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

Literary Review, Summer, 1999 by Susan Tekulve

What we do when we tell a tale of our hard times is that we create the meaning that raises it above the mud and makes it into experience that will nourish our souls. And that, finally, is what Lynch means when he says "Nothing bad can happen to us ..." But what Lynch had to learn is that, true, it is all material, but it is not just so much fabric for weaving into a cloak; for the things that happen to us to be transformed into experience involves a great process of pain and triumph over pain.

I've noticed that most of your critical work focuses on the short story. And one reviewer even called Crossing Borders an extended short story. Is there such a thing as an extended short story? Do you prefer writing short stories or novels?

Yes, my critical pieces have been mostly, though far from exclusively, focused on short stories. Actually my main focus has been on the idea of how one creates illusions--on the fact that realism is as much an illusion as surrealism. But I do or have very much favored the short story form and my novels generally tend to be short, with the exception of The Book of Angels, which was 380 pages in manuscript. The novel I have just finished is 330 pages in manuscript. A Weather of the Eye is very short, but I still think of it as a novel because of the span of emotion it covers. That reviewer who called Crossing Borders an extended short story, I think, was making an idle comment. To me it is a novel, albeit a pretty compact and dense, one (if I may make such a statement). But I do love short stories, I love the short forms, I love to be able to span a world in twenty pages, whether as a reader or as a writer. A good short story always leaves me as a reader breathless and excited, satisfied, but wishing for more at the same time. Yet many a novel, as Kurt Vonnegut observed in Fates Worse Than Death, a third of the way through has one chanting, END END END!

Crossing Borders was originally a short story. How did you know that this story would lead to a novel?

I guess in reality, the first story I wrote that would lead later to Crossing Borders was one entitled "City of the Foxes," published in 1986 in Writer's Forum. Then another story came along called "Footsteps," published in 1988, I think, in Short Story, followed immediately by "Years in Kaldar," which appeared in The Literary Review in 1988 and which received a little bit of recognition.

When I sent the first of those three stories to a friend of mine, she sent me a telegram in response, which said, "Loved chapter one, send chapter two immediately!" In fact, I was beginning to have a sense that these stories were about the same protagonist, so I began to stitch the stories together, and doing so required more cloth, more exploration, leading me to come closer in on the state of spiritual agony, near death that the protagonist was suffering and which was leading him to want to pull his world down around him, anything, to get free. Wasn't it Nietzsche who said that an act of destruction is necessarily an act of creation? Metaphorically speaking, of course. By destroying his old life, he recreates himself to the point that he can survive, he can take on the important responsibilities of his life.