The Call is Coming from Inside the House: An Interview with Krystelle Bamford
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I should probably tell you from the top that I first read your book a couple of years ago, back when it was still a manuscript on submission. I was interning at a publishing house at the time and used to skim through the slush pile when things were slow, which was often. I must’ve read a few dozen in the months I was there, and yours was the one that stuck and left a mark. So, it’s a real pleasure to get to speak to you now that it’s out in the world.
Thank you. That’s funny, I also interned at a publishing house. The job advert said they were looking for someone to lift heavy boxes, and I thought, great I can do that. I enjoyed it at the time, and now, all these years later, it is funny to be on the other side of things.
I remember authors used to come and visit, and then they’d get to leave again. And there was part of me that was so jealous they just got to leave. They would walk in and say hello, and then they would get whisked away to lunch or whatever. I thought to myself, ah, one day I want to just come in for fifteen minutes and then be taken out to lunch, that sounds great. So, yeah, it’s nice. It’s taken me a really long time to get to that point and it’s nice to be here.
So, did publishing end up being a brief detour for you?
About three and a half years. Then I left to do a Master’s in creative writing, in poetry. So yeah, then I was like great, let me try and make a career of writing, but that is quite difficult it turns out.
I’d like to hear more about the Master’s, was that where you first felt like you were developing your voice?
It was at St Andrews, learning under Don Paterson and Jacob Polley. Don especially was focused on the technical side of language – that kind of fierce attention to craft was new to me.
I found it difficult at first because I lacked the critical vocabulary. The American system I’d come from didn’t emphasise that kind of analysis. There’s something about being forced to think about a poem like a tiny, delicate machine, built with tiny, precise tools… it changed my ear, and I felt a shift in my writing.
I also started writing prose poems around then – one of which eventually became the seed of Idle Grounds. It took about a decade for it to flower.
The novel does read like a long prose poem. I didn’t need to know you were a poet to know you were a poet, you know? What was it like shifting from poetry to prose?
I wrote poetry for years and years and years. It’s all I ever thought I wanted to write, until I got to a point where I felt very stymied. My dad passed away quite a long time ago, and I felt like that was all I could write about. Even if I tried to branch out and explore other things, I just always came back to that one subject. And I know poets can spend their entire lives just exploring one subject, but the subject of grief is a really heavy place to dwell in for years and years.
I’d been stuck on this kind of personal route with poetry for such a long time that the idea of writing fiction from the point of view of, like, My Little Pony, or whatever, was great. You know, like, this pony can do anything! It could be completely ridiculous. It didn’t really have to matter, especially since I had no intention of showing it to anyone except my partner who’s a writer.
Ok, this is something I’ve been wondering ever since we started talking… The novel’s set in Massachusetts, but your accent’s Scottish? What’s the story there?
I am American, but I’ve been in Scotland for a really long time. I’m like Madonna in her Guy Ritchie phase. When I go home to America, everyone’s like, what? And I’ve actually had someone who’s been like, well, when are you gonna stop? Like, this is a joke, right? But this is just the way I talk now. I’ve been here for almost twenty years.
That’s shaped how Americans tell stories: larger than life characters, ridiculous packaging, but always with a truth at the core.
When I go home to Massachusetts, I can slip back on some words. I think that’s normal, but it fades quickly when I leave. My dad had a neutral accent, but when he was around a bunch of guys, suddenly he sounded like a character plucked out of Good Will Hunting. We used to really laugh at him for it, and now I catch myself doing the same thing.
Well, I had to ask because the voice in Idle Grounds is so unmistakably American. I mean that as a real compliment. To me, a British literary voice often feels soft, reserved, measured. But your narrator is audacious, wry, enigmatic… there’s a swagger to the prose, a kind of bravado that feels like it’s actively challenging the reader. Do you know what I mean?
I think for a long time, especially when I first started writing short stories, I was trying to write in a really neutral, polished way. Kind of that British voice you’re describing. I did that because a lot of the literature I admire does, like Ishiguro’s prose that’s like porcelain. But I found that when I wrote like that, it wasn’t that interesting, probably because it just didn’t suit me.
So that brashness of voice you’re referring to just makes me laugh – it’s the kind that can say something obviously untrue. By the time the reader’s caught up, the voice has moved on to something else. I’ve been reading American tall tales, Paul Bunyan – they’re mad, poetic, bolshy. I think that’s shaped how Americans tell stories: larger than life characters, ridiculous packaging, but always with a truth at the core.
Right. Your writing feels like it sits in that same tradition as Flannery O’Connor’s, actually.
Oh, yeah, she’s amazing and a really big influence. Her short story ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ was such a big one for me. It’s quite a funny short story. Well, I mean, it’s funny up until it’s not. And I think that’s why it’s so devastating, because you’re so caught up in the ridiculousness of the situation; that of the grandma who’s just awful, and the kids are a pain… but then there’s this sense that the danger is unfolding underneath, right under your nose, in slow motion. And then there’s this gut punch of emotional truth at the very end. I hope that’s something I can do myself one day.
You really pulled it off in Idle Grounds. Part of that feeling of doom came from following this group of kid cousins as they head deeper and deeper into the woods, while their parents, the adults, are tangled in their own drama back at the house. There’s something about children – we tend to presuppose that they’re innocent, blank slates. Was that why you chose to centre the story around them?
On a practical level, the choice was probably because when I wrote this during lockdown, I only saw my partner and my kids. When you’ve got kids, you inevitably try to put yourself in their headspace because you’re trying to figure out why they’re so upset about x, y, and z.
But I also think you’re totally right in that we presuppose a certain innocence with children. But the children in Idle Grounds are fairly monstrous in the way kids can be. Kids are also, obviously, capable of huge amounts of kindness as well. So, I wouldn’t call them immoral, but certainly amoral.
I think what makes kids such interesting characters is that their emotions aren’t as tethered as adults’ emotions. The swings are massive. Kids can turn on somebody and absolutely hate them; hate them as if they never liked them. And then, you know, two pages later, everything is forgiven, and the subject of hate is now a hero. As adults, those changes happen slowly, over years. But with kids, it’s immediate and total. And I think that worked well for the scope of the book that’s set over the course of one afternoon. The climaxes have to be quick, and that happens naturally with children. It happens quickly and it dissipates quickly.
You’re right. What really struck me is how, even though the novel centres on the kids, you weave in these interludes with the adults that feel so grounded. It’s like we’re being pulled along this surreal, sometimes almost fable-like thread with the children and then suddenly be dropped into something unmistakably adult, heavy with history and baggage.
That contrast made me wonder, if the kids are amoral, what does that make the grown-ups? I found myself feeling sympathy for them, not despite of their failings, really, but because of them.
I have huge sympathy for the adults too. It’s funny because, with some of responses to the book, people are just horrified that these grown-ups would be so wrapped up in their own conversation that they would let the children kind of wander unattended. As a parent myself, I know how desperate you can be for adult conversation; you’ll ignore almost anything in order to just, like, finish a sentence.
I think what’s happening with the adults in the book is that, outside the family unit, they’ve managed to function pretty well. But when they all come together, it brings out this old, childish dynamic in them. And I think that’s true for most families. When you get together with your family as an adult, you become a child again, and there’s no way that a child can have a child, right?
So, they’re kind of caught in this spell of old grievances, old rhythms – almost just being children again themselves, and the day just gets away from them, and their inattention sparks a tragedy. I can see how that could happen to almost anyone. They might be immoral in some ways, but I could recognise my own failings in them, too.
Definitely. You set the tone from the foreword, where it’s suggested that the book is about humanity, or the absence of it. By the end, I found myself wondering if that absence of humanity is what defines humanity. And that ambiguity feels deeply poetic – this real refusal to settle on a single truth. Reading it, I felt like I was being pulled back and forth, caught in a tug of war.
It was always in the back of my mind that I didn’t want to really frustrate readers because that starts to feel obnoxious. But I knew that there were no super clear answers, because I think there just can’t be, not when you’re remembering something steeped in recrimination, like in this book.
I find that if I remember something too clearly, I’d have trouble writing it down.
As I get older, I’ve become more and more aware of just how faulty memory is. It’s shocking – things you would swear on a stack of bibles that you remember correctly can be totally incorrect. But that uncertainty opens up space, especially as a writer.
I find that if I remember something too clearly, I’d have trouble writing it down. I’d feel so bound by what I had actually experienced that I’d really struggle to try and capture it. But if the memory’s a bit blurred, there’s room to embroider.
Poetry taught me to sit in ambiguity. In poetry, you’re less pressed to offer concrete answers, and there’s more permission to be open-ended. You know, the last line of so many poems is neither this thing nor the other. It kind of vibrates. It’s pulled between those two poles, and that’s what makes it potent; that’s where the vibration comes from.
It’s funny you bring up the last line of a poem, because the last line of Idle Grounds reads exactly like one. Just the second half – ‘we turned our horses towards the future’ – stayed with me.
When I first read the manuscript, it was still called Then They Rode Back, which felt like such a perfect loop. The ending line pushes toward the future, but there’s this feeling that we’re being pulled right back to where we started. It’s like the momentum can’t fully stick. But from my very short stint in publishing, I know titles rarely survive the submission process intact…
I mean, first of all, thank you for saying that about the kind of cyclical nature and then them being pulled back, because no one’s actually mentioned that yet. And to me, that was so important. I appreciate that, because I was pleased, to be honest, with my last line. It did link up with the title at the time. But actually, the novel originally had a different title, also pulled from the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ that I tweaked slightly. The consensus was that it was too long or difficult to market. But I was really in love with the first long, unwieldy title.
Could you share that with us?
Yeah, it was Boldly We Rode and Well. Really impossible to say. I loved it so much, but it’s a mouthful and I found myself choking on it when people asked me what the book was called. So, it went through a few iterations before my editor, Linda Mohamed at Hutchinson Heinemann, came up with Idle Grounds which I was really happy with.
I love the word idle, I just love it. It’s such a nasty word and it appears on the first page of the book, talking about the idle rich. And I was also really circling on the idea of, like, parade grounds for some reason. So, Idle Grounds worked.
And I think it all comes back to the foreword when the narrator is talking about the Romanov family and this idea of that incredible kind of privilege and luxury, but the crowds are amassing at the gate, you know? You feel like you’ve got all the time in the world, but all the while, the world is changing around you, and you’re just not clued in enough to pick up on it.
To some degree, that described the culture that the Idle Grounds family was operating in; that old money, New England WASP tradition that kind of poisoned their family well.
There’s something about that sense of just being shut off from the world at large and the fact that it will absolutely 100 per cent come to an end. And when the axe falls, it’ll come as a terrible surprise to everybody involved, you know. To me, it’s similar to Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette movie –that hazy, fever-dream atmosphere where you, as an audience member, know what’s coming for her. Right from the start, that injects an incredible sense of dread in something that’s very beautiful and gauzy.
The Romanovs seem like the perfect choice then…
I know it’s ridiculous to have so much sympathy for the Romanov kids because there were millions and millions of children who were incredibly impoverished in Russia at the time and kept under the thumb of that family. And you don’t see them, you don’t know anything about them, and so your heart doesn’t break for them.
But there was something moving about the Romanovs because they really did, by all accounts, love each other. They were like proper children, they all slept in the same room, their mom and dad spent loads of time with them, they played with them… It’s a bit awful to see photos of them and know that, at any moment, their world is going to collapse. It’s just the fact that they had a lot and that it was all taken away. It shouldn’t make it more tragic than if you had someone who barely had anything and then had that taken away and yet…. It’s that their fall was from such a height, I guess.
So, having their story feature at the very beginning of the book kind of set the stage in a really grandiose way as well. I liked how overly grand that metaphor is.
There’s a certain hubris in being shocked by tragedy and then turning it into a myth.
It’s a completely ridiculous way to set up your characters by comparing them to the Russian imperial family. Obviously, the kids in Idle Grounds have very little in common with the Romanovs, but just the fact that they thought enough of themselves to draw that comparison is funny.
I loved that too. And, you know, you just mentioned the height of the fall. The distance of that height was key for Aristotle when he tried to define tragedy. Tragic heroes could only be these noble, elevated characters. That’s what made the bad things that happened to them truly tragic as opposed to simply unfortunate. Idle Grounds seems to be challenging that criterion throughout. Would you call it tragic?
That’s a really good point. I think with the adults, they’re so stuck on the dissolution of their family, on these various tragedies that happened when they were younger. They’re stuck in part because they’re like we’re the So-and-So’s, how could this possibly happen to us? And that’s part of why they find it so impossible to come to terms with what happened.
All families have tragedies, but not all families build their identities around those tragedies. A lot of families, I think, learn to move on together. But there’s a certain hubris in being shocked by tragedy and then turning it into a myth. It’s like, something that happens to everyone becomes this epic, world-shattering thing because it happened to you.
And I think that kind of perspective can come from these old-money families, where their lives used to be treated like public property. You know, personal things that happened to them were like public tragedies.
For a really long time, they were the people whose lives made it into the history books. So, there’s a kind of hangover from that – this idea that when something awful happens to them, it’s as if it happens to the whole world.
I think the Idle Grounds family, to some degree, shares that mentality. And it’s not their fault. I think a lot of people are like that.
Was that why the setting – 1980s WASP Massachusetts – felt right for the story?
Honestly, when I first started writing, I didn’t know where it was set. It could’ve been anywhere. But the more I wrote, the more I realised it had to be 1980s America. That period felt like a hinge, shifting from something familiar and comfortable into something new and less certain.
So many films from that era were about the home turning against you, the call is coming from inside the house and all that. The idea that your environment, the space that’s meant to protect you, might actually be unsafe. That kind of paranoia really fed into Idle Grounds.
The kids pick up on it; they’re scared of, like, lead poisoning, the wallpaper leering at them, the basement… Classic kid stuff, it’s true, but filtered through that specific cultural anxiety.
As for Massachusetts, that’s just where I grew up. Confined to my desk in Scotland during lockdown, it was the only way I had of getting home.
I kept thinking, the call’s coming from inside the house… Thanks so much for sharing, Krystelle, and congratulations again.
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Image Credit: David Gow.
Krystelle Bamford’s work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, bath magg, PANK, Under the Radar and a number of anthologies including the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021 (Eyewear). She is a 2019 Primers (Nine Arches Press) poet and was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Born in France and raised in a haunted little corner of Massachusetts, she now lives with her partner and two kids in Edinburgh. Idle Grounds is her debut novel.
Lilia Fetini is studying for the CFA exam and writes when the mood strikes.
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