Author Q&A with Kelsey Ferrell

Kelsey Ferrell is a multi-medium creative from California. She holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley and is a second-year MFA Candidate at UC Riverside. She has written and released a punk album, Trauma Portfolio, and four singles, under her artist name, Feral. Kelsey directed a tragicomic film about the feral Inland Empire donkey herds titled Donkumentary as a recipient of the 2023 Gluck Fellowship for the Arts. She is the winner of UC Riverside’s 2024 L.M. and Marcia McQuern Endowed Graduate Award in Nonfiction Writing. Kelsey performs stand-up comedy and dreams of owning a cat one day.

Her CNF piece, Eloise, was this year’s first runner-up in the HoneyBee Prize for creative nonfiction. It appears in our summer issue and is her first publication.

Tell us about yourself.

I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, and spent most of my childhood reading. I was always a heavily academic person, so when I started college at UC Berkeley I studied interdisciplinary social sciences and was somewhat surprised by how many of my extracurriculars ended up being creative pursuits. I didn’t really know what I wanted to become, but I loved learning and discovered how fun it was to create. Halfway through college, I released a punk album, and from that point onward, my artistic journey was irreversible. I simply couldn’t do anything else. All I wanted to do was make art and tell stories. I found myself continuing to try new mediums, like stand-up and screenwriting. Wanting to do an MFA was in the back of my head for many years, so I finally sent in an application and now I am lucky enough to be more than halfway through UC Riverside’s MFA. At UCR I have gotten to become a prose writer and filmmaker, which is so fun and exciting! I’m also a cancer sun and cancer moon, a lover of horror movies and cringe comedies, and I teach creative writing classes at UCR to really awesome undergraduates.

As a multimedia creative, you’ve dabbled in various art forms, which art form speaks most to you? Why?

I think at this point, songwriting, as well as performing my music, is the most intuitive art form because I’ve been doing it the longest. It’s become sort of a meditative second nature. Yet, I would say stand-up comedy is the most rewarding art form because getting a room to laugh feels way better than getting a room to applaud. Filmmaking and prose are more recent endeavors to me, so I’m still experiencing a bit of a learning curve in storytelling in those mediums, but their challenges make them interesting and serendipitous in ways that songwriting and stand-up aren’t. It might be a cop-out answer, but what really speaks to me as an artist is getting to tell stories in different mediums. It’s so fun to have a variety of options to explore the human condition. I think it improves my art to take the time to find the right container for every story, instead of forcing every story into one form, regardless of if that’s the best one for it. 

Do you find your various art forms overlapping? Why or why not?

Oh, definitely. I think the core of my work all comes from the same well, regardless of the form it takes. I find myself writing jokes and satire into my lyrics all the time. Songwriting also makes you really focused on delivering devastating lines, finding the most gut-wrenching phrasing to end a verse. I find myself paralleling that when I’m finding the final sentence for a paragraph or the final sentence for a prose piece. A song also repeats the chorus, looping around to the same refrain. I don’t do this exactly in my prose, but I think being accustomed to writing a chorus in music has created an artist’s instinct to use callbacks as much as I can. I did that in Eloise several times, making small references to previous paragraphs as the story progressed so that every cut keeps hurting no matter how far back it is. The piece is pretty meta in that way. With filmmaking (which I’m still quite new to), I think being on stage frequently for stand-up and music makes it easy to switch to being on camera. In my opinion, there’s no reason to overspecialize in one thing, it’s counterproductive. Switching it up between mediums is what takes me deeper as an artist. 

Eloise, like many creative nonfiction pieces, is deeply personal. Was it challenging to put this piece out into the world, or liberating? Why?

I’m not sure what it’s like for other creative nonfiction authors, but personally I don’t find it emotionally challenging to write this kind of piece. If the story is already bleak, barren, and resigned, there’s nothing left to lose. As the story says, I had already lost the partner I wanted, the one other connection I found was a dead end, I couldn’t adopt the cat, and I couldn’t rely on my biology. At that point, the scariest, shittiest things have already happened, so writing them down and people being able to read about them doesn’t intimidate me. So, Eloise was not really challenging to me in that specific way (though a different creative nonfiction piece might feel challenging to divulge; I don’t want to homogenize). I also wouldn’t call putting out Eloise liberating. It’s exciting and cool to be published, and it feels awesome to have written what I wrote. I think I would use the word salvaging over the word liberating. I might not get to be with Theo, or Ben, and so on, but I get to keep them inside this piece. It’s like, what slivers of my dreams can I preserve when I write them down? It’s a very precious thing to write about these losses because in many ways it’s the only way I can keep what’s gone, or what may never be. 

How do you hope Eloise will connect with your readers? What do you want them to take away from this piece?

You know, this is the hardest question to answer for me, because I’ve never really thought about having “readers” before. Thanks for publishing me so that this is something I can think about now! Haha. But let me think through this. First things first, I see Eloise as a very bleak story. It’s about the impossibility of not only the dream but the consolation prize as well. People always joke about how if you can’t find romantic love, you can become a crazy cat lady; or how if you’re single, you can have a bunch of fun casually dating around. In this story, those silver linings are just as out of reach as the original dream. It’s like, okay, I don’t get to be with Theo, but maybe I can adopt a cat and have fun with Ben, right? But no—I can’t afford the cat and Ben never texts back. And there’s something humiliating about not even getting the next best thing, so to speak. I want this piece to find readers who have their own version of this kind of lack, who have a barrenness in their lives regardless of if their body is physically mirroring that barrenness. I want readers to separate hope and desire in their minds, to see this piece as proof that hope isn’t the only way to keep going. The last paragraph doesn’t show it—it’s just me in my room by myself—but readers know that at some point after that night, I got up and wrote it all down. I had no hope that Theo would come back or that Ben would text me again or that I’d get a cat— but that was irrelevant to me continuing to put one foot in front of the other one, living my life despite that. Desire without hope exists. It’s a strong enough force to keep someone on their feet. 

How does writing help you cope with the trials of life?

Not to be dramatic, but writing is lowkey the only way to cope with the trials of life. Well, I would put reading/studying philosophy as runner-up in that race. I’m not saying this is advice for everyone, but if I could go back in time to myself at 18, I’d tell her, “Don’t go to therapy, write everything you’re drawn to write, and sign up for more philosophy classes.” I think humans have been trying to understand the human condition for thousands of years, and we can join that extremely normal experience through engaging in art and philosophy. I feel like I’m a part of the oldest tradition in the world when I’m writing my stories trying to understand the world around me. I always think of the James Baldwin quote: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” 

Do you find yourself writing similar themes for your creative nonfiction pieces? If so, what theme keeps reoccurring? Why do you think that is?

Yes absolutely, I find myself constantly investigating the ways things go wrong. Failure to connect, failure to achieve, that sort of thing. Especially when it’s irreversible. I’m drawn to tragedy and comedy in equal measure, and I’d argue that that is due to the fact that those are equally represented in one’s failures and losses. When things go wrong, that often hurts the most in interpersonal relationships, so I find myself writing about heartbreak and grief. But heartbreak and grief are consequences. Recently I’ve been a bit more interested in what precedes them, uncovering the way things fall apart. As far as why I keep returning to that, I think the easy answer is that things simply go wrong a lot, so there’s a lot to write about. But still, why is that as opposed to something else equally as bountiful in reality? I guess it goes back to what I said about salvaging. If things go wrong, it’s because they once went right. Holding onto those slivers of what was good and beautiful, that’s important to me, and so is honoring the story of how those things were lost. 

How has your MFA program changed you as a writer?

It’s changed me so much as a writer. I’m so grateful to the UCR MFA. I’d never taken a formal creative writing class until my MFA; my undergraduate degree was in the social sciences so I wrote academic papers. I had some solid creative instincts and passion before the MFA, but I didn’t have any skills or even a framework for what makes a story well told. That’s something I learned at UCR. I am deeply indebted to the faculty there and my classmates for teaching me things I would never have figured out on my own. 

Who has influenced your writing the most? Why?

I have to say my professor Reza Aslan. As I said, when I applied to my MFA program, I had some good creative instincts going for me from songwriting and stand-up. But I’d never really taken formal creative writing classes—and I had no experience in prose specifically. My prose submissions were really messy, and Reza knew right away exactly where I was going wrong and taught me how to level up. He’s an excellent teacher. Plenty of people in life are going to put you through something painful, beautiful, and unforgettable to write about. But very few people say, “Okay, stop crying, this is how you’re going to tell the story.” But that’s what I needed to hear as a writer and that’s how Reza influenced me.

What do you think of when you hear, “The Good Life?”

When I hear “the good life,” I think of the life one gets when the dream life is discarded. I remember a quote from Maureen Dowd, which Ariel Levy wrote about in her memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply. Maureen said, “Everybody doesn’t get everything” and I think that’s what the good life is getting at. Okay, you’re going to lose, and you’re going to lose often, but what are you going to do with what’s left? That to me, is the good life: when you discover how to create a life in the ruins. 

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Thank you, Kelsey, for allowing us to share your essay with our readers and for taking extra time on this Q&A with us! We’re glad we were able to connect and wish you the best with the completion of your MFA, teaching, future writing, and all of your endeavors! <3