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

Literary Review, Summer, 1999 by Susan Tekulve

Well, when I had written the story, I felt a little guilty and uncertain what the therapists in the center might think about it. I was a bit uncertain whether I had done something I shouldn't have done, so I sent a copy of the story to the founder and director of that center--an amazing woman named Inge Genefke, who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a couple of times--to ask if it was okay what I had done. She was completely positive and supportive, and to my surprise in fact, the story was later used as background material for therapists working in another center, along with "The Burning Room."

"The Burning Room" came about because in the end I felt that "Flying Lessons" only told half the story. The experience of helping a torture survivor to live again involves not only the patient or client, but also the therapist. In the manual, they are instructed not to spend more than a certain number of hours a day in direct contact with the survivors because the information they receive--intimate accounts of the experiences they have; to listen to--is so straining, so devastating, that they risk damaging themselves. Like going into a burning room to rescue someone, as one of the survivors in the story says.

So I wanted to tell the story of the therapist as well--and in some sense it was my own story--that recounts some of the feelings I experienced just in editing the handbook, which gave me some insight into what I would consider the heroic dedication of those actually involved in the therapy. The way the things I read there began to infest my mind like evil seeds, producing ugly pictures, gave me a little bit of insight into the danger these therapists were exposing themselves to. I wanted to celebrate with that story the great work being done by these people, but I wanted to do it in a way that in no manner could seem sentimental. I wanted to try to recreate the experience. So it is the same story told from the two points of view. It also gave me an opportunity to use some Danish lore that I was eager to employ--bits that fit in naturally there--about the midsummer night ritual of burning the witch, about the autumn wasps drunk on rotting pears, etc.

But your actual question was how I was able to handle my own emotions and the elements of story to produce these fictions. I guess the answer is that you turn the emotion into a kind of dynamo, by sort of meditating it into control, by not letting it run rampant. You reign it in and then its force enters your control, instead of allowing it to control you. This is why it is possible to write yourself through just about any kind of human pain, I guess. A friend of mine was telling me the other day about a novelist friend writing about the suicide of his son, how it had taken many years before he could try to deal with it. I'm sure that is the way with many an event--if the emotion is too strong, it will flood you, drown you. You need to learn to handle it in stages sometimes, until you have the upper hand and can use its force as a tool to shape your story with.