An interview with Jennifer Kates
Jennifer Wachtel Kates was born and raised in middle Tennessee. She earned her B.A. in Creative Writing from Rhodes College, her M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers, and her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Georgia State University. She has taught both General Education and Creative Writing classes in MTSU’s English Department since 1997. Additionally, she directs MTSU Write, the low-residency certificate program in Creative Writing, and edits SHIFT: A Publication of MTSU Write. Kates serves as the current Executive Director of the Southern Literary Festival, for which she serves as faculty sponsor for MTSU’s best undergraduate writers each spring.
Kates is member of the Rutherford County Arts Alliance and a passionate advocate for literary arts in her community. She lives in a 102-year-old home in downtown Murfreesboro with her three teenage sons, two dogs, and a bearded dragon.
Can you tell our students about your novel? What inspired it?
The novel I am working on began as a memoir project for my friend Dave. He has a very interesting life story that involves some religious trauma and family drama, so I told him he should write it. I helped him as he began to write, and then it gradually became me doing most of the writing, and then we both decided that it would work better as a novel based on a true story.
In a nutshell, Dave grew up without much direction in a non-religious household with no father to speak of. As a young teen, he discovered a talent for writing, public speaking and acting. He also began to think of himself as having a future in journalism. Just as he was about to take off and think about college, he was introduced to the Jesus freak movement of the early 70s. It took him off course and into a life within a fringe evangelical movement. Later, he began to realize some of the flaws in the theology and questioned the organization, which got him ejected. He lost his faith and then his family, who were encouraged or rather required to shun him. He has remade his life after re-conversion and currently lives, speaks, and tours nationally about living and dying as an atheist.
What are some of the challenges you have encountered with this project? What are you doing to overcome them?
Well, the initial challenge was trying to decide whether to write a memoir or a fiction piece. There’s a lot of gray area in between creative nonfiction and fiction, and we spent quite a lot of time walking that line and trying it both ways.
My ongoing challenge is of course time. I am pretty busy with three teenage boys, a full teaching schedule, and MTSU Write. I’ve had to be extremely purposeful about making time for this project. In Process has actually inspired me to spend more time in revision of the chapter I will read.
But perhaps the biggest challenge I have faced was the text that arrived in February. I was in my office chatting with a student when Dave sent me a text that simply said, “I have ALS.”
Do you have any rituals you have to complete when you write or to prepare to write?
I wouldn’t call them rituals per se. But I have learned that I really can’t write much at home. There are far too many distractions with my dogs and boys and all the things my house needs. When I really want to write, I take myself away. I go to a coffee shop, or I go to Dave’s house if we’re writing together, or I’ve even been known to rent a cabin in a state park to take myself away from work and home and focus on writing. Last summer I partnered with a former student, and we met once a week for an hour at a coffee shop just to discipline each other to write for an hour.
Is there any advice you can give to student writers that are just starting out?
The thing I tell my students is: write every day! Also, it’s important to read widely and follow your favorites. Find a community of writers that you can turn to for support, be that at a class, a writer’s group at the library, a meet-up group, an online group, or just friends who are willing to sit and write or talk about writing with you. And lastly, you have to share your work. It could be at an open-mic reading or a workshop group or submitting for publication.
What is something you’ve written that you are proud, of and why do you feel that way?
I wrote a story at the end of my graduate doctoral program called “Egg and Spoon,” and I am proud of it because it was the first truly purposeful story that I wrote as a writer practicing the craft, as opposed to just guessing at what I was doing. It went through the whole process of true revision over and over again, as well as editing. I won an award for the story, it was published, and I even received fan mail for it. I have read it aloud on a few occasions and made people cry, so that makes me feel like I’ve succeeded.
Are there any books, stories, or writers you feel are essential for student writers to read?
Oh wow. I often recommend that beginning writers start with anthologies like the Norton or Best American series. They can give you a smorgasbord of quality, current short fiction, and then you can see what you gravitate toward and follow those writers’ work. That’s how I fell in love with Tobias Wolff.
There are lots of good, solid, classic works on craft as well. I actually keep a selected bibliography on my computer because people ask me this question so often. I recommend On Becoming a Novelist as well as The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. I use What If? by Pamela Painter and Anne Bernays in my fiction workshop. I also like Janet Burroway’s books on craft. But I really think the best thing to do is to read lots and lots of different types of short stories, see what turns you on, and then follow that to see how it’s made
What do you do when you get stuck?
Drink? Just kidding. I think it’s important to have more than one project going at the same time, so that if one thing is not productive you can put it aside and spend your time working on something else. I also think it’s completely useful to stop and journal about why you are stuck. Another tactic is to stop trying to write and to go read something instead, or just take a walk and clear your head. Sometimes though, what you really need is for someone else to read it and give you some feedback. It’s hard to know when you need which remedy, but practice makes it easier to recognize what kind of stuck you are.
