Kateryna Kievit’s Office Universe: Normal People Don’t Act Like This

In her new collection Normal People Don’t Act Like This, Ukrainian-born author Kateryna Kievit transforms fluorescent-lit offices, malfunctioning printers, and forgotten vending machines into surreal stages where alienation, tenderness, and quiet revolt unfold. Blending absurdism, satire, and emotional insight, her stories speak to anyone who has ever stared too long at a blinking cursor and wondered if the system was watching back.

Now based in Belgium, Kievit revisits her experience in Ukrainian corporate culture through a dreamlike lens — finding clarity, not through logic, but through metaphor. In this conversation, we talk about revolutionary paperclips, emotionally volatile spreadsheets, and why a burnout can sometimes be a blessing in disguise.

Curious to explore her strange, tender world? Read the interview — and don’t forget to grab a copy of Normal People Don’t Act Like This. It might just change the way you look at your office light.

Q: Your book is surreal, fragmented, and yet strangely familiar. What was the seed of collection Normal People Don’t Act Like This? (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FBK81CJP Kindle eBook)

Kateryna Kievit:
It began with exhaustion — a kind of emotional burnout that made me look at office life as something both absurd and poetic. The seed was my time in a large corporation in Ukraine — an experience that left deep traces, though I couldn’t process it fully at the time. It was only after moving to Belgium, into a gentler and more supportive environment, that I found the distance and safety to revisit that complex emotional terrain. What had once felt overwhelming turned into material for reflection, and eventually — for fiction. I stopped trying to make sense of the corporate world logically and began translating it through metaphor. That’s how stories like Pavlo Phoenix of It Was Just Another Monday Burnout or Tailomachy came to be — surreal, symbolic responses to something very real.

Q: How would you describe your style to someone unfamiliar with your writing?

Kateryna Kievit:
Surreal satire with tenderness. I borrow from myth, tech, and office jargon to create emotional allegories. I’m not interested in telling stories “the right way” — I’m interested in the truth that shows up when structure breaks down. Think of it as Franz Kafka meets a read Slack channel — but with more affection.

Q: Your characters include a revolutionary paperclip, a dog whose tail stages a coup, and a vending machine that can falls in love. Why inanimate objects?

Kateryna Kievit:
Because they listen. Unlike humans, objects don’t interrupt. They absorb us quietly. I often think our emotional lives leave a residue on things — keyboards, mugs, light switches. Writing from the perspective of objects lets me bypass ego and reach for something more universal: longing, loyalty, absurdity, decay.

Q: Many of your stories unfold in surreal office or factory settings, where language and systems seem to distort reality. What draws you to corporate environments as literary terrain?

Kateryna Kievit:
They’re the new temples of meaning — or of its erosion. In places like offices or production lines, everything is organized, labeled, procedural — yet people often feel lost, alienated, or quietly disintegrating. That contradiction fascinates me. In a story like Duat, for instance, the night shift on a European factory floor becomes a descent into the underworld — not metaphorically, but almost literally. The corporate setting becomes a kind of mythological stage where emotions hide behind protocols, and identity dissolves into function. I’m interested in how systems shape us, and how poetry seeps through their cracks.

Q: You dedicate one of your stories to Ukrainian writer Andriy Lyubka. What’s the connection?

Kateryna Kievit:
His work dances between absurdity and emotion, much like mine. The story Sleeping in the Office is a quiet nod to that sensibility — where the smallest act, like falling asleep at work, becomes a gesture of trust, vulnerability, and unexpected intimacy. Lyubka’s writing taught me to value those in-between spaces.

Q: The title of the book — Normal People Don’t Act Like This — suggests irony. Who are the “normal people”?

Kateryna Kievit:

If normality means suppressing our strangeness, I’d rather be strange. The book celebrates those who feel too much, act “wrong,” or resist being optimized.

Q: You’ve mentioned the book is structured in three parts: Ritual, Static, and Light Signal. Why this progression?

Kateryna Kievit:
It mirrors a transformation. Ritual is the scripted part of our lives — habits, systems, survival mode. Static is burnout, disconnection, malfunction. Light Signal is the glimmer of something else — connection, memory, tenderness. It’s not a happy ending, but a shift in awareness. The stories don’t resolve neatly, but they move toward feeling.

Q: Will you be translating the book into Dutch or Ukrainian?

Kateryna Kievit:
Yes, eventually — or at least, I hope so. Ukrainian is the language that shaped my emotional landscape, so a translation feels both natural and necessary. Dutch is where I live now — it’s part of my present. I’d love the book to exist in all three languages, not just as a linguistic exercise, but to see how the tone shifts, what stays tender, and what grows teeth in each version. It’s not just translation — it’s reincarnation.

Q: What role does Ukraine play in your writing — emotionally, culturally, linguistically?

Kateryna Kievit:
It’s the background hum in everything. Even when I write in English, the cadence, the rhythm, the emotional texture — they’re rooted in Ukrainian experience. I grew up surrounded by absurdity and tenderness, by beauty that coexists with bureaucracy. That duality shaped me. My humor, my melancholy, my resistance to cynicism — all of it is Ukrainian in some way.

You can feel it in my characters. Pavlo Phoenix, who burns out every Monday near the coffee machine — his pain is laced with irony and dignity. Uliana, who finally talks back to her inner critic — that critic, Plytkar, speaks in a voice unmistakably inspired by Ukrainian emotional logic: blunt, poetic, and full of barbed affection. Even someone like Jarema, the intern in Soup, is caught between duty and absurdity in a way that echoes our cultural memory. These are not just names — they carry a weight, a history, a tone that I can’t and wouldn’t want to escape.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from this book?

Kateryna Kievit: That it’s okay to feel weird. That disconnection is not failure — it’s often the first sign that something inside you is waking up. And that sometimes, to survive modern life, we need to let go of logic and lean into poetry.

Q: What’s next for you as a writer?

Kateryna Kievit:
I’m slowly beginning work on a novel — it continues my exploration of systems, longing, and quiet transformation, but this time through a more sustained character arc. It’s still fragmentary, still surreal in places, but something larger is beginning to take shape. And actually, the first pages of that novel already appear at the end of Normal People Don’t Act Like This. Think of them as a signal — a door that’s starting to open. I’m also sharing shorter work on Substack. TikTok and submitting stories to literary journals. But mostly, I’m listening to the next strange thing trying to speak.

Curious to explore her strange, tender world? Read the interview — and don’t forget to grab a copy of Normal People Don’t Act Like This. It might just change the way you look at your office light.