Kathryn Scanlan’s slim novel “Kick the Latch” didn’t arrive with a massive media push when it was published in 2022, but both book and author continue to defy expectations.
Over the course of a single week this year, the Los Angeles-based writer was the recipient of both the £10,000 Gordon Burn Prize and one of this year’s Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes, which comes with an astounding $175,000 award.
“It’s shocking. I was not expecting that,” said Scanlan, who spoke by phone from her Silverlake home. “I think it was a span of a week that I found out about both of them. So that was crazy.”
“It still hasn’t really sunk in yet. It seems surreal,” she said. “It was a weird week, a nice week.”
Scanlan and I met up at an event at Skylight Books for Rita Bullwinkel’s novel “Headshot,” where she and novelists Amina Cain and Rachel Khong joined Bullwinkel and musician Kelsey Shell for a night of readings and music.
“[Bullwinkel] asked several people to just read alongside her, which I think is a really cool model for her book release,” said Scanlan, who knew Cain but not the others. “They’re all lovely, and Rita had a little dinner for us at Figaro next door before we did the reading, which was really nice.”
I asked Scanlan to describe “Kick the Latch.”
“If I’m describing the book, I just try to keep it simple and say that it’s a novel that I wrote based on interviews I did with a former racehorse trainer from Iowa,” said Scanlan, who is also the author of the book “Aug 9-Fog” and a collection of stories, “The Dominant Animal.”
In “Kick the Latch,” the narrator, a woman named Sonia, tells stories about her life, which has largely been spent around horses. In Scanlan’s skillful telling, the sections are brief, captivating and potent, revealing Sonia’s insights about the animals and the peculiarities (and dangers) of the racetrack community. Even the most painful stories are delivered with an economy that can be devastating.
“The first conversation … was about four hours long. And so after that, I transcribed it and then I had this big text document,” said Scanlan about her time with Sonia. “Right away, I just started playing around with it just to see what I could do with it. And so I started just cutting and pasting sections of it into individual Word documents and kind of working on those, playing around with those and rewriting them in some instances.
“A lot of it was a question of editing, of trying to bring out what I thought was really interesting about a particular anecdote or scene or vignette or story,” she said. “It was a process of starting with the original raw material and then over years just working it into this short form.
“I like it when you can sort of see it all at once or maybe see a block of text on a page and have that kind of control over it and and shape it almost like it’s an object or an artwork,” said Scanlan, who studied painting and writing and whose husband is a painter.
One of my own favorite sections of the book concerns the story of a woman known as Bicycle Jenny. Scanlan lights up as she recalls hearing Sonia tell it.
“When she told me that story, I just loved it so much,” said Scanlan. “I sort of sat up a little bit and was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is a book.”
These days, Scanlan said she’s at work on something new, though it’s too soon to talk about. Still, she’s pleased about the continued interest in “Kick the Latch.”
“The hope always, I guess, when you’re writing a book is that it has a really long life outside of this world of, you know, buzz and publicity,” said Scanlan. “I had no expectations in the beginning that anything like this would come of it.”
