It took Thomas E. Kennedy twenty years to publish his first story. In the twenty-five years following that first publication, he has published more than 20 books—fiction and creative nonfiction—edited numerous anthologies, published more than 100 stories and 60 essays, along with 20 poems, 50 literary studies, and innumerable book reviews, interviews, and translations from Danish to English. Among other awards, he has won the O. Henry Prize (1994), the Pushcart Prize (1990), the Charles Angoff Award (1988), the European short story competition (twice), the Gulf Coast short story contest in 2000, the Frank Expatriate Writing Award in 2001. Kennedy has more than a dozen honorable mentions in the Pushcart and Best American Short Stories anthologies. Most recently he was recognized in the New Letters Readers Awards for his essay, "I Am Joe's Prostate" (2007). Some of his work has been translated into Danish, French, and Serbo-Croatian, and a Danish translation of one of his earlier novels, A Weather of the Eye, has just been completed.

About his 1997 story collection, Drive Dive Dance & Fight, Andre Dubus II said, "Kennedy's stories are as good as any I've been reading in the past ten years or more. His characters are full, alive and each story is rich and deep. He writes with wisdom, and it is perhaps that wisdom which turns some of his stories of great sorrow into something triumphant. The title story is worth the book's price. It is funny, gloomy, terrifying and joyful."

About his 2004 novel, Greene's Summer, Andre Dubus III said, "Greene's Summer is a deeply stirring novel suffused with intelligence, grace, and that rarest of qualities—written or otherwise—wisdom. "

Between 1996 and 2005, Kennedy worked on the four books of his Copenhagen Quartet, published one a year between 2002 and 2005—four independent novels about the souls and seasons of the Danish capital, each written in a different style. In 2004, Harper College in Illinois produced a DVD documentary film about the Copenhagen Quartet, and in 2007, Kennedy's fiction was the subject of a panel discussion at the AWP Conference in Atlanta. The six papers presented at that panel are being published in 2008 in such journals as South Carolina Review, New Letters, The Literary Review, Cimarron Review, and Perigee.

Kennedy has a B.A. (summa cum laude) from Fordham University, a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College, and a Ph.D. in American literature from Copenhagen University. He has lived a variety of lives—as a shoemaker's helper, soldier, bank clerk, stenographer, editor, translator, international executive, teacher, and drifter.

Since 1974, he has lived in Europe, first in France, then in Denmark where he has served inter alia as International Editor of the American literary journals Cimarron Review and Potpourri and StoryQuarterly, Contributing Editor of the Pushcart Prize, as Advisory Editor of The Literary Review and Absinthe: New European Writing as well as co-editor of Best New Writing/The Eric Hoffer Award. He has taught and read as a visitor at many American and European universities and is a core member of the MFA faculty at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

In 2007, two new books were published—the novel, A Passion in the Desert (Wordcraft of Oregon) and the story collection, Cast Upon the Day (Hopewell Publications); a new collection of essays, Riding the Dog: A Look Back at America will appear from New American Press in spring 2008, and a new collection of stories as well as a blog chapbook, A Shout from Copenhagen, are ready for press. Finally, he has just completed the translation into English of two Danish nonfiction works—The Meeting with Evil: Inge Genefke's Fight Against Torture by Thomas Larsen and Alice Maud Guldbrandsen's Silence Was My Song: The Bombing of Copenhagen's French School. Excerpts from these books have appeared in New Letters magazine and The Literary Review and are forthcoming in New Letters and Perigee. Kennedy is also translating a poetry collection by Henrik Nordbrandt, from which a number of the translations have appeared or will in American Poetry Review, Agni, and elsewhere.

The Role of Intuition and Spontaneity

Duff Brenna: What do you think about the idea that many writers get obsessed with writing, so they can get out of this mess of a "real" world and get back to that alternate dimension?

Thomas E. Kennedy: Italo Calvino talks about this idea in his essay on "Lightness" —about "literature as an existential function, the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living . . . the sudden agile leap of the poet who raises himself above the weight of the world." When you're into that alternate dimension your characters lead the way. This is what Forster said happened in A Passage to India. Nabokov claimed, in reaction to Forster, that characters should be galley slaves who do as they are told.

Brenna:   What part does intuition play in your writing? What about spontaneity?

Kennedy: I think a lot about Wordsworth's definition of poetry: "the spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility." Yet I wonder sometimes what that actually means. Must we really learn to restructure the spontaneous?  Or must we learn to erupt in form? I want to go deeper into this. I don't mean about seeking le mot just—of course, I do that. I'm talking about the very foundations of the work. We learn our craft, we learn it long and hard, so that when we come to our writing finally we are like carpenters or wire-lathers—we know how things go together and if we lay a crooked curbing, we curse and tear it out and start over.

Calvino says, "Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard." And then to illustrate his point he quotes Paul Valéry, " Il faut être léger comme l'oiseau, et non comme la plume." One should be light like a bird and not like a feather. This is a challenge to me because in the forty-plus years of my pursuit of craft, I think one of the most important, shall I say, advances that I made was the discovery of the seemingly haphazard. I won't say anything about vagueness being powerful, although ambiguity of course certainly can be. This might be an essential difference in various methods—or it might be a mere difference in terminology. But I have seen writers wade into a seemingly final draft and, as nearly as I can determine, savage it, shape it, reverse it.

I admire those writers who can do that and come up with splendid results. But I know for myself that that can be the quickest route to the destruction of the ephemeral spirit that constructs the fiction for me, that shows the connectedness of all that is so seemingly haphazard in life. I have had to learn to allow my mind to accept the words that are handed up to it from wherever it is they come from. Or as Beckett said, "It all happens between the hand and the page."

About a third of my eighty or so short stories, maybe more, and maybe the best of them, if I can say that, occurred in such a way that their structure was largely inviolable. If I started trying to pull bricks out it would topple. I think all the stories in Unreal City came that way and many of them in Drive, Dive, Dance & Fight as well as in Cast Upon the Day, with the exception of "The Pleasure of Man and Woman Together on Earth" in the latter book. Sometimes I didn't understand the story at all, I only felt its rightness, and later, after it was published, I would discover the "meaning." Of course, I rewrote, polished, shifted sentences about, but basically the story is there as it came to me, and I learned how to judge this by ruining a few stories first with undue and unnecessary monkeying, trying to insert "reason" into what was essentially "wild."

However, with "The Pleasure of Man and Woman Together on Earth," I set out consciously to challenge my method of not-knowing. In that story I wanted everything to "mean" something, I wanted it to function on an "idea"—that a man cannot buy back what he sells in pursuit of success even if he becomes a multi-millionaire. It was sort of a Gatsby story, though with a different slant.

Yet in writing the story, other things began to creep in, random things, and the main character starts questioning these random things—e.g., the fact that his mother was French and left a book about Rodin behind, leads him to see a sculpture of Balzac, which inspires him to read a particular story by Balzac, which inspires him to read Dante, and all of these elements become important for him, and he asks himself, How can these things be important to me and my life when I discovered them by chance?  Even though it pleased me that I was able to attain what seemed to me some success with the original "idea" of the story, and it pleased me that my character slapped me around a bit and brought in his questions about my determination to control the story.

Joyce is mined for ideas by the critics, and surely there are ideas there, but I had to smile when I read in Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce, "To the French among whom he lived for twenty years, he lacks the refined rationalism which would prove him incontestably a man of letters." I rather like what J. M. Cohen said about him: "Joyce seems to come to things through words instead of to words through things." Andre Dubus used to quote Zola as saying, "My books are full of ideas but none of them are mine." I wonder sometimes.

The critics are so ingenious; they sometimes dazzle me with what they mine from a work, but often, maybe even usually, if I start thinking in that vein while I'm writing, even while I revise, I'm a dead man. In Joyce's "Grace," when the main character falls down the stairs into a basement, I'm afraid I just don't care to think of The Fall of Man unless it is—as I suspect it was meant—with a hefty grain of irony.

I like what Rilke said about this: "With nothing can one approach a work of art  so little as with critical words; they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures."

Language vs. Film

Brenna: Let's leap from the profound to the profane. Do you ever write with the movies in mind?  It seems that the only way to break out from the pack these days is to get a movie made of your novel or short story.

Kennedy: Right in the heart! I would be a liar if I denied I would love to have a movie made out of something I've written. I kind of thought that my third novel, The Book of Angels, might make a good movie. A Danish critic published a public challenge to Nordic Film to make a movie of my novel, Danish Fall, but I never wrote either of those books with that in mind. The same with my first novel and a couple of my stories. I would love to see a film maker interpret them for film. But I don't write with that in mind; I couldn't.

I have to say there has been any number of good movies made from any number of good novels, but no film adaptation of a strong novel that I've ever seen has had the power of the novel itself. The story about John Huston's recruitment of Ray Bradbury to write the script of Moby Dick is instructive. According to Bradbury, Huston contacted him because of a short story of his in the Saturday Evening Post about a dinosaur that came back to the future and fell in love with a lamp post. Bradbury told Huston he had never read Moby Dick, and Huston said, "But I know you could do it, Ray. Because of the dinosaur. And the lamp post." You have to hear Bradbury do it in his Huston voice. And yet maybe it is not such a crazy connection. The film wasn't bad, I thought. But nothing next to the book, of course.

Brenna:   Have you ever seen a movie that was better than the book, or as good?

Kennedy: I thought the film of Midnight Cowboy was better than the book. Huston's film of Joyce's The Dead seemed close to being as good as the written story. Wonderful movies can be made if you have real artists like Huston involved. I had an opportunity to discuss this with Rick Moody the other day. He told me he was extremely happy with the film made of his novel, The Ice Storm. Before it was made into a movie it sold only 5,500 copies. After the movie it sold 75,000. But the whole idea of waiting to get picked by Hollywood, or even by a noble independent, appealing as it may be, is I think something of a sucker's game. Sure most of us want it, I guess, but what does it really entail?

I know people who've gone through years of options finally to have the movie made, and maybe the movie is even good, like Gordon Weaver's Count a Lonely Cadence filmed as Cadence by Martin Sheen, but in some way or another they get railed out of the project, end up with a small handful of dollars and nothing much else because the thing is not released in theaters, but as a video with some unsatisfactory and unrecognizable title. They did that to Carolyn Chute when they filmed The Beans of Egypt, Maine, a fine novel and a fine and faithful film, too, but the video people gave it the goddamned title of Forbidden Choices, to try to play up on the incest implications.

Of course, these are problems most of us probably wouldn't mind having, but my point is that it can too easily come down to an expense of spirit in a waste of unfulfilled greed. There is a guy in Los Angeles named Patrick Mulvihill who works for Warner and who assures me of his determination to make a film of my story, "Drive Dive Dance & Fight," not with Warner, but as an Indie. He wants it to be his directorial debut. He asked me to co-write the script with him, and I tried for a while, but finally had to admit it is not my medium. I gave him carte blanche. I hope he does it. I would love to see it, but it will be his version of my story. My story is made out of words, his film will be made out of filmic images—just as a painting is made out of pigments.

Brenna: Do you know the story behind the film adaptation Stanley Kubrick did of Stephen's King's The Shining? The fiasco King thought it was?

Kennedy: Actually, yes. Kubrick took large liberties with King's book, turned it into a kind of horror burlesque. Real camp. I saw it. Nicholson is funny as hell, and I guess the film is scary at points, too, though I could never see that, but most of the humanity that was in the book disappears. King's book was about child abuse and the child abuser as victim of his own past. It was pretty moving, maybe the best piece of writing King has ever done, though I have only read four of his books, one of which was a comic book in prose, but I can understand why he was upset with what Kubrick did.

Brenna: I've heard that King made his own version and it wasn't very good.

Kennedy: Yes, he did, and you are right, it was not very good at all, could not at all measure up against Kubrick's even if it did reinstate all the scrapped elements. I think this bolsters the argument that the novel and language are stronger media than film. Maybe the reason for that is that language is closer to mental image than to ocular image, or maybe combines mental and ocular, and of course the person who can film a dream has yet to be found as far as I know. Kubrick made a memorable though ultimately slight film out of a pretty good novel; when King tried to reinstate its strengths in a remake of the film, it just didn't work out.

Look, we were raised to wait for the film of the novel, and it very very seldom works out. Even One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a fine film, comes nowhere near the book. Kesey was ticked off about that, too: "That shrimp!" he said about Nicholson as MacMurphy. Originally Kirk Douglas should have done MacMurphy but too much time passed. Nicholson is always brilliant, but I would have loved to see Douglas do it. And yet no one could do MacMurphy as Kesey's words did. Or Chief Bromden. Or Nurse Ratchet.

Same thing with Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. Henry Fonda and Paul Newman were terrific, but they are not the Stompers by a country mile. There was a very lively film of The Brothers Karamazov in 1956 with Lee J. Cobb and Yul Brynner; I saw that when I was twelve and was excited about it—especially the scene where Cobb ties up a woman and tickles her foot with a feather!—but four years later I read the book and I was transported by the words of Dostoevsky.

Hey, shut me up, I could go on and on.

Brenna: What do you think of the notion that film is today's literature?

Kennedy: I do notice that some pieces submitted to my workshop in recent years read like film scripts, but trying to write like that is based on a misunderstanding. All the time you see it—young writers responding not to poetry or fiction but to film. I had a manuscript a while back that started something like, "Boston. I can't believe I'm back in fucking Boston." I didn't get it; he had to explain it was a play on the opening lines of Coppola's Apocalypse Now which, of course, is a play on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. But in the film those words were bolstered by the stunning images of Martin Sheen in the hotel in Saigon. Film is not fiction.

In The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound points out that literature is made of words while drama is made of people speaking words and that what is lacking in the words they speak can be made up for in the movement of bodies. Some people think they can see a film in their head and just write the dialogue down, but it doesn't work that way. Some of the most powerful moments in film, reduced to a script, are nothing, just as some of the most powerful singing performances are achieved with banal, lifeless lyrics.

Put Jack Nicholson's body behind the words, or Marlon Brando's, or some other great actor or actress, and the words come to life. In a film script when you write, "He walks across the room," it works because you've got a Brando or a Harvey Keitel or a Robert Duvall or a James Earl Jones waiting to put flesh to those words. If you write in fiction, "He walks across the room," it is dead wood, pulls no weight, does nothing for the most part.

Brenna: Yes, I agree, some of the hardest scenes to write in fiction are transition scenes from one room to another or from a chair to the kitchen, from a car to a porch. But as far as literature goes, what will happen to the language if it defaults to the movie screen?  If people quit reading and make movies their literature, wouldn't that be the true death of the language, not to mention the novel?

Kennedy: To my mind, language is the supreme medium, always was and always will be. I've been trying to read Finnegans Wake again of late—a story as you know of a sleeping man dreaming the history of mankind. There is an interesting statement by Seamus Dean about it: he says that one of the book's implications is that the myth of the Fall can be understood as a fall into language, that language is secondary and not primary.

We experience this whenever we try to "tell" a dream. The very act of casting the images, or whatever they are, into language changes them, nuances drop away by the score with every word we select. The world and the word are two different things. As Dean puts it, "The priority of the dream over the language in which it is narrated cannot be established linguistically."

Brenna: I would disagree with the notion that language is somehow "a fall." Language is secondary, as Dean says, but without it the dream's priority cannot be communicated. Inadequate as it is, language at least is a means of trying to express the inexpressible. It is therefore a step up, not down. It separates us from dogs who also dream, but whose priority of the dream can only be expressed in, say, the kicking of a paw or the way they whine in their sleep.

Kennedy: I think Dean and Joyce are talking about the dream as a kind of original paradise, but I agree with your point. In a piece written by Galileo on the great inventions of mankind, he writes, "But above all stupendous inventions, what eminence of mind was his who dreamed of finding a means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, no matter how far distant in place and time?  Of speaking with those who are in India, of speaking with those who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years?  And with what facility?  All by using the various arrangements of twenty little characters on a page!" In one of his poems, Jack Myers writes, "There is a horse kicking in the brain that must be let out . . ." What film image could capture that?  A dozen words and you're transported, and you don't even need any equipment or props beyond your wits, your lungs, your breath, your mouth.

Rejection, Publishing, and the Spiritual Discipline of Writing

Brenna: You said it took twenty years to publish your first story. How were you able to keep going? That kind of rejection would have destroyed many writers, I think.

Kennedy: Rejection is part of the experience. After a while you get used to it. Well, sort of. About 15 years ago I looked into the subject of rejection to try to get a handle on it. I researched and published an article on it in Poets & Writers, and I found out how many outstanding writers have weathered monumental rejections and how few writers can actually live from their sales. Gordon Weaver sent one of his stories out something like seventy times, then sold it for a few hundred dollars to a magazine that published the next two or three he sent them.

The late, great Andre Dubus II sent one of his stories out thirty-eight times before he found a little magazine that would take it. And it is a splendid story, a very short one titled "Waiting." Writing that article on rejection helped me realize it's not personal, it's part of the experience. You have to be the water that wears away the stone.

Brenna: Do you ever feel like you're the stone, like you're the one being worn away?  Have you ever thought of quitting?

Kennedy: Sure I thought about it, but the next day I'd be back at my typewriter anyway. As Rainer Maria Rilke says in his Letters to a Young Poet: "Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create . . . Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside . . . Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write, find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write?  . . . but perhaps after this descent into yourself and into your inner solitude you will have to give up becoming a poet; it is enough to feel that one could live without writing; then one must not attempt it at all."

A writer produces a story in much the same way that an oyster produces a pearl, around some grain of irritant, through pain and worry and irritation. So you write a story and half the time you have trouble even giving the thing away. But you can't dwell on that. Your business is to write what you can the best you can. To tell you the truth, after that initial twenty years of frustration, every time I sell a story now I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve. It is like a small miracle to me that some college will pay me to come and read to fifty or a hundred students and faculty, or even a dozen or two. I feel truly privileged even just to get that much attention and recognition for doing something that I love to do and that makes it possible for me to live and be happy. In the end, that is our prime duty in life: to live and be happy. I feel sure of that.

Brenna: So the writing itself is its own reward?

Kennedy: Yes, definitely, the rest is gravy. The writing and then, afterwards, as John O'Hara pointed out, the contemplation of the finished product. That part doesn't last as long, though. Really, the true joy of writing is experiencing that rush of well-being and creativity while you are in the process, feeling it happen, experiencing yourself as a tool of the craft, a medium of the story. It is a spiritual feeling really, a communion.

Brenna: You see it as spiritual?

Kennedy: Yes, writing can be spiritual in the sense that it feels like a communion with some force greater than yourself. A lot of writers don't like to talk about that. Maybe they feel that they are aggrandizing themselves or their work by calling the craft a spiritual pursuit, but it is that nonetheless in my opinion. It is a spiritual discipline. And I feel pretty sure that a lot of writers feel the same whether they will admit it or not. Look, I never heard you call it spiritual, but when I read some of your scenes in The Holy Book of the Beard—the scene where Mary's boy drowns and she saves herself, for instance—if you aren't in the heart of the spirit of existence with that, I don't know where you are. Was that not a holy moment for you, writing that?  I mean you use the word in the title even.

Brenna: Holy and horrible. Your child is drowning and you can't save him. It becomes a defining moment for Mary in the book. Out of that self-preserving act she creates a religion. Her dead boy becomes an icon.

Kennedy: That makes me think about Jasper Johns, the protagonist of Beard?  You identify him with Jesus, yet a Jesus who steals and lusts and who is pretty selfish. You're exploring religion there, digging in for a deeper grasp of the spiritual essence which provides the myths of one of the prime religions of the western world. And when you were writing it, I'd bet you were in the grip of something.

Brenna: I can see how easily it could be equated with some sort of spiritual essence or force.

Kennedy: The Mary figure chooses survival when her son is drowning, and this act provides the source of spirituality for the remainder of her life. At the same time you give us Godot, the old patriarch, who ends up impotent, groping for the power of words. You give us a sense of Jesus, Mary, and God the Father—not merely weightily, but also playfully.

Brenna: To tell you the truth, the Jesus, God, Mary trinity didn't come until later, after the first or second draft, when I began to see that there were some associations there. But I hadn't purposely put them in the narrative.

Kennedy: Well as Calvino says, "The moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force . . . The symbolism . . . may be more or less explicit but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic." I don't like to go that far, but I concede the point. There is a kind of magic to the image. When Magritte paints a realistic picture of a pipe and then hangs a sign under it saying, " Ceci n'est pas une pipe," This is not a pipe, perhaps he is making a statement about the relationship of image and text, but even more so, I think he is making a statement about the difference between image and reality. A picture of a pipe is not a pipe; it is a picture of a pipe. A man in fiction is not a man, but a character, and it is in this act of creation in a realm other than the world, the magic comes in. So to my mind, the mere fact that your Mary is a symbol of a woman entails a certain magic.

Inner Man: Behold Your Inner Woman

Brenna: Speaking of women. You've talked about how writing has taught you to see women in a more comprehensive way. Can you explain that?

Kennedy: Women have emerged in our society over the past several decades in ways that have truly overturned the preconceptions and stereotypes of hundreds of years. The once two-dimensional view of women has been displaced. It really does seem to be a paradigm shift and it has emerged, I think, not only through the conscious effort of intelligent women and men, but even through a subconscious or archetypal surfacing of a force to rectify an imbalance in our structures.

I find something of this in my own writing. A tendency that at first was quite slight, where male characters were suddenly making surprising discoveries about women. This grew further over the past couple of years in the form of stories that came to me almost as dreams, in one case, literally as a dream, in which a woman with no face held up a tablet before me on which were written some words.

I awoke, scribbled them down, saw them in the morning, and they seemed to be words in a foreign language. They were, in fact, a mixture of French and Italian, and I should certainly have recognized the words, but I didn't, so I emailed them to a woman I know in Rome, Linda Lappin, and she emailed back that the words donna della aube -- meant quite literally "Mistress of the Sunrise."

Around the same time I had that dream, I experienced an optical illusion; I thought I saw in the window across the way from my apartment an illuminated statue of the Blessed Mother, with her arms opened out in embrace. It was only a lamp whose shape resembled that form, but my eyes, or my mind, read it that way.

Another experience—at a writer's conference where I was teaching, a group of woman organized a goddess circle to go out on the countryside and welcome the full moon; to my surprise, the next night they invited me to join them. A nice gesture, but how odd that they just happened to pick me; we hadn't discussed these things and I was the only man invited. Another story came out of that, "Rafferty the Goddess."

Still later, in 2004, it turned out that the central intelligence of the novel I consider my best work, Greene's Summer, turned out to be a woman, Michela Ibsen. I know that I am by no means finished with this, or rather it is by no means finished with me, but I find it quite remarkable.

Brenna: Do you compose on the computer?  

Kennedy: Ballpoint pen on lined white pads when I have them. Otherwise whatever paper presents itself. I have this wonderful Montblanc ballpoint pen. I love this pen. It is the first expensive pen I ever had. It cost about $300 and even a refill costs about ten bucks, but it sits so perfectly in my hand. I wrote the four novels of the Copenhagen Quartet with this pen. In the twelve or thirteen years that I've had it, I wrote nine books with it and a good many stories and essays. I've started saving the handwritten manuscripts now—hundreds and hundreds of scribbled pages—my poor kids will have to take the decision what to burn, what to save, if anything. I've tried to toss them out, but can't.

Anyway, at some point in the writing I go to the computer which makes it easier to overview what I have, but virtually all first drafts are done on my Montblanc by hand. I write in a mixture of long hand and short hand—Gregg method, which I learned in the army. Very useful. Makes it possible to write as fast as I think.

Brenna: Do you have a particular time of day when you write?

Kennedy: My favorite time is early morning, but as time grows scarce and other pressures mount, I will take any unit of time I can get my hands on and wherever it might be. I like to write on planes for example. No one to bother you except the flight attendant with the drink trolley, which is no bother at all.

Brenna: How much do you get done on a good day?

Kennedy: I guess I do about three or four pages. Sometimes more. Rarely as much as ten or so.

Brenna: Do you drink or smoke anything while you write?

Kennedy: I always start dry, maybe with a glass of juice or club soda and will write as long as I can, but I do find if I am writing at night and going strong but near exhaustion, a drink can carry me a little further, even two or, rarely, three, but then the next day it is hard to read my short hand. Sometimes I like the stuff that comes out that way, though. It breaks patterns, breaks up the line. Sometimes of course it is just silly.

Works in Progress

Brenna: You were in the Army, right?  Any novels there?

Kennedy: In 1998, during a stay at the Chateau Lavigny in Switzerland, I finished a novel, Roaring Boys, which comes partially out of my military experience which was pretty pathetic really. I got picked for a plum assignment, working in the old Executive Office Building of The White House, but to be allowed to get there, I had to go through a series of security clearance investigations, interrogations really. I was eighteen years old, and when they found out I was a virgin, they started investigating my sex life: I was hooked up to lie detectors and asked if I had ever had abnormal sex with women (whatever that is!), sex with other men, with animals, etc. It was real screwball stuff.

But the main thrust of the book is about a group of draft age kids in Queens, New York, in 1964, and they are not aware that Vietnam is about to get them. The book is about racism, homophobia, sexism, and the human isolation that results. People get forced into these thought patterns that are like a cage; you can't think, you can't breathe, you deny anything in yourself that goes against the stereotype, and the result is isolation, misery, and violence.

Brenna: You say that one's finished?

Kennedy: Yes, but not published yet. I put it aside after about ten rejections to concentrate on the four novels of the Copenhagen Quartet, which so far has been the happiest experience of my writing life. Four novels written over a period of ten years, and I had a publisher for them, so I could just relax and let the suckers be written.

Brenna: What else is in the works?

Kennedy: This year, I've published two books, one a collection of stories written between 1999 and 2006, titled Cast Upon the Day. The other is a novel, A Passion in the Desert, the first draft of which I wrote in 1995. I put it aside, too, to work on the Quartet, and so much time passed that I doubted I would ever come back to it. It was an education for me to pick up an eleven-year-old draft of a novel and rework it. You begin to see that you have learned a few things in the years that passed, both as a man and as a writer.

A single little comment from my partner, Alice, also helped enormously and actually made it possible for me to realize the vision I was struggling toward in the book. Alice said, "That wife in the novel is not nearly as nice as you think. "  This switched on a floodlight in my brain. And it's funny—I wrote the first draft when I was still married to my ex, just before we split, in the mid-90s, and finished it a dozen years later, in a new century, a new millennium, and in a new relationship.

This coming spring I have a collection of essays coming out from New American Press entitled Riding the Dog: A look back at America. It is a quartet of essays written in 2003 about a ride through the south on a Greyhound Bus, experiencing the blackout in Manhattan, a return to my home town in Queens, and finally an exploration of places where writers used to live and drink in Manhattan.

Also I am puttering with another Copenhagen novel, but it might be a very short one, I'm not certain. Its working title is The Christmas Lunch at Emdrup Lake. It takes place in a single day and involves twenty or more characters—so it is a challenge.

I'm also enjoying the new blog I started, "A Shout from Copenhagen. " This is up on four different sites at present—a kind of "syndication"—on the website of Absinthe: New European Writing, on Google BlogSpot, on MySpace and on Google itself. For years now I've been unable to keep a diary with any regularity, and this blog, to which I add a post every week, is a satisfying substitute for keeping a journal. I try to tell about my experiences here in Copenhagen—visiting prisons, bookshops, bars, people I meet, etc.

A Danish translation of one of my earlier novels, A Weather of the Eye, is ready for market now, and I am spending a good amount of time translating other people's books, working on three simultaneously—a biography of the anti-torture activist, Inge Genefke, Alice's book about the bombing of a Copenhagen school during World War II, and a collection of poems by Henrik Nordbrandt. After the Quartet, I keep hoping for some new big idea to occur to me.

The Quartet was unlike anything I'd ever done before, starting with the first volume, Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story (2002)—a kind of cross genre of novel, travel-book, historical meditation, catalogue of anecdotes, dictionary of literary biography. This delivered me to the idea of writing four novels about Copenhagen, one in each season, each independent of the others, with different characters, and each in a different style. Had I not had the publisher I had, Roger Derham, I don't think I could have completed that project—the rejection potential is so great for a quartet of books. Knowing Roger was there, ready to publish each book as I finished it, not counting beans, left me free to create. Roger appeared like magic when I needed him—he approached me—and after the last book was published, just as mysteriously as he had appeared, he was gone. But his having been there made all the difference for me.

Without the Copenhagen Quartet, Greg Herriges would never have been able to make his documentary film about the four novels and South Carolina Review would not have published Herriges' article about the process, and it would have been highly unlikely that the AWP Panel would have been approved. That panel engendered a lot of critical attention. Also, I would never have had all those essays about my work in New Letters, Cimarron Review, South Carolina Review.

I'm grateful for all of it! And curious. Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, I would not have imagined myself producing a quartet of novels about this ancient capital, or the essays that I would be writing and publishing. So if I get another decade or two to write, what might come out of that? We never know how much, or how little, we might have left in us.