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WORK TITLE: The Driest Season
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WEBSITE: http://meghankenny.co/
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STATE: PA
COUNTRY: United States
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PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Kenyan College, B.A.; Boise State University, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, teacher, and tutor. Lancaster Country Day School, Lancaster, PA, teacher; Gotham Writers’ Workshop online, teacher. Had taught at Boise State University; The Cabin Literary Center; for the Writers in the Schools Program in Idaho; at the Gilman School, the Schools Program in Idaho; Writer at Harriman; Gerstell Academy; Gilman School; Boise State University; Towson University; University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Johns Hopkins University’s M.A. in Writing Program; Tickner Writing Fellow, 2008-2009; Bread Loaf, Bernard O’Keefe Scholar; Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, Peter Taylor Fellow; Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tennessee Williams Scholar; Vermont Studio Center, residency; La Muse in France, residency.
AVOCATIONS:Photography.
AWARDS:Iowa Review Award, 2005.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including Gettysburg Review, Cincinnati Review, Hobart, and Kenyon Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Meghan Kenny is a writer, teacher, and tutor. She teaches at Lancaster Country Day School in Pennsylvania and for Gotham Writers’ Workshop online. She has taught previously at Writers in the Schools Program in Idaho, at Writers at Harriman, at Gerstell Academy, Gilman School, Boise State University, Towson University, and at the University of Maryland.
Kenny grew up in Connecticut and New Hampshire. She attended college at Kenyon College, where she studied English and creative writing. She went to graduate school at Boise State University, where she studied fiction writing with Robert Olmstead and Mitch Wieland. Kenny has lived in France, Japan, and Peru.
Kenny’s stories have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Cincinnati Review, Hobart, and Kenyon Review. Her story “The Driest Season” won her the 2005 Iowa Review Award. She says that she tries to write a page or two every day.
The Driest Season, Kenny’s first novel, based off her award-winning short story of the same name, tells the story of 15-year-old Cielle Jacobson. The year is 1943, and a scorching drought has plagued Cielle’s hometown of Boaz, Wisconsin. The story opens with Cielle discovering the body of her father hanging from the barn rafts of the family farm. The drought took its toll on the man, but Cielle knows that the man’s suicide was likely a result of the lifelong hidden depression from which he suffered.
As Cielle, her sister, and her mother, mourn the shocking death of their father and husband, they must figure out how they will survive without the patriarch of their family leading the way. This consideration is complicated due to the circumstances surrounding the ownership of the land upon which they live and farm. The land is not their own; it is leased to them by a local landlord. Since Cielle’s father’s death was a suicide, they family has contractually foregone their rights to the land. As a result, a large portion of the story involves the Jacobsons’ attempts to keep the true cause of death hidden from the landlord.
As Cielle’s mother and their neighbor labor to cover up the death as a suicide, the reader is invited into brief flashes of Cielle’s memories of her father. We see Cielle’s struggles to cope with the grief of her father’s death, while simultaneously grappling with the adolescent experience of transitioning from a child to an adult. Cielle, a gifted violinist and contemplative teen, sees changes all around her, with her sister preparing for college and her mother adjusting to her new life as a widower.
The characters in the book are mostly women, and Kenny develops them as strong and flexible. The death of her husband brings out a hardness in Cielle’s mother. Though at times failing to provide the comfort Cielle craves, the woman maintains a strong core at the moments when she needs to. Cielle’s sister, Helen, desires a traditional life of a husband and children, but her hardness is shown through her straightforward language. The men in the story are those of the young men of the town, many of whom are preparing to ship out to war. Cielle feels acutely the loss of her father and the shifts and rifts in her relationships with everyone else in her life.
In describing the book, Laura Spence-Ash in Ploughshares wrote that Kenny “walks right up to a situation, and forces her characters, and her readers, to live in these uncomfortable moments, to feel their weight.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly noted: “The supporting characters seem to exist only to fulfill specific narrative purposes,” while adding that Cielle’s “feelings of destabilization in this time of uncertainty are palpable and heartfelt.” Kathy Sexton in Booklist wrote: “Kenny tells an impactful story of everyday lives in trying circumstances.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 1, 2017, Kathy Sexton, review of The Driest Season, p. 29.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2017, review of The Driest Season.
Publishers Weekly, November 20, 2017, review of The Driest Season, p. 68.
ONLINE
Ploughshares, http://blog.pshares.org/ (February 9, 2018), Laura Spence-Ash, review of The Driest Season.
Salamander, http://salamandermag.org/ (March 9, 2018), Olivia Kate Cerrone, review of Love Is No Small Thing: Stories.
Novels
The Driest Season (2018)
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Collections
Love Is No Small Thing (2017)
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MEGHAN KENNY INTERVIEW WITH CURTIS SMITH
June 21, 2017 sheryl monks Books, Interviews Leave a comment
Meghan Kenny
Meghan Kenny’s stories have appeared in literary journals including The Gettysburg Review, Cincinnati Review, Hobart, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2005 Iowa Review Award, and was the 2008-2009 Tickner Fellow at the Gilman School, a Bernard O’Keefe Scholar at Bread Loaf, a Peter Taylor Fellow at The Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. LSU Press published her short story collection, Love Is No Small Thing, in March, and her debut novel, The Driest Season, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2018. She currently teaches at Lancaster Country Day School in Pennsylvania and for Gotham Writers’ Workshop online.
Love Is No Small Thing by Meghan Kenny
Curtis Smith: Congratulations on Love is No Small Thing. This is your first book, correct? I’m always interested in that journey. Can you tell us how Love came about?
Meghan Kenny: It is my first book. Many of the stories began in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I was in graduate school at Boise State University, where I studied fiction writing with Robert Olmstead and Mitch Wieland. I had a draft of this collection done ten years ago, but when I queried at least twenty agents, they all wrote back saying they liked my writing but wanted to see a novel. So I set the stories aside and began a novel in 2007, which took me six years to write. I also kept writing stories, many of which made their way into the collection. In 2013, I went back out to query agents with both books, and I landed my first choice, a wonderful agent, and I thought that things would be smooth sailing, but that wasn’t the case. The two books are very different and it was a tough market. We sent the books around as a package for over a year, but no one was interested, not the big houses, not the smaller houses, not the independents. In the fall of 2015, I was back to sending the books out on my own again to contests and smaller presses, and to anyone who would read them. Michael Griffith, who edits the Yellow Shoe Fiction Series at LSU Press, accepted Love Is No Small Thing in February of 2016, and it was published in March of 2017. I also sold my novel, The Driest Season, in September of 2016 to Starling Lawrence at W.W. Norton, and that book comes out in early 2018. So, from start to publication, the collection took almost twenty years, and the novel about eleven. Thankfully, my stubborn persistence paid off in the end, but I need some lessons on how to work faster and more efficiently.
CS: The title story examines a failing relationship—and interwoven in it are a series of wonderful visuals—mysterious, fire-throwing neighbors, elk in a frozen lake. And speaking of wonderful images, I loved the ballerinas falling from the sky to end “All These Lovely Boys.” What comes to you first—the situation that will be the story’s central element or the images that speak to the story’s undercurrents in another kind of language? What are the challenges of weaving them together?
MK: A lot of different things work for me in starting a story, but it usually comes in the form of something concrete rather than conceptual. I never plan or outline; I write forward on instinct and revise later. It’s a see what happens way of writing, and while it can be painstakingly slow and messy, that’s my process. I’m not organized or disciplined enough for outlines. For the title story, the situation came first: I was drawn to the absurdity of being in costumes on Halloween night when the narrator finds out her long-time boyfriend had cheated on her, blowing up so much of what she hoped for and wanted—a committed partner, a baby, to make a life with another. The elk bit was from a local Boise news story I’d seen, and I wanted to work it in because of the haunting image of these huge animals walking over thin ice unknowingly to their death, making the same bad decision over and over again, much like the narrator did with her crappy boyfriend.
“All These Lovely Boys” came from a summer writing workshop prompt where I’d been given two photographs from a magazine: one of a man dressed as a female ballerina wearing a wig, sparkly eye mask, and with a penciled in mole, and another photo of a camera man and lighting man. The goal was to figure out how these people would end up in a story together, and this story was the result. Both stories, along with a few others in the collection, are set in Idaho, where I lived for seven years—it’s a beautiful and dramatic landscape that was foreign to me as a New Englander— the high desert, foothills, rivers, and mountains worked their way into me.
CS: I’m also always intrigued by point of view, and in Love, you have stories written in first, second, and third person. At what point of the process does pov make itself known? Do you imagine it from the beginning in a certain voice—or does it evolve with the story itself?
MK: I think “How Far to Go” was my one requisite second person story after reading Lorrie Moore. Second person gets a bad rap, which is unfortunate. I’m fond of that story, and I love the energy of the second person, but I don’t think I’ve ever written another story in second person. I usually write in first or a close third. I feel most connected with a character that way. When I started writing I was exclusively first person, and I love the intimacy of first person, but over the years I’ve felt more comfortable with third person and the room it allows a narrative. I’ve found, though, that my content dictates my form, and so I tend to go with what feels right for the characters and the story itself.
CS: In “These Things Happen,” we’re dropped into an awkward then oddly threatening conversation between two older men. I’m drawn to stories that walk that fine line of suspense and normality, and this piece had a very quiet yet distinct ratcheting of stakes as the story went on. As you wrote this piece, how conscious were you of the element of tension and what strategies did you employ to pull off something so compact yet powerful?
MK: The element of tension was always the driving force of this story from the second Frank Farinella knocked on the window of the diner. I wanted George to feel threatened and uncomfortable, and be pushed out of his comfort zone. I don’t think I was aware of employing strategies while writing—this was the only story I’ve ever written in a day (because I had a workshop deadline) and barely changed at all afterward, but I had been reading a lot of Tobias Wolff stories at the time, where there are threatening conversations between men, I’m thinking of “Bullet In The Brain” and “Hunters in the Snow,” and it likely rubbed off on me. When I put these two men head-to-head and kept the banter moving forward, it helped to create that tension with a hint of danger. I love the juxtaposition of the mundane and weird in stories, the familiar and unfamiliar, because that’s how I experience the world. There’s so much absurdity in the mundane, beautiful, and tragic moments of our lives, and there are so many strange and unexpected ways we come to have a better understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and in this story, for George, that came in the form of a strange run-in with Frank at the diner that made him sit up and pay attention.
CS: There is a lot of love in these stories—sometimes true, sometimes tarnished, sometimes unrequited—but always present, if somewhat mysterious and coded in a way as unique as our fingerprints. Was the overreaching theme of love on your mind from the beginning? Did it creep up as you started amassing stories or did you realize only after you stepped back from the project and considered it as a whole?
MK: It crept up on me, for sure. Each story was written without the intention of theme or linking a collection. The stories were written over so much time, and came from such different places and states of mind, I didn’t consider how they would work in a book until much later. I simply wanted to write good stories that could stand on their own. It was much later that I realized my writing kept coming back to love in its various forms, and I later worked on choosing stories and ordering them in a way that might hold a collection together around the theme of love.
CS: Are you an everyday writer? Do you have a personal routine—time, place, atmosphere?
MK: I am not an everyday writer. I do carry around a notebook and try to write at least a page or two almost every day, but teaching full time at an independent school, teaching fiction online for Gotham Writers’ Workshop part-time, and tutoring on the side keeps me busier than I’d like, and I’m not a morning person, so getting up at 4am to write sounds awful. If I have a story or project going, I’m better at carving out time after work or during weekends, but I get most of my writing done on vacations and in the summer when I have space and time. I need a lot of space and time to think, read, process, and then sit down and write. I think habit is good, especially for being productive and having momentum, but everyone has to find their own approach that fits with their lives, and you do whatever works.
CS: What’s your favorite part of the process? Least favorite?
MK: Revision is my favorite part of the writing process. I’m a perfectionist and a procrastinator, so starting is hardest for me. I have a lot of false starts and tweak at things along the way just to finish a first draft. It’s easier for me to see the bigger picture and fit puzzle pieces together in revision.
CS: Was it always writing or nothing else for you? Were there other creative outlets that called to you before you settled on writing?
MK: It was always writing, but photography was a close second; I love both ways of seeing and telling a story. I’ve always been a visual learner and observer, and most often what I see sparks a story more than what I hear, or overhear. If I could walk around with a camera at all times, I would. I think that’s why I love the short story so much— it can feel like capturing a moment as a photograph would.
CS: What’s next?
MK: I am a few stories in on a new collection, and I’ve had an idea for a novel swirling around for years that I’ve been scribbling on, trying to find an in, but I haven’t quite found it yet. All I know is this next project has different requirements and will be a totally different beast. Writing the first novel was hard, and I don’t feel any wiser about how to do it again. I just hope it doesn’t take as long this next time around.
Curtis Smith
Curtis Smith
Curtis Smith is the author of three novels, five story collections, and two essay collections. His most recent book is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Bookmarked, part of Ig Publishing’s new series where authors are invited to write about a book that influenced their lives and careers. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and son.
MEGHAN KENNY ON WRITING, TEACHING, AND HER NEW BOOK ‘LOVE IS NO SMALL THING’
JULIA SCHEIBMARCH 27, 20170
Meghan Kenny writes about matters of the heart: in her first collection of short stories, Love is No Small Thing, published earlier this month by Yellow Shoe Fiction, she explores the nature of love and loss. Her novel The Driest Season is in the copyediting phase at W.W. Norton, she says, and will most likely be out next January.
After a childhood in New England, an undergrad education at Kenyon College, an MFA at Boise State University, and time spent in such far-flung places as Japan and Peru, Kenny finds herself in Lancaster city in her third year of teaching mainly seventh-grade English at Lancaster Country Day School. We caught up with her last week at Characters Pub.
The Triangle: How does a story begin? What comes first—concept, setting, characters?
Meghan Kenny: I need to have something concrete. So I usually have a character voice or a specific problem, and I start there. I think I’m more drawn to writing scene and dialogue than I am to exposition.
Eudora Welty said to write about what you don’t know about what you know. So with a lot of my stories, I know about being a daughter or a sister or a partner to someone or a friend, but within these dynamics, there is a lot that I don’t know. The mysterious and unknown, people’s motivations and how we navigate relationships—why people leave, why people lie.
T: What are some of your favorite writing exercises to give students?
MK: I like to try to get them outside of their own experience. Recently I gave my seniors a character prompt. Before you write anything, you make a list of character traits: fears, desires, defining physical characteristics. Then you start by having the character introduce themselves. I use this exercise to teach them the elements of fiction. After they create the character, students write about them having a flashback, have them interact with another character, etc.
An exercise that I love that was given to me, (which resulted in) the story of the lovely boys with the cross-dresser–the teacher gave us two pictures from magazines and a first line. We had to make a list of tragic events and mundane activities. The tragic event would shape the story. You’d make a story from these elements. I love giving that one to the kids because you can be this white kid living in Lancaster, and never have traveled much or anything, and with this exercise they end up with characters much different from themselves, and how do you make it work?
And what I teach them in that prompt, I hope, is that there’s a craft to writing—character, conflict, place, what’s happening, why it’s happening—that it’s not just the muse, or whatever.
T: You often write from the male point of view. Why do you choose to do this and what are the challenges of writing from a male perspective?
MK: It’s probably a little weird to say this but I don’t find it very challenging. I guess I’m making a judgment here, but I’m a pretty crass person and it feels more accurate to write like that from a male perspective. Also, the female perspective feels a little too close to home sometimes—like the story about the couple trying to get pregnant.
T: Several of your stories include these kind of mystifying confrontations between men.
MK: Part of the reason I think I like to write from a male point of view is because men perplex the shit out of me—to better understand them. And I don’t know if it works, but I like that idea.
T: Many of your characters seem lost, like they just kind of ended up where they are.
MK: I feel like the stories are about a lot of near misses: the characters’ lives didn’t turn out the way they thought they would—now where do I go from here?
I feel like I find myself in places where I never expected to be—like, how did I get here? But you’re always making choices along the way. And just because you have a goal doesn’t mean you’re going to get there. With seventh graders, they’re learning they’re not gonna get everything they want, but it’s going to be okay. I think those things just get bigger and more profound as you get older.
T: So, your novel is based on your short story, which is based on your grandma’s experience of finding her dad after he hanged himself.
MK: Yes. It’s a really quiet story. It takes place in World War II-era rural Wisconsin. We never knew for sure what happened, so I made it up—it’s 98 percent fiction. We weren’t sure about her childhood. She had dementia. Before she died, we took (my grandmother) and her sister back to the place where they grew up. The crazy thing was, it was exactly as I had imagined it. But I never knew for sure (about the hanging) before we did the research.
T: Did you find a newspaper clipping or something?
MK: Yes. There’s this tiny little library—I wanted to look at microfiche. I found it. It was printed in the newspaper. It would probably have been on a Sunday, and they would have found him when they got back from church: he hanged himself by a short rope in the barn. It happened during the Depression, actually, but I chose to place it during the war. (In the novel) she finds him on a summer day and then in the couple of months afterward, things tilt and shift.
***
Photo: Fran Cooper
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Meghan Kenny was raised in Connecticut and New Hampshire. She received her BA in English and creative writing from Kenyon College, and her MFA in fiction from Boise State University. She is the winner of the Iowa Review Fiction Award, has published work in The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Driest Season, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2018.
Meghan Kenny is the author of the novel The Driest Season (W.W. Norton & Company) and the short-story collection Love Is No Small Thing (LSU Press, forthcoming) and has published fiction in The Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, The Cincinnati Review, Hobart, and Pleiades, among many others. She has taught at Boise State University, The Cabin Literary Center, for the Writers in the Schools Program in Idaho, and at the Gilman School as a Tickner Writing Fellow. She holds a BA from Kenyon College and an MFA in Fiction from Boise State University.
Meghan Kenny was raised in Connecticut and New Hampshire. She received her BA in English and creative writing from Kenyon College, and her MFA in fiction from Boise State University.
She was the 2008-2009 Tickner Fellow at the Gilman School, a Bernard O'Keefe Scholar at Bread Loaf, a Peter Taylor Fellow at The Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop, a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writers' Conference, an Emerging Writer at Franklin & Marshall's Emerging Writers Festival, and has held residencies at Vermont Studio Center and La Muse in France. She has lived in France, Japan, and Peru, and has taught writing and literature to grades 4-12 for Writers in the Schools Program in Idaho, Writers at Harriman, Gerstell Academy, Gilman School, Boise State University, Towson University, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Gotham Writers' Workshop online. She currently teaches at Lancaster Country Day School in Pennsylvania, and will be teaching a Contemporary American Writers course at Johns Hopkins University's MA in Writing Program this fall.
Her stories have appeared in literary journals including The Gettysburg Review, Cincinnati Review, Hobart, and The Kenyon Review. She was awarded the 2005 Iowa Review Award for her story, "The Driest Season", which was a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and her story "Heartbreak Hotel" won 2nd place in Glimmer Train's 2012 Fiction Open. Her short story collection, Love Is No Small Thing, is out with LSU Press, and her debut novel, The Driest Season, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in February 2018.
The Driest Season
Publishers Weekly. 264.47 (Nov. 20, 2017): p68.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Driest Season
Meghan Kenny. Norton, $25.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-393-63459-4
Kenny's debut novel is a frustratingly tentative coming-of-age narrative set on a Wisconsin farm during World War II. Cielle is almost 16 when she finds her father's body hanging in the barn following his suicide, and the novel follows her family through their period of mourning: Cielle, her sister, and her mother try to make sense of what happened, while also determining how exactly their lives will change in the wake of the tragedy. The farm is actually owned by a local landlord and leased to the family, and since Cielle's father's suicide means they have contractually foregone their rights to it, much of the novel's tension involves the family's attempts to keep the true cause of death a secret and pretend it was accidental in order to save the farm. Young men close to Cielle enlist in the war effort, disappearing just like her father, and her feelings of destabilization in this time of uncertainty are palpable and heartfelt. But her epiphanies throughout feel forced, and the supporting characters seem to exist only to fulfill specific narrative purposes. The story arrives at its logical conclusion mostly by refusing to detour into more complicated terrain. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Driest Season." Publishers Weekly, 20 Nov. 2017, p. 68. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517262064/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=80e0368e. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517262064
The Driest Season
Kathy Sexton
Booklist. 114.5 (Nov. 1, 2017): p29.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Driest Season.
By Meghan Kenny.
Feb. 2018.192p. Norton, $25.95 (9780393634594).
Based on her award-winning short story of the same name, Kelly's debut novel is a quiet and moving coming-of-age tale set during WWII. Cielle is not quite 16 when she finds her father hanging from the barn rafters on their Midwestern farm. The long drought has hit them hard, but more likely his suicide was related to his depression--information she doesn't disclose immediately because she knows it will change everything, and Cielle needs everything to stay just as it is. Her father's death brings into relief other looming changes, many caused by the war but some more routine, like her sister, Helen, leaving for college. Kenny artfully weaves Cielle's story of coming to terms with the fact that though loving people won't necessarily save them or keep them safe, those relationships are still worth it. And it is Cielle's relationships that make this story: those with her sister and her longstanding crush are especially genuine and sweet. With a light touch, Kenny tells an impactful story of everyday lives in trying circumstances. --Kathy Sexton
YA: Cielle's moving narrative will likely strike a chord with teens who like realistic historicalfiction. KS.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "The Driest Season." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2017, p. 29. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515382991/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c2e400a5. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515382991
Kenny, Meghan: THE DRIEST SEASON
Kirkus Reviews. (Nov. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kenny, Meghan THE DRIEST SEASON Norton (Adult Fiction) $25.95 2, 13 ISBN: 978-0-393-63459-4
A father's death leaves a daughter seeking answers and a return to normal life in this impressive debut novel.
It's mid-July 1943, amid a drought in Boaz, Wisconsin, when 15-year-old Cielle Jacobson finds her father hanging from a beam in their barn. Her mother and a neighbor cover up the suicide as an accident, adding to the questions shadowing Cielle, whose closeness to her father is revealed in brief, tender flashbacks. As the narrative moves through several weeks and vignettes, Kenny (Love Is No Small Thing: Stories, 2017) anchors her third-person narrative to Cielle's point of view. She is a gifted violinist, a loving sister, and a thoughtful teen who ponders her place in a small town and in the universe and feels her childhood "leaving little by little every day." The author offers little drama: a tornado that razes the barn; a horse-riding accident; a suicide note left unread for many pages; a subplot involving a wily Cielle and the suicide's effect on the legal disposition of the Jacobsons' land. Even the war is mostly an aside--Mrs. Jacobson alludes to "rationed butter and sugar"--until Cielle's sister learns that her boyfriend has joined up and a neighbor's injured son comes home in a wheelchair. But from the life-altering suicide to her first kiss, everything bears some significance for Cielle's progress toward adulthood. She calls to mind Frankie of Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, who begins to think about the world during "a long queer season" one spring. And like Bunny in the double-edged opening of William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows, Cielle doesn't "waken all at once." Still, she begins to blossom despite the drought.
Kenny's thoughtful, finely crafted work is an eloquent reminder that the breadth of a world matters less than the depth of a character.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kenny, Meghan: THE DRIEST SEASON." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512028578/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=80d7f760. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512028578
The Driest Season by Meghan Kenny
Author: Laura Spence-Ash |
Feb
09
2018
Posted In Book Reviews, Fiction
The Driest Season
Meghan Kenny
W. W. Norton | February 13, 2018
Amazon | Powell’s
The Driest Season, Meghan Kenny’s debut novel, is compact and efficient, clocking in at just under two hundred pages. Borne out of a short story which won the Iowa Review Award, the novel takes place in Boaz, Wisconsin during six weeks in the summer of 1943. The story is told in a close third-person voice as we follow Cielle, a girl on the brink of turning sixteen. The prose is precise and strong, never overly lyrical or excessive, and it perfectly matches Cielle’s character and outlook on life. Kenny’s first book, Love is No Small Thing, which was published in 2017, is a story collection; here, too, her writing is concise and character-driven.
The brevity of the novel—in page count, not in depth—means that it’s easy to read in a weekend. Falling into this book and living completely in its world for a day or two may be just the right way to read it. The kind of reading experience that I equate with childhood, and with those first books I loved, works wonderfully here because the book unfurls in such a confined time and place. For two days, we can retreat to the Wisconsin summer during World War II and live there, with the characters, as their lives twist and turn.
And you may be forced to do this; the novel’s opening grabs the reader and doesn’t let her go. So often, novels that begin with an inciting, dramatic event mean that the novel will be exploring the good stuff: what led up to that event and then what follows. (Julie Buntin’s recent novel, Marlena, works similarly.) Here are the opening lines of this novel:
In that driest season, Cielle’s father hanged himself in the barn. A rope tied to a beam above stacked bales of hay, a wheelbarrow, rusted cans. Cielle found him. Home from summer school in the middle of July, and her legs couldn’t move beneath her. She looked and didn’t look. Her father hung still, bloated and blue.
Throughout the book, this is always the way Kenny operates: she walks right up to a situation, and forces her characters, and her readers, to live in these uncomfortable moments, to feel their weight. There were times when I cringed for the characters, when I “didn’t look,” wanting to alleviate the pressure, but it is this honesty and this willingness to confront that makes this novel so fresh and successful. The tension never wavers.
And that tautness makes such sense here because it mimics the way that Cielle behaves in the world. She is one of the most original female characters I’ve encountered in a long while. She is a strong girl who rarely backs down. She speaks her mind. She questions, she worries, she grieves, and we’re given access to her innermost thoughts. We’re with her as she tries to make sense of her father’s suicide and to understand her place in the world. Most critically, though, Cielle watches and observes. She makes sense of things through what she sees. In a flashback, she remembers the moment that her mother brought her to meet an Amish man at a market:
When they were close to him, only feet away, Cielle noticed the gray stitches that sewed his shirt together, like stitches in a wound. Like knowing what held a person together and kept them from falling apart. Wide, gray stitches in his navy blue shirt and suspenders.
Cielle is trying to understand what led to her father’s death, what it was that made him commit suicide. These slivers of comprehension get threaded into the narrative, Cielle noticing a small detail which seems to open up a space of understanding.
The novel is largely inhabited by strong women; even Cielle’s older sister, Helen, whom she disapproves of for her desire to marry and live a conventional life, is often straightforward and uncompromising. Cielle’s mother is especially well-drawn. When we first meet her, just after Cielle has found her father’s body, she is in the bathroom: “She found her mother in the claw-foot tub, lying still, looking at her feet in front of her; she did not bathe in the afternoon or during drought.” Seeing her only through Cielle’s eyes, we become frustrated with her inability to connect to Cielle, to provide comfort. But then, in the moment when it matters, we see that she, too, has an iron core.
The world of this novel is one where successes and failures are linked to the land and to the weather. Kenny describes the way in which these people are connected to this place by constantly showing us the land, the sky, the air. The dryness and the heat are palpable, and that weight adds to the grief and gloom:
The ground radiated heat. Dry grasses on the shoulder of the road crunched under her feet, and she became heated as she walked. She thought a dry piece of grass might be stuck in the back of her throat. The sun made the top of her hair almost too hot to touch.
The workmanlike nature of the prose beautifully echoes the land as well as the characters.
For much of the novel, one bad event follows another and, at first, it felt like too much. How much more can this family endure, I kept thinking. When will this girl get a break? But I came to understand that the book is about survival as much as it’s about grief and coming-of-age. What’s particularly wonderful here is how unsentimental this all is. Kenny is not interested in nostalgia, or in describing a world of the past where everything was simpler and, therefore, better. While this is a historical novel, it’s primarily a character study: the characters lie in relief against the backdrop of history.
This is a tough, unrelenting world, and Cielle is learning how to navigate it. By the end of the novel, we know she will not only survive but, with any luck, will go on to take over the world.
Of Love and Class: Love Is No Small Thing by Meghan Kenny (Louisiana State University Press, Yellow Shoe Fiction Series, 2017).
Reviews
Olivia Kate Cerrone
The stories of Meghan Kenny’s debut collection Love Is No Small Thing follow a diverse range of narrators driven by a shared longing for intimacy. Characters struggle to navigate through the ever-complicated terrain of romantic and familial relationships. In “All These Lovely Boys,” a father attempts to overcome a dogged sense of personal alienation as he strives to understand his cross-dressing son, who performs in drag with a skydiving troupe. As he watches his boy fall from the sky in an aerial ballet, the father admits that “I was tight and unsettled. I tried to be an honest man…When it comes to your children, it doesn’t always matter what you like and don’t like.” Imperfect resolutions, a sense of stasis and unrest, permeate the lives of these individuals in the wake of difficult choices and complex realities.
Often set in rural and western American enclaves, these stories, especially those narrated by female perspectives, reminded me of Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness, in their ache for love and fulfillment, even from partners who turn out to be all wrong. Many of the women from Love Is No Small Thing wrestle with forging romantic commitments, along with feeling comfortable in their own skin. In “Return is to Here,” Dorie relocates to Idaho from Connecticut in hopes of finding “something wide open and new” and becomes involved with Roger, a tough, free-spirited man who drives a pickup and takes her out shooting. Despite their growing affection and trust in one another, the deep-rooted issue of class soon pushes them apart. When Dorie invites Roger to accompany her to an affluent friend’s wedding back home, his discomfort upon arrival is immediate. “I hate suits…I feel constricted,” he says. He is soon scrutinized by Dorie’s ex-boyfriend, Stevens, who wants to know what his job is and what kind of car he drives. Likewise, Dorie is questioned by a close friend as to when she will eventually return home East. After Roger privately jokes with Dorie that Stevens might be interested in him, she whispers, “a lot of people want something they can’t have,” to which Roger replies, “yeah, all this…lack out here—people must be desperate.”
Throughout the collection, class differences serve as an underpinning to the tensions that set many of the characters apart. In “Man is the Measure of All Things,” Russell, who renovates homes professionally, is invited to the dinner party of one of his wealthy clients, John Vandermies. Though Russell looks forward to the opportunity, he also questions the condescending behavior of the affluent guests, some of whom he considers prospective clients. Russell also finds himself unsettled by an earlier interaction with two gun-toting truckers he met on the side of the road, who try to get his assistance with a mysterious plea: “we’ve lost one, and you’ve got to help.” Yet the truckers repulse and frighten Russell, and he refuses. Later, he reveals further complexity surrounding his aversion: “he knew these types of men; they were the type in his family: drinking, reckless, angry, fighting. Men he’d left behind long ago. The kind of man he chose not to be. But they were inside him, not far beneath the surface; it was in his DNA.”
Later, when those same truckers crash Vandermies’s party, Russell fears for his life, and considers a fast escape, only to discover the disturbing reality behind their earlier remarks. The truckers reveal two young boys gagged and tied, accused of stealing from Vandermies’s land. Russell recognizes one of the boys as his wife’s student, but despite his plea to let the boys go, he is ignored. Russell remains conflicted, unable to choose between standing up for the boys and alienating prospective clients, or falling in with the crowd.
The dynamics of class are examined from various perspectives, revealing the ways in which privilege doesn’t always promise contentment. In “Heartbreak Hotel,” a father takes a road trip with his adult daughter through mid-America, destined for a museum show she is curating in Boise. The father quietly mourns the lives he never led in favor of a more practical existence, while his daughter, who has spent her youth travelling internationally and pursuing her dreams, grieves the lack of a romantic partner. Together, they journey “where the land drops into the Snake River canyon, where the surface of the earth breaks into crevices and cracks left behind from the elements wearing her down, reshaping her, making her shift and change, shift and change.” Like the landscape surrounding them, these characters transcend the rough and broken places in the roads they follow, emerging transformed. The stories in Love Is No Small Thing offer a penetrating, nuanced look into the lives of individuals who long to feel at home in the world through others, but especially from within themselves.
Olivia Kate Cerrone is the author of The Hunger Saint (Bordighera Press, 2017). Her Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction won the 2016 Jack Dyer prize from the Crab Orchard Review. A member of the PEN American Center, she serves as an associate editor for CONSEQUENCE Magazine and as a creative writing workshop facilitator for Writers Without Margins, a nonprofit organization dedicated to marginalized voices.