‘Tales from the Liminal’ offers up weird and wonderful stories

The world in Sandra “S.K.” Kruse’s new book is bizarre, backward and beautiful. Populated by Bigfoot, Gertrude Stein and Schrödinger’s cat, it is both deeply strange and oddly familiar. There are professorial pigs and typing monkeys and a vast catalogue of philosophical ideas sprung from their hypothetical cages, brought to life as the author gives them form and makes her way, in a series of very short stories, from one odd place to another. 

Tales from the Liminal is Kruse’s debut book, but she is not new to writing. Published by Deuxmers, the anthology is filled with tight, surreal stories that are carefully polished and compiled with singular purpose, because for all its strangeness the book is clearly set in this world, a place full of outlandish ideas and characters. A place where people who look and think with the fullness of their wits and imaginations are often amazed at the things they encounter. 

Kruse was born and raised in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where she attended Catholic school for twelve years. In 1988, she left to earn a degree in English from UW-Madison and launch her writing career. But following a debut in The Onion, she found herself on a 25-year sabbatical to raise eleven children. Eventually, she returned to writing. Her work was longlisted for the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction and she has won multiple awards in the National League of American Pen Women’s “Soul-making Keats Literary Competition.” Her work has also appeared in Reed Magazine. With the release of Tales from the Liminal this month, she blends humor, fabulism and realism with a unique voice she refined for years. Timothy Cech, Reed Magazine’s fiction editor, called hers “a breed of storytelling that encases an entire cosmos within a compact form with prose that pulses with life, with tableaus that transfix the imagination with glimmers of divine order in an emotionally turbulent landscape.”

A reader has to venture out pretty far to find similar writing, but perhaps Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently stories exist in a similar realm, where so many different tones and themes cohabitate.

“To develop my voice, I had to do what all artists do in the beginning,” explains Kruse. “I studied the masters. I read diverse, excellent writers. Still do.”

“I also did a fifteen-year stint as a technical writer, which required an economy and precision of words that developed the more practical aspects of the craft,” she continues. “I wrote as much as I could whenever there was time and got critiques from people who would tell me the truth. I cut, revised, and cut some more. I wrote three novels this way. Finding my voice felt like a parallel track because that comes from within. When I sat down to write these stories during the pandemic, I decided to just open myself and see what came out. It’s harder than any tangible aspect of writing. There’s a certain dread that precedes it. At least for me. I always think of the quote, often - I guess apocryphally - attributed to Hemingway, ‘There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.’ That about sums it up.”

Her love of creative writing was only sharpened by her hiatus, which she took to raise a family. 

“As a young person, I revered the great writers of the cannon and longed to be counted amongst them!” Kruse says. “But as life goes, there wasn’t much time for several decades to give myself to writing, and, as much as it panged my young heart every time I walked past that giant mural in Barnes & Noble, I’m grateful that I had the built-in breakers. I had time for that egoic drive to dissipate, for my thought life to mature and expand, to find and trust my voice.”

“I spent a lot of time in those decades meditating and working out ideas that now seem to be recurring themes in my writing,” she continues. 

Balancing absurdity with gravitas and heart is very difficult, and when asked how she approaches the problem she answers candidly: “I don’t know.”

“It’s what comes out of me. I think it’s my voice,” she says. “Where does that come from? Is it a combination of what we’ve read and spent our time pondering all mixed in with our unique way of perceiving and expressing things? I know that the literature that took hold of me as a young woman—the stuff that made my heart palpitate—was the strange and existential. The first book that made me sit up and take notice was Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. That was sixth grade. But I remember exactly where I was sitting at my desk in eighth grade, the light in the room, the feel of the glossy paper, and the startling image on the cover of the literary magazine that introduced me to Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis.’ Reading that story was revelation. The possibilities of what you could do with writing - what I wanted to do with writing - exploded for me that day.”

While the stories are eclectic, Kruse’s process was essentially the same from tale to tale. 

“I started with a simple phrase, image, or idea that interested me—something I’d heard or seen and jotted down,” she says. “I’d take one of these and just try to open that vein and let it go where it wanted to go. I was always somewhat surprised when the first draft was done. There was always editing I needed to do, but the voice would be there, very sure of itself, and it just kept happening. Every time, I was surprised.”

The liminal is that which exists on both sides of a boundary, or in transition. Kruse’s stories, too, lie somewhere within, or between, multiple genres. 

“Genre is the bane of my writerly existence,” she jokes. “There’s no category in the Goodreads dropdown list, for example, that applies to my collection. ‘Speculative,’ ‘metaphysical,’ or ‘fabulist’ could work, but they weren’t options. I had to choose ‘science fiction’ because it was the only one that came close. We always have to name and categorize everything - I suppose it’s an efficient way for our brains to process information, but it’s also limiting - it keeps us from just encountering and experience things, events, and people, in all their rich complexity.”

The book’s title refers to both how the stories were written and the places they go. 

“One layer is to how I wrote the stories - hovering in that liminal space between the conscious and unconscious mind,” Kruse says. “Another layer is the fabulist settings of the stories - the mix of the fantastical and the real. A third layer has to do with the content of the stories - the human experience of liminality. The theme runs throughout the collection, manifest in different ways, but one experience, in particular, has to do with those times in life when we are thrust unexpectedly into a disorienting limbo between some old paradigm and a new one yet to emerge - times of darkness and confusion, usually unwelcome at their onset but eventually revealed to have been essential to some significant period of renewal in our lives. The last story in the collection, ‘Summoned by a Star,’ in just 500 words, follows the life of a seed, which offers rich meditation on this transformative, liminal experience, helping us to overcome our fear, trust the process, and embrace the little deaths that must always precede new life.”

Kruse lives in the Town of Primrose. She will hold a book release event Saturday, Nov. 13, from 5-7 p.m. at Kismet Books, 101 N Main St, Verona. Find out more at skkruse.com.