monologues. Maybe that’s how I’ve intended them to sound; as if they’re all contained within one quotation mark. I think I was trying different things—to use voice, and use a point of view and perspective in a narrative way to frame it, as a deeper dimension of the story. Here it exists outside the text, or in the blank that you fill in. I don’t know how effective it is or how much it’s working, but that’s how I came at some of those stories.
NC: I think it works really well. I feel this is a major goal for a lot of writers. If somebody were to show me your writing without your name or the title, after reading a body of your work, I can tell that it’s you, because it creates a distinct writing voice. It kind of zooms out and becomes its own monologue. When you write a short story in particular, what is your goal?
KS: I think that changes when I’m in different seasons of writing. Sometimes I will sit down to write a story that evokes a special or particular feeling, or a unique flavor of a broad feeling, whether that’s loss or anxiety, or joy or horror. There are special kinds of nuanced feelings being explored. Something that feels rather broad, but bringing it down to its sinew, examining it and exploring it at that magnification. It makes it seem much more specific—much more personal and intimate. That’s sometimes how I approach stories, and I think that’s maybe a first draft kind of thing. Then the narrative takes over, and there’s other craft things to consider the different components. That’s usually when I sit down to write a short piece, especially a flash piece. A piece under 1,000 words, I’ll be out to explore the nuance of a particular feeling as a jumping-off point, using a personal anecdote as a way to explore it. And I think that’s really as simple as those two things coming together, and then it becomes something else that evolves into other things. That’s my goal…to bring those two things together.
NC: How do you find a humorous voice and inject that in your writing?
KS: It’s tough and humor is hard. I’m not saying that I figured it out. It’s so individual. What you might find funny, someone else might not find funny. It’s so weird, having done a couple of readings this year and seeing what I think are funny jokes that just go nowhere. Then what I think are pretty, plaintive lines of narrative get big laughs. It is so strange getting that kind of immediate feedback on different parts of the language of a piece. The collection as a theme, it’s kind of—that these are all assholes, right? On any day, everyone, anyone could be an asshole. And they could have a story too. There’s something about the charming asshole that is a very, very funny and bewitching character. And I think it holds multitudes. There’s an element of selfishness and cruelty and casual violence that some of these guys [in the collection] seem pretty accessible to. But then there’s also a little humility and tenderness as well. And in the distance between those two there’s humor. There’s comedy. So I’m glad that people think it’s funny and I’m okay if people don’t think it’s funny at all. I’m okay with both reactions.
NC: Some of it is the situation that your characters find themselves in are realistic, yet they’re absurd. Veterans or Navy guys. How much do you pull from your own experiences?
KS: It’s because those are the characters and settings that I’m familiar with. I think it just feels authentic. Some of these stories are stories that have been told to me third-hand, or things that have survived as memories that are probably not true, in the way that I remember them. Sometimes that can have its own kind of internal magic. The veteran stuff is interesting, because I definitely write about military veterans, but I don’t think of myself as a veteran writer. I just don’t think that I fall into that category neatly. I don’t know if I have anything interesting or particularly meaningful to say on the subject of service. I think it’s almost besides the point that some of those guys are in the military. It just happens to be where their story is taking place.
NC: That’s your experience, so that’s where you’re coming from. Do you think it’s important for writers to write at least some of what they know? Does that help your writing?
KS: I think so…It lends to the authenticity of the story’s construction. It gives credence to the more incredulous elements of the plot. So I think that in that way, it can be effective. I think it’s important to pull from your own experience, but more than that, it’s important to follow the story and have the story be at the center. To lose track of the story, or distract from the story, or to make a choice that deviates from where the story should go because it happened in real life, or because it was part of your real experience, doesn’t impress me. That doesn’t convince me of it. I think that there should be a point where the story takes over, and all the details and craft, and all the tools and elements and language, roll up to in service of the story that you’re telling, and that should be preeminent. And if it happens, the story becomes centered around the factual narrative that you’re pulling from. It’s a simple question that I’m answering currently in my life.
NC: So are there elements that you feel aren’t your experience that you add that aren’t from your life. How do you write something that you haven’t experienced? For example, the “Fish Man” story.
KS: This was a story that was told to me in the Navy over a cigarette. One guy grew up on a farm, and was telling us about how there was some sinkhole in this lake, and they couldn’t figure out why they had to take all the fish out. What happened in the story is kind of what happens in real life. They did their best to save all the fish, and in the end, they went back the next day, and all the fish had jumped out and died, and they didn’t know why. It was this big, crazy mystery. But then I was starting to think about it. I don’t know how I came on this idea of a guy getting drunk and finding these fish in a municipal area. It was such a delicious premise for me. It unfolded as fable to me, with the boys finding him and helping, and it being this crusade. Then the idea that it was supposed to be this moment where everything changed and got better. Instead, it was the last breath of hope on a downward spiral. Very little in that story happened to me, except for the feelings of imminent failure. I think everyone feels, or has had the feeling of, nothing going right. Being one of those boys feels so real to me. Having written that story, I don’t think it happened to me, but where I feel I show up in that story is not in the main character. It’s in one of the boys that comes across him. So I think that there are different perspectives in the story that I associate myself with, but it’s not always the first-person perspective in the story.
NC: I feel a lot of the stories, they’re all trying—on a mission, a side quest—to do something that’s right. As a writer, it’s exciting because you don’t have to be the main character or the narrator in the situation. You can even appear or identify with a side character in a story. It makes it feel like a lot less pressure to tell a story from another perspective.
KS: A lot of times the narrator is the least interesting person in some of these stories. I’m thinking specifically of “cullen”. The main character in that story is having a nervous breakdown and a complete manic event. If you really wanted to make the wildest story Cullen would be the first person, and you would see it from his perspective. You would get a front-row view of his paranoia. But you don’t get that. You get this. You get states removed. You get countries removed. This friend that he calls and who’s going through his own kind of crisis and you see the real main human crisis is being viewed through a telescope in the story,
NC: Right. These things are happening at the same time, but also in retrospect. Then there’s this idea of making it out alive. Something I really respect about your writing is that the endings aren’t always in a neat bow. How do you approach writing the ending of a short story?
KS: The endings are truly mysteries. One of my friends, Mike Nagel, has always said
“A good short story ends on a sharp intake of breath.” You’re just coming to. You’re being removed from the moment where the next thing happens. Which I think is interesting. I don’t think this is the case for everything, but it can lead to some interesting results. The endings, I mess with so, so much. I’m rarely happy with it. I think sometimes the stories just exhaust themselves. Maybe that’s not being fair to the stories that are a little bit more tightly scripted.
NC: Endings are hard, but you do them really well. You trust that the reader is intelligent enough to take from it what they want. They’re not neat, but they’re perfect.
KS: I think the endings kind of revealed themselves. It was one of those things where I gave them to a couple early readers, and they had a bunch of notes about how to fix the rest of the story. But there was this unanimous consensus that the endings should be as is. And I think that was the same thing with “A New Kind of Dan” as well. I worked on that story for a long time, and got a lot of feedback on that story specifically. But then again, the unanimous consensus was that the ending, and the content that that bookends, is something solid and to be retained.
NC: Thank you so much for this conversation.
KS: I sounded insane 85% of the time. You got a good 15%.
NC: It’s totally workable. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.