Interview with Author &

PaperBackSwap Member

Mary Potter Kenyon

 

Mary Potter Kenyon is the author of five Familius titles:
Coupon Crazy: The Science, the Savings, and the Stories Behind America’s Extreme Obsession, Chemo-Therapist: How Cancer Cured a Marriage, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace, and Mary & Me: A Lasting Link Through Ink, (with co-writer Mary Jedlicka Humston), and a grief journal slated for publication in early 2018.

Mary has graciously offered to be interviewed here on the PaperBackSwap Blog.

 

Welcome Ms. Kenyon and thank you for agreeing to this interview!

Thank you for featuring me and my books.

 

You wrote your book, Refined by Fire in the two years following the death of your husband of 34 years. Where and how did you find the courage to share such a personal journey?

I’d already written about caring for my husband David during his cancer treatment in my book “Chemo-Therapist: How Cancer Cured a Marriage.” Our marriage relationship was revitalized through that cancer journey, and David was a five-year survivor when he had a heart attack. After writing my way through caregiving in 2006 it seemed only natural to write my way through grief, too. Within months of my husband’s death, I was facing the loss of grandson who was battling terminal cancer. Writing and reading is how I’ve always faced things, even as a teenager. I wrote “Chemo-Therapist” because every book I picked up about caregiving through cancer ended in the death of the cancer patient. I wasn’t about to read those, so I wrote my own, a story of love, hope, and a revitalized marriage relationship. My husband always told me it was a love story, not a cancer story. David had been the biggest supporter of my writing. “Coupon Crazy” was his idea, “Chemo-Therapist” was our love story, and “Refined By Fire” was written because of the loss of him. Pieces of my personal journal and blog appear in “Refined By Fire,” revealing the rawness of grief. I wrote it with blood, sweat, and tears, and it is the book I am most proud of. I knew I wouldn’t be able to help others in their own journey if I wasn’t willing to be completely open and honest in my writing. 

 

In your book you quote many other authors on the theme of loss and grief. One of my favorites is by Anne Lamott:

“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”

Do you have a go-to quote? One that usually helps you to put things in perspective?

For years, I’d utilized my personal journal to jot down quotes or paragraphs from books I was reading, words that inspired me or said perfectly what I was feeling or experiencing. I’d noticed other authors using quotes at the beginning of their chapters, particularly in non-fiction, and I wanted to do the same thing. The idea was that if that author’s words spoke to the reader, they’d want to read more. I love leading readers to other books and authors. Lo and behold, one day I learned that there was actually a term for the quotes at the beginning of a chapter; epigraph. Now, I use epigraphs in all of my books. I don’t have a single favorite quote. Depending on what is going on in my life, it changes. At various times, I’ve even taped a quote to my desk, or carried one in my purse, usually when I am struggling with something and need inspiration or encouragement. I’m also drawn to journal, calendars, wall plaques and stationery with inspiring quotes.

 

What would you like to share with others who are going through grief and loss?

In my upcoming journal, I write about how many weeks went by after our downstairs and upstairs hallway lightbulbs burnt out. I couldn’t bring myself to haul out the ladder and replace them. That was something my husband had always done. I didn’t ask anyone else to do it, either. In fact, my teen daughters thought something had gone wrong with the switches. We adjusted to the newly darkened hallways. We’d leave the light on and the door open in the upstairs bathroom so we could see the steps at night. We’d open the downstairs bathroom and turn on that light to illuminate the dark hallway closet. We lived that way for months until one of my older daughters was helping me clean out the closet and wondered out loud why the hallway light wasn’t working. My daughters were horrified when I admitted I hadn’t gotten around to changing the lightbulbs. My point? It is a very dark night of the soul when we lose a loved one. But there are things we can do for ourselves during that dark period; read books by those who have gone down the path before us, attend support groups, reach out to others in our newly discovered empathy, or by journaling. We have the ‘lightbulbs,’ or the tools for healing available to us. We just have to utilize them. 

 

You are Senior Services librarian at the Dyersville, Iowa library. Have books always been a part of your life?

As a child growing up in poverty, I thought only rich people owned books. I learned to read before I attended school, and spent hours learning to print my name so I could obtain the coveted library card. It was a rite of passage in our family. During the summer, my two younger sisters and I would check out five to six books each on a Friday, and by Monday morning we’d have finished our own and be trading with each other. I worked at the same little local library as a teenager every summer, and again (with the same boss!) for a couple of years before my eighth child was born. When I needed to find work after my husband’s death, my first job was as a director of a small library. Then I worked as a newspaper reporter for eighteen months, what some would consider the perfect job for a writer. But it felt as though the endless meeting coverage, Beef and Pork Queen, corn stories, and legislative coffee coverage was killing me creatively. Now I’m back in a library, doing all my favorite parts of the job, without the responsibilities of a Director, and working on a book about using creativity in everyday life. I always dreamed of being an author or a librarian when I grew up, and now I’m both. 

 

How did you find PaperBackSwap? Any special memories?

I’ve always wanted to own a lot of books. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t have shelves of books in their home. As a teen, I saved every penny of my babysitting money to purchase cheap Scholastic paperbacks. When I began homeschooling in 1992, I had a wonderful excuse for buying books. And for a short while, my husband and I even operated a used bookstore, so I had ready access to books. During that period of time, I was bartering books for clothing, toys, and educational materials for my children, so the idea of swapping books was nothing new to me. I’ve been a member since shortly after its inception, so I can’t even remember how I discovered it.  

I’ll never forget the day a man came to our door, a book in his hand, his wife waiting for him by the car. His name was Pete, and though I can’t remember what state he’d traveled from, he was passing through Iowa to go to a wedding and he’d decided to hand-deliver the children’s book I had ordered. My husband and I stood on the porch together, listening to this man’s story. He’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and he’d consciously made the decision to live every day of the life he had left. His wife came up on the porch and talked to us, too, with tears in her eyes. Their time together was limited, and this man was hand-delivering books to other book lovers, just to touch their lives in some way. He touched ours. After the couple left, David and I sat on the couch and held hands, quiet. His cancer treatment had given us a whole new perspective on life, but meeting Pete gave us a renewed determination to appreciate life and each other. I wrote him later, to tell him how much his gesture had meant to us. It was the next year that I lost David, and I have wondered since about this couple and the gift they had given us in the reminder to cherish each other.

 

Did you read as a child? What was your favorite book growing up?

I was an avid reader as a child, reading anything I could get my hands on. I’ve collected some of my favorites and have a shelf full of childhood reads; books by Lois Lensky, Jean Little, Elizabeth Enright. I loved anything I could identify with and even spent a summer spying on my neighbors, thanks to “Harriet the Spy.” As a teen working at a library, I started with the “A” authors, working my way through the alphabet and the shelves full of adult fiction, certain that by the time I’d graduated, I’d read every book in that library.

And now, what do you read? Do you read for entertainment? For escape? For knowledge? How many books are there in your To Be Read Pile?

I do a lot of research when I am working on a non-fiction book, so right now, I have 12-15 books on creativity in my to-read pile, but when I need a break from non-fiction, there are 10 fiction books in another pile, waiting to be read. I am a big believer in life-long learning, so I read a lot of non-fiction. I keep track of the books I read (and want to read) on Goodreads.com, and my (modest) goal this year is to read 50 books. I read 65 last year, approximately 60% non-fiction. 

 

Mary Potter Kenyon graduated from the University of Northern Iowa with a BA in Psychology. She is Senior Services librarian at the James Kennedy Public Library in Dyersville, and a certified grief counselor. She is widely published in newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. She is the author of six books, including the award-winning “Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace,” and a grief journal slated for publication in early 2018. Mary is a popular public speaker and workshop instructor. See her website at www.marypotterkenyon.com.

 

       

Mary Potter Kenyon has generously offer a copy of 4 of her books to a PaperBackSwap Member who comments here on the blog. A winner will be chosen at random. Good luck!

 

 

Vostromo‘s Interview with Author John Freeman Gill

JOHN FREEMAN GILL is a native New Yorker and the writer behind Avenue magazine’s popular Edifice Complex column. His nonfiction pieces about New York have been featured in The New York Times Magazine, the collections The New York Times Book of New York and More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times, as well as The Atlantic, The New York Observer, The Washington Monthly, The International Herald Tribune, Premiere and, because that’s not enough, “and others.” (For comparison’s sake, mine have not.)

John graduated Yale University summa cum laude and received an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. (For comparison’s sake, I did not.) His novel THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS has just been published by Knopf, to wide acclaim from the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers, Omnivoracious: The Amazon Book Review, Booklist, and, because that’s not enough, “and more.”

John is charming and witty and loves Steely Dan and cats and if there is even the slightest degree of autobiographical truth in his novel do not, I say not, let him teach you how to French kiss. If you meet him you can ask about the roast chicken with the Barbie doll head, though I don’t advise it. Everyone in his family has fabulous hair. (For comparison’s sake, I once had a gerbil named Monty.)

*****************************************************
VOSTROMO: Welcome to PaperBackSwap, John, and congratulations on the publication of your novel. You’ve been writing about architectural history and the stories behind cityscapes for a long time. Where does your interest in the subject come from?

JOHN FREEMAN GILL: Initially it was just osmosis. The Upper West Side apartment where I grew up was something of a museum of Lost New York. My mother is an artist and native New Yorker, and for the past 63 years she’s been keeping one step ahead of the wrecking ball by painting portraits of city blocks just before their buildings are torn down. When I was growing up, the demolished landmarks of old New York were very much alive and well on the walls of our apartment: the 57th Street Automat served up cheesecake in the kitchen; the windows of the Fifth Avenue Bonwit Teller (razed for Trump Tower) displayed dresses in my mom’s bedroom; trains hurtled along the Third Avenue el in our front hall. In addition, she collected salvaged scraps of the lost city. There were grotesques carved into limestone keystones, terra-cotta spandrels that had once adorned a tenement, a stained-glass window bearing the word Delicatessen, giant carved stone brackets turned upside down to support a stone slab as a bar. She even had a picture frame made of wood salvaged from the Third Avenue El, or elevated train, when it was demolished in the 1950s. So I lived with the vanished city, which inevitably sensitized me to the living city around me when I headed out into the streets to live my life as a teenager and then adult.

V: One of your columns for Avenue begins If you know where to look, [the city] is full of rabbit holes, portals to worlds of splendid peculiarity hidden from the street. This could easily be the tagline for The Gargoyle Hunters. Setting aside the fact that I was not consulted about this obvious missed cross-promotional opportunity, real events inspired the novel. What made you decide to incorporate them into fiction, instead of reportage?

JFG: In truth, real events inspired only one important strand of the novel; most of the story is my invention. I began with the characters and the circumstance—a 13-year-old boy in the aftermath of a difficult divorce in the vividly crumbling New York of the 1970s. I thought it would be meaningful to tell a small, intimate story of a fracturing family while also telling a big story about the near death of New York City in the year and a half leading up to the famous Daily News headline: FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. The idea of using a real-life event came later. The event was a bizarre and seemingly impossible architectural heist: the theft of an entire landmark city building, which shocked the city and made the front page of The New York Times in 1974. The mystery was never solved, and I wanted to find out how the story ended. So I sat down and wrote it, placing at the center of the action my reluctant 13-year-old protagonist, Griffin, and his obsessive father.

V: Hunters is a coming-of-age story that mirrors a changing cityscape with a boy’s changing understanding of family dynamics. One of the ways you express this is the twinning of opposites: characters focusing on the importance of the past miss the importance of the present; they move up and down from parapets to basements, inside and outside from bedrooms to scaffolds; they have deeply private moments in very public places; they compare the meaning of the lowliest of buildings (an outhouse) to the most exalted (the landmark first skyscrapers of New York). There are lovely phrasings scattered throughout the book: an architectural detail is “protected from the filthy heavens;” an artwork throws a “spotlight on the invisible;” a first kiss makes one feel “magnificently lost and at home at the same time.” My favorite of these is the moment the narrator imagines the part he played in his complex family history as “the bridge that kept my parents apart.” I mention these to prove that I can read, and that I read your book, and that your publisher shouldn’t feel they wasted their money sending me a copy, and that they haven’t made a huge mistake by agreeing to have you appear here. Truce?

JFG: In theory, a truce would be just fine. But then what am I going to do with this handy sword-cane I brought along to this interview? [Editor’s note: for comparison’s sake, I came to this interview unarmed.]

V: The theme of twinned opposites has a larger resonance, reflected in the first-person narration being easily, straightforwardly casual but unable to cover a deep undercurrent of menace: characters appreciate and cherish their city even as they lie, steal, and manipulate its people, flout its laws with abandon, risk their physical safety in its heights and depths; they reach for meaningful connection to each other even as they keep dangerous secrets. It’s a feeling startlingly encapsulated in the prologue, where a happy family drive to a Sunday picnic reveals the steaming sidelots of a slaughterhouse, glimpsed in passing though the pre-dawn fog. It’s also a very American maturation from boy to man, and marks a striking departure from the themes of your earlier works like My Sister Is A Big Fat Poopyhead and Mom, Make Her Give My Hot Wheels Back, to name two. Was this change of focus a conscious choice, or did your sister, now an adult, threaten you in some way, perhaps physically?

JFG: For the record, you just made up those two sophomoric titles, but I gather your readers are used to that sort of thing by now. On a serious note, though, one of my sisters actually did regularly chase me around and beat the hell out of me when I was little. Then one day, when I was seven and she was eleven, I turned around and socked her in the eyeball. Never one to skimp on drama, she ran around screaming, “I’m blind! I’m blind! I can’t see! Oh, I’m blind!” We’ve been getting along swimmingly ever since.

V: I went to school with your sister Claudia. She was one of the Beautiful People, it’s not much of an overstatement to say a lot of the boys had a bit of a crush on her. Years later, when I did a show that required me to grow a full beard, I had some head shots taken, and still more years later I shared one on Facebook. Her comment was “Very handsome, got better with age!” which is of course a barely-concealed way of saying “my god you were hideous in tenth grade.” Does this kind of passive-aggressive exchange explain why you named her “Quigley” and did all those horrible things to her in the book?

JFG: Ahh, you are jumping to false conclusions based on the one sliver of my life you know about. I actually have two sisters, and Quigley is not based on either of them. (And may I just say how sweet I think it is that after all these decades, a man of your advanced years still feels compelled to say, “a lot of the boys had a bit of a crush on her,” when you’re clearly talking about yourself?)

V: Claudia designs, crafts and sells beautiful decorative home objets d’art. As a writer, have you been able to solve the conundrum of how to be positively supportive of someone’s creative work while drawing as little attention as possible to the fact that you haven’t bought anything from them because as much as you like her stuff it’s hard to afford because money is tight what with having to save for the plastic surgery you want to get because of what she said about you in high school?

JFG: If I tell you you’re a perfectly attractive man, will you take off that rubber Nixon mask? It’s hard to hear what you’re saying in there.

V: Did Claudia read your book? Did she like it?

JFG: Yes, Claudia did read it and was generously supportive. But I guess you never know if she was just being polite; after all, she told you you were handsome.

V: Do you know if she’s… seeing anyone? I mean, just, you know. Curious! About an old friend, it’s not, I mean, you know, I’m only…

JFG: You’re gibbering. You know that, right?

V: [Loud coughing] Getting back to The Gargoyle Hunters, what stands out for me more than anything is a single line that I can fairly say sums up much of my own outlook on life. It occurs just about halfway through, at a time when the narrator is learning that an individual life, like a single building or an entire metropolis, is a process of construction, use, and wear over time, a million pieces held together by a purpose perhaps appreciated fully only in restrospect; I thought to end our time together by quoting it:

I felt it vibrating through my fingertips — like the time I touched the robot girl’s damaged nipple at Dad’s studio door, only much, much worse.

If that drives one person to read your book, I’ll have done my part.

 

 

Thank you Mr. Gill and of course, Vostromo for this great interview!

Mr. Gill has generously offered a brand-new copy of his book, The Gargoyle Hunters to a PaperBackSwap member who comments here on the Blog. A winner will be chosen at random. We will announce the winner in a week. Good Luck to everyone!

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save