Kali White VanBaale is a 2025 Iowa Author Award Recipient with many different books published through her years as a writer. VanBaale juggles her day to day life with being a writer in the morning and a teacher in the afternoon. She is the author of many award winning books, such as: “The Monsters We Make,” “Good Divide,” and “The Space Between.” VanBaale read from her newest short story novel, “Release of Information: And Other Linked Stories,” at Prairie Lights Bookstore on April 7.
The Daily Iowan: When did you decide to write professionally, and why did you decide to do so?
VanBaale: I had written more as a hobby through my teens, into my early 20s. It was around that time when I had my first child, and I was staying home with the newborn, and thought, maybe this is it, it’s now or never to take a real go at writing professionally.
I started to dedicate full time, or as much as I could to writing, which took me a good four or five years to get the novel completed and published. The problem with writing for the first time as a novelist is learning the craft, and accepting that you may need to rewrite things. It won’t be perfect the first time.
Do your stories tend to flow naturally to you?
I think they do. At first it was a lot of work to figure out the order of the short stories in my recent novel, and the order to introduce certain characters. Because they’ll connect back to the other characters in the story, I had to be strategic. In my earlier stories I struggled on how I wanted to write them, and the final four stories I wrote came very quickly, and I knew where I wanted them to be. Some parts can be easier than others.
How does your experience as an established author help you to create more meaningful themes and content?
I’ve been writing and publishing for over 25 years, and I think what comes with age and experience and longevity is confidence.
It’s the ability to try new things, push myself out of my comfort zone and try new things.
Even when writing in novel form, I’ve tried very different things in each one of them. Even my short story collection was a completely different genre for me.
I had never published a collection before.
I think as I’ve gotten older and more experienced I’ve gotten more willing to try. I’ve become more willing to try new forms of writing, new stories, and push myself further than before.
As an author of both nonfiction and fiction, which writing style do you find more appealing?
That’s really easy to answer. Fiction is my first love. I do sometimes enjoy nonfiction, and I did a lot of crime writing for the A&E network, where they have a true crime blog.
I did some reporting from them. It was super interesting because it was so different from fiction writing, in ways that I wasn’t completely trained in. Most of my experience in writing isn’t within nonfiction. I think in some ways nonfiction can be harder to write than fiction.
As a short story writer, the writing process can be more unique to you. What does a typical writing routine look like for you?
I split my days between writing and teaching because I am on faculty at an MFA program. I do all my writing in the morning, and I do all my teaching in the afternoon.
I’ll usually have about four good hours in the morning where I can really get into writing. I’m old school though, and I do a lot of my early drafts longhand just writing in spiral notebooks because I feel like it gets ideas generating faster than when I’m staring at a blank computer screen.
I think there is something physical about getting it down on paper, and the connection with my hand and my brain.
I also feel like I can be messier and take more risks to figure out where I’m going, whereas if I’m staring at a screen, I feel a lot more pressure for it to be polished and perfect.
Although, after the first draft, I moved to the computer to clean it up.
I’m a very slow first draft writer, but I’m a more efficient revisionist. I enjoy it a lot and can easily revise a piece of fiction five, 10, 20 times before I’m finally OK with it. With some novels, I have rewritten from beginning to end dozens of times.
It can be a lot of work, but I think that’s what separates writers who get published because they’re willing to keep revising and doing the work to make something better in the end.
