Kathryn Kulpa

Pleasant Drugs is my first published book, a collection of 15 short stories drawn from the 30 or so stories I wrote and published between my the time of my first published story (“Elaine I Love You,” Seventeen, March 1994) and “Cartography,” which appears for the first time in the collection.

All of the stories in Pleasant Drugs were written over a certain period of my life, during my twenties and thirties, and I think that in different ways the stories all reflect that time of young adulthood, that feeling of standing at a border and crossing, or choosing not to cross, into the next realm. I’m drawn to them, these characters in flux, those who live on edges and in the spaces between, all of them waiting for love or transformation or a second chance or some other kind of perfect someday.

Most of the stories are grounded in the real world, but there’s also an undercurrent of magical realism that carries through the collection, an overlay of myth and fairy tale: resourceful orphans, perilous journeys, a quest for something lost, a longing for transcendence. There’s always a sense in these stories that you could step away from the known path and become lost. Anxious, map-reading Maggie in “Cartography” fears her flirtatious mother may lead them to “a country outside the map, where getting lost means being lost forever.” There's a peril to entering that unknown world--but there's a pull to it as well, and some characters, like Michael in “How the Light Walks,” never do return to the daylight realm. Perhaps their fates are not so dark. Perhaps they simply found another way back to the innocence they lost, like Conover, the regretful atomic scientist in “The Night Copernicus Died,” who imagines a world of “no planets, no universe, no vastness of space, only one small earth and a bowl over the sky, carefully tended, carefully rocked.”

I’m not sure I ever started out to be a regional writer, or that I really think of myself as one, but when my stories have been published abroad I’m always instantly recognizable to Europeans as an American writer by the number of cars passing each other on the roads of these stories: Barclay’s 1974 Pontiac LeMans with a front grille like two friendly eyes, Mr. Lillicrop’s yellow Chrysler. I have a lot of road trip stories: Cristina and her guitar player heading off to Mexico in "Cristina in Another Country," the Maine trip in "Insensates," the two brothers going back to their hometown roots in "Pleasant Drugs and Terminal Liquors." Contemporary pilgrims in a world of soulless televangelists and fractured post-nuclear families, these travelers live with a vague sense that at one time, in their own past, or the distant past, things had been better, and that they will never be that good again. Yet they find hope, or at least solace, in the “pleasant drugs” that sustain them on their journey.

When I was fifteen, sleeping but not sleeping in a sleeping bag in my friend’s living room on a hot night at the very end of June, the moon shone on my face through her window. I could smell the river. “I wish I could take this summer night and put it in a Coke bottle and keep it in my room for when I need it,” I wrote in my notebook. And in a way, every story I’ve written has been an attempt to do just that. An argument against mortality, the only one I can offer. Like the all-night café whose neon cup calls to the weary traveler: salvation.

"The characters in Pleasant Drugs are straddlers--caught in a perpetual twilight between adolescence and adulthood, between the real world and other, more fantastical realms. Kulpa's stories are populated by men and women on the edge of hopelessness, and her work shines in its ability to evoke that state, and to touch us with the small satisfactions of life that keep us all going. A dazzling, lyrical debut."
“I found myself in Kathryn Kulpa’s short stories and it scared the hell out of me. Pleasant Drugs is a fine collection, deeply affecting and well-wrought.”
“Kulpa, just like her people, observes us all, and reports on our antics with pity and generosity. Her voice is singular: well-mannered, but unmannered; young and knowing. Funny, too, and at very odd moments. Best of all she doesn't maintain her own stylistic and thematic comfort zone--she journeys, in this excellent collection, wherever each story takes her.”
"Kulpa’s fiction gives the reader a glimpse into the lives of her often adolescent or young-adult female characters, as her various protagonists lace their way through the thickets of growing up. In the best of Kulpa’s stories ... her prose captures the ambiguity of veiled emotional turmoil. Whole lived lives are encapsulated within these pages.”
“Kulpa's wit and insight recall fiction writers like Lorrie Moore and Joy Williams who merge art and wit to capture the human condition in our contemporary and fractured world.”
“Lovely, funny, and very moving stories."
“The stories possess a strong dose of hope, for amid the cafes, carnivals, and anonymous strip malls of late twentieth-century America, these characters seek redemption, sometimes catching glimpses of it through art, love, or drunkenness, or through the sheer dumb luck of being young.”
"With powerful imagery, this collection of short stories explores various turning points in ordinary people’s lives. The author manages to make the reader care about her characters, however odd they may be, and to see beauty in some of the most unlikely places. A refreshing and thought-provoking collection."

Excerpt from the title story, “Pleasant Drugs and Terminal Liquors:”

She looked at him, shaking her head. “I thought you’d come home drunk,” she said. “I thought you were downtown in some bar. And I kept thinking what I’d do. Or what I’d do if the police called. Or came to the door. That’s what they do, don’t they? They don’t call.” He knew she was remembering that night at his parents’ house, when they’d gone ahead and eaten dinner without his father, started opening presents, and then the state troopers showed up like late, embarrassed guests. She’d been pregnant with Lucy then.

“I’m sorry,” he said, knowing how little that was to give her. He watched the Christmas tree lights blink on and off in her face. He was thinking of an open window and blue police lights. He reached his hand up toward hers, and she took it, but cautiously, it seemed, almost formally, as though she had already told him goodbye.

Excerpt from a magical realist story, “The Night Copernicus Died:”

It was June, it was always June. And something was floating just beyond his reach, a certain late-day color of the sun, boys’ voices, the snap and splash of someone diving into a pool. It was almost there: how cool the grass was where the shadows lay, the smell of chlorine and cookout smoke, the collar-jingle of somebody’s dog. It was too physical for a memory, and it came to him more and more now. It made him feel bizarre, displaced. Jarred out of smeary black-and-white newsprint by the bright colors of a hot dog ad.