The life behind the words - Guest Editors' Notes

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Thomas E. Kennedy

To the best of my memory, the idea for an issue on the secret life of the writer was born of an e-mail from a writer friend, Greg Herriges, detailing the myriad social, domestic, administrative, and academic demands his day made upon him before he could get back home to the work of the fiction unfolding in his brain. I seem to remember him saying, "People think writers live exotic lives, but the real secret life of the writer is everything that keeps us from the writing."

Whether or not that was how Walter Cummins and I came up with the idea of this issue, I feel uncertain, for as a fiction writer I am an habitual crafter of small creation myths. Why this is so I do not know. Perhaps it was the nuns who trained me, sharpened my ability to hone instant plausibilities as to why or how something had been done or not done or in truth need not be done or never really was intended to be done. Explain and make it real or get whacked. Dancing under the sword, so to speak. And isn't that in the best traditions of Scheherazade?

I recall once happily spinning a story for my in-laws about something my wife and I had experienced only to be interrupted midway by her exclamation: "Why that's not how it happened at all!" I said, "Oh, I know, but it's a much better story this way." She gazed incredulously at me thinking, I think, that she would never know whether what I told her was factual, at odds with what I considered the quintessence of the teller's craft: to make it possible for us to understand events, even if that understanding be no more than that we do not understand.

So whether or not it was Greg Herriges's account of the quotidian duties keeping him from the deeper labor of his existence that gave this project its initial spark, I choose to remember it as such. It seems also a logical next step from two earlier issues of TLR which I guest-edited: "Stories & Sources" (1998) and "Poems & Sources" (2000). The source essays in those issues focused on the circumstances behind a specific work; here Walter and I were looking for the connection between life and the profession of writing. From that opening has grown this collection of essays about the life of the teller behind the tales, which is as varied as the number of participating authors. Here we have the life behind the words of cities, philosophers, translators, lovers, a poet who drums, a writer who paints, a painter whose work was suppressed because she was a woman, and a writer who survived and prevailed over the secret abuse to which he had been subjected as a child.

I received and read these essays over the past year, exchanging reactions with Walter, as an ongoing process of warm humor, cold fear, amazement, pleasure, enlightenment ... And finally it no longer matters for me how we got started. Like life itself, the journey became more important than its point of departure or its destination. It is my hope, as I feel certain it is Waiter's as well, that our readers will share the pleasure of enlightenment that this project has unveiled for us.

Thomas E. Kennedy's latest books are the novel Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story and Realism & Other Illusions: Essays on the Craft of Fiction, both published in 2002. He has previously published three novels, two story collections, four books of literary criticism and several anthologies. Another novel, Bluett's Blue Hours, A Winter's Tale, is scheduled for publication in 2003. His stories, essays, poems, travel writing, interviews and photographs appear regularly in American and European anthologies and periodicals and have won a number of awards.