Stonecoast Review
The Literary Journal of the Stonecoast MFA
Staff Spotlight
Kit Ball
What do you write?
Popular fiction, more leaning towards horror and dark fantasy
Is there an author or artist who has most profoundly influenced your work?
I’ve always loved Ray Bradbury, lately I’ve been more influenced by Sayaka Murata and Carmen Maria Machado
Why did you choose Stonecoast for your MFA?
I’m originally from Maine and there was something really cozy about coming back to work on my writing, since it has always been largely influenced by growing up in the middle of the terrifying woods.
What is your favorite Stonecoast memory?
Probably trivia game night, since it falls in the middle of the residency week when most of us are half exhausted and don’t get a single question correct. I enjoy Justin’s disappointment in us.
What do you hope to accomplish in the future?
I hope to one day teach writing so I can have a captive audience to my rants about narrative devices.
If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?
I will always have a very special place in my heart for Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.
Excerpt from “Inciting Incident” by Kit Ball
Denton calls it an “inciting incident.”
I think he does that because he knows it pisses me off. The way the words sounds in his mouth, like someone else’s ghost is speaking through his grey tongue, the way I know he must have picked it up from somewhere, dusted it off, and brought it home.
Denton claims the inciting incident is where it all started. The day we (Denton, me, the other lowlifes like us that are passed out at the park) decided to give up. He claims that something happened to us, some trauma, some meltdown, that was the snap. And there was no going back from a snap, he says.
I’m not sure I believe him, but it has become a pet project for him to dig the inciting incident out of me. If I remembered one, I might even tell him. just to get him off my back. But nothing comes to mind. You could blame a lot of big things, doomsday big, and clouds hanging overhead, but genuinely I don’t see anything as an incident. I remember it was very slow and comforting. I remember it like downy comforters laying over my head, grandmother’s quilt, the sound of the adults in the other room talking.
And then there’s the scraping of chairs.
If there was an inciting incident, it came a lot later.
