An Interview with Jackie Thomas-Kennedy
I first encountered Jackie Thomas-Kennedy’s work in Electric Literature, where I read her flash piece “Eugenie is Anointed,” which was selected by Kelly Link as the winner of the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. Thomas-Kennedy’s is the kind of writing that makes you sit up in your chair, that makes you forget your tea—it will go cold, but it doesn’t matter—and forget the rice cooking on the stove. That is to say, her stories are immediately and irresistibly engaging, both because her details are so sharply polished, and because you can sense from the first lines the emotional turbulence churning beneath the surface.
Issue 19 of The Idaho Review features three of Thomas-Kennedy’s flash pieces: “Apologetics,” “Secret Faucet,” and “Ablutions.” You can read those pieces in our archive. I had the privilege of chatting with Thomas-Kennedy over email about flash fiction and her writing process.
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IR: Can you talk about your writing process with flash fiction and how it differs, if at all, from your process with short stories?
JKT: Writing always starts with a visual image for me. The only intention, initially, is to press on the image and see what happens. In the case of these three flash pieces, I was thinking a lot about handwashing and its prevalence in conversation throughout 2020. I kept picturing sink basins and running water. Perhaps because I was thinking about action with fairly linear structure - washing hands, trimming nails, taking a bath - I knew these stories would be on the shorter side. The writing process itself is consistent.
IR: One of the many features of your stories that I admire is the rich subtext, and how you manage to leave much unstated while giving the reader a strong sense of backstory, character relationships, and emotion. Does this come about in revision? Do you do pre-writing, or other kinds of writing about your characters outside of the story?
JKT: One of my first writing teachers - the beloved late Wesley Gibson - handed a draft back to me with the observation that my characters were far too candid with each other in the throes of an argument. They were saying (screaming, in fact) what they actually felt; Wesley thought the conflict would seep out in a much more circuitous fashion. I think about that whenever I'm trying to shape conflict. My primary interest in dialogue is the way it accidentally reflects whatever characters aren't saying. In terms of backstory, I cut enormous swaths out of every draft during revision, so I always know more about the characters than what ultimately appears on the page.
IR: You write often about girls and women who grapple with the roles they are asked to play by other people—by partners, by family, by religion, and by the world. I wonder if you could talk a bit about how you go about developing your characters.
JKT: I try to figure out who characters are by putting them in conversation; I'm also interested in the way they relate to literal objects, and the connection between sense and memory. Right now, I'm working on something set during the pandemic, and I find that I am constantly revising in order to remove gestures that wouldn't be visible on someone wearing a face mask. I've discovered that I often turn to facial expressions to develop character, something I didn't know until I started working on stories of people in public space in the summer of 2020.
IR: What are you reading that is exciting you, and why?
JKT: I just finished Brandon Taylor's Real Life. Among countless things I admire is the way Taylor controls time. He places characters on a tennis court or in a laboratory, for instance, and really stays with them, balancing rich interiority with constant physicality. The perceptive quality of the narration is astonishing, in particular the use of nervous laughter. I'm always reading The Journals of John Cheever, in no particular order. Everything Jo Ann Beard writes makes me want to flip back to the first page and start all over again as soon as I've reached the end. And one more: I read and loved and was brought to tears by Mary Ruefle's essay "Dear Friends" in The Sewanee Review.
IR: What's next for your writing? Can you tell us more about the project set during the pandemic?
JKT: I'm writing a novel about two families that form a pod in 2020 and eventually move into one house together.
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Jackie Thomas-Kennedy is the winner of the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. She was awarded a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in 2014. Her work has been recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts, and her stories have appeared/are forthcoming in Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Glimmer Train, Georgetown Review, SLICE, StoryQuarterly, Madison Review, Canteen, L Magazine, Day One, Crazyhorse, Bennington Review, Harpur Palate, and One Story. Her reviews have appeared in Harvard Review, The Millions, and on the Ploughshares blog. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Fine Arts Work Center, Ucross Foundation, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and the Saltonstall Foundation. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University School of the Arts.