Author Interview: Theresa Griffin Kennedy

Author Theresa Griffin Kennedy is a native Portlander who has written an earlier nonfiction book about Portland's history of corruption and a book of poetry. Burnside Field Lizard, a short story collection, is her first book of fiction.

Theresa recently answered questions for Rose City reader about her new book, writing, and "domestic noir":

How did you come to write the stories in Burnside Field Lizard?

The stories detail the struggles of women that society has cast aside. This is something I feel strongly about. There are five stories and that tends to be the focus; women who are tossed away, not valued and fight to survive doing that they have to, even if it is deviant. As a low income mother and college student in my middle 30’s living in NE Portland, I saw a lot of struggling women. Many of them were prostitutes, drug addicted and homeless.

What is the significance of the title? Does it have a personal meaning for you besides its connection to the title story?

The title is simple and something I came up with kind of out of the blue. I feel there is a kind of unforgettable quality to it, a kind of musicality to the words. I’d always known what a “field lizard” was, since I was a child as one of my older brothers told me.

What is the significance of the cover image?

The cover image was originally created from a cell phone photo my daughter took in 2016. It was then recreated by my graphic designer Gigi Little, by taking her own photo and working with that. The image was something I felt would resonate with readers and viewers as something that was both random and beautiful and might represent the randomness of urban life.

You are a native Portlander. How much of your stories are drawn from their location and
your knowledge of it?

I’d say all my stories are dealing in some way with Portland. I’ve lived here my whole life and know nearly every inch of the city. I am not one of those writers who can write about cities that I’m not familiar with. I value writing about things I’m familiar with because in knowing the geography of a city in all its facets you write with more authority when you have that perspective.

You describe your stories as “domestic noir.” What do you mean by that?

My stories are domestic noir, which is a new term and an important term. The term was coined by the author Julia Crouch who defined it on her blog. Her definition is brilliant: “In a nutshell, Domestic Noir takes place primarily in homes and workplaces, concerns itself largely (but not exclusively) with the female experience, is based around relationships and takes as its base a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants.” This definition falls under my writing and other writers such as Gillian Murphy, Darcey Steinke and many other women writers.

What is your professional background? How did it lead you to writing fiction?

I have limited work experience. I was an older returning college student when I went back to school. When I started college in 2001, I was going to become a parole officer but I found that my writing skills were becoming evident. It helped that my father, Dorsey Griffin was also a writer and author. He encouraged my writing more than anyone else and the fact is I wouldn’t be a writer or author today if not for my father’s unwavering support.

What did you learn from writing your book – either about the subject of the stories or the
writing process – that most surprised you?

I think what I learned most is how angry I am about the plight of women in our society. There’s always been a war against women. But I think realizing how this impacts me emotionally is one of the most important things I learned from writing this book. And also that I can write a killer sex scene, that graphic sex writing in literature does not scare me and that it does not have to be tame. It can be ugly; it can be explicit and still moving emotionally.

What is the most valuable advice you’ve been given as an author?

If I had to pin it down to one thing it would be to not be afraid. And the best advice I’ve gotten about writing has been from men and not women, strange as that may sound. JD Chandler and Tom Hansen are both authors who have been really supportive of me and they’ve both always told me, to just tackle what I want, to not worry about the approval of the establishment or the powers that be. To just take on what you want and not look back, that and reading every available chance you have to expand your awareness of plot mechanisms, expand your vocabulary, grammar and strengthen your overall understanding of the bigger picture of a story or a novel.

Who are your three (or four or five) favorite authors? Is your own writing influenced by the
authors you read?

Number one: Darcey Steinke. There is just something about her writing that is so unique and so utterly unforgettable because of how she plays with language. Specifically I’m speaking of her second novel Suicide Blonde and its impact on me. It’s a book I read every year and I think her greatest work. No one can make the ugly beautiful like Darcey Steinke, the English novelist Daphne Du Maurier, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, and most currently, Portland author Lidia Yuknavitch. They are all great writers but I love so many others, too. Cormac McCarthy is a favorite, along with Ian McEwan, Alice Walker, and of course Jane Alexander and Gillian Murphy. But I would not say my writing is influenced by anyone I have read or will read. My voice is uniquely my own.

What kind of books do you like to read? What are you reading now?

I read constantly although I’ve been narrowing it down to only two at a time. Right now I’m reading FEAR by Bob Woodward and Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch. The contrast is wonderful and they’re both absolutely amazing books.

You are active on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. From an author's perspective, how
important are social networking sites and other internet resources to promote your book?

Instagram is much more fun than Facebook, so now I’m hooked! It can be a burden sometimes to feel obligated to check in and create a post or update. But it’s also a source of enjoyment. I've weathered a lot of drama through social media but the positive has outweighed the negative and it's simply the best way to promote yourself as a writer.

Do you have any events coming up to promote your book?

There will be a launch party at CRUSH in the month of October, date TBA! Follow me on Twitter for details.

What’s next? Are you working on your next book?

About ten months ago, I began writing my first novel, Talionic Night in Portland. A TV assignment editor becomes involved with a grade school custodian and they fall in love. They traverse a very class conscious town in a morbid comic love story with Portland as the backdrop, during 2005. It's been a lot of fun to write. Talionic Night in Portland will be available in early 2019.

I’m finishing a book of intimate personal narrative essays from my life called We Learned to Live in that Castle: Stories. These stories document my teen years in foster care and the sexual awakening that occurred while I was constantly moving from one foster home to another, my years as an isolated single mother in the early 2000’s, a rape I experienced as a child in 1979 when I was thirteen, and the suicide of my first love, a boy I desperately loved. We Learned to Live in that Castle: Stories will also be available in 2019.

THANKS THERESA!

BURNSIDE FIELD LIZARD IS OUT THIS WEEK! ASK YOUR LOCAL BOOK SELLER TO ORDER IT.

Mailbox Monday: The Shame of Losing by Sarah Cannon

What books came into your house last week? I got a brand new memoir from a PNW writer.



The Shame of Losing by Sarah Cannon. Days before she turned 33, Sarah's husband suffered a traumatic brain injury at work that changed everything about her marriage and the life they had planned.

Thanks for joining me for Mailbox Monday, a weekly "show & tell" blog event where participants share the books they acquired the week before. Visit the Mailbox Monday website to find links to all the participants' posts and read more about Books that Caught our Eye.

Mailbox Monday is graciously hosted by Leslie of Under My Apple Tree, Serena of Savvy Verse & Wit, and Martha of Reviews by Martha's Bookshelf.

Book Beginning: The Book of Dirt by Bram Presser

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

THANKS FOR JOINING ME ON FRIDAYS FOR BOOK BEGINNING FUN!

MY BOOK BEGINNING

In the region of T, not far from the city of U, there once stood a village that had been in Poland, then Hungary, then Subcarpathian Ruthenia, then Czechoslovakia, then Slovakia, then Hungary again, then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, then the Ukraine and now cannot be found on any map.

-- The Book of Dirt by Bram Presser. Presser weaves family history with fiction, historic photos and documents to recreate his grandparents' Holocaust story.

Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author’s name.

EARLY BIRDS & SLOWPOKES: This weekly post goes up Thursday evening for those who like to get their posts up and linked early on. But feel free to add a link all week.

FACEBOOK: Rose City Reader has a Facebook page where I post about new and favorite books, book events, and other bookish tidbits, as well as link to blog posts. I'd love a "Like" on the page! You can go to the page here to Like it. I am happy to Like you back if you have a blog or professional Facebook page, so please leave a comment with a link and I will find you.

TWITTER, ETC: If you are on Twitter, Instagram, Google+, or other social media, please post using the hash tag #BookBeginnings. I try to follow all Book  Beginnings participants on whatever interweb sites you are on, so please let me know if I have missed any and I will catch up.

TIE IN: The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice is a natural tie in with this event and there is a lot of cross over, so many people combine the two. The idea is to post a teaser from page 56 of the book you are reading and share a link to your post. Find details and the Linky for your Friday 56 post on Freda’s Voice.

YOUR BOOK BEGINNING

Author Interview: Beth Benedix

Beth Benedix is the author of Ghost Writer: A Story About Telling a Holocaust Story. While she was ghostwriting a memoir for a holocaust survivor, he urged Beth to write her own story about what it was like to confront the challenge of telling someone else's history when it "swelled beyond its own boundaries."

Beth recently answered questions for Rose City Reader. Find out more about the author of Ghost Writer and get to know the woman behind the book.

Before we get to your book, Ghost Writer, can you introduce us briefly to Joe Koenig?

Yes, of course. Joe is such a remarkable man, and I just hope I’ve been able to do him justice in the book. His story of survival during the Holocaust is itself extraordinary—by the time he was seventeen, he had lost his entire family, been imprisoned in four camps (including a work camp that he snuck into, intuiting that he would be safer inside than alone in the rural outskirts of Czestochowa, Poland), and survived two death marches. To me, it’s the way he lives in the midst of this story, the way he lives without dwelling, that I find so breathtaking. In the book, I describe him as the epitome of swagger—which, to me, is the quality of creating your own boundaries, setting your own course, defining the world in your own terms. Joe’s intuition is everything—he moves in the space of his own boundaries—somehow always knowing what next step to take. I find the way he approaches his life to be so… healthy, so affirmative. For him, it’s all about family and love. Throughout the writing of the book, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the best way to describe him was as a philosopher, in that he seemed to be describing a way of being and moving through the world. But his philosophy is the most embodied, authentic and down-to-earth I’ve ever seen, and I came away holding him up as a model of yes-saying. It’s a way of being in the world that I would very much like to emulate.

How did ghostwriting Koenig’s memoir lead to writing your book, Ghost Writer: A Story About Telling a Holocaust Story?

Well, technically, I never really did ghostwrite Joe’s memoir. I tried to do this—in the form of a third person narrative of his story of survival (included in the book), which I provided to Joe’s family. But even the original third person narrative had elements of my first-person attempts to nail down the story, to frame and contextualize the narrative I was hearing. I don’t actually consider myself a ghostwriter, in that I knew from the beginning that whatever form the book would eventually take needed to be a departure from standard ghostwritten accounts. The title is a nod to that departure... in separating the two terms (ghost and writer), the emphasis is on all of the “ghosts” that loom over the telling of the story, that intrude into this narrative that resists closure.

Who is your intended audience and what do you hope your readers will gain from your book?

I’m very much hoping to start a conversation with as diverse an audience as possible about what it means to tell another person’s story—about the obligations and limitations of memory and the ways in which telling our stories, and listening to the stories of others, brings us together. I wrote this book, specifically, because I feel there is an urgency to collect Holocaust survivors’ stories before there are no longer survivors left to tell them. But I also feel, generally, that there is an urgency to change the way we tell these stories—and all stories of survival and memory. I very much wanted to disrupt the monological strain, the one-directional mode, that so often dominates survivor testimony. It’s the dialogue, the back-and-forth, the moments of encounter and recognition that most authentically preserve and pass on memory, I’ve come to find.

I see my audience as people who are interested in Holocaust narratives and history, and, more broadly, as people who are interested in process-driven narrative non-fiction. I hope readers will come away feeling like they have met a remarkable man, and considering the possibility that memory-collecting is a raw, unscripted and sometimes messy affair.

Do you have recommendations for other books about the Holocaust or Holocaust survivors?

Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz are two memoirs that I find extremely powerful. In both cases, there is a stark beauty in the prose that conveys the immediacy of the horror they’ve experienced. I go back to Night again and again.

Nicole Krauss’s novel, The History of Love, is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. The relationship at the center of the book between a Holocaust survivor and a young girl in many, many ways influenced my sense that these stories told now must be about convergence, about paths crossing. This is how we remember, how we preserve memory.

Other books that deeply influenced my thinking are Henry Greenspan’s On Listening to Holocaust Survivors and Peter Haas’ Morality After Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic. John K. Roth’s vast body of work has shaped my studies and approach, and is a must for anyone who is thinking about the philosophical and theological implications of the Holocaust.

Do you have recommendations for other books about writing and storytelling?

Oh, my goodness, there are so many! The ones that most heavily influenced my writing are self-conscious memoirs with narrators who are talking deliberately about process and second-guessing themselves along the way. My two biggest influences are Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and David Harris-Gershon’s What do you Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill your Wife? Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted is also a favorite—I love the fragmented quality of her writing and the way she uses original documents to frame her story.

Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir and Stephen King’s On Writing are two books on the craft of storytelling that speak the most to me.

What did you learn from writing your book – either about the subject of the book or the writing process – that most surprised you?

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that writing this book was a life-changing experience for me. Everything feels different now, more applied, more high stake. I’ve learned from Joe (am trying to learn) the art of perspective, of recognizing what matters and what doesn’t. About the writing process—I’ve learned that it really is a process. The book was nine years in the making, and in many ways I feel I’m still circling around the subject. It will never feel done to me, and I’m surprised to learn that I am completely okay with that lack of closure.

What is your work background? How did it lead you to writing this book?

I am a professor at DePauw University. My background is in comparative literature, with an emphasis on Modern Jewish writers, religious studies, and philosophy. Comp Lit is by nature an interdisciplinary field, one that doesn’t fit neatly into any particular category, and it allows a great deal of freedom to explore connections and intersections among ideas and genres. It’s kind of a marginal, liminal space, a space I feel really comfortable in. Looking back, I think this background—maybe my being drawn to Comp Lit in the first place—was key to my being able to conceive of Ghost Writer in the way that I did. It’s an assumption of the field (and one that I very much share) that no single lens will ever capture the thing in front of you—it’s about the constant shifting of lenses, the collecting of multiple perspectives, the perpetual circling around the subject. This is how I always imagined the book needed to take shape, with the process itself at the center of the story.

I also teach a good deal of writing in my classes, and work closely with all of my students to help them to find the arc of the stories they want to tell. I love these conversations, because they always begin with the questions that each student has about the material we’re reading, the things each student finds most compelling and worth puzzling through, and each conversation always starts with my just sitting and listening closely to their narratives, collecting their thoughts, and helping them to identify patterns in their thinking. I think perhaps I really honed this approach through my relationship with Joe, through our interactions that involved listening more than anything. And in the process of these conversations with students, so, so many shapes and story arcs and approaches emerged. It has begun to make an embodied sense to me that writing is always an act of listening, shaping, and re-shaping. It has been a tremendous gift to learn from my students and to be able to share what I’ve learned from the process of writing this book with them.

What do you like to read? What books are on your nightstand right now?

I am a huge fan of Kafka, Nietzsche, Murakami, and all things dark and existential. Right now, I’m reading two wonderful collections of short stories, one by Lesley Nneka Arimah, What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, the other by Helen Oyeyemi, What is Not Yours is Not Yours.

My favorite books of all time are Lolita, The Stranger, Madame Bovary, and Dara Horn’s The World to Come. The book on my nightstand (which has been there for a while) is my friend’s copy of roscitrea-20Beezlebub’s Tales to his Grandson (it’s slow going but I very much want to get through it!).

What is the most valuable advice you’ve been given as an author?

My friend, Tom Chiarella, novelist, longtime writer for Esquire and freelance journalist once told me: “You can start any piece of writing with the word ‘so’”—as in, “so, I’m sitting here with these interview questions trying to come up with perfectly-crafted answers…” It throws your audience immediately into the world you’re trying to throw them into, establishes a kind of intimacy, and lets people know exactly where you’re coming from. It’s all about transparency, revealing your thought process. I don’t know how many times this little gem saved me from the paralysis of the blank page, or how many times I shared it with my students to help them get started on their own projects.

What’s next? What are you working on now?

Right now, I’m working on marketing this book and gaining an audience. It’s a welcome transition, this crossing-over from academic writing to a general audience, and I’m very much hoping to have the opportunity to meet and talk with people and to hear what they think about Ghost Writer. I’m waiting for the next writing project to announce itself to me.

In the meantime, I’m busy being a mom, teaching, directing a nonprofit organization I founded called The Castle that brings integrated arts and project-based learning experiences into public schools in Putnam County, IN, and gigging as much as possible with my band, Black Market Vinyl. Joe taught me, among many other things, to grab every moment, which I’m trying to do.

THANKS, BETH!

GHOST WRITER IS AVAILABLE ON LINE, OR ASK YOUR LOCAL BOOK SELLER TO ORDER IT!

Teaser Tuesday: Valley of Genius by Adam Fisher

Steve Wozniak: The story of Apple is a little misunderstood. It's not like Steve and I did it ourselves.

-- Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher.

Fisher compiled thousands of hours of his own interviews with everyone from Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to the founders of Facebook, then trimmed them down into a compelling oral-history of Silicon Valley.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by The Purple Booker, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.