Kyle Laurita-Bonometti
 

“I write because it gives me something to hold on to.”

The editors of Eucalyptus Lit recently had the privilege and opportunity to speak with Kyle Laurita-Bonometti, prose winner of Eucalyptus Lit's inaugural summer contest. His work “Hearts on Spades” features in Issue 5, Bequest.

​

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

​

How did you start writing?

I've been writing for as long as I can remember—ever since I was a little kid. I had a single mom. She would work late, so I spent a lot of time at my grandparents house. My grandfather was a writer, and my grandmother had this old IBM computer. I would just type away. When I was six years old I'd write detective stories, mostly a lot of mysteries. Reading and writing, honestly, was kind of how I got through a lot of stuff as a kid. So when I got older, I felt like I kind of owed it to myself to try my hand at it and see what I could do.

Why do you write? What does writing mean to you?

I guess it calls back to what I was saying earlier. When I was younger, I used to read and write to kind of get through stuff. I would go into my own world and put everything else aside when I was reading or writing. 

As an adult, it was the same, but different. I write for myself. I write because it gives me something to hold on to. It gives me something to focus on—like a path, you know? It's like a path forward. For me, writing is partly about survival, but it's also about living. Checking in with yourself and keeping tabs on yourself and how you're living. 

I think it's kind of inevitable when you spend a lot of time paying attention to those around you, that you're going to want to chronicle it somehow. You know you can't be a human in this world without seeing what people go through and having some empathy about it. When you have those kinds of things that you keep with you, you’ve got to document it somehow, or else it'll eat you alive. 

So for me, that's what writing's always been. And I think that comes across “Hearts on Spades.” A big part of that story was about noticing things that either nobody was paying attention to or cared about enough to talk about, and having that with me and needing to express it somehow. So that's, that's kind of what writing is about for me.

How do you get your inspiration? What is your creative process?

I'm a pretty big stream-of-consciousness writer. What comes up on the page inevitably ends up being something that I'm struggling with, or I'm having difficulty processing, or something I need to dedicate a little more time to. Usually when I write, it comes off as an incoherent mess at first, and then once I start parsing my way through it, it starts to make a little more sense over time. Inevitably, these characters rise right out of the swamp. And you grow to love them, and then you can't do anything but provide a home for them. 

Could you tell us a little bit about “Hearts on Spades”? 

Sure! It's about this kid, Isaac, who's more than a little lost, I would say.

The story opens up with this character, Gloria. It was going to be about her initially—what happened to her was based on someone I actually knew. But, as I wrote the story, I ended up realizing that every character, including the protagonist Isaac, was a vessel for all these kinds of characters that I've met throughout my life. These people who you meet at the gas station at 2 a.m. while you're pumping gas, and they ask you for a quarter to buy a pack of cigarettes. Or your friend’s aunt, who is always at the table, but who nobody pays any attention to because she just goes on and on. 

When you meet these people, it's easy, I think, to shrug them off. But sometimes, when you're in that place yourself, when you're amongst them, you just start to wonder, “What's going on here? Who is this person? How did they get here?” 

That empathy stretches out. And you wonder about yourself, of course: “How did I get here?” But all these characters, all these parts, kind of come together. And I think that's what “Hearts on Spades” was about: noticing and giving attention to these characters who, for all intents and purposes, I felt had been kind of thrown aside by society.

What have you been up to recently? Can you share some more about your current work or direction? 

I finished the final draft of my first book earlier this year, so I've been shopping that out to a few agents, seeing if anything comes back. 

I'm also working on another book—it’s very short, more like a novella. It’s a mix of a detective mystery that takes place in a college campus. There's a lot of mental health stuff in that one as well—it's a recurring theme in my work.

I've been trying to work on some longer form stuff. I've done a lot of short stories and personal essays over the years, but, as I get older and I start thinking about stuff more, I try to take my writing more seriously. I can get into that a little more, if you like. 

We'd love to hear a little bit more about that!

The first book, the book that I finished, was a coming-of-age story about a kid backpacking in Hawaii. I started when I was younger: when I was 19, I wrote it for six months, and then I stopped. I swore it off. I just had a lot going on in my life.

I picked it up, I want to say, about two years ago, and I was like “I love this story, and I'd love to come back to it—to finish it and give it its due.” 

So I finally finished writing it. It's a coming of age story about a kid backpacking in Hawaii who’s running away from a lot of problems—his family, his life, school, all these things. He drops out of school, and he moves to Hawaii, and he ends up just coming across the same problems in his life in Hawaii. The same stuff he was running away from comes up again and again in different forms. He learns to reconcile with himself a little bit and face what he's been running away from. 

The other one is about someone who's a little older, they're in college, and something happens to one of their friends. He takes it on himself to investigate, and, through the process of investigating what happens to his friend, he starts to find out more about his own family and his own history. And, again, he comes to reconcile with that kind of stuff. There's a lot of that in my writing.

​

And a last question that we ask everyone—-what advice do you have for young writers? 

Keep at it. That's the biggest thing, you know. Through the highs and lows, publishing or not getting published, writing something that sucks or that elates you, just keep at it.

That's the main thing people talk about. It takes 10,000 hours to really get good at something, and I believe that. I think talent is part of it, but much more than that is just dedication and perseverance and the willingness to keep on opening yourself up again and again, day after day, page after page.

Do you have anything else that you'd like to ask or tell our audience?

I think what you guys do is really important work. With the amount of writing out there these days, I think curating and providing a place for writing to be is really important. 

We really appreciate you, too—and each and every one of our writers who shares their work with us!