Kennedy, Kate 1948-

PERSONAL:

Born May 15, 1948, in Winchester, MA; daughter of John L. (a psychology professor) and Nancy (a personnel administrator); married Nathanael Greene (a landscape gardener), June 14, 1980; children: Annie Burke (stepdaughter), Nathan Greene (stepson), Rachel Greene. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Wellesley College, B.A. (with honors), 1970; University of California at Los Angeles, M.A., 1972. Politics: Democrat. Hobbies and other interests: Hiking, gardening, reading, traveling.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Cape Elizabeth, ME. E-mail—katherinekennedy@gmail.com.

CAREER:

Freelance writer, editor, discussion leader. Community Learning Center for Adults, Cambridge, MA, coordinator of English as Second Language Services, 1972-77; Somerset County Basic Skills Program, Skowhegan, ME, director, 1979-80; Portland High School, Portland, ME, part-time writing teacher, 1983-2003; Waynflete Summertime Arts Program, creative writing teacher, 1989-92; Portland Adult Education, Portland, coteacher of sudden fiction, beginning 1998. Writing workshop instructor. Board member, Maine Arts Commission's Arts-in-Education Panel, 1989-92, Maine Alliance for Arts Education, 1993-97.

MEMBER:

Poets & Writers, Maine Artist Roster, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.

AWARDS, HONORS:

American Pen Women's scholarship, Mature Women in Letters, 1988; Fiction winner of writing competition, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, 2005.

WRITINGS:

(Coauthor) Using Language Experience with Adults, New Readers Press (Syracuse, NY), 1975.

(Coauthor) Games & Butterflies: A Resource Book for Adult Education Teachers, New Readers Press (Syracuse, NY), 1979.

End over End (novel), Soho Press (New York, NY), 2001.

More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Maine Women (biography), TwoDot (Guilford, CT), 2005.

Also author of three unpublished novels; contributor of short fiction to anthologies, including New Maine Writing II, 1979; and Teachers As Writers Anthology, 1989. Contributor to periodicals, including Dissident, Kennebec, Island Journal, and Arise. Editor of guidebook for Maine Island Trail Association.

SIDELIGHTS:

Kate Kennedy wrote three novels that never saw print before publishing her fourth, End over End, to great critical acclaim. The story of a troubled teenage girl named Ivory, who runs away from home and is eventually discovered murdered, End over End drew on the author's many years of teaching experience. "While teaching at Portland [Maine] …," related Tim O'Sullivan for the Portland Phoenix, "Kennedy has had students with siblings murdered, and students who spent time at the youth correctional facility. Teenage girls who do not act out, troubled but abandoned, particularly drove her to write this book." The novel is not so much about the tragic plot as it is about the characters, and Kennedy tells her tale from multiple perspectives, including through the eyes of parents, teachers, and friends in a way that O'Sullivan compared to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

Critics had high praise for Kennedy's debut, describing End over End as a heart-wrenching story in which the author offers no easy answers to the tragedy. "Kennedy's portrait of poor, suburban youth culture is pitch-perfect and devastating in its implications," reported a Publishers Weekly contributor, "and her prose is so beautiful that the apparent lack of focus hardly seems to matter." Judith Bolton-Fasman similarly commented in a New York Times Book Review article that "Kennedy's prose is replete with sensuous detail and keen insight." Writing in Library Journal, Margaret Smith concluded, "Atmosphere and characters are right on the money" in a novel that is both "heartbreaking and healing."

Kennedy told CA: "I write because I love to ‘get off the planet’ into fictional worlds; I write to inhabit other places and times and to find out what motivates, inspires and obsesses the people who live there—and then. I write because it's what I do, it makes me happy and I feel most myself while I'm doing it (which doesn't mean that writing is always easy). I write because I love to learn about history, new places, confusing situations, and to follow the subjects which for some reason well up and need me to write about them. Right now these include: Navajo uranium mining, the early days of nuclear bomb testing and the space program, rock shops, fossils. … This makes research tricky, since I live in Maine and I know so very little about these topics. To learn more quickly, I took a semester leave from my half-time teaching job in the fall of 2001 so that my husband and I could travel around the Southwest for six weeks, soaking up smells, sights, landscapes, stories. I still feel woefully ignorant, but I'm excited and eager nonetheless. Which brings me to this: I write to take risks, to tell stories I'm not sure I have the right to tell or the skills or heart to pull off—but I'm compelled to try anyway.

"The novel End over End … is a completely different beast. It tells the story of a murder, an investigation, a trial. Ivory Towle, a rural New England teenager, is running wild at the time she disappears one summer afternoon. Six weeks later her body is discovered in the woods. Her boyfriend and his friend are accused of the crime, but there's little concrete evidence against them. The book is told in ninety-nine short chapters through the eyes of twenty-six different characters—from Ivory herself, her family, her girlfriends to the boys accused and their families; from a teacher, a reporter, and a funeral director to defense lawyers, a prosecutor, an elderly juror. The multiple, revolving points of view seemed the best way to bring a reader close-in to this story. Because the murder is never really solved, I knew this couldn't be a conventional ‘whodunnit.’ In fact, it never occurred to me that I was writing a mystery at all. (I still don't think of it that way.) Where did this novel come from? Once I served on a jury. More important than that, however: I've taught writing to teenagers for almost twenty years; their stories haunt me, the perils they face, their strength as well as their confusion.

"It feels important to tell you that I've been a writer for a long time—over twenty-four years. End over End is my fourth novel, represented by a fourth agent, though it's the first one to be published. I've had high hopes for publication with each novel and liked the agent I had for each, but it didn't come together until relatively recently. In the face of many rejections, I've come back to the notion that writing must contain within itself enough reward, as hard as that has been at times to remember. I've referred to myself (sometimes with gallows humor when a novel came so close but not quite close enough—yet again) as the ‘queen of intrinsic pleasure.’ It's wonderful to at last have a novel out in the world. But it's not the same as writing. That's the real joy and what matters most."