Real Cities with Imaginary Prose About Them: An Interview with Thomas E. Kennedy - Interview

Literary Review, Summer, 1999 by Susan Tekulve

Although Thomas E. Kennedy has lived in Copenhagen for the last twenty-two), ears, he does not think of himself as an expatriate writer. At home in Denmark, his adopted country, or traveling back to New York City where he was born, Kennedy is more concerned with how writers look through a lens of distance and memory at a place and its people to create the illusion of fiction.

Known for testing the boundaries of realism, Kennedy believes that a well-crafted story or novel, no matter how surreal its landscape may be, will communicate more emotional truth than the journalistic retelling of the event on which it is based. His most recent novel The Book of Angels (Wordcraft of Oregon, 1996) begins in Kansas City, but it ends in the mind of its protagonist, fiction writer Mike Lynch, as he fights a relentless magician who wants to steal his imagination. Novelist Gladys Swan wrote that the stories in Unreal City (Wordcraft of Oregon, 1996) "take us on a journey to those more than real cities of the mind and habitations of the spirit." The stories in his latest collection, Drive, Dive, Dance and Fight (BkMk Press, 1997) are fiercely realistic, firmly grounded in Kansas City, New York, and Copenhagen; yet they delve so deeply into the minds and hearts of the central characters that the reader forgets that they are set anywhere at all.

Author of three novels and two short story collections, Kennedy has edited three anthologies and published critical volumes on the short stories of Robert Coover and Andre Dubus. His stories appear regularly in American and European journals and have been awarded a Pushcart Prize (1990), an O. Henry Prize (1994), and the, European magazine prize (1995).

ST: Why Do You Live In Denmark?

TEK: I fell in love with Denmark the first time I visited here in 1972. I had been living in New York City at the time, and it was a violent period. I had a Norwegian girlfriend who lived on East Second Street in Alphabet City there, between Avenues C & D. Scary place then. Anyway, one day one of her neighbors got annoyed because her faucet was dripping, and he emptied a rifle through her door. Miraculously neither she nor the six-year-old boy standing beside her were hit. I went down to visit her and saw those bullet holes in the door, and I said to myself, I've got to get out of this place. Later that year I visited Copenhagen, and my first night there I was sampling the good Danish beer and got a little tipsy and lost my way. In the wee hours of the morning I was wandering through these empty cobblestoned streets, hearing my footfalls echo off the ancient stone walls, and suddenly I stopped and thought, I'm lost, have no idea where.' I am, and I am completely relaxed. Had it been New York--had it been, say, Central Park, where I also once lost my way at night, I would have been decidedly uncalm.

Shortly after that I fell in love with a Danish woman. By then I was living in France. I was offered a job in Copenhagen. She and I married, had two fine kids, Daniel, who is now nineteen, and Isabel, who is about to turn eighteen. Sadly, my wife and I decided to part ways after twenty-two years, but I am staying in Denmark. It is my home now, even if the U. S. is also my home. I live now in an apartment on the street lakes just at the edge of central Copenhagen. I have six windows looking down on Black Dam Lake, and this is the area of Copenhagen I first fell in love with. It was an amazing coincidence or whatever you want to call it that when the time came for me to have to find an apartment of my own I went out and this place was vacant, the first place I looked at, the apartment of my dreams. I love to look down at the water rippling in the summer wind, a dance with specks of light, and in winter when it freezes, I love to walk across in the blue late afternoon to have a drink at the cafe on the other side. I like the Danish people and the Danish way of life. The taxes are high, but no one is poor, no one goes without medical care or education. And people don't hassle each other. It is very much a "live and let live world," as long as you don't swing your arms too wide and wildly.

Do you think of yourself as an expatriate writer?

Not really, but others seem to. I believe that we carry our world with us, although I would not deny that my way of thinking and my way of writing have been affected by the experience of living in another culture. It was useful for me to leave the States and look back at it through the lens of life in Northern Europe. I learned something about my behavior and attitudes simply by noting how out of place I felt for a time, until I had learned to fit in here. As a New Yorker, I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder; ask a New Yorker a question and he is likely to take a fighting stance, feel threatened. Ask a Dane, and he is likely to smile, flattered that you would ask, even that you would challenge his position. Of course, generalizations are mostly bunk, but there's something to it.

An expatriate writer? For years, my stories were set in New York. And there were some practical difficulties in that because when you've been away for ten, fifteen, twenty years, things do change. If you set a story in the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, and then have the people eat in the restaurant there, you might inadvertently give it the name it had in the '70s, which is not the same as the name it has in the '90s. But these are minor details. In the course of time, I do find myself comfortable setting stories in other places as well. I have set stories now in Copenhagen, Madrid, on Cyprus, in South Africa. The last novel I completed is set in Copenhagen. Still, probably most of my stuff is either set in the U. S. or, in the case of the surrealistic stuff, is set nowhere in particular.