An Interview with Jennifer Wachtel Kates

“Your history, your family, your experiences, they come back at the moments you’re not expecting them to.”

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 process is a memoir that explores generational trauma among the women on the maternal side of her family. She lives in a 118-year-old house in Murfreesboro with her three nearly adult sons and a very naughty beagle.

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How did you get started at the Department of English here at MTSU?

I used to be married to the other Dr. Kates. We were looking for jobs; he was a couple years ahead of me in the process. He was in Chicago, I was in Atlanta, we were ready to move anywhere they would give us a job. He ended up getting a lectureship position. My family is in Middle Tennessee, so I was like, “Great!” I came and finished my degree a couple years later.

And how long have you been involved with the In Process series?

Oh, since the beginning. [Dr. Barnett] came into my office one day and said, “What do you think about this idea?” And I said, “What a great idea! Why didn’t I think of that?” A few years later she said “Would you like to read?”

The first time I read, it was kind of an accident because we had a last-minute cancellation. I think it was the last one of the semester, and she was sort of panicking. Then she had this idea to just have a panel of faculty that read. And it was sort of haphazard, but we all had some new stuff or some stuff in process. So it worked out, and it was such a hit that she said, “I think we should always end [the season] this way. This is kinda cool.”

At Dr. Barnett’s recommendation to familiarize myself with your work, I picked up Childish Things, the memoir that you co-wrote with Dave Warnock. I’d love to know how all of that got started and what your role in that process was.

Dave and I were friends, and I would hear him tell stories about his life. And I would say “You really should write a book.” He is actually a good writer. He originally wanted to be a writer and kinda got off track because of where his life went. He said, “I can’t do it without some help.” And I said, “Okay. I’ll help you.”

It was really very, very joint. We had already started drafting bits and pieces when he got his ALS diagnosis. After that, it sort of took on a sense of urgency. Nothing like that to give you a writing deadline. He was in Nashville at first, and we just sort of would jot down ideas.

But when we really got going, he had moved to North Carolina, so we would use Google Docs. And he got to the point where he couldn’t type, so he would use the voice feature. He would send me a “chapter,” which was usually two pages of sort of an episode, but he was used to sermons and and articles. And so I said, “Pick up a novel there in your house and tell me how long a chapter is.”

And so we’d flesh it out over the phone. I would pull up the Google Doc, and he would dictate things to me, and I would make suggestions. I knew enough about some of the stories to sort of cue him, but a lot of it was just kinda what I do as a teacher where I’ll say, “You didn’t have any imagery or dialogue. That’s all narrative summary,” which is how a lot of us write when we’re first starting out. Then we would just really get going. We got to where we could do a whole chapter in a couple of hours.

It was very fun. He’s funny, and we could be very honest with each other. It got to the point where he would anticipate my suggestions: “Oh, I know. You wanna know what color the carpet is. I know you wanna know what it smells like. Okay. Okay.” But he could feed me dialogue that I couldn’t really imagine. My role was to help draw out the details, and then later I helped to shape the arc of the book.

As you described, and as dark as a lot of it was, I think you both were good at inserting levity into certain points

Well, he’s like that. We went back and forth about is this fiction? Nonfiction? We called it a memoir. I said, “You have to tell the truth.” Because he’d be like, “Can we say that?” I’m like, “Of course. It happened.” And we went back and forth about changing names. Some are changed; some are not. And I said, “Look. You’re dying, so you may as well tell it like it is.”

I think it’s Anne Lamott that said something along the lines of, if people don’t like the way you portrayed them, they should have treated you better. So yeah, I was very encouraging of that, and I think he’s a courageous person anyway about telling the truth. And I think that’s an important thing writers struggle with, especially if they’re talking about themselves. Once he was like, “Oh, I can do that.” I’m like, you know, it’s yours. You can say whatever you want. This is your truth.

Had you ever worked on a project like this before that was so collaborative in nature? And were there any unique problems or situations that came up because of that?

I don’t think I’ve ever worked on anything this collaborative. I mean, I’ve worked with writers before just sort of as an editor or coach. And, certainly, with students on projects. But not anybody that I’ve known this well and, could be like, “Well, what about your brother?” I knew enough of the story to kind of do that.

I think we worked really beautifully together. Dave struggled with some of the same things many of my students struggle with, like showing versus telling. But he found it easier to do the hard part: being completely honest.

With Childish Things being a memoir and an autobiographical work, this is a bit of a complicated question compared to a fictional work. But are there any specific takeaways that you hope people have from reading it?

I mean, he definitely had an axe to grind, and I would say that was one challenge. I would say, “This is not a sermon.” And I know that’s the form he was used to. And so I’d remind him, “Just show it. Show, don’t tell. And the message will come through.” One of the reasons I thought the story needed to be told is because it’s just interesting. It’s pretty dramatic to go through: being swept up into a religious conversion, a life observing behind the curtain of evangelical religion, and then a devastating de-conversion process. But I also think it’s probably something that a lot of people can relate to.

Different versions of this happened to a lot of people. His life sort of got interrupted by this massive religious movement. I can just see the through line of what happened and where he was headed. He was ready to go off to college and become a writer and do all these things when it just — our original title, which we couldn’t use because someone else used it, was Jesus Interrupted. But he just felt like it was an interruption.

And a lot of people have reached out to him, and they’re like, “Oh, I went through this too.” I think he wanted to expose some things about that movement, in the seventies and eighties, about some megachurches today, about the way religion can be toxic. So maybe that’s the obvious answer. But also, I think more universally that we are products of whatever we’ve gone through and that we always get a choice. That’s one thing that kept coming up is that you get to choose. No matter what’s happened to you or is happening to you, you get to choose what you’re gonna do next.

Childish Things is a very personal and a very intimate recollection. And you’ve talked a little bit about the process of coaxing the truth out. Do you think that being able to approach the work from an outsider’s perspective was helpful to the writing process?

Yeah. I didn’t have his experience. But, I mean, I grew up in Middle Tennessee, and I went to a private religious school for twelve years. I actually did experience a lot of what Dave did as I was growing up in an evangelical church environment, but nothing as dramatic as what Dave saw. So I think I had this sort of insider/outsider perspective. I knew enough about the Bible and church hymns to make suggestions or to understand his references. I would often have him feed me preacher dialogue. I would say, “Alright, give me a prayer. How would you say it?” I mean, that’s a very specific type of speech.

He had a very specific definition of what he meant when he was talking about “the church.” But when it came to details about his particular type of church service, I had to coach him and remind him “They’re not gonna know what kind of service it is or what something like ‘anointment’ may mean.” So I think a lot of it was me reminding him that the audience is not privy to a lot of insider information, and you have to define that or describe that.

Do you feel like you guys have gotten a lot of responsiveness to the book from other people in the south in these kinds of religious sects?

I mean, he’s gotten responses from all over the world, really. He’s older than I am, but I was a little child when this movement was building up in the late seventies, early eighties. And so to me, it was just life. You don’t know when you’re living through this. I didn’t really think about it until people talked about the Satanic Panic movement, and I’m like, “Oh, yeah. I remember they talked about this.”

I didn’t really think about that as a societal movement, but it was, in retrospect, a wave in religion. And I think that we are seeing and living with the consequences of that in very big ways right now, politically and socially. And it has shaped our Supreme Court. It shaped a lot of things, but, also, we have a lot of really wounded people who our populace is just made up of. People who are like, “Oh, wait. I do have agency.”

So I think it’s had a huge effect on society overall, and not just in the world of religion or American culture. It’s also world culture because when that was happening, people like Dave really saw it as their mandate. When we wrote the chapter about his mission trip to Russia, he said, “I really did think I was saving all these children who were clearly just mimicking back what they were told.” They’re eight years old and you describe hell and you describe heaven, and you’re like, “Which one do you like?” It’s not really a true conversion. But, there are places all over the world where this movement took hold and still is affecting politics and education and all areas of life. So it’s not just his story. It’s his unique story, but we are living the after-effects of it now. And the response he has gotten shows that.

Is there anything that you’re working on right now that you’re able to tell us about? I don’t know if things are hush-hush. Obviously, that’s fine.

It’s funny because I’m slow with projects. I teach full-time, and I do all these other things. It was good to work with Dave because I couldn’t be slow. Something I’ve been working on for two or three years now is about my grandmother Ruby. My mom is in her seventies and has started sharing just things I never knew. I knew my grandmother growing up and I was an adult when she died, but I did not know her well. On my dad’s side, I knew everyone. I had cousins and aunts and uncles, and we all were very close. And I heard all the stories, and I knew who did what. But on my mom’s side, there were very few stories. But now, she has just started opening up and revealing details like the fact like the fact that Ruby had other husbands I did not know about. There were other children I didn’t know existed.

So I just was like, I wanna hear more. A couple of years ago, my mom’s family all met in West Tennessee. We rented a cabin, and I just sat there with my computer like this [furiously typing] while they shared stories. I think what got me was with my grandmother, her mother married twice, and so there were 15 siblings all together. And her stepfather, not her father but the second husband, was a pedophile. And he raped all of those children except her, they say. So I was just like, god. I mean, what a house to live in and how would that affect you? The more I learn about Ruby, the more I’m interested in issues of generational trauma. And I mean, she was not a good person. She did terrible, terrible things; and terrible things happened to her. My mom carries a lot of that pain and resentment. But I’m kinda like, woah. I can see this through line of abuse and abuses.

I’ve read a few pieces from this project at In Process, bits and pieces about Ruby, but it’s just a bunch of disparate pieces about her, pieces about my mom that she’s told me, and I’ve even started doing some pieces about me. And I’m also doing research on generational trauma and, even epigenetics and stuff. I’m really curious.

There’s no way I can verify all the facts or learn all the details since most of the people involved are no longer living, so it’s greatly fictionalized. I read The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, and I’ve said this before in my classes, but that was what freed me. I had a teacher that said, you need to read this because she wrote about her great grandmother, who died in childbirth, alone. And that’s the opening scene of the book. As I read it, I realized nobody was there. There were very few known details. A traveling salesman found her or something, and then the baby survived. But even though nobody was there to witness the scene, Stone was so detailed. She got into her great grandmother’s body and felt the labor and felt the heat, and the details of the room. And I thought, “Oh, so I can do that.”

I don’t know what I’m gonna read yet [at In Process], actually. (She laughs.) I’ve gotta pick a couple of the newer pieces and develop them enough to read, but, it’s like quilt pieces. I’ve got all these quilt pieces lying around. They haven’t come together yet.

In the spirit of In Process.

Exactly! Exactly. And I try to think of each episode as its own whole thing. Sort of like a short story, but I imagine eventually it’ll come together. Childish Things was kind of that way. I remember the day when I told Dave, “I can see the whole thing now. I can see the order. I can see how the first chapter is connected to the last.” So I expect that something like that will happen with Ruby. Eventually I will have enough material and one day I will back up and see the whole thing. It’s not nearly there now. But I have a lot of vignettes and narratives that I enjoy and like and will find a way to piece together eventually.

I did notice that during Childish Things you’d have those moments kind of in between every couple of chapters where it would pull a specific piece out of the timeline and put it there. And it didn’t feel obtrusive to things. I thought it was done in a way that I really liked.

Yeah, that was about Dave’s biological father, who was never really in his life. And he’d say, “How do I include this? There’s not a line. There’s not a narrative. He would just appear every few years.” I said, “Well, why don’t you just write those separately, and we’ll figure that out later.” And then as it came together, we were like, oh, this is what we’re gonna do. We’re just gonna drop them in. Because that’s how that kind of thing works anyway. Your history, your family, your experiences, they come back at the moments you’re not expecting them to. So, once we decided to do that, it became pretty evident where each one needed to go.

To close out, I wanted to ask if you have any advice for the students who will be taking part in the seminar this fall. You know, if there’s any way that you think they can engage with the works more closely. Just any advice that you might have for them.

Yeah. I think the best thing that I’ve seen it do, which is what I always love about it, is that it helps students see writers as just real people. One part of my teaching philosophy is that I view my students as peers in training. We are not supposed to remain in this hierarchy. You guys are supposed to become peers. But I think In Process helps break down those barriers a little. And so I would urge students, when you’re reading something in a creative writing class or in a class like this, to think about it like a writer. Like you’re reading something your friend wrote and you ask questions about where did this idea come from? How did you put that together? Especially if you really, really like something. Like, how did you make that happen? Because a lot of times sometimes writers are like, “I don’t know. It just came to me.” But a lot of times you can really learn, like, “oh, I fought with that and fought with that, and here’s what led to that epiphany about where to put, you know, this piece or that piece.” Don’t be afraid to ask the dumb questions. They are absolutely the best questions. Everybody asks, what’s your process? And it’s a very good question.

Usually, you go to a typical reading and you haven’t necessarily read what is gonna be read. Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t. But this time, in this class, you have definitely read some work that you can speak to specifically and everyone or most of the people in the room have also read. So I think it’s really a unique opportunity to speak to a writer about this chapter or that character or, especially the process for a specific piece of writing. And time after time when students do ask those questions, you get real answers. The writer reveals that they are not magic. There is no secret. You just muddle about. I remember, experiencing that much later in my education, but just thinking, “Oh, that’s kinda like what I do too.” That’s empowering to junior writers to know that what “professional” writers do is not that different from what they experience.

With more experience, certain things maybe get a little more, like, “I know what to do next.” But, honestly, there’s still plenty of muddling around and impostor syndrome and saying “Is this a stupid idea?” When I teach creative writing, when I’m working on something, I’ll bring questions in sometimes and ask, “Is this too harsh? Can I start this way?” And they’re always like, “We can’t help you.” And I have to say, “No. You guys are writers too, and this is early in the process.”

Kind of demystifying the process.

Yeah! I mean, mystery is fun or whatever, but too much mystery is scary. And then you feel like it’s unattainable. And our job is to empower students. Our job is to nurture them and empower them so they can do whatever it is they wanna do. We don’t figure that out for them. But, we help them learn some skills. And more than that, I think, help them learn that they can and that they have that power. They can learn anything they need to learn.

Taylor Wood is a senior Audio Production student at Middle Tennessee State University. He lives in Nolensville, Tennessee with his family.