Interview With Author Kate Evans
By The Misfit | October 13, 2008
Kate Evans was introduced to me by Patricia Harrelson who, if you’ll recall, I interviewed about her book Between Two Women: Conversations About Love & Relationships back in August. Kate is a prolific writer who has three books available: a non fiction book called Negotiating the Self: Identity, Sexuality, and Emotion in Learning to Teach, a book of poetry entitled Like All We Love, and her new book For the May Queen.
Kate can be found online at her blog Being and Writing and I hope you’ll stop by to see her. In the meantime, please enjoy our brief conversation.
You write in many different genres – fiction, non-fiction, poetry – are you drawn to one genre more than any other or do you find that there is a common thread that runs through all of them?
I love them all for different reasons. Each one provides me with a way to dig into life. Writing a poem tends to be immediately satisfying because even if I revise it (which I do 99 percent of the time), I still can generally write something that feels complete in one sitting.
I love fiction because my characters become so real to me. It’s like having many people live inside me that I didn’t know were there. With fiction writing I can be a generally healthy, artistic Sybil.
As far as nonfiction, I’ve been working on a memoir. It’s very close to the bone because it’s about my father’s long illness and death followed by my mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Writing it is helping me come to new understandings about how we all grapple with mortality.
Can you give us an overview about your newest release For the May Queen?
It’s about what happens when we leave home. Everyone leaves the nest at some point and has to face decisions about what to do with a new sense of freedom. The choices we make help us grapple with who we are and who we want to be.
The story focuses on 17-year-old Norma’s first year in college living in the dorms. It takes place in 1981, so it’s got a lot of fun 70s and 80s culture in it. It’s also about the culture of dorm life, the real stuff: the sex, the drugs, the drinking. Many people either don’t know about this world or have been through it themselves. The question is: Is this a normal rite of passage or a societal problem, or both in some way? Of course the novel doesn’t answer that question. The readers experience life with Norma and get to draw their own conclusions.
Coming-of-age stories are always popular, both in terms of availability and readership. Why do you think the genre has consistently fared so well?
Because generally that’s the time of life when there’s a lot of external and internal conflict. In some ways, we are at our emotional peak. I also think there’s a nostalgic appeal. And the interest in thinking about “if I could do it all over again, I would have done x, y or z.”
You have three books in progress – Complementary Colors (to be released in 2009) a Memoir about caregiving, and a historical novel. Would you give us a sneak-peek for each one?
Complementary Colors is about a straight woman who falls in love with a lesbian. It’s about how we grapple with who we are when we change radically.
The memoir, which I referred to earlier, is essentially about caregiving. My father was ill for 25, and my mother was his primary caregiver. We’d always hoped when he died that Mom would have a second chance at life: to travel, to do whatever she wanted to do. But shortly after he died, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. These stories are intertwined with my spouse’s caregiving for her ill mother. There’s also some backstory about my coming-out at age 31. A portion of the memoir is being published in the next issue of the literary magazine ZYZZYVA.
The historical novel is based on the real lives of three famous bisexual/lesbian women during the 1930s, 40s and 50s. They were all writers, they were all married to (or divorced from) men, and there was a kind of sexual triangle going on. They crossed paths with many other famous people, such as Truman Capote, Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams, Garbo, Deitrich, W.H. Auden… the list goes on and on. As you can imagine, it’s quite an undertaking and I’m feeling a little stymied by it right now. I feel like I need to go sit in a cabin for 2 months to really get a handle on it. Maybe I’ll get a chance to do something like that during next summer break.
There is a blog entry on your blog entitled The Lesson – it caught my interest because of the apathy and lack of personal responsibility I noticed in students during my very brief tenure teaching high school English. Did the student reply to your challenge?
No he didn’t. I was disappointed because I was looking forward to getting something creative out of him! Like you, I taught high school for a while (three years). I didn’t care for the whole system of bells and cyclone fences and kids who were hating it all and would obviously thrive in some other environment.
Teaching college, I certainly do come across some apathy. But it’s easier to hand their choices back over to the students in college than in high school. If they don’t turn in an assignment or don’t come to class, that’s their adult decision.
But I’d say the majority of my students are unique, interesting people with stories to tell. When I focus on their humanness, instead of on the minutiae that can threaten to tow you under in acadmia, I find teaching much more enriching.
And when I teach undergrad classes, I try to remember what I was like as an undergrad. I was frustrated with life, a bit lost, and probably a pain-in-the-ass to some of my teachers–not too unlike Norma in For the May Queen.
I would much prefer, however, to teach in an environment that didn’t involve grades or requirements. All that stuff gets in the way of learning. I’d love to just to teach writing to to people who want to become better writers. I know there are some writers who make their living by teaching private workshops. I’ve done some of that and really enjoyed it. However, to make a living off it would mean running a small business, not my forte.
Topics: interview with the misfit, writing from the misfit | No Comments »