While I was studying abroad in London last spring, I had the opportunity to interview English poet, Karen McCarthy Woolf just months after her novel, “Top Doll” was published. Karen is best known for her acclaimed debut collection, “An Aviary of Small Birds,” which explores themes of loss and migration. Karen has received numerous awards, including the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Prize, and has held prestigious positions such as Fulbright Scholar and Poet in Residence at the National Maritime Museum. Exploring Karen’s mind and genius while also getting to understand her warm exterior was nothing short of inspiring. In hopes that you’ll feel similarly, I am sharing the condensed Paris Review write-up that I put together after speaking with Karen. Enjoy!

Seated across from me in our interview, Karen McCarthy Woolf spoke freely and with enthusiasm, reassuring her engagement in the conversation with each hand gesture adorning a flash of her sparkling silver rings. Similar to her poetry, Karen’s presence commanded a room. Always keeping her body pointed in my direction regardless of where her tangents brought her mouth. Karen exuded cues of engagement with each word she spoke. Before arriving at our interview, Karen wrote day 69 of her 100 days of Haikus challenge. This small act quickly informed me of how heavily integrated writing was in the daily happenings of her life.

Lived experience is a hallmark of Karen’s poetry. Her first poetry collection, An Aviary of Small Birds, is an elegy to her stillborn son with aims to make an incredibly personal and intimate experience universal for readers. Karen’s second poetry collection, Seasonal Disturbances, observes the natural order of life and death and draws influence from the time she spent in nature healing from her son’s death. Karen’s unwavering observation of life, death and nature in her writing is commendable. “I write through thick and thin. So I write even when really difficult things are happening in my life” said Woolf. 

A jack of all trades, Karen has written 7 anthologies, two poetry collections, and her debut novel, Top Doll, a semi-fictional novel that is a culmination of biography, fiction, poetry and prose. Top Doll is a story about Huguette Clark, American billionaire heiress, with an extensive collection of 700 dolls that encompass many backgrounds and stories that demand to be told. Huguette’s story is one that caught Woolf’s eye sitting in a classroom in UCLA upon reading her obituary online and attending an auction to obtain one of Huguette’s dolls. This novel was the star of our conversation. 

Karen jumped from topic to topic in her responses, affording each tangent as much enthusiasm and excitement as the next. She spoke just as she writes- in billowing tangents that exude signs of emotion, life and experience. In writing Top Doll, one of Karen’s many missions was to have fun with the work. Her fun nature exceeded her writing as she joked, laughed and brightly told stories throughout our conversation. 

Our conversation took place on the third floor of Boston University’s building in Harrington Gardens on a Tuesday evening. An observing ear could notice the clack of computer keys giving way to the pressure of double-tasking student’s fingers and birds singing just beyond the window that shed a fleeting glow of light into the room. Karen’s transformative storytelling abilities, positive nature and fun attitude felt synonymous with this warm spring day.  Throughout our conversation, Karen said the words ‘you know?’ a countless number of times. I found these two simple words to be a bit funny as Karen repeated them in an attempt to gauge my understanding, because when dealing with a mind as brilliant as Karen’s, I never really did know what she might say or what intriguing topic she may fall upon. This was a beautiful realization. 

INTERVIEWER

First, if it’s okay, I’d love to talk about your mom a bit. I read that you used to write English essays with your Mom at your kitchen table. When thinking of nature vs nurture, do you think it was your environment that encouraged you to pursue writing?

KAREN MCCARTHY WOOLF

Oh, gosh, definitely. 100%. So, yeah, my mom worked at a library when I was little, and I live very near a big library, actually, in Swiss Cottage. It’s a very modern building. So books were always around. My mom was a very, very avid reader. And she’s also a writer, she used to write poetry. I think my mum was a really good writer, not such a good editor. But yeah, she used to work on a lot of quite humorous stuff. So yeah, that sort of spirit of her encouraging. And in fact, you know, when I’m talking about the kitchen table that I was studying, I was doing my sort of English GCSE and my mom was, she was at that time doing a degree. So she was a single mom with three daughters, and she was at university. Yeah, studying for a degree in English literature. So, you know, we’d sort of be around the table and, and start doing that stuff together. 

INTERVIEWER

Between all that, did you have a lot of time to play with dolls as a child? 

WOOLF

It’s a funny thing, because we used to live in this house, which I suppose you would think of as similar to a brownstone. And with that sort of brownstone idea, you had the steps going up. So I always used to play on the stoop, you know, be out playing in the front garden. And I sort of at the age where you probably don’t get new dolls, but I still was playing with my dolls now being, maybe 8? Anyway, I had them all on different steps, and it was a summer’s day, and someone called me into the house, I went into the house, and I came out and someone had stolen all my dolls. Somehow this sort of thing of having these dolls stolen, and then being too old to really get new ones. I think in a way, writers are always kind of looking to resolve some form of loss, or trauma in their work, you know, to kind of flip things to turn it around to transform something that is painful or difficult or challenging. And, you know, sort of make this world your own. 

INTERVIEWER

I understand that when you started writing Top Doll, it kind of overlapped with Seasonal Disturbances. Did you find that either of these pieces kind of motivated or inspired together?

WOOLF

Well, what interests me is that my poetry is quite grounded in the natural world. So Seasonal Disturbances, you know, part of that book is written on a residency on a boat in the middle of the River Thames. It’s like, thinking about the physical and emotional and the sort of psycho spiritual experience of water or being on water. Okay, but very much about being outside. And then Top Doll is unrelentingly in the interior. It felt quite separate and almost opposite, in that sense. I’m always thinking about, I want to have a little bit of fun with some of the serious stuff that is happening that we’re dealing with. So, for me, Top Doll was just this kind of opportunity to, you know, make a bit of mischief. And I suppose that’s that thing, isn’t it? When we play with dolls, one of the things that we do is kind of like, make a bit of mischief with them, do things that we wouldn’t necessarily do in real life?

INTERVIEWER

 I know that it takes a certain level of enthusiasm and imagination to publish any debut novel. But were you ever apprehensive about publishing something as unique and ambitious as Top Doll, kind of in its own realm?

WOOLF

Well, I think I was more apprehensive about whether I’m actually finishing. You know, that was what was really driving me mad. Man, yeah, you sort of think, ‘Oh, my God, will everybody love it?’ Actually, there was one review that came in, and my publisher said, ‘Oh, it’s not a brilliant review, do you want to read it?’ And I was like, ‘I’ll let you know when I’m ready for that kind of critique.’ You know, it’s funny, but when you have this sort of thing of mixing, you know, kind of mixing real life with fiction. When you’re writing something in the realms of biography, you know, you really have to kind of say, well, this is a personal existence. For me, personally, I feel like there is a sort of moral obligation somehow. Whereas, oh, unless they’re a big person in history, like Custer or something, you know, that needs to stop for grabs. You know what I mean? But with the dolls, even, you start thinking, well, they waited all this time to get out of the apartment, to have a good little send off into the world. They start to become a little bit real in your own head, even though they’re not.

INTERVIEWER

Did you always know that you were going to write about the dolls or did it take fully being immersed in the room with a collection of 700 of them to know that you were going to write from their point of view? 

WOOLF

Oh, no, that came much later. Actually. I had started writing Dolly. This was such a long project, but mainly because I sort of wrote two poetry collections and did a PhD, as well at this time. So this was like my backburner project for ages. Even when I was in LA on a Fulbright and the Santa Barbara Manor mansion is obviously in California, and all of these things, I was still writing something else and thinking about something else in terms of like street poetry. Then the novel was just my little sort of thing I did on the side. And then eventually, it got to the point where it’s like, alright, I finished the poetry, I kind of have to finish the novel off now. When we wrote the very first thing for the book, it was kind of in this voice. I thought it might be a male voice, but then I realized I absolutely didn’t want to write that voice. And that it would be just so much more fun to write from the perspective of dolls. 

INTERVIEWER

In preparing for a role, actors will method act and interview similar subjects to really create a character. Since you obviously couldn’t ask a Barbie about their life, were you able to find a muse or inspiration in any other scope? What was the character building process like?

WOOLF

It’s funny, because one of the books I looked at, in my PhD, is a book called The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück. In that book, there’s a whole dialogue between this poet in her garden and then there are all these flowers with these personal poems and the weather and God speaking through the landscape, this thing called Theophany. In a lot of ways, I can kind of see how Top Doll’s structure is not dissimilar to that in a very different way. But that idea of the persona voice, I think that’s maybe the poet in me, it doesn’t seem remotely odd to, like, make adults but it just doesn’t. But I can sort of see what might happen. 

INTERVIEWER

What were your goals in narrating Top Doll through the eyes of a doll? Nostalgia? Dystopia? Bridging the gap between the living and lifeless?

WOOLF

Do you know what the funny thing is? Those sorts of things are there in a way, but when you’re writing, you’re like, I’ve just got to get these dolls out of the apartment. That’s all I need to do. I just need to move them there or get them to the hospital or to have some kind of showdown. My one regret is that I didn’t actually write more violence, it’s really fun to write. Yeah. But I know there’s an opportunity in the future for such matters. Seriously, you know, I felt like because you’re almost writing it in a cartoon-like style because the dolls have a cartoon-like quality to them, because a head can be ripped off and then replaced and sat down to watch telly again. I quite liked this experience of being able to do the sort of miraculous things, or dreadful things. And then everything’s all okay in five minutes.

INTERVIEWER

So when editing your writing, which I know can be gruesome. What was your approach here? And does this kind of vary when you’re writing a poetry collection versus the novel?

WOOLF

I mean, I don’t find it very gruesome. I actually think that sort of thing of getting the whole story out is harder than editing. I’m one of those people that if I’m not careful, I’ll edit as I write. And I can be quite quick in it. But I’d rather try not to, I think it’s better to just try and get the draft out and then go back. So it sort of depends on what I’m writing. Bizarrely, I wrote so many more sonnets that are not in the book. But it really didn’t serve the book. What I needed to think about was character, plot and narrative. And it’s all very well, I actually wandered around doing research and then wrote it up. So the doll’s voice, which is very bizarre, probably not a very unusual form of doing things. But, I say that because I realized I had to take so many of them out. They weren’t serving any purpose. They weren’t serving the plot. I think that I wrote that book, kind of like you would write a poetry collection, and not how I think one should write a novel. I kind of knew that I was breaking that rule, but I did because I think that that’s just sort of how I had to do it. I would say that, whenever I’ve written drama, I’m pretty disciplined. Or I’ll write a plan. You’re going to start at the beginning, and you’re going to get to the end and you’re going to know what’s happening. And then you fill it in. That is a much more efficient way to write something that is a larger, longer narrative. Because you can go off on a lot of tangents. So, it’s quite good to have that skeleton plan. I keep thinking that I should run some kind of masterclass called how not to write a novel, because that was sort of part of it. At the same time, I do think that you know, like, when you try a new form, one of the things that you’re really aiming to do is to challenge yourself to think about what you can do as a writer that you haven’t done before. What can I do that I haven’t done? What can I learn? What can I try?