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

Literary Review, Summer, 1999 by Susan Tekulve

Nonetheless, I think generally speaking that I do try to avoid "logic" when I am writing. I do write by association, but it is a kind of focused association process. I guess I don't see human behavior as logical. I guess I don't see human events developing logically, and since fiction is in some way a reflection of human behavior and human events, even if a highly distilled and more organized one, I try to write in a manner that arises more from my existential sense than from any cranial view.

I never (or anyway extremely rarely) think in terms of plot or in terms of causation in a fiction. I just can't work that way. To me it has to grow raggedly like the vegetation. That is why I usually don't know what a story is about until I've written it.

I guess what I mean is that I don't see myself as "masterminding" my fiction, but mostly just transmitting :it. I am a tool of the fiction, so to speak. The fiction is the driving force. As a writer friend, Gladys Swan, once said, "I sometimes feel my stories come through me on their way somewhere else." Now that might sound kind of self-pleased and I surely don't mean it that way, but there is a certain mystery to the process I think--the same kind of mystery at play every time someone opens his or her mouth and speaks.

Associative writing often leads to internalized plots, and yet so many editors seem wary of internalized stories that "aren't dramatic enough. "Do you think a character's thought of an action can be as powerful as the action itself?

The greatest human drama, in my opinion, occurs within the walls of the human skull. I find interior landscapes very dramatic. After all, what is time really? Sometimes I ask myself' if the present really exists at all. It seems to me that the present is a continous deepening of the past as we move toward the future. We stand with the history of our years at our back, looking forward, but our brains, our minds are decades deep. This is what was so brilliant about Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and James Joyce's Ulysses. The simultaneity of time.

Do you think this is a cultural issue? Are European editors more tolerant of internal landscapes?

You are probably right that Europeans are more open to it. As my friend David Apple field, [editor of the literary quarterly Frank, published in Paris] says, "When Americans begin to find themselves in an interior landscape when they're reading, their immediate reaction tends to be, 'Hey, what's this! We want to go to the beach and have some fun!'" But I certainly don't want to come off as some kind of effete pseudo-European. Some great American writers--and great American readers--work beautifully with the interior landscape. And I appreciate and respect the conviction of many writers and readers that the interior fictional landscape should simply be reflected in the exterior fictional landscape.

Don't get me wrong. I like a good action fiction too, but I also believe, as you suggest, that some of the most sophisticated and exciting action takes place in the distance between object and perception, including the distance between a fictional character's perception and that which he is seen to perceive.