L’Esprit Featured Writer || Issue Five

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A conversation with author Kat Meads. Read an essay by Kat here.

L’Esprit Literary Review: How did your piece come to be, and what do you want our readers to know about your work?

Kat Meads: I first read Jean Stafford’s A Mother in History more than twenty years ago when researching another essay called “On Fighting the Temptation to Fictionalize Marina Oswald,” originally published by the journal Drunken Boat and collected in 2:12 a.m. under a different title. The widow of Lee Harvey Oswald was the focus of that essay, but Marguerite, Oswald’s mother, also came into the piece. Much has been written about Oswald’s mother, but Stafford’s book stood out in its peculiarities—and I mean that as the highest compliment. I’ve lately been on a rereading kick, and Stafford’s book was one that nagged at me to return to it for a second read. “The Deluded and the Disengaged” developed from there. 

As to the second part of the question, I’m known among my friends as being constitutionally incapable of describing my work to anyone else. Depending on the hour, to me, my various projects seem radically different from each other or radically the same. 

LLR: You also write and publish fiction. How do they intersect with your critical / nonfiction work, and how do the two (or three) genres inform one another?

KM: Which form I use for which material continues to be a bit of a mystery to me. At the onset, it’s mostly a sense: this seems like a poem/story/essay/short play. (Meaning: which form best suits what I can make of the material.) One of the earliest nonfiction pieces I wrote and published was about working at a potato grader one summer when I was young and very cash poor. It was the first time I can remember thinking: I should do this as nonfiction, not fiction. It was an experience that certainly lent itself to fiction, but something about the realities on display—the struggling farmer, the long-distance truckers—made me want to go in the other direction.

LLR: Something in The Deluded and the Disengaged resonated to us with work in the tradition of In Cold Blood. What drew you specifically to this subject matter, and how did you go about research and investigation for this essay? 

KM: I’m smiling at your mention of Capote’s startling (at the time) methods in reporting on the Holcomb, Kansas, murders. When I was in college at Carolina, two members of the English faculty, Doris Betts and Daphne Althas, “debated,” for the benefit of our class, whether the work was fiction or nonfiction. Quite the eye-opening discussion—so In Cold Blood was early embedded in my consciousness. 

For people my age in the U.S., the Kennedy assassination, its principals and ramifications will forever be of interest. Since I had researched Marguerite previously, for this essay I primarily read up on Stafford’s life and work before returning to A Mother in History, which I wanted to examine as a literary construction.

LLR: What about this particular form of the critical essay appealed to you as a medium by which to approach this subject matter?

KM: It’s a less ranging essay than the critical essays in These Particular Women—in certain aspects, it qualifies as a retrospective book review with a prelude that covers Stafford’s situation going into the assignment. She needed money; she didn’t want to go to Texas; she resented being taken away from her fiction writing. Her approach—inserting herself in a major way into a piece of reportage—was becoming more popular, thanks to the work of journalists identified as the New Journalists. But Stafford, in A Mother in History, went a step further: she’s interviewing an unraveled woman and, in the process, also documenting her own unraveling.

LLR: What is your creative process like? When you sit down to write, how do you approach your work? More specifically, can you speak to the journey of working on this piece, and the intersection of reportage and creative elements? 

KM: In nonfiction, I start with reading and accumulate a pile of hand-scrawled notes as I go along that include facts and quotes from other texts as well as my questions and asides. Usually after typing up my notes, I’m aware of where my preoccupations lie and have an idea of a narrative arc and structure for the piece. Then I try to get through a very, very rough draft in one sitting that will later be much revised. The one-sitting advantage is usually tonal. If I can find the tone I want, I can move on to sentence-to-sentence revisions. The procedure was the same with “The Deluded and the Disengaged.”

LLR: At L’Esprit we like to talk about literary ancestry, a concept somewhat removed from influences that encompasses the work that, much like genealogical ancestry, finds its way into one’s writing—intentionally or otherwise. Are there writers or works that you might see as your literary ancestors, as a writer generally and/or with regards towards this piece?

KM: I admire and bow down to many, many essayists: Orwell, Baldwin, Hardwick, Malcolm, Didion, Jenny Diski, Daphne Merkin, Jacqueline Rose, Adam Phillips … I could go on and on.

LLR: A more specific version of that same question: Which essays, stories, literary movements, traditions, or ideas do you see this project as being in conversation with? 

KM: I think most agree that the journalists who have been associated with the New Journalism label are responsible for foregrounding narrative style in nonfiction. I’m a sucker for style. Taken with the style of the author, I could read a piece on laying asphalt with pleasure.

LLR: How do you approach revision?

KM: I start from the beginning and go to the end many, many times, aiming for a certain rhythm and flow. The rhythm-and-flow focus helps ferret out digressions—information or details that may still be fascinating to me, but whose inclusion detracts from the overall argument in nonfiction and the shapeliness of the narrative in fiction.

LLR: What was the last book, story, poem, or work of art that moved you?

KM: The fantastic Dayswork, a collaborative novel by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel.

LLR: Anything else you’d like to say to our readers?

KM: Thanks for reading!

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Kat Meads is the author of three essay collections, most recently These Particular Women. She lives in California.

Photo Credit:  berenice melis on Unsplash