A Lot of Luck and Good Decisions: An Interview with Jennifer Wachtel Kates

“Some of it’s conscious, and some of it’s subconscious, but I don’t know why it’s always come easy to me.”

Jennifer Wachtel Kates is a Middle Tennessee native and Master Instructor in MTSU’s Department of English, where she has taught composition, literature, and creative writing courses since 1997. She earned her M.A. at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers and her Ph.D. at Georgia State University. She is the former director of MTSU Write, current editor of SHIFT: A Publication of MTSU Write, and President and Co-Executive Director of the Southern Literary Festival Association. She has won MTSU’s Outstanding Public Service Award and Outstanding Teaching in General Education Award. She co-authored (with Dave Warnock) Childish Things: A Memoir, and has published short fiction in The Southwestern Review, and The GSU Review. Her current project-in-progress is a memoir that explores generational trauma among the women on the maternal side of her family. She lives in a 117-year-old house in Murfreesboro with her three nearly adult sons and a very naughty beagle.

So, how did you end up teaching at MTSU? Did you always know you wanted to teach and write?

Yes and no. I mean, when I was very, very little — I was reading before I was two — it was clear that I was going to be a “word” person, but then somehow in high school or college, I got the idea that teaching wasn’t for me. So I was a psych major for two years, but I was still writing. I was a junior in college before I took my first creative writing course, and I was like, “Wow! I kinda like this!” And then I won an award, I published a couple of things, and literally, my senior year, I went to my teacher, and I didn’t even know what to do next. I’m a first-generation college student, so I was like, “What can I do?” He goes, “You could go to grad school,” and I said, “You can do that?” He suggested a few grad schools, I applied where he said, and I was very lucky to get into a good program. I just sort of fell into it. I started teaching as a part of an assistantship. I was there to be a writer, and then I really loved the teaching. After my master’s, I took a couple years and taught at Vol State, and then I sort of had direction. I went for my Ph.D. program, and that was when I was like, “Oh. This is what I’m doing with my life. I’m writing, I’m teaching.”

That kind of answers my next question then. I was going to ask if you had a plan, or if life just kind of worked itself out.

Yeah, I’m from Middle Tennessee, so that was kind of lucky to end up back where my family is from. So, a lot of luck, sometimes good decisions. It’s just a combination.

You co-authored and published a memoir with Dave Warnock. How was that collaborative experience for you? What would you say was the key to getting that to work?

It was actually really great. We were good friends before, and he would tell me these stories of his upbringing, which was sort of dramatic because of his experiences with religion. I kept saying, “You should write this!” He was interested in writing and he had wanted to be a journalist, and then this religious movement in the early 70s sort of just swept him up. So he didn’t go to college. He’s actually a pretty good writer. We collaborated basically with Google Docs and on the phone. He has ALS, and we’d already started the book before he got diagnosed. There would come a point where he couldn’t type, so he was doing voice to text. He would draft a chapter, and it would sound a little bit like a sermon, because that’s what he’s used to writing, you know? So I taught him, and he was a good student! Within a few sessions, he would be like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, you want me to embody it. Show, don’t tell, blah blah blah.” We just got into a routine where we sort of committed to twice-a -week appointments. We’d go for an hour and he’d write something, then I would go through and read it aloud and I’d stop and say, “Okay, feed me some dialogue here. This needs to be a scene. Show me what this would look like.” I would type and then we’d smooth it out. It was very collaborative and in the moment, as opposed to sending it back and forth. We’re working on another book now.

Your collaborative memoir focuses on some of Warnock’s religious trauma throughout his life. What drew you to that topic?

It was a very interesting story. It’s his lived experience, so when I would hear these things, I just thought this was very interesting. I didn’t have the same experience, but I’m from the Bible Belt, so I get it. He was part of a church, but it was one of these sort of fringy … I would say it was more like a cult than a church. I just thought it was fascinating in terms of narrative structure because he’s an interesting character. He was very young, and because of all the other things that had happened before, he was in this perfect position to be very vulnerable to that movement. He wanted to be seen, you know. He was seeking attention and seeking purpose. He had all the right traits to be sucked into a movement like this. I just thought that was really interesting, and the complication of it was very interesting because it had to do with his family of origin; it had to do with external factors, with who he is. This is the way humans develop, but from the point of view of a writer, I could see a fully developed character and a full through-line of a story that had numerous themes and motifs. A lot of that shaped up as we started writing. And I thought it was a thing that’s important to talk about, because I think there is a lot of that, especially in my generation. In the early 70s, the “Jesus freak” movement, and in the 80s, the “Satanic Panic” sort of got out of control. I grew up in that, where everybody was afraid of everything all the time. I think there are a lot of people — I’ve met a lot of folks through Dave — who did experience religious trauma as a result of that. So I feel like we should be talking about this and dealing with it. I guess the dark side of religious freedom is that it makes it easier for some people to take advantage of that.

You are the editor of SHIFT, a literary publication at MTSU. Can you tell us a little more about that publication and why you chose to take part in it?

Well, I was the director of MTSU Write, which is our community-facing creative writing program. When I took it over, I was thinking, “How can we grow? How can we change?” After a few years, I thought, a creative writing program should have a magazine, right? We have Collage; that is our student magazine. We have other publications within the university, but I discovered we had never had a publication that accepts outside work. And I love typewriters. I actually collect antique typewriters, and I was like, “Hmm … we could use typewriters,” and when we developed our brand mark, I thought maybe we could use that image, of the old fashioned SHIFT key. I really liked that as a title for a magazine: “SHIFT.”

So now, I’d like to ask you about some of your current projects.

That’s funny, because last night, I just started working on something new and different! And that’s what writers do, you know. But the project I’m working on for In Process, I’ve been working on since last summer. I’ve written a memoir, you know, with Dave, and a lot of my stories have been based on family. My dissertation was based on my great grandmother on my father’s side, who kept memoirs that I kind of rewrote and fictionalized. Recently, my mom sort of started coming out with these stories that I’d never heard before. Her side of the family, we’ve never been close. I knew her parents, but I never had cousins and aunts and uncles like on my dad’s side. I didn’t know much, and suddenly, [my mom] every once in a while would just start telling stories about something I never heard of, people I’ve never heard of. She had other stepfathers I didn’t know existed. She had a baby sister I didn’t know existed. So, last summer, I traveled out to West Tennessee where my people settled, in Eagle Creek. We rented a cabin out on Kentucky Lake, and all the cousins and people who were still around came and we had dinner. I sat around and asked questions. They were telling these stories about my grandmother, who was one of 15 kids. And they were telling these stories as if they were hilarious family anecdotes and laughing, but they were actually very horrible traumatic things that these people did. My grandmother was apparently not a very nice person, and most people would be like, “Oh, gosh, that’s a skeleton, put it in a closet.” But to me, it was fascinating. Like, how did a person become that? I was really interested in how she got that way. So I’ve been researching generational trauma. I’m really interested in epigenetics, which is kind of, sort of fringy, I guess … But there are these studies that have started to come out where they look at people whose ancestors were victims of the Holocaust or slavery or other traumas, and how that gets into the genetic code. So there are, obviously, behavioral things that get passed down, but also genes get altered when there’s major trauma. The family carries that on over generations and generations. I don’t know if that’s happening in my family, but it’s always been interesting to me. So now I’m sort of fleshing out these family stories and trying to bring them to life. I’m imagining Ruby, my grandmother, and her siblings, and how that came to be, and how it has affected my mother and maybe even me.

Do you find it hard to write about personal things like that?

No? I’m kind of weird that way. I’ve always been a super open book. When I started writing, I think I was always a very quiet, private child. So writing was like a place for me to be open, and I would just tell stories, then completely fictionalize a lot of stuff. So while my work was clearly fiction, it was almost all based from a real place, about real people. Some of it’s conscious, and some of it’s subconscious, but I don’t know why it’s always come easy to me. Then, this part of the family, to me, is not close because I didn’t know them growing up. I’m learning about them in my 50s for the first time. It’s almost like they are fictional characters to me, which gives me a little bit of freedom. Now, when I get to the part where I write about my mom, I might have a different answer for you.

You mentioned you’d just started another project …?

This is completely different, and I don’t know what’s going to come of it … But my oldest son has autism, and I’ve done a lot of work in the autism community, especially when he was really little. He’s doing great, and he just graduated from college, so now he’s in that terrible, liminal space of learning to “adult.” So you finish your education and you’re like, “Now I’m supposed to get a job, I guess? But I don’t know — I don’t know how to be an adult.” The way I remember it, it sucked for me. I was neurotypical and I had plenty of family support, financial security, a lot of advantages, but it still was a weird time of life. The educational structure is set up for you, you know, and then you finish with this degree and you’re like, “So … do I get a job now?” Then, getting a job is terrible. Until you get settled, there’s just a period of time where you’re just floating. So for him, it’s doubly hard because of his social interaction issues, and I was thinking … “Why don’t we have resources?” This is how it’s been with him his whole life, though: A new challenge comes up, and we start looking for resources. And there’s this one therapy that we used a lot when he was younger. People in the autism community will be familiar with Social Stories, which are a specific kind of story for autistic children that teach a specific skill, using a very specific pattern of rules. I wrote several of those when he was little, and it occurred to me that we should have Social Stories for grown-ups. Not on that childish level, but I think the same learning process could work for people learning how to interview, learning how to make friends, learning how to take care of their space and their body. So, I don’t know if anything will come of that. I’ve talked to a few friends about it, maybe collaborating, but I was like, “Wait. I know about young adults. I’ve been teaching them for more than thirty years. I have three of them that are my own, and I used to be one. And I’m a writer! So maybe I could put all these things together and create something useful.”

You’ve kind of already talked a little bit about your writing process, but I’d like to ask when you write, do you like to have an outline or plan things out?

No, I do that later. First of all, I think there’s a big difference between a short story and a novel. For a short story, I think planning the whole thing out kind of kills it. Part of the joy is in the serendipity of seeing what will happen next. I think you have to know who your character is, so it helps if you know what they are going to say and what they are going to do. But I think you just have to be real messy at first. After you’ve got a full draft, or maybe in the second or third draft, then I think it’s time to think about structure/plot. Then I think you do have to be very intentional about what is the sequence of events. I teach my students about “book-ending,” where your story’s beginning and ending should be opposites, even if it’s just an idea. But I don’t impose that on my own stories until further along in the process, and then very intentionally, I decide how we move from beginning to end. But with a novel, you have to be more intentional about planning and structuring. With memoirs, it’s easier because it’s reality; you know what’s going to happen. But everybody’s process is different, and I do like to just wander before planning it out. I think that for me, outlining is a step that comes more than halfway through the process, when I start to get really intentional about structure.

I also wanted to ask you about your naughty beagle!

Molly lived on a farm, and I live downtown. So she needs like a million acres to run. She can smell the whole world, and she can get out of anything. She can open the door if it’s not deadbolted; she can unlock gates. She can get under, over. She gets out all the time. Usually, she just comes back. But on July 4th, she was out all night. The next day someone found her and called me, and she had crossed over two streets. She sort of keeps me on my toes. It’s like having a toddler.

Okay, well, I guess to sort of close us out, I’ll ask you the most generic interview question ever … Any advice?

Oh, I mean … There’s no secret to it. Sometimes you need to just go write. Go and make a mess of it. I think people can talk about writing, people can think about writing, they can plan their room and move their pencils around as much as they want, but really, you just have to sit down and do it. I don’t think it gets any easier, no matter how long you’ve been doing it or how many degrees you have, sitting down and doing it, it’s still … It’s like exercise. You’re like, “I don’t wanna do it!” But then you do it, and you’re like, “I’m glad I did it …” If you’re expecting that to get easier — the motivation to make a daily habit of writing — No. Just, no. You have to make yourself do it. Just do it badly. Write badly. All good writing starts out bad.

Caroline Bailey is a senior at MTSU, majoring in Integrated Studies with a minor in Writing. She enjoys all things creative and hopes to have a future as a writer and teacher.