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Episode 36—The Joyful Kim Kankiewicz Writes with Her Ears
127 Plays8 years ago
Kim Kankiewicz won Creative Nonfiction's essay prize for Issue No. 32, an issue themed "Joy". Lots of cool insights from a brilliant voice in personal essay.
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Transcript
Introduction to CNF Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
You guys ready to have a CNF in good time?
00:00:08
Speaker
This is the hashtag CNF podcast. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara. This is where we talk to artists, writers, and filmmakers, you name it, about creating works of narrative nonfiction.
Guest Introduction: Kim Kankowitz
00:00:24
Speaker
And today, we have Kim Kankowitz, who won Creative Nonfiction's essay contest for issue 62, themed, Joy.
00:00:38
Speaker
It won the best essay prize, and it's damn good. It's called Rumors of Lost Stars. We'll get to that most certainly very, very soon. Couple of housekeeping things, as you all know. I like to try to get the subscription stuff out of the way, so please subscribe on iTunes and Google Play Music if you're an androider. I'm an androider, so it's nice to see the old hashtag up on the Google Play Music store.
00:01:08
Speaker
So Kim Kankowitz, where to start? She is a Seattle area writer and editor. She writes essays, articles, and reviews for publications that include Brain, Child, Salon, Pacific Standard, Colorado Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Full Grown People. Her work has also been anthologized in full grown people's greatest hits.
00:01:36
Speaker
So we're dealing with a heavy hitter here. Heavy hitter here.
Winning the Creative Nonfiction Essay Prize
00:01:42
Speaker
So without further ado, this is Kim Kankowitz and I started by asking her what that moment was like when she won Creative Non-Fictions SA Prize.
00:01:56
Speaker
So, in fact, I was Skyping some people at the University of Nebraska at Kearney for an article that I was researching. And I clicked on my email because I was about five minutes early, read the announcement, burst into tears. We were video conferencing. So then I was a complete mess and thought that I may have imagined the email. So throughout this
00:02:24
Speaker
conversation about a completely different topic with these people I was interviewing, I kept checking my email and confirming that it said what I had indeed read. And so it was surreal and very encouraging because as you know, you write in isolation and a rejection doesn't give you a lot of feedback. So, you know, I
00:02:52
Speaker
had submitted a different version of that essay to a couple of other places and who knows if it was even worth revising just based on a rejection even an encouraging one you don't know you know within the individual piece what's working what's not and so it was it was a surprise it was a validation that you know I can keep working on something and it maybe is on the right track and
00:03:21
Speaker
Just that I had connected with somebody, I guess that's the other thing about writing personal essays. I don't know if anybody else cares. And what I have to process in my own thinking and experience, does that matter to anybody else?
The Purpose of Personal Essays
00:03:40
Speaker
Will that have meaning to anybody else? Not in an egocentric way, but the reason I write is to make connections with other people.
00:03:49
Speaker
If it did that in some way, that's really encouraging. When you were drafting the essay and going through your various levels of creation with it, how mindful were you and are you of trying to connect to the reader on the other side of it that you may never meet? Or is that something you save for later in the process once you start chipping at the marble? Yeah, so I start with that.
00:04:19
Speaker
And then I revise with that. But while I'm writing, I get a little lost in the language that might be sort of something that slows me down in my process. But while I'm writing, I'm really focused on language and structure and not so much on audience. So I hope that I have an idea of that when I start working on the piece. And then when I have a draft,
00:04:48
Speaker
I start looking at that again. Do you have an ideal reader in mind when you're crafting an essay or something similar? Yeah. I think someone who has some of my experience in common is probably what I'm picturing. It depends on the piece. Sometimes it's someone more like a parent figure, I guess.
00:05:16
Speaker
someone younger than me. So it really depends on the thing that I'm writing. But often, like with this one, it was somebody who could find commonality with my particular experience. And how did you arrive at this essay, Rumors of Lost Stars? And how did you devise its structure around these three stars, like Vega, Altair, and Deneb?
Structure and Theme of Essay
00:05:46
Speaker
Maybe you can give a little oversight of what kind of just in a little graph about what the essay is about in your words and then maybe then dive into the how you decided to hang the structure around those stars. Sure. Okay, so the essay is set during a summer while I was still an undergraduate and was losing vision in my right eye. And at that point, I had pretty
00:06:14
Speaker
low vision in my left eye as well. So I was teaching assistant at an astronomy camp that involved pretty much any night it was clear enough to see the stars, we would go stargazing. And it was an experience that felt, you know, I felt very separate from the students that I was taking on these stargazing trips, because I couldn't see what they could see. And
00:06:44
Speaker
that I had recently recovered or was in recovery from an eating disorder. So some of those feelings of being separate from and just, you know, it's at the age where you're kind of figuring out your identity and all those things were converging. And so that was, I guess, probably one of the more profound experiences I'd had at the point when I originally started writing the essay, which was just a few years after that.
00:07:14
Speaker
that I finished it, submitted it a couple of places, just didn't really have a sense of what it was about, even for myself. And so it just sat for a long time without me going back to it until creative nonfiction had announced the joy theme. And I think that going back to this as I had been at the back of my mind,
00:07:42
Speaker
for about a year before that. And I don't honestly know why, you know, what brought it back, except that I'm very motivated by closure. So anything that I've started at some point, you know, I want to come back around to it and and complete it. So the theme just something clicked with it that I this is about joy. It's about an experience because during that summer, there was one night that we went
00:08:11
Speaker
to a rural area and I didn't expect that this would be any different than any other night we went stargazing but I was able to see the stars and it was a very joyful moment. And so I then with the theme of joy was able to look again at the meaning of that night within the context of that summer and what does that have to say about the experience of joy. And so then
00:08:40
Speaker
When I started writing, I kind of gravitate toward threes anyway in structuring even an individual sentence. And so kind of jumped out right away just with what this draft that I had lying around. And I went back to read that there were kind of three parts already. And so the stars in the summer triangle, which we definitely observed while we were
00:09:09
Speaker
doing our star gazing because it was during the summer. So that's just jumped out as a way to structure the essay. And then when that was there, it made it a lot easier.
00:09:21
Speaker
That must have been a very exciting moment for you just as an artist to see that congruency. Like you already had sort of that wire frame of your essay set up, but then to see such a cosmic alignment to, you know, literally in a sense that these three stars and the stories behind them actually just paired up so wonderfully with your own personal experience.
00:09:47
Speaker
I mean, you must have just started levitating when you saw that congruency. Yeah, pretty much. I wrote solid for like a Friday that I had the day off through really late, you know, it was probably Monday, like really late on Sunday night. Once I stumbled on that, because it was so exciting, it just sat down and did the whole thing in a weekend.
00:10:16
Speaker
And what's really kind of interesting about how this essay came to be published and this issue of creative nonfiction was you essentially had this nice locomotive but no tracks to guide it. And then when you got the focus, when someone put what it really was about in front of you,
00:10:39
Speaker
it honed the focus of the thing and it was able to get in motion in that sense. Sometimes people write through it and then you start to figure out what it's about, but it's almost like you wrote it and then weren't quite sure what it was about until an outside force made you shoehorn it into something and it really allowed the thing to take flight.
00:11:03
Speaker
I hope that happens again.
Writing to Prompts and Themes
00:11:06
Speaker
I have a lot of pieces that I don't quite know what they're about. Yeah.
00:11:11
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of theme things and I imagine that it's even if it's a bit of a stretch I mean, maybe this essay could vary if they did like a Who knows like the opposite the opposite of joy some sort of grief thing or a lost thing I'm sure you could have found a way to maneuver and manipulate it to fit that theme so I guess things can be a bit amoebic and then they can uh and can can can float and
00:11:39
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Find a way and find a focus if you just kind of write to a certain prompt or a certain theme and you can kind of make it what you want to make it. So when you were writing it, what was your, you said like when you got the theme of it and you kind of wrote it in a bit of a sprint. But what is your daily ritual like when you're sort of in that synthesis mode of creating something of this nature? Right.
00:12:06
Speaker
So I do like to have a longer period to write. Getting up in the morning and writing for an hour, something like that, doesn't typically work for me because I take a long time to think and figure out where I am in the piece. So what works best for me is either at night I'm a parent, so after everyone is sleeping,
00:12:36
Speaker
I can stay up pretty late and get lost in a piece. So having quiet hours to do that. Or I do generally write some every weekend, not quite the extent of that essay in this one in particular. But I do usually write for a number of hours straight on a weekend.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's kind of writing to find the thread and then writing around it and playing with language. I'm very motivated by language attentive to language and finding phrases and where they fit. And, you know, so I think it's kind of I actually just heard a painter speak about her process and how she gets kind of
00:13:34
Speaker
lost in the painting and what brushstrokes and colors go where. And it sounded a lot like writing to me that you have this big piece and then all of the elements of it kind of need time and space to figure out where they go and how they fit together.
00:13:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's great that you bring up a painter. A lot of times I like asking people, whether they be writers or filmmakers or whatever, like what other artistic media do you consume to help inform your vocation?
Influence of Artistic Media on Writing
00:14:10
Speaker
Because you can find a lot of those, you can find that inspiration in maybe music or painting that helps you become a stronger writer.
00:14:18
Speaker
Is that something you like to revisit elsewhere? Like what other things might you use to unplug from writing, but also help inform what you like to do? Yeah, choral music for sure. And some of what I'm working on now is about choral music. But I think the sound, because like I was saying about language,
00:14:43
Speaker
I write with my ear and there's a connection between the appeal of that to me and the appeal of choral music as a participant and then being surrounded by the sound and the rhythm of what I write is satisfying. I like the rhythm of writing and I find that in music too. So I can't write to music that is too
00:15:14
Speaker
upbeat or has lyrics that are too interesting because I can't really tune that out. I pay attention to that. But I do like writing to say something like medieval or Renaissance music in Latin if I can't really understand what they're saying. And just the soothing sound of that and the different tones of that are not distracting to me and seem like they sort of
00:15:44
Speaker
support what I'm trying to do. And what other writers or essayists helped inform your style? And who were some of those influences that helped you come to the place where you're writing the type of work that Rumors of Lost Stars has become? Who were some of those influences? Yeah.
Influences and Inspirations
00:16:07
Speaker
So Brian Doyle and
00:16:11
Speaker
It's awesome that he's in this issue of creative nonfiction. That's crazy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And specifically him because a lot of great writing is about really, really difficult stuff, especially personal writing. And I appreciate that writing. But for whatever reason, I am attempting a lot of times to write about something
00:16:40
Speaker
that in the end has kind of a redemptive quality or there's some sort of moment of elevation that sort of makes the difficult stuff beautiful in some way. And I think he does that really well. One of the first things I remember reading of his was a brief essay, a brief excerpt from his book about
00:17:08
Speaker
but now I'm gonna just space on the title of it, but about his son's heart condition. And there was an essay published in one of the best American essay series about the hummingbird heart and then elephant hearts. And it kind of, in this very brief essay, contained a whole bunch of meaning. It was beautiful, but it was about a really difficult thing, his son's heart condition. And then since reading,
00:17:39
Speaker
some of his work, I find that quality of finding beauty in the things that are traumatic or difficult parts of the human experience. Yeah, so he does that. I really enjoy the lyrical quality of Sonya Livingston. I didn't know much about her until fairly recently. I love her work.
00:18:10
Speaker
because she pulls together many themes and knowledge about different people and historical moments, and I love that too. When I start writing something, everything I write is about everything in the world when I start writing it and then rein it in somehow. But I love it when people manage to do that in some way that
00:18:36
Speaker
This piece is going to be about this one experience, but I'm also going to talk about the history of the women's movement at the same time, or this historical figure, and somehow weave that in in a way that makes sense.
00:18:55
Speaker
Yeah, getting to your point about how Brian Doyle was able to take some heavy topic, but produce some sort of uplifting quality towards the end. In the third section of your essay, there were a couple sentences I had underlined, specifically
00:19:16
Speaker
As you're losing your eyesight in your right eye, my ability to see the stars doesn't mean they are gone. And then towards the very end, you say, what if joy is the momentary glimpse of a beauty we sense but can't always perceive?
00:19:32
Speaker
And it's like this thing like you're making lemonade out of lemons in this sense. And that's going right to what you were saying about trying to end these things that are a bit heavy in subject matter and giving them levity and saying like, well, I may be down, but I'm not out, so to speak.
00:19:49
Speaker
Yeah, and you know what? It's really hard to do that now. In the last several months, you've probably experienced that too. Yeah, so that's made writing really challenging if that's kind of part of my personal mission, what propels me as a writer. Just the climate right now is not conducive to that.
00:20:15
Speaker
Yeah, which is kind of serendipitous that an issue-themed joy of unexpected brightness in the darkest times seemed to come out right after January 20th. So it was kind of like, all right, well, this gives us some degree of hope that there are these wonderful stories that can lift us up and provide some of that inspiration that we need and let us know that it's out there and that there is something beyond the immediate despair. Yeah.
00:20:46
Speaker
So what are some books or books that you tend to reread the most if you are in fact one of the people who are rereaders of books? Yeah. You know, I have to confess that I'm not because I like to read everything and I always feel like there's more that I want to read and haven't read and I'm going to run out of time.
00:21:15
Speaker
So I don't typically reread book length work. I do reread essays. And many of them are in anthologies. So Best American, you know, I have those and reread work from those. And I try to always be subscribing to a handful of literary journals and you know, kind of vary which ones I'm subscribing to. And then
00:21:42
Speaker
keep them on hand so I can reread the ones that stand out to me, I guess. What are some of the lit journals you subscribe to? Currently, I have Creative Nonfiction, the Georgia Review, the Normal School,
00:22:01
Speaker
ruminate. I like that one that has like, like I was talking about the redemptive quality, that one is overtly connected to faith. So there's a lot of times a strain of that in their work. I'm peeking back at my work right now. Under the gum tree and I have that. And I think that's all I'm subscribing to currently. I have the Missouri Review. I like that journal and I have subscribed to that
00:22:31
Speaker
in the past. Yeah. And what are some essays that you reread a lot? I reread a lot of Rebecca Solnitz and I'm not necessarily really writing like her, but they're just so idea rich and you kind of have to reread to get what you didn't get the first time. And what was the moment you knew that you wanted to be a writer?
Early Passion for Writing
00:23:01
Speaker
as soon as I could read. Yeah, that's all I really ever wanted to be. And so I became everything else. And then but yeah, as a kid, I remember the first book I read was a Nancy Drew book, and high literary quality that it is. It, I just knew that I wanted to do that, you know, create that experience for
00:23:30
Speaker
other people because reading was my favorite thing to do as a kid. And yeah, I just wanted to be part of the group of people who made that happen. Did you as a little kid, did you write your own Nancy Drew mysteries? Oh, yeah. My friend and I enacted some too. But yeah, I very imitative kinds of writing. My dad had a
00:24:00
Speaker
typewriter at home and so I probably used it more than he did writing You know, we'd see a movie or something and I'd come home and write I guess what amounts to fan fiction with characters and Imitate the styles of the books that I enjoyed. So yeah, definitely So what would you say to this point is your proudest moment as a writer? The creative nonfiction
00:24:28
Speaker
just publication there and the prize would be up there. But actually, one of my favorite moments and proudest moments is writing and delivering a eulogy for my grandfather's funeral. And when was that? That was in 1997. And he, my brother and I, my brother wrote a song that we performed and then
00:24:59
Speaker
Um, yeah, I wrote just it, it was at that time to me felt like the most cohesive thing I had read and are written and read in public. So what did your grandfather mean to you?
Impact of Family Work Ethic
00:25:16
Speaker
Um, he, so he was a carpenter. He was a handyman kind of guy and he was very honest and hardworking and he,
00:25:28
Speaker
We lived about six hours from where I grew up and he and my grandmother would come to almost anything that my brother and I had, like we were in plays or when we graduated, we had certain events going on. They would come to those and then my grandpa would come in the summer and kind of help us renovate our house basically every summer, kind of focus on a project. And so just the sort of being involved
00:25:58
Speaker
with extended family being supportive, always coming to show support and interest in what we were doing. And his ability to do those home renovation projects was like magic to me. I'm so not mechanical. And so what he could do, you know, it's like, how can anybody do that? And I would just watch him and and be fascinated and
00:26:27
Speaker
highly impressed by what he could do. And the way he approached his work, did that help inform you in the work that you do now?
Craftsmanship in Writing
00:26:37
Speaker
Probably the sticking with it part, for sure. But I have kind of thought about this, you know, the kind of worker or the approach that he took or somebody who is kind of working with something
00:26:56
Speaker
hands on, I mean it is an art in a way, but there's a tangible quality and a goal that you know when it's fixed. And sometimes I wish that's the kind of work that I did because writing is so not like that, especially with this kind of personal essay or creative nonfiction writing.
00:27:19
Speaker
It's so subjective much more time that you can never know if it needs fixing or if it just didn't land in the right lap. But with craftsmanship of some nature, there are some nuance to say building a table, but by and large, if it stands upright and doesn't wobble, well, there you go.
00:27:41
Speaker
What was the, and it could have been the eulogy you presented at your grandfather's funeral, but what was the biggest validation you received in your early years that gave you confidence that you could write and tell stories as a vocation? Yeah, so actually as a senior in high school, the English teacher, I went to a very small school, so we all had the same senior English teacher, and she was wonderful.
00:28:11
Speaker
You know, but she nominated my writing for a state award. And that was that kind of made me think for the first time I could do this for somebody besides myself. Yeah. So that that moment stands out to me that it's kind of clicked that even though I had wanted to be a writer all my life, I I kind of thought real people don't do that. Right. So, yeah. So that was
00:28:41
Speaker
That was the moment when I thought, oh, yeah, maybe I could. Yeah, maybe that was the moment where you and then subsequently your English teacher gave yourself permission to pursue it. Exactly, yeah. And that seems to be kind of a recursive process of, okay, I'm giving myself permission. Like right now, I'm giving myself permission to write fiction, which I have told myself I'm not good at doing that for
00:29:11
Speaker
off and on for years. But yeah, I have to give myself permission to say, well, it may not go anywhere, but I'm going to write it anyway. And what was that piece of writing that your English teacher nominated? Do you remember? I do. That was a poem inspired by a T.S. Eliot poem. And I don't actually write poetry at this point, but it was a narrative poem. So it had
00:29:39
Speaker
you know, the elements of story that I'm drawn to and then the language, like I said, that was, I think, the part that got it nominated, the use of language. What did being a successful writer look like when you were in college versus where you are now with several published credits and being a working writer? Yeah.
00:30:07
Speaker
So I kind of always thought, well, I'll know that I'm a writer when I write a book, and I haven't done that still. So in college, that would have been kind of the definition for me. And since then, it's setting publication in different venues as a goal, having a piece that means a lot to me published eventually,
00:30:36
Speaker
I set more project-specific goals or publication-specific goals in terms of the venue for publication. And just if I can do it and continue to make some kind of a living with the kind of writing that pays, too, is a little different. But just to be able to continue to do that is success, and it's not so much as
00:31:06
Speaker
being like I thought as a college student, somebody who's written a book and is known for having written a book, that isn't so important to me anymore. And I do want to write a book still, but I don't think that defines me as a writer at this point.
00:31:24
Speaker
And how do you process, say, the new year and the goals for keeping the writing vocation afloat and ensuring that you're sort of creatively fulfilled, but you're also doing the kind of nuts and bolts things that allow you to keep doing it for the long term? Yeah. I always start, I do kind of a visual mapping thing at the beginning of every year with
00:31:52
Speaker
sort of do a grid on a big piece of paper and throw the the projects that are at the back of my mind or in some some draft form each of those into a square and then make little notes on you know what's kind of the most compelling to me right now what could be another step in that process and so then when I do on the weekend work on something it's it's the one that's I've identified as you know closest to done or the
00:32:21
Speaker
I see an opportunity to refine it and submit it to a certain place. So at the beginning of the year, I put it in visual form. And then the writing that pays the bills, that's fallen into a little more of a schedule. It's the nine to five working time. So that's always going on. And I try to fit the other writing into the evenings and weekends and use that visual mapping as a way to organize my thinking about it.
00:32:51
Speaker
I think there's a quote from Tony Robbins who once said he's like, we tend to overestimate what we can do in one year, but we underestimate what we can do in 10.
Future Aspirations
00:33:02
Speaker
And I wonder, how do you see yourself long term? In the span of 10 years, what would you like to see your name on? I think a collection of essays.
00:33:21
Speaker
And a novel, I would like to write a novel. So 10 years, that seems like I probably could do that in 10 years. Very nice. And where can people find you online, Kim? I'm at kimkankowitz.com. OK. And are you on any of the other socials, or is it just your website?
Where to Find Kim Kankowitz Online
00:33:43
Speaker
No, I'm on Twitter.
00:33:46
Speaker
silent on Twitter but I do have an account it's at Kim probable and I just have a personal Facebook page at this point but sure yep fantastic well Kim congratulations on on winning the SA prize it's it's a great story I've read it twice already I'll probably read it again very soon and yeah and thanks so much for carving out some time of your morning and to come on the show
00:34:11
Speaker
Sure, thanks for asking me, Brendan. It was fun talking with you. Oh, fantastic. Thanks so much, and we'll be in touch, I'm sure. OK, sounds good. All right, take care. You too. Bye.