FROM THE KR WEB SITE
AN INTERVIEW WITH LORI WHITE

KR Fiction Editor Nancy Zafris talked with White about her short story, "Postcards from the Road," in the Summer 2007 issue of KR and more.

Nancy Zafris: This is your first, or one of your first publications, is that right?

Lori White : I’ve had a few stories in smaller journals. This is my first publication in a major literary magazine.

NZ: Let’s talk a little bit about your story “Postcards from the Road” that appears in the summer issue of The Kenyon Review. It’s a short short, and we don’t do many short shorts. But what I like about this piece is how you manage so many story threads in such a compressed space, and how the story you seem to be telling isn’t at all the real story. This real story emerged gradually, a real feat in a short short, where “gradual” isn’t exactly the operative word.

LW: Thank you, Nancy. I actually suffer from size-envy when it comes to my stories, so that’s nice to hear. Writing is such a slow, painful process for me. I’m amazed by people who can sit down and whip out ten good pages.

NZ: My question, then, is this: Did any of these story lines take you by surprise? The brother’s ex-wife, for example, did you have that character and story line planned all along?

LW: Most all of the threads were a surprise, actually. I had the main character, Nate, in mind for a while. I’d spent the last year of graduate school essentially hibernating in my house, going out only to work or to walk my dog. I would walk around my neighborhood, making sure to pass by this one neighbor’s house at least once a day. I called him “The Hoarder.” I liked to see what was new in his driveway and on his front lawn: broken furniture, cardboard boxes, a fishing skiff, old mattresses. He had four or five cars parked on the street, stuffed to the roof with unidentifiable junk. He also had a brand-new Hummer with Texas plates, the one car he kept clean. I could never figure that out. His neighbors started to get upset. I think a building inspector was even called out. Frankly, I was obsessed with him, talked about him all the time. My friends and my sister started to ask for updates. He became my narrator. But that’s all I knew going into the story. That’s probably what made it work. I’m not sure Nate’s hoarding traits are that apparent in the story, which is ironic.

More >>

ANNOUNCEMENTS
Inside the Summer 2007 issue of KR...

• Fiction by T.C. Boyle, Myfanwy Collins, Gerald Duff, Amina Gautier, Alan Heathcock, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Daniel Torday, Lori White
• Poetry by Marvin Bell, Claudia Grinnell, John Hollander, William Logan, Maurya Simon, Arthur Sze, Charles Harper Webb
• Nonfiction by Atar Hadari, Stanley Plumly, Roger Rosenblatt, Jeff Staiger
• And David Lynn's interview with Ian McEwan

Don't miss it...on newsstands now. Better yet, order a subscription now and get it in your mailbox.

---

The Kenyon Review is supported in part by generous grants from the Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Smart Family Foundation, and the New York Times Company Foundation.

 

 

NEWS KR APPOINTS NEW BLOG EDITOR

As Liz Lopatto stepped down to focus on her new real job, Tyler Meier stepped up.


Lopatto began working with KR late last summer to launch the blog—and it was her conversational, often humorous tone that brought readers back every day. In August 2006, our first month of blogging, we had 10,000 views. In May 2007, it numbered 40,000.

Lopatto, a 2006 graduate of Kenyon College, recently started a full-time job working in journalism. KR Editor David Lynn asked Tyler Meier, also a Kenyon alum, to take the job. Said Lynn, "Tyler also has a long Kenyon and KR pedigree, but he’s been out in the world for a number of years now, among other things having earned an M.F.A. in creative writing."

Meier is no stranger to the literary world. His poems have appeared in Agni, The Seattle Review, and Cranky. His chapbook manuscript, “Lovesong from a Lifeboat,” was a finalist for the 2006 GreenTower Press Chapbook Series Award. He also teaches in KR's Young Writers program each summer.

"I hope the blog continues to be a dynamo of ideas, full of readings, introductions, musings, discoveries, enthusiasms and debate—and in that way continue to be something worthy, something important enough that we would recognize a loss if we were without it," said Meier. "I'm excited to watch it become more and more important to the work the Kenyon Review does, and to the growing circle of readers it reaches each day."

KR's new blog editor Tyler Meier.

Already Meier has introduced several new bloggers who are contributing to the site, including Seattle writers Nancy Jooyoun Kim, Jonathan Crimmins, and Susan Parr, as well as poet Heather Christle, writer and editor Sean Casey, and Jessica Johnson. We also look forward to continued blogging from contributors Jerry Harp, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, and others, as well as the occasional post from Liz Lopatto.

Think of this section as a bulletin from KR in which we brag about the accomplishments of the extended KR family and leave out the gall-bladder surgeries.

• Matthew Winkler, a trustee and past president of KR's board, will receive the 2007 Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award. Winkler is editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. This annual award recognizes an individual whose career exemplifies the consistent and superior insight and professional skills necessary to further the understanding of business, financial and economic issues.Winkler will receive his award at the 2007 Loeb Awards dinner, Monday, June 25, 2007, in New York City.
• Will Allison’s first novel, What You Have Left, was released earlier this month from Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. KR readers will remember Allison's story, “Niernsee’s Tower,” from the Spring 2004 issue.
• Daniel Torday, whose short story "Undress" appears in the current issue of KR, has joined the faculty at Bryn Mawr College. He'll begin in fall 2007 as Visiting Prose Writer at the college.
• Yasmine Beverly Rana's play "Over the Hedges" was presented as part of "Gone in 60 Seconds" at the New World Theater in Brooklyn earlier this month. "Blackened Windows" and "Kabul" from Rana's The War Zone is My Bed will be produced at the Resilience of the Spirit Human Rights Festival, opening on July 26th. "Blackened Windows" will also be published by TDR: The Drama Review in a special upcoming issue on war and trauma. Rana's play "Sniper Avenue" appeared in KR's Winter 2007 issue.
• Elliott Holt, a KR Writers Workshop alum, was featured with five other emerging writers in New York Magazine's "Stars of Tomorrow."
• Charles Wright's Scar Tissue is the International winner of the seventh annual Griffin Poetry Prize. The C$100,000 Griffin Poetry Prize, the richest poetry prize in the world for a single volume of poetry, is divided between the International and Canadian winners. The prize is for first edition books of poetry published in 2006, and submitted from anywhere in the world. Wright's poem "Scar Tissue II" appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of KR.

It is time to look for gods
in the basement with the plumber
but even there it's like knocking
on the womb: Be a woman, and no answer.

Instead, under the sky's corridor
of planes, the dog puts back her ears
and the shadows disappear, all six.
The smell reminds me again:

Little one, count your coins
for the gods number them.
It is a votive pressing up from the earth,
something burning already.