This is the continuation of an interview with Thomas E. Kennedy. Please read Part 1 first.
MA: I have seen you lecture and read you work many times, you are fantastic at it and unlike a lot of authors, you hold my attention! A lot of writers tend to shy away from publicity and fear having to give lectures and talks. When you started out was this something you had to overcome or did you just naturally have that presence?
TEK: I’ve always enjoyed reading my stories – or any stories – aloud. My father used to read to us when I was a kid, and he was a great reader, he did the voices and all, and every so often, he would ask each of us to read something aloud. I felt a little stiff doing that the first few times, but he always praised us, always encouraged us when it came to literary things. He was Vice President of a bank and wrote poems in the evenings, and in his whole life, he only published two poems (one in the New York Times, a sonnet), but he kept trying, and he loved to read, and he was the one who got me reading – when I was 15, I asked him to suggest a book I might like and he gave me Dostoyevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, which was an inspired suggestion. He must have seen how Raskolnikovian I was becoming.
Anyway, when I got to the MFA setting and had like eight minutes to read among a roster of fellow students, I recall being a bit nervous the first few times and realizing that it was necessary to rehearse and hear myself reading aloud and consider how to phrase certain lines, a bit like a jazz singer perhaps. Or maybe my father’s reading voice influenced me.
Over the past 40 years, I guess I’ve given a few hundred readings and engaged in Q&A afterwards, and I do enjoy that direct connection with an audience. During my first couple of dozen readings, when it occasionally went bad, when I was losing the audience, I could feel it through the floorboards, but realized I had to be alert to that because when you feel that unrest from the audience, it won’t do just to panic or even just to tough it out, you can still assess your performance and improve it and win the audience back. I’ve experienced that a number of times. But by now it’s mostly second nature, I don’t worry much about it. The nervousness I do feel is spice to my performance, I think, and a primer to my adrenaline.
As for lecturing – I’m not very good at that. I need to have a manuscript written out for me to talk from, but I do enjoy Q&A and general discussion – I have gotten to like that feeling of going with the flow, following my own lead and see where it goes.
MA: I do a lot to help authors get out there and promote their work in a public setting through promotions, readings and lectures. How important do you think getting out there and talking to your readers is to the success of a book.
TEK: At the very least if you go out there and are professional about it, you can convince the booksellers that your book is worth selling. More than once, after a reading, I’ve had a bookseller say to me, I am definitely better prepared to sell your book now. One time, it was at a reading where no one showed up – just the bookseller and her assistant, but it was a huge store, and she had me read over the PA system and she sat there and listened and had me sign forty books afterwards, which is good, I understand they can’t return signed books. So that was 40 sold. The important thing is not to get miffed or petulant if no one shows up for the reading – it’s usually not the organizer’s fault. They did what they could, but there is no way of knowing what might happen that will stop people from coming.
I have a principle which I usually tell the event organizer – My principle is that I don’t read for less than two people at least one of whom is not me. It doesn’t help matters if you get self-serious about these things. And sometimes you get lucky and have a hundred or more people in the audience, but no matter how many or how few people there are, you never know – you never know how deeply you might be touching one person in the audience, or two or three. I gave a reading recently to about ten people, and afterwards a woman came up to me – this was a reading from IN THE COMPANY OF ANGELS, about a Chilean torture survivor – and this woman was a Chilean, and she was clearly moved and thanked me for “keeping the memory alive.” That meant a lot to me.
So I do think it is worth it to get out there and read and talk – but I also think it’s fun, and it is a privilege, too, to get a chance to present your work directly to an audience.
MA: Speaking of promoting, you just came off a book tour where you visited various cities and gave lectures, readings and did signings. How did the tour go?
TEK: Yeah, I was just on a 28-day, 14-city, 18-event reading tour, and it was tiring (it took me about ten days to get back to normal after I got home), but it was also fun – I saw a lot of old friends, met a lot of new ones, saw a lot of the country, sold and signed a lot of books, did a whole lot of partying with some sweet people. We’ve got to do what we can. But I don’t think I will do another 28-day tour. 12 or 14 days is sufficient.
MA: With over twenty-four books published you have a massive body of work. The books range from fiction to non-fiction and literary essays. Do you feel you excel in one of those forms more than the others? At the same time which one do you enjoy the most?
TEK: Well I like to write, I like to use language, I like to give free passage to the words that rise from whatever part of us they rise from. And no matter what kind of writing I do, my intuition tends to lead me. But mostly I like to write fiction and creative nonfiction (memoirs, personal essays), and I do not feel that there is that much difference between fiction and CNF – other than that the latter is supposed to be “true” whereas the former may be imagined. But of course, we imagine everything – our identities are a fiction we imagine, our life experiences are imagined fictions based on fact. Whether or not we know it, we may think that we are presenting the hard facts of a case, but how do we know? We might be fabricating, we might be blind to what really happened, we might think we remember something that never happened. How many times do we hear somebody else telling a story of an event that we were involved in, and we think, Hey, man, that’s not how it happened… But who’s to know who is right and who is wrong. Maybe everyone is right. William Blake said, Every eye sees differently. Well every I sees differently, too.
MA: In terms of the way you write, do you approach the various forms differently?
TEK: I guess the above response covers that. I approach everything intuitively. Have always done so. That’s why I’m not particularly good at science or classifications or theory. Please don’t get me started on literary theory – I wouldn’t know where to start. I met a woman in San Francisco not so long ago and she told me she was at a literary conference, and I asked what it was about, and she told me it was a theory conference, about “chicks with dicks.” I mean it’s a great phrase and maybe it was a great conference, too, but it seems rather limited.
MA: You have had tremendous success with your books overseas and where you live in Copenhagen, Denmark. In America your books haven’t had the same impact, why do you feel that is?
TEK: The response in Copenhagen has been good, I think, because the Danes seem to enjoy reading a foreigner’s take on their capital. The Danish press and TV and radio have given me a good bit of attention. In the U.S., until recently, my books were only published by small presses which means generally that the big media don’t take you seriously. Of my first 24 books, one was reviewed in the NY Times, two in the Kansas City Star. That’s because they were small press books; they were reviewed in the literary press but not the big media. The most recent book was quite another story.
To read the completion of this article click here: Thomas E. Kennedy Interview Part 3
For more about Thomas's life, books and other ventures, visit: www.thomasekennedy.com
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