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WORK TITLE: Girl on the Leeside
WORK NOTES:
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BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://kathleenannekenney.com/
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NATIONALITY: American
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2144913/kathleen-anne-kenney * http://kathleenannekenney.com/about-the-author/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married, husband’s name Greg; children.
EDUCATION:College of St. Teresa, B.A. (history), 1982; Winona State University, B.A. (studio art), 2003, M.A. (English), 2014.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Freelance writer and playwright; university arts administrator.
AWARDS:Grant from Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council.
WRITINGS
Work has appeared in newspapers and magazines, including Big River Magazine, Coulee Region Women’s Magazine, and Tapestry.
SIDELIGHTS
Kathleen Anne Kenney, who also uses the name Kathleen Peterson, is a freelance writer and playwright whose work often draws on her Irish American heritage. She grew up as the youngest child in a large Irish-American family that she has described as happy and loving. Her parents were ravenous readers, and books became the young Kenney’s cherished companions. As the author observed in a piece for Signature Reads: “I was drawn to writing from a very early age because I was surrounded by books. . . . The lives I led immersed in stories were as real and valuable to me as the life I led in our bustling, loving home.”
Kenney majored in history at St. Teresa College and later earned a B.A. in studio art at Winona State University in Minnesota, where she went on to earn an M.A. in English in 2014. In addition to two novels, she has written several short plays presented at the Theatre du Mississippi in Winona, Minnesota, including Drops & Drama I and Drops & Drama II in 2005 as well as Return Engagement and The Bootleg Blues in 2014. Her The Ghost of an Idea, about the English novelist Charles Dickens, was presented as a staged reading at the Winona County History Center in 2012. She has received grant support for her work from the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council. Kenney’s work has also appeared in newspapers and magazines, including Tapestry, Coulee Region Women’s Magazine, and Big River. She lives with her family in Winona and works as an arts administrator at a local university.
Summer for the Taking
The author’s first novel is Summer for the Taking. Published under the name Kathleen Anne Peterson, the book has drawn comparisons to the work of Jane Smiley and Richard Russo. Its protagonist, Joe, has just returned to his home town of Burns Valley, Minnesota, to get back on his feet after having lost his job. He is also upset at his ex-wife’s recent remarriage and has brought his fourteen-year-old daughter, Kandi, with him to Burns Valley to stay for the summer. Joe’s return is good news for his mother, Ida Mae, who has been struggling to keep her diner afloat and who needs her son’s help in the kitchen. But matters soon become more complicated. A mysterious Irish woman has recently come to town and has opened a trendy café near the campus of the local college. Ida Mae now has an unwanted business competitor—who, perhaps inadvertently, is sparking a culture clash between Ida Mae’s townie regulars and the more sophisticated academic types that the townies reflexively resent.
Joe had never planned to let himself become drawn into his hometown’s nasty dramas, which intensify after a series of suspected arson cases traumatizes the community. But circumstances end up giving him responsibility for the fates of both the diner and the café, and he must find a way to balance what he wants for himself with what would be best for his family and for the town.
Girl on the Leeside
Set in contemporary rural Ireland, Girl on the Leeside tells the story of a quiet life disrupted by the appearance of a stranger. Siobhan Doyle, who was a very small child when her mother was killed in a bombing, has lived since then with her Uncle Kee and helps him run the family’s centuries-old pub, the Leeside. When not serving behind the Leeside’s bar, she writes poems and hides them away. Their small social circle also includes Kee’s girlfriend Katie, who grumbles at Kee’s overprotectiveness toward his niece, as well as a traveler family, headed by the formidable Galway Gwen, that makes annual visits to the Leeside. Siobhan is content with this insular life and has no wish for it to change. But then Tim Ferris, an American professor of Irish literature, arranges a brief stay at the pub.
Siobhan is drawn to Tim, especially because of their shared love of literature, and begins to imagine a different and more exciting future for herself. She also discovers that Uncle Kee, trying to protect her, has shielded her from the whole truth about her father. Struggling with a potent mix of new feelings, from sexual desire to pain, grief, and love, Siobhan comes to see that there is no shortcut to navigating through these feelings: she must deal with them all, no matter how uncomfortable, in order to become fully adult.
A writer for Kirkus Reviews said that the novel has some appealing elements, but found its plot far-fetched and its characters “charming but still unrealistic.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer provided a similar assessment of the book, acknowledging some “compelling” plot components (such as the Irish Republican Army, or IRA, bombing that killed Siobhan’s mother) but criticizing the author’s reliance on cliché and describing Siobhan as a “stereotypically Irish manic pixie dream girl.” Wild Geese contributor Claire Fullerton, on the other hand, hailed Girl on the Leeside as a novel “deep in character study” and nuance, and “laden with beautiful imagery . . . and radiant poetry.” Fullerton considered the book an insightful exploration of a young woman’s desire to dare and to experience emotional growth, and she praised Kenney’s skill in conveying the ways in which Siobhan struggles with, and finally triumphs over, the fears that have held her back for so long.
In a piece posted on the Vintage Books and Anchor Books Reading Group Center Website, Kenney said that she first started thinking about the character of Siobhan after her family’s first visit to Ireland: “Painfully introverted, sexually unawakened, even child-like—it was as if she needed me to set in motion the chain of events that would launch her into adulthood.” Pondering Siobhan’s sheltered life, Kenney wondered who might have sheltered this character, and why; in imagining possible answers to these questions, the author had the outline of her character’s story. Girl on the Leeside‘s setting in rural Ireland is “another intentional ‘character’ in the story,” Kenney observed. Siobhan’s “symbiotic relationship between self and her beloved Leeside comes from an elemental connection with the earth that all people have.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2017, review of Girl on the Leeside.
Publishers Weekly, April 10, 2017, review of Girl on the Leeside.
ONLINE
Bustle, https://www.bustle.com/ (June 5, 2017), E. Ce Miller, “16 Books That’ll Take You around the World This Summer.”
Kathleen Anne Kenney Website, http://kathleenannekenney.com (January 24, 2018).
Minnesota Playlist, http://minnesotaplaylist.com/ (January 24, 2018), Kathleen Peterson profile.
Signature Reads, http://www.signature-reads.com/ (June 14, 2017), Kathleen Anne Kenney, “Coming of Age and Literature: The Power of Reading as an Adolescent.”
Vintage Books and Anchor Books Reading Group Center, http://knopfdoubleday.com/ (August 8, 2017), Kathleen Anne Kenney, “Getting Lucky: Kathleen Anne Kenney on Writing and Inspiration.”
Wild Geese, http://thewildgeese.irish/ (July 9, 2017), Claire Fullerton, review of Girl on the Leeside.
Getting Lucky: Kathleen Anne Kenney on Writing and Inspiration
The experience of bringing pen to page is different for everyone. For some, the words flow free and a plan is only a hindrance. For others, it comes in fits and starts and an outline is a lifeline. Whatever the case may be when you call forth your literary muse, we can all agree that with good writing there’s always an element of luck. Here, Kathleen Anne Kenney recounts her experience writing—and getting lucky with—Girl on the Leeside.
If a writer is very, very lucky, a character emerges from the ether or the subconscious or some suburb of Oz/Kansas—wherever—and whispers to you to tell their story. My work is absolutely character-driven, much more than plot focused. All of my writing begins with the advent of one character whose story, apparently, is somewhere inside me and needs to be drawn out and told.
The character of Siobhan appeared in my head about fifteen years ago, shortly after my family returned from our first visit to Ireland. Painfully introverted, sexually unawakened, even child-like—it was as if she needed me to set in motion the chain of events that would launch her into adulthood. Siobhan’s narrow life is focused primarily on the Leeside Pub, where she lives with her uncle, and Irish literature. Once I began exploring Siobhan, and how Siobhan and I could navigate her story together, other characters joined the party. If she was very sheltered, who sheltered her? Uncle Kee. Why? Because he’d lost his sister—Siobhan’s mother—in a violent bombing. Who else could inhabit their world? Katie, who’s in love with Kee and impatient with his compulsive protectiveness of Siobhan. The traveler family of longstanding tradition, headed by Galway Gwen, who visit yearly and are also part of the fabric of Siobhan’s life. Who or what happens to upset the proverbial apple cart? Professor Tim Ferris, an American scholar of Irish studies, to whom Siobhan finds herself drawn in ways that mystify her. Thus let the tale begin.
The setting—rural western Ireland—is another intentional “character” in the story; as a reader I find the physical setting of a novel important. As a writer, I’m very much drawn to exploring our sense of place, and believe that most people are intimately defined by their relationship to place. Our reaction to and interactions with our surroundings are fundamental to our identity. Certainly that is true of me, and of Siobhan. Her symbiotic relationship between self and her beloved Leeside comes from an elemental connection with the earth that all people have. Our second visit to the west of Ireland took place a few years ago. The small villages, green hills, endless shorelines, and welcoming people all enlivened my interest in my ancestral heritage even more. It was then I took up the manuscript again and revised it to the point where I felt the work was as strong as I could make it—and was perhaps ready to go forth into the world.
Girl on the Leeside is my third manuscript, and it taught me that the more I write, the less I know. The process of writing fascinates me. How to make a reader experience the voices of my characters as I, the writer, do? And not cross the lines into stereotyping, predictability, or worse, falsehood? If my characters are not real people to me, they will not come alive for the reader. One of the best quotes about creating art for me is from the pen of the wonderful Aaron Sorkin: “An artist’s job is to captivate you for however long we’ve asked for your attention. If we stumble into truth, we got lucky.”
As a writer, one of my fundamental goals
is to be a witness; this concept is at the core of keeping the language active and moving my narrative forward through the journey of the characters. In this way, the reader and the writer are both witnesses to the story. A novel is a contract between the reader and writer, an exchange that is, hopefully, intensely personal and captivating for both. If that happens, we both got lucky.
Coming of Age and Literature: The Power of Reading as an Adolescent
By KATHLEEN ANNE KENNEY
June 14, 2017
In the film “You’ve Got Mail” the charming character played by Meg Ryan speaks passionately to the also charming character played by Tom Hanks: “When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.” This devastatingly true statement was written by the brilliant Nora Ephron.
Speaking for myself, I was drawn to writing from a very early age because I was surrounded by books. The youngest in a large family with reading-addicted parents, the lives I led immersed in stories were as real and valuable to me as the life I led in our bustling, loving home. I was raised in an Irish-American family – we were Catholic – and, luckily, my parents had a catholic taste in literature. Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, John Le Carre, Rumer Godden, Iris Murdoch, W.B. Yeats and Pogo were jumbled together, amidst many others, in the dozen or so bookcases spread around the house.
At no time can I remember my parents ever fighting or giving each other the silent treatment. They adored each other. They also adored being parents. So I was happy; I was really a happy kid. Can a writer emerge from a persona that isn’t going through any more than a token fledgling angst?
My novel is entitled Girl on the Leeside. And while I wasn’t sheltered nearly to the extent that my protagonist is, I was raised ‘on the lee: the side that is sheltered or turned away from the wind.’ If Mom and Dad could have arranged it, our childhoods would have lasted twice as long. I was the youngest by three and a half years, and my parents tried to make exactly that happen with me. I was a sophomore in high school before I was allowed alone in the house in the evenings. I was “Little Guy” – for years my brothers, and sometimes Dad, called me that. I was a senior in high school before I wore my first pair of high heels. I craved books that took me on adventures while I at the same time held onto my innocence within the walls of my bedroom.“I was drawn to writing from a very early age because I was surrounded by books.”
TWEET THIS QUOTE
I loved our busy home and busy neighborhood, but reading was absolutely what I did whenever I had time to myself. (Bedtime was maddeningly inconvenient, so routinely I read by nightlight, hanging over the space between my mattress and headboard. I wore glasses by the time I was seven). In early childhood my favorite books were Winnie-the-Pooh, Wind in the Willows, the Madeline books, and everything by Virginia Lee Burton, Dr. Seuss, Maj Lindman, and Beatrix Potter. I vaguely remember believing animals could talk.
The Betsy-Tacy series showed me that I could be a writer – if Betsy could, I could! So I started scribbling stories in notebooks. In grade school we had reading and math groups designated by skill level: Rockets, Jets, and Planes. (Really – this was a thing). I was a Rocket in reading! In math I was a Plane (more like a Helicopter, actually). To my school’s credit, much of the advanced reading included stories about other cultures around the world, stories about children living during war, etc. Snow Treasure and The Snow Goose affected me profoundly – when children your own age are in real danger within a story you’ll never forget how you identified with that fear. And how you hope you’d be as brave as they were in the face of it. Who doesn’t read A Wrinkle in Time and make it part of their DNA? The Navajo story Annie and the Old One handled death and family traditions in a such a universal way that I was comforted in the aftermath of my grandfather’s passing.
Once the formidable pre-teen years arrived, boys were ‘meh’ – I had four brothers, after all. I’ll admit Nancy Drew became a favorite, along with books by Edward Eager, Roald Dahl, and Beverly Cleary, and early forays into Christie and Wodehouse. In high school I began to read plays, too: Neil Simon, Jerome Lawrence, Philip Barry, Thornton Wilder, and Shakespeare. That’s when I started writing with real determination. Even as a happy kid, I had my dreams – a jumble of dragons, ancient cities, witty drawing rooms, tropical islands, and time travel. The dreams are still there, still jumbled together. Because I suspect this Little Guy never fully grew up.
Kathleen Peterson is a published freelance writer and playwright in Winona, MN. She has had short plays presented at Theatre du Mississippi, including the two first “Drops and Drama” productions featuring the historic Masonic drops collection. Her “New Menu” play was among the eight winners in the 2012 Rochester Repertory Theatre’s “Ten-Minute Plays” national competition. She was awarded an individual artist grant from the Southeastern MN Arts Council in 2012 for a staged reading of her a one-actor play about Charles Dickens, "The Ghost of an Idea." This script is available through The Script Co. In the fall of 2014 she was commissioned to write a play set in 1920’s Winona, called “The Bootleg Blues.” In December of 2014 she published the novel Summer for the Taking with Bookshelf Editions in Winona. Her writing has appeared in Big River Magazine, Coulee Region Women’s Magazine, Tapestry Magazine, as well as area newspapers.
Kirkus Reviews:
A bookish young woman must make decisions about her future in this novel set in Ireland.
Kenney’s debut begins with a prologue. We see the series of tragedies that has left a 2-year-old and her uncle alone at the Leeside Pub. By Chapter 1, Siobhan is in her late 20s, still living with her Uncle Kee, and now working at the Leeside. Siobhan and her uncle have a close relationship and share a passion for Irish folklore and poetry, but Siobhan is otherwise withdrawn. She serves meat pies and drinks to the regulars and spends her free time writing poems that she does not share with anyone. It quickly becomes clear that literature is nearly all she has known of life. When Tim Ferris, an American professor of Irish studies, arrives at the pub, he ushers in a wave of brand-new experiences. Siobhan’s extreme naiveté makes her a mystery even to herself. Through the course of the novel, she feels emotions like excitement and grief as if for the first time. Her small stature is frequently emphasized, and her one close friend wonders aloud if she may be a fairy from the myths she loves so much. But, despite the improbable confluence of circumstances, the novel stays grounded in reality. Siobhan learns the truth of the past her uncle has kept from her and experiences the pain of love and loss. She seems at least somewhat aware of her odd trajectory into adulthood, writing at one point, “I’m not sure if growing up all at once at 27 is easier or harder than doing it bit by bit.” The other characters in Siobhan’s life are rendered with a similar flatness that makes them identifiable and, at times, charming but still unrealistic.
A late coming-of-age story with a far-fetched plot.
Pub Date: June 20th, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54239-5
Page count: 304pp
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 4th, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15th, 2017
Publishers Weekly:
Girl on the Leeside
Kathleen Anne Kenney. Doubleday/Talese, $25.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-385-54239-5
Playwright Kenney delves into Irish poetry and literature in her debut novel about a bartender who suddenly finds her isolated life opened up with the arrival of an unexpected guest at her quiet pub. Siobhan Doyle has lived with her Uncle Kee since the unexpected death of her mother 25 years earlier. She enjoys the quiet, picturesque life she and Kee have crafted at the Leeside, a centuries-old family pub they run together in a rural Irish town. But their routine is turned upside down when Professor Tim Ferris, an American who studies Irish literature and poetry, arrives for a few days stay. As she and Tim begin to bond, Siobhan considers the possibility of life beyond the Leeside—especially after it is revealed that her uncle lied about her father’s fate. Though rooted interestingly in a bond over literature, the novel lacks depth at times. Despite Siobhan being nearly 30 years old, she is characterized like a stereotypically Irish manic pixie dream girl: childish, ethereal, and lacking in realism. Alternately rushed and weighed down by wooden dialogue, Kenney’s novel sidesteps the most compelling parts of its own plot (including an IRA bombing) and themes (the place of literature in social identity) in favor of heavy-handed tropes. Agent: Marly Rusoff, Marly Rusoff Literary. (June) review date 4/10/2017
http://thewildgeese.irish/profiles/blogs/book-review-girl-on-the-leeside-by-kathleen-anne-kenney
Posted by Claire Fullerton on July 9, 2017
Because I once lived in a small town in Connemara, at the gateway of the Irish-speaking area called the Gaeltacht, I look for those novels that depict the region as it is, for once one has spent significant time there, its ways and means register in the soul with perpetual resonance, leaving one forever nostalgic for what can only be described as the west of Ireland’s consciousness. It isn’t easy to capture, for all its subtle nuances, yet author Kathleen Anne Kenney has done just that in writing Girl on the Leeside in the manner the region deserves, which is to say this beautiful story is gifted to the reader with a sensitive, light touch.
Girl on the Leeside is deep in character study. Most of what happens concerns the human predicament, no matter where it is set. More than a coming of age story centered on twenty seven year old Siobhan Doyle, it is a story of the path to emotional maturity, out of a circumstantial comfort zone, (which, in this case, is perfectly plausible, due to its isolated and insular Irish setting) into all that it takes to overcome one’s self-imposed limitations to brave the risk of furthering one’s life.
In utter fearlessness, Kathleen Anne Kenney invites the reader to suspend disbelief in giving us an otherworldly character that speaks to the inner fairy in those who dare to dream. Small and ethereal Siobhan is orphaned at the age of two by her unconventional mother, and father of unknown origin. She is taken in and raised by her mother’s brother, Keenan Doyle, the publican of his family’s generational, rural establishment called the Leeside, near the shores of a lough tucked away in remote Connemara. Introverted, with little outside influence, she is keenly possessed by her culture’s ancient poetry and folklore. She is a natural born artist, gifted with an intuitive grasp on words and story, a passion shared by her Uncle Keenan, yet so pronounced in her that she walks the line between fantasy and reality. It isn’t easy to redirect one’s invested frame of reference in the world, if it isn’t completely necessary, yet necessity arrives at the Leeside, when American professor of ancient Irish poetry and folklore, Tim Ferris, comes to compare literary notes with Siobhan and Keenan. It is this catalyst that sets the wheels in motion of a heartfelt, insightful story that involves the willingness to grow. All throughout, author Kathleen Anne Kenney explores the myriad fears that get in the way, and shows us the way to triumph.
Girl on the Leeside is a deceptively soft read. It is so laden with beautiful imagery, so seamlessly woven with radiant poetry that it lulls you into its poignancy and holds you captive, all the way to its satisfying end.
16 Books That'll Take You Around The World This Summer
ByE. CE MILLER
A beautiful and poetic coming-of-age story, Kathleen Anne Kenney’s Girl on the Leeside will transport you to a quiet Irish village as charming as it is haunting, where Siobhan Doyle has been kept under her well-meaning Uncle Kee’s overbearing watch in the wake of her mother’s death. An aspiring poet who has never left her Emerald Isle hometown, Siobhan finds herself captivated by Tim, a visiting American literary scholar who makes Siobhan consider life away from The Leeside for the first time.