Kate Lister Campbell discusses “If You Wanted to Live”—her short story about children of divorce caring for a pet rabbit—with associate editor Trent Kay Maverick. Find this story in the Spring 2026 issue of Colorado Review.
Kate Lister Campbell was raised in Kansas City and lives in New York. Her fiction has appeared in Granta Online, Witness, Indiana Review, and North American Review. She is the winner of the 2025 Salamander Fiction Contest. She received her MFA from Warren Wilson College.
Trent Kay Maverick: This is a dark story. It centers on a pet rabbit, and some unfortunate things happen to this rabbit. I have to ask… did you have a pet rabbit growing up?
Kate Lister Campbell: Yeah, it’s a dark story. And I have a dark answer. The story is somewhat autobiographical. After my parents got divorced, I lived with my mom for a year. She was very depressed, somewhat psychotic, very disturbed. And when I moved out to live with my dad, she bought my sister a rabbit. At first it was a cute bunny. And then it became this terrifying, vicious rabbit. They didn’t let it out of the cage much. Its urine and feces eventually ate through the hardwood floor because this poor animal was trapped in there. And then my mother started to fill the room with trash. I tried to write this story several times, and the rabbit is what I’ve always been circling around. It was a way to represent the horror that I felt and experienced growing up.
TKM: The narrator’s parents are in a marriage that is falling apart, during a time when divorce was becoming mainstream. How does this impact the story?
KLC: It was the late 80s, early 90s. My parents and a lot of their friends had gotten married very young. Their parents and grandparents stayed married through very difficult marriages. And then there was this new world coming around: It wasn’t just one or two people getting divorced, it was like, now everyone’s getting divorced! Like a new beginnings type of thing, a kind of self actualization. But it was also destructive. It wasn’t like it is now, where parents are paying so much attention to the kids. What was freeing for them was destructive for us.
TKM: We do get to spend some nice time with the family in this story before everything falls apart. They get to go on that beach vacation.
KLC: I’m a real believer in, you’ve got to give your readers some pleasure. It can’t just be all abuse! I hate it when you’re in a story and the scenery is horrible and everything is gross and you’re like, oh my god! I love the part where they go to the ocean, which is beautiful. I worked really hard in that scene on kicking it up a notch with language and unsentimental beauty. When a family is breaking up or things are falling apart, there can be beautiful moments of coming together, or, ‘maybe we can save this’ or ‘maybe this is how it really is.’ And then it’s not.
TKM: Did you know, when you started writing, what was going to happen to the rabbit?
KLC: No. I thought the rabbit was going to die while they were away. And then I was like, well, what if it’s just gone? What happened to it? Then it’s a mystery for the narrator. It’s a mystery for me. That makes it more compelling to keep writing.
TKM: How did it become clear to you?
KLC: It’s when the narrator is sick. She’s sick upstairs and there’s something sick downstairs too. The house is like levels of consciousness. She sees what’s happening with the rabbit, and—if she lingers too long in that house—what could happen to her. So she chooses to survive.
TKM: The relationship between the two sisters is complex. It’s rivalry, but also a complete imbalance in the experience that these two are going through.
KLC: It’s definitely based on my relationship with my sister. It’s about examining my megalomania as a child and the real jealousy of having been the first and only child for a while. The narrator cannot forgive her sister for existing. There’s this desire to exclude the sister. The narrator likes to take things out on the sister. And, in a way that perhaps she’s not totally getting, the parents are taking things out on her.
I think the narrator loves her sister. And also, there’s something about her sister’s pure childish happiness that makes her furious. Because she’s not in that place anymore. She doesn’t have that ability to have pure unadulterated love for this horrible rabbit.
TKM: The final scene we get with the sisters… I find that scene really moving. They’re adults now, and the narrator still can’t bring herself to tell her sister what really happened to this rabbit.
KLC: At some level, there’s a kindness there. And at some level, there’s a cruelty. It’s a kind of possessiveness. I know what happened and you don’t. I’m going to keep you—like a child—in the dark. You don’t need to understand this, because you can’t. There’s an arrogance and a cruelty still in that relationship.
TKM: Being the older sister never goes away, right?
KLC: Or, you’re still playing that role. That role of the know-it-all. That superiority. It protects the narrator from the knowledge that she was just as vulnerable as her sister, that she didn’t have control in this frightening house. She never really gets out of that with her sister. I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten out of it with mine. And I don’t know if I ever will.
TKM: I really like how time moves in this story. We experience a year in the life of this narrator and her family. And then, bam, she’s an adult.
KLC: I’ve found over time that my work has tended in that direction, to have a short story over a longer period. It’s 5000 words, but it’s a year and then also the rest of her life. Time needs to move like that in order for the crumble to feel real. It’s not gonna happen overnight. But it also needs to happen within the span of the pages.
TKM: The ending really sneaks up on you. It all happens very quickly in that last paragraph. At what point did you know that was the note to end on?
KLC: Well, I was like, what is this story about? It has to be about the effect on her as an adult. I wrote the story in the wake of my mother’s death, and I had found our dog’s ashes in her storage unit before she died. And I thought, why in the world did she save these ashes? She didn’t even like our dog. It was just weird. And I was like, this mother [in the story] would have saved the bunny’s ashes as a torturous reminder, like she’s not letting go. And the narrator, in taking those ashes, she’s trying to provide a kindness to the memory of this rabbit. I think at a subconscious level, she is grateful to the rabbit. She’s still terrified of it. And when suddenly that’s gone, the full horror and fear of who her mother was hits her… and the loss.
TKM: How would you situate this story in your body of work and other topics and themes you write about?
KLC: A lot of my short stories are about the Midwest. I’m working on a short story collection—which is basically finished—tentatively titled Per Aspera, which comes from the Kansas State motto, ad astra per aspera, which means “to the stars through difficulty.” So the book is just called “through difficulty.” I’m thinking of changing it to the title of this story: “If You Wanted to Live.” I think that’s a better title.
TKM: Where can we read some of these stories?
KLC: Two were published in Granta Online. “Donut County” is about a woman from the Midwest who’s doing fertility treatments in New York. Then there’s one called “Kings of Cool Crest,” about two guys who work together at a mini golf course in Independence, MO. It’s about race, class and social mobility. And then my most recent story, “Ape Opus,” won the Salamander Fiction Prize. That one’s about a girl from Kansas who has a religious experience while on a junket for her husband’s finance job. So, there is definitely a theme.
TKM: I think of the Midwest as being a very… it can be a lonely, desolate place.
KLC: It can be, but you also have this richness. There’s nothing I love more than an Iowa or Missouri sunset… but there’s nothing uglier than looking out the window of the Embassy Suites near the airport on Christmas Day, which is where I stay when I visit my family. It’s just brown. Dead and flat and low ugly buildings. But yeah, I’m probably the biggest Iowa enthusiast you’ll ever meet. Also, people in the Midwest are sneakily wild, at least my family is. You wouldn’t believe what goes on in Des Moines.
TKM: You’re working on a novel. What’s it about?
KLC: My novel is about a family in Iowa over the entire twentieth century. It starts with a house party in the 50s. Imagine Mad Men but Midwest, so take it down a notch, a little shabbier. The parents are in the basement getting very drunk. The kids are all upstairs. They’re supposed to be asleep. And then one of the kids sneaks out with one of the other kids and gets into a very bad accident. And it’s about this family and what ends up happening to their three children as a result. I’m excited to write it now that I’ve talked about it. That sounded really exciting as I’m talking.
TKM: Thanks for sharing more context about this story, especially because it’s so personal.
KLC: I think sometimes I’m embarrassed to be like, well, it’s autobiographical. Oh, it’s just about me. But it’s not just about me, it’s about a whole generation, and people who’ve had crumbling families and depressed, psychotic mothers, and the experience and feelings around that. I think I need to get over the fear of the autobiographical as something that’s unimportant or not worthy of being explored. So I feel like I took a big step with that.
Trent Kay Maverick is a second-year MFA candidate in fiction and Gill-Ronda Fellow at Colorado State University. Trent’s essays and audio narratives appear in/on/with the Washington Post, Ideastream, Kast Media, KCRW, the Missouri Review’s Miller Aud-Cast, and the Belt anthology Red State Blues: Stories from Midwestern Life on the Left.