Kailum’s hybrid work, “Patch Notes for the End of the World,” starts at the beginning of human civilization and zooms into a singular, essential interaction between an adult and child. The scale of this piece, and how it manages to straddle both humor and heart so deftly, captured our attention during our reading, and we’re thrilled to share this interview with the author. Read Kailum’s winning work, and then take a peek behind the patch notes.
Rebecca Paredes: You submitted this piece for our History Repeating challenge, which asked writers to explore cycles of destruction and what happens when that cycle breaks. How did that prompt inform your work?
Kailum Graves: The prompt immediately made me think about repetition at different scales—historical, political, domestic, emotional. I was interested in the way the same patterns of harm can keep reappearing in new language, new institutions, new rooms. A war becomes a family system. A family system becomes a sentence someone says to a child.
What drew me to the challenge was the final question: what happens when the cycle breaks? I didn’t want the answer to be grand or triumphant. I wanted the break to be almost unbearably small—a pause, a refusal, a hand opening instead of closing. The piece is really about that tiny, difficult moment when someone inherits an old script and chooses not to perform it.
RP: We loved that this piece uses patch notes, which developers use to detail changes with each software update. How did you land on this as your structure?
KG: I liked the coldness of patch notes as a form. They’re so functional and tidy—added this, removed that, known issue, minor fix. There’s something both funny and horrifying about applying that language to human history and inherited harm. The structure let me move quickly through huge ideas without having to explain them in a traditional narrative way. It also gave the piece a kind of bureaucratic absurdity, which felt right for the subject. So much violence is made possible by systems that describe terrible things in very clean language. Patch notes became a way to expose the gap between the neatness of the record and the mess of what actually happened.
RP: You described this work as “hybrid microfiction/prose poem,” which is spot-on—there are so many knockout lines in here, like “Added drawers that slam like verdicts” and “Children now able to recite the year a war began while failing to identify the sound of one starting in their own home.” This is a long way of saying, do you tend to write pieces that blend genres, and if so, what draws you to it?
KG: I’m very drawn to hybrid forms. I think some subjects resist behaving as only fiction or only poetry or only essays. Sorrow, heartache, trauma, love, memory—they rarely arrive in clean categories, so I like forms that can blur or fracture a little. I often find myself starting with a strange premise or structure and then using it to get at something emotionally direct. In this case, the patch notes gave me permission to be compressed, funny, bleak, and lyrical at once. Genre-blending lets me follow the emotional logic of a piece rather than the rules of a single form. It can make room for jokes and devastation to sit uncomfortably close together, which feels very human to me.
RP: Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece, or anything you’re working on now?
KG: I think the piece is ultimately about refusal as a form of tenderness. Not a perfect cure, not a clean redemption, but a small interruption in an old pattern. I’m interested in the idea that history does not only repeat through governments and wars, but through gestures, rooms, tones of voice, and the things people do not know they have inherited.
At the moment, I’m working across fiction, poetry, and television. I’m especially interested in speculative and uncanny premises that open into very human questions: how people survive themselves, how humor works as an emergency device, and how tenderness can appear in places where it was never properly installed.
