Kim Samek by Sarah LaBrie - BOMB Magazine

A woman trades her literal heart for social media fame. A different woman finds her soulmate then loses him thanks to an uncannily accurate algorithm. Two people bond over an office chair that sends everyone who sits in it into the center of an ecological disaster. In the twelve darkly funny short stories that make up Kim Samek’s debut collection, I Am the Ghost Here (The Dial Press, 2026), characters communicate via app, surveil one another through household appliances, and post inspirational videos for a living, all while yearning to be held, cared for, and truly seen—services their phones cannot provide. The focus here, as Samek explains, is on identifying “the moment when our lives become secondary to what unfolds in digital spaces” in order to “uncover the hidden power structures that shape us.” In this interview, we discuss the many questions that inspired these stories, the writers she counts as influences, and her journey to publication.

Sarah LaBrieWhat’s your writing background?

Kim SamekI wrote my first story when I was five and wrote nearly every day when I was a kid. I loved books from a young age. I was always drawn to the big idea. I went to college to study creative writing, German literature, and philosophy. After graduating, I realized I needed a job to support my interest in writing fiction, so I ended up working in television as a writer and a producer. I spent years trying to balance working on a novel with working late nights and weekends. Then later, during the pandemic, I wrote short fiction seriously for the first time.

Photo of Kim Samek by Jesse Dittmar.

SLHow did you teach yourself to write?

KSI studied creative writing and German literature at Stanford, so I had some formal training. Then I decided to hold off on an MFA. I could write well, but I didn’t have anything to say. I wanted to develop my voice alone. I lived my life. I honed my craft working in television, where I developed the muscle memory to edit quickly and to finish work on a deadline. I joined a writing group with some of the young novelists in Los Angeles and became involved in the literary ecosystem. Later, in 2020, I attended a Tin House novel workshop and studied under Brit Bennett. But after a lifetime of reading and studying the craft, I wrote my book without any outside influence. I taught myself how to write a short story.

Many people go to an MFA program to form a community, but I was lucky to fall into one. When I first moved to Los Angeles out of college, I rented a summer sublet on Craigslist. I didn’t know my roommate was also a writer until after I accepted the room. She had studied with Aimee Bender and T.C. Boyle. Over the years, we met other young writers at readings, literary events, and through journals like Black Clock. I also met you soon after you finished your MFA. We were always talking about books. Actually, it’s striking how many short story collections came up back then. Novels dominate the literary landscape now, yet so many of our favorite authors are primarily known for their short fiction.

Though reading and workshopping laid the foundation for my writing, the most important part has been learning to trust myself and manage my own process. I had to learn to write from the most creative part of my mind to write the kind of story I wanted to read. I learned that I was more engaged with the work if I wrote using humor. I could see myself as a reader and writer at the same time. If you love what you’re writing, people will feel it in your work.

SLHow long had you been working on these stories before they became a book?

KSI wrote my first real short story in 2022. I was isolated at this time and more online than usual. I wrote the stories in less than a year and a half. Several of the earliest stories were written in the span of a couple of months: “I Am the Ghost Here,” “Egg Mother,” “The Garbage Patch,” and a few others that were not included.

My first published stories were plucked from the slush pile—two were accepted on the same day, by Guernica *and *Ecotone. I had written them with minimal input, as they were originally part of a personal project. As agents approached, I realized my stories were in conversation with each other, and I could shape them into a cohesive work without linking them. I threaded themes of labor and climate throughout these stories about women trying to get by. They are connected organically. The stories were answering one question: How did we get here?

I had no idea what to expect. People often tell you not to try to debut with a short story collection, so I didn’t have any expectations. I wrote these stories to process my own anxieties and to make myself laugh. I wasn’t writing to sell a book—I was writing freely, letting the work lead. I found that I wrote differently without expectations. I feel very grateful that no one demanded a novel from me instead of stories. My agent and my publisher, Dial Press, have been very supportive.

SLHow do you know when a story is finished?

KSI write stories that center on characters who want something—often some form of connection or a sense of meaning. The resolution is rarely difficult to imagine: they either attain it, in some form, or they don’t. Still, I believe no story is ever truly finished. You have to know when to stop writing. I would revise a story after publication if I could. I used to over-revise. Now I stick closer to the first draft, at least in structure. I enjoy the challenge of delivering an emotional punch in a compact space. The short story is an editor’s format. In a novel, you might take seventy pages to illustrate one point. In a short story, every line counts. I love that a story feels like it could continue beyond the last page yet still be satisfying. As a reader, I’d rather leave a story wanting more.

SL** **How did you decide which stories to include in this collection?

KSThere were a number of stories to choose from, so I focused on the stories that would cohere as a portrait of the time. My characters are gig workers, delivery drivers, firefighters putting out trash heap fires, and people hired to spy on others through their appliances. Together, they tell a story about labor and globalization. The settings range from Los Angeles to the Pacific Northwest to Thailand, a place facing an extreme climate crisis risk.

These themes thread through stories about lonely women contending with illness, motherhood, or war; women forced to parent while ash falls; women who feel they have lost control of their bodies, their lives, and their narratives in a political moment when the world feels foreign, when democracy is broken, and the forces shaping our lives disregard basic humanity. While these women face existential crises, they are also living their lives. I was interested in depicting the interplay between slow-moving, systemic crises and the daily rhythms of life—often, climate change is woven into the tapestry of the story rather than occupying the foreground. I also explore what happens off-screen in the Global South, showing the consequences of these forces beyond our immediate visibility.

SL The women in many of these stories pride themselves on their athleticism, but then fall ill or get injured and suddenly find their lives changed forever. What do you hope to get across about the loss of bodily autonomy and the loss of identity?

KSMy work echoes, to some extent, the existentialists who were writing as a response to industrialization and the world wars—a time when life felt absurd and out of control, similar to the irrational era we’re living through today. While some stories explicitly reference illness, I also use illness metaphorically to explore what it feels like when an individual loses political agency—the sense that the world moves forward without our input, leaving us feeling powerless amid larger forces. The women in these stories often find meaning in other people, in the personal.

SLIn “The Sharpest Knife,” which features a Covid-like disease in a world where news journalism has been infiltrated by “impersonators,” a character appears to become a robot because the internet tells him he will. In that same story, his wife tells her doctor, “You can’t trust the news, but if you don’t read the news, you get sick.” In “MILF Hotel,” a character describes her son as having “come of age during the erosion of truth.” Is it fair to say the slipperiness of reality is a pervasive theme here?

KSWhile I worked on these stories, social media began to blur the lines between what is real and what is not. When we lose a sense of what is true, alienation seems inevitable. I see existentialism as a response to social structures that fail humanity. Kafka often wrote about bureaucracy, which I interpret as a government fundamentally misaligned with individual needs. Our governing systems don’t aim to build good or fulfilling lives—they show little interest in freedom, compassion, or equality as guiding principles. This isn’t about the slipperiness of reality, but about the deliberate erosion of truth by those in power. We’ve been conditioned to accept fake news as normal, and we rarely challenge the platforms that spread it.

I wrote this book amid a global crisis when access to information was vital. It was alarming that no mechanism existed to filter out misinformation. In “The Sharpest Knife,” I was responding to a moment when blue checkmarks could be bought, and impersonators appeared overnight. I imagined the future from there. With advances in AI, it’s becoming harder to distinguish what’s real. Now, we are forced to expend energy deciding whether a video—or any piece of media—is authentic or if the facts are made up. It’s unnatural to question the reality of what we see to this extent. I’m interested in how this shift changes our experience of being human.