Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work.
Today: Mike’s fiction, memoir and nonfiction can be found in Tin House, Foglifter, Oyster River Pages and other magazines. He is the author of thriller Criminals, which was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2022 (Indie), the upbeat scifi romance Red Dot, and comic novel The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg, which won Best LGBTQ Book at the San Francisco Book Festival. He lives with his husband and dog in San Francisco.
Thanks so much, Mike, for joining me!
J. Scott Coatsworth: What was your first published work? Tell me a little about it.
Mike Karpa: My first published piece was a short story. In it, a cab driver picks up a woman dressed to party, only she looks like she’s from an earlier era. She asks to be taken to a place that doesn’t exist. As they talk, he realizes she’s a character from a Raymond Chandler novel. And so does she. So they talk about being real. It won first prize in a contest and I was quite proud. I was channeling some Chandler vibes when I wrote it, so it’s set in Los Angeles. It was called “Epistemologically Speaking” and here’s the first paragraph:
I was stopped at a red light on Wilshire Boulevard reading Kierkegaard one afternoon when a wickedly handsome woman, overdressed for downtown, with deep black hair, red lips and long, personable legs rapped on the front window of my cab.
It’s out of print, of course, so maybe I will resurrect it as a giveaway. The noir atmosphere fits with my first novel, Criminals, so it could be paired with that.
JSC: What was the hardest part of writing this book?
MK: I’m going to talk about that first novel. I was told early on that it was unpublishable because the main character has sex with both men and women. Supposedly, that turns off gay and straight readers, because they don’t want to share space on the page. Bi readers, of course, didn’t exist. I was later told it was unpublishable because I used the local name for Tokyo’s international airport, never mind that no one in Tokyo called it anything else. And so on. Repeatedly hearing that word “unpublishable” for what I thought was a decent book deeply discouraged me. After I published it myself, Criminals was selected as a “Best of 2022” book by major trade magazine Kirkus Reviews, making their top 100 indie books for the year. That’s an honor received by just over 1% of the indie books they review. Of course, the earlier critics were correct, because it never was published by a traditional publisher.
JSC: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done in the name of research?
MK: I am too embarrassed to say.
JSC: Who did your cover, and what was the design process like?
MK: Each cover design has been different, the first with a different artist and designer, the second with the artist (Maria Oglesby) also being the designer, the third by me with assistance from facebook groups, the fourth designed by me using art by my husband, and the latest by me alone. I’m quite happy with all of them, but the artwork on Criminals is just amazing, to go back to that book again. It’s a watercolor by San Francisco artist Hitoshi Shigeta depicting a Tokyo subway station scene from the book. Hitoshi does a fun comic strip, Dimmstown (on Facebook), and he did a first cover based on my description of that scene and I thought it was great. But a critique group said hang on a sec, this sounds like an adult book and the illustration style is middle grade. They were completely right. Luckily, Hitoshi also does noir-style images, so he redid the same composition with a noir vibe, and it turned out magnificently.
JSC: Have you ever taken a trip to research a story? Tell me about it.
MK: I wrote an espionage novel, an alternate history of India developing the atomic bomb (which I may publish next year). In it, I invented a character who was one of the earliest nuclear scientists in Europe—a Polish woman pretending to be German as she works with the Nazis. As I wrote and did research, I discovered very late in the game that there was a real scientist whose story closely resembled my invented one: Lise Meitner, who developed the theory of nuclear fission.
Shortly after, I found myself in what had recently been East Germany and made a trek to Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin, where Meitner worked. I didn’t expect to find anything of note, but not only was her institute still standing, there was a bust of her (and only her) in the front lobby. Looking at her face in three dimensions grounded me in the era in a new way, so I added Meitner as a character as well and had my character be her protégé. Descriptions of the institute’s grand marble staircase and hallways made it into the final novel, along with a house in town that I used as my character’s house. Meitner, incidentally, didn’t get the Nobel for her discover—a collaborator did—but she does have an element named after her. Meitnerium is element 109 and has the symbol Mt.
JSC: How did you deal with rejection letters?
MK: Oh, not well. I submit and query with great optimism, genuinely expecting my piece will be published. When I am rejected, which is the usual result, I am quite disappointed. I never feel shocked, though, because that optimism lives side by side with imposter syndrome, so being rejected produces no cognitive dissonance. And of course, sometimes I get pieces accepted. Some magazines even pay real cash money. That helps deal with rejection letters. But even nice rejections are tough.
About five years ago, I made a major shift. After being turned down in close to 400 queries to agents, I took no for an answer. I carried around a burden of inadequacy for a time but I’ve gotten enough pats on the back from industry professionals over the years to say, yes, I write well enough, but they can’t make money on me. (Neither can I, heh heh.) Long story short, I stopped querying and start self-publishing. It’s been great. I write much more now, have more fun, and have sold a thousand books. Well, close to it. OK, fine, 700!
JSC: Are there underrepresented groups or ideas featured in your book? If so, discuss them.
MK: I’m a gay man, and most of my books center on that experience, though some don’t. Even if I foreground straight characters, I include the existence of a variety of queer folks. Doing this is at the core of why I write, I think. I am also part Mexican, on my mom’s side, so I will often be inclusive there, often writing in folks who have mixed backgrounds—part this, part that, part something else. People who are not part of a “community,” or are maybe searching for a community. My dad was a slave laborer kidnapped by Nazis and then in a refugee camp in Germany for three more years, which is where he finished high school. For that reason, the experiences of refugees and immigrants are similarly a big part of the world I see. I’m also interested in people from tiny ethnicities—my dad was Estonian—as well as people from displaced peoples and diasporas. Complex language communities are also a core area of interest for me.
JSC: Name the book you like most among all you’ve written, and tell us why.
MK: It can vary, but I had a great time writing my scifi novel Red Dot. It came so easily. It features a nearly all-queer cast and it’s really upbeat. My characters grapple with important emotional conflicts (jealousy and loss), but they’re not angsty. They cope, they have fun, they have sex, they look wryly on the world. And they want the best for others as well as themselves. All with sentient AI, robots, flying cars, and boatloads of quirky creations in a competitive gonzo art scene.
JSC: What’s your favorite line from any movie?
MK: OK, I am taking this one in a different direction, because my line doesn’t exist. The movie it’s not from is The Maltese Falcon. (Have you noticed I love noir?) It’s between femme fatale girl Bridgid O’Shaughnessey and detective Sam Spade:
Bridgid: “I’ve been bad, Mr. Spade, very bad. Worse than you could know.”
Sam Spade: “Well don’t brag about it.”
The thing is, it isn’t in the movie. It’s more of a meta quote of the noir feel of the movie. In actuality, the dialog is this:
Brigid: “I’ve been bad, worse than you could know.”
Sam: “You know, that’s good, because if you actually were as innocent as you pretend to be, we’d never get anywhere.”
Then later…
Sam: You ARE a liar.
Brigid: I am a liar. I’ve always been a liar.
Sam: Well, don’t brag about it. …
And not long after.
Brigid: Kiss me, Sam Spade. Kiss me.
Spade: Why not?
Yes, why not indeed?
JSC: What are you working on now?
MK: A memoir. I know, I know, a marginally published writer working on a memoir is a joke. Literally. I have a New Yorker cartoon by Sipress on my wall, and the caption reads: “Congratulations! Your manuscript was the one-millionth personal memoir submitted to us this year.” But I am doing it anyway.
It focuses on about ten weeks in the summer of 1981, when I turned 21. I was barricaded in the closet and finding my place in the world, as I suppose we all are at that age, but a few unusual things happen. No spoilers here, but the setting is Taiwan under martial law. I’m a college dropout and my parents and brother are living in Saudi Arabia, working. Iran’s Islamic revolution is barely two years old.
Overall, the throughline is friendship and regret. It’s called Mango Summer and it has been quite difficult to write. As a fiction writer, I have to constantly stop myself from inventing. I am on draft four and feel like there will be two more drafts to come.
And now for Mike’s book: Criminals:
It’s 1991. Gay American Conner’s refuge in Japan is going sour—he’s alienating friends and has started sleeping with a woman. When a smuggling scheme bankrolled by a former boyfriend goes south, he scours Tokyo’s dimly lit night scene for a solution as gangsters, grifters and police close in. Enter Marika, who has fled a failing suburban marriage. Together, they embark on a shady caper that may save or doom them both.
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Excerpt
Conner rolled his shoulder blades against his airplane seat, shifting the hashish he’d banded tight around his ribs, and still he itched. What kind of idiot was he? Some white-toothed chatterbox in an airless Bangkok drug alley tells him the packaging will fool the airport dogs and Conner believes him? And now here he was, planted in a window seat flying straight, no doubt, toward Japanese jail at five hundred and fifty-five miles an hour.
A soft warning bell sounded overhead and the fasten-seat-belts light went on as a female voice announced the plane’s descent into Tokyo-Narita in Thai, Japanese and English. Beneath Conner’s yellow business shirt, the plastic buckle of the belt was snagging against his skin, daring him to unbuckle it.
“You okay?” the guy next to him asked.
Conner glanced at the man. White. Medium build. Dark haired, like Conner. Perhaps a few years older. He was awfully good looking, but Conner couldn’t risk interacting with anyone. Conner nodded. “Fine.” His shoulders cramped and the too-short strap drove into a space between two ribs he hadn’t known was there. He felt like a penned-up calf on slaughter day.
The guy stuck out his hand across the empty seat between them. “Matt.” He had a rich, rumbling baritone, a Midwest American accent straight off TV. So unlike Conner’s old-school L.A. drawl—more Okie than Valley Girl—that English-school owners found so distressingly unintelligible.
Conner shook Matt’s hand. The guy’s grip was firm, his hand warm. Conner wanted to hang on to it for a week.
“You work in Tokyo?” Matt asked.
“Ikari Bank.” Something about the word bank, Conner had found, killed conversations, and as much as he liked hearing that resonant voice, he needed to smother this interchange in its crib.
The guy straightened up in his seat. “Survived the great ‘crash’ of 1990, did you?” He made quotation-mark signs with his fingers, as though he didn’t believe the stock market had plunged by half. “We’re partnering with Ikari. I’m at the American Embassy, on contract.” He laughed. “Working with the Ministry of Finance, liberalization, that sort of thing. What are you in? M&A? Commercial paper?” Matt crossed his legs, letting one leather-clad foot stick out into the aisle.
Ah, gaijin salaryman, Conner thought. Tokyo was still crawling with these educated American fortune seekers, despite the meltdown. Not aimless chuckleheads like himself but kids who did things like intern, interview and tell amusing stories about . . . well, who knows what. Conner wasn’t “amusing.” He had prepared a story about selling traveler’s checks for Ikari, but now sat in awkward silence because he couldn’t carry the lie very far and the guy had a firm grip that he wanted to feel again.
Matt’s foot caught the skirt of a Thai flight attendant as she hustled up the narrow pathway to her station. He jerked his head in a very small bow and lifted his hand in a slight reverse karate chop of wordless apology. It was an effortlessly Japanese gesture for an American and made Conner kind of enviously hate him. The flight attendant turned to smile at Matt, her teeth as deep white and perfect as the Bangkok drug dealer’s. Matt’s dark green eyes sparkled back.
“Damn, Skippy,” he whispered to Conner as she sashayed up the aisle. “Sexy,” he growled, pitching his voice low.
Conner exhaled, shrinking his lungs to relieve the bite of the strap. To come out or not come out? Conner watched the woman dip to pick up a stray headset from a seat cushion and noted that he did feel a spark of excitement as he looked at her. Maybe it was time for a different sort of coming out. “You know, I guess she is.”
“You guess?”
“I’m new at this.”
Matt looked at Conner. Conner could see his mind was trying to figure out what Conner had just said.
Conner’s ears buzzed, blood pressure rising. If he could risk carrying drugs through customs, could he not risk a little honesty? It was the nineties now; times had changed. “Always thought I was just gay.” His throat stumbled on the word gay, so laden with power. “But I’m going out with a woman for the first time.” Ah, Katie. Going out definitely wasn’t the phrase. Katie didn’t think much of Conner; they only had sex, really, which was about the last thing he’d ever expected. But he liked it. Quite a bit.
Matt shifted back in his seat. Not a good sign, but sometimes it took people a moment to get over the surprise. Matt recrossed his khaki-sheathed legs and drummed his fingers on his knee.
The buckle of Conner’s chest pack crabbed into his back, a fingernail on a fleshy chalkboard. He internally thanked Matt for taking his mind off it for so long. He’d picked up the pack in an open-air Bangkok market yesterday. It was emblazoned with an already peeling Louis Vuitton insignia and the proud statement, Happyness of life is satiety. My shoes. It sounded like something Conner would have come up with.
Matt glanced at him, but nervously. Never mind. Conner wasn’t sure what he thought of himself either. Sleeping with a woman hadn’t made him any less attracted to men. But Katie had made a move one night, and he’d wondered if anything had changed since high school. It had. So, was he going to be a different person now? The experience now had him thinking: was he a person, or just a bunch of behaviors? Hello, I’d like you to meet my friend Conner. He’s a behavior.
Conner stared out the window as the coast appeared. The outskirts of greater Tokyo were just visible at the edge of the wintry brown countryside outside Narita. Somewhere out there was Mount Fuji. Lots of people saw it on the approach but Conner never had.
The wing flaps rose and the engines began to scream, setting off a scream inside Conner as well. Shining beads scrawled across his oval plastic window. All it took for Conner to land in prison was for one Japanese policeman to look at this scrawny twenty-five-year-old in a pin-striped suit and butter-toned shirt and ask, Is he stupid enough to lash a kilo of hash to his chest?