About Susan Kelly

I grew up in western North Carolina in a small town of three thousand called Rutherfordton, which was the basis for the town of Cullen in Even Now. I’m the oldest of three sisters, and it was an idyllic childhood of bike-riding and creek-playing and after supper games. (One of my enduring memories, however, is that because we had a well and a septic tank rather than city water, I wasn’t allowed to take bubble baths…).

I attended St. Catherine’s School, an all girls boarding school in Richmond, Virginia. St. Catherine’s introduced me to serious literature, and I fell in love with William Faulkner and Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, of course, and can still quote from all of them as well as a few Shakespeare soliloquies and the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales in old English. I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where mostly, I’m afraid, I majored in revelry, and in English on the side.

I searched real estate titles for a Raleigh law firm, then married and moved to Atlanta, where, like Pril in How Close We Come, I summarized depositions for a large firm in downtown Atlanta. My husband Sterling and I returned to North Carolina, to Greensboro, and had two boys and a girl whom we cursed with unisex names. When I was forty I decided to pursue my Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, and received my MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Currently, my oldest, Sterling, lives and works in Charleston, SC; Stafford attends Wofford College, and Preston is a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Somehow, while we weren’t paying attention, my husband and I have become bona fide empty nesters.

If you wonder what the S stands for in the middle of my website, it’s Stafford, my maiden name. (And yes, I know four or five other Susan Kellys too.)

FAQs

How did you begin writing?

I was always interested in books and writing, always. I was one of those children who threw themselves across the bed and read during the day; all the typical girl books--Nancy Drew and Frances Hodgson Burnett, Eleanor Estes, E.B. White, the Misty of Chincoteague horse books. Most are still on my bookshelves. I can remember despairing that even if I managed to read a book every day I could never read all the books in the world before I died. As a child I wrote a great deal of strictly-rhyming poetry, and a never-ending story about a girl who ran away to the deep woods and survived on nuts and berries in a hollow tree. I kept this handwritten single-spaced tome locked in a drawer and would give anything to have it now. I won elementary school creative writing awards and sent poems to Highlights and Jack and Jill magazines.

As it has a way of doing, life intervened in the form of college, career, marriage, children, and my writing stopped altogether. Three things occurred when I was in my early thirties. My father died, and his death not only made me introspective, but aware of my own mortality. My last child went to nursery school, giving me six hours a week entirely alone. And I took a continuing ed course in creative writing at Duke University, as much for the hour of peace in the drive over and back as for the class itself. (My husband had to do the kiddy bath ‘n bed routine. . .) The product of that course was my first published story--in a literary magazine-- and like Pavlov’s dog, the taste was good.

Very few people knew I was writing. I kept what I was doing a secret because it’s like announcing you’re going on a diet: people expect to see results. The results were that I dropped out of sight, until eventually a friend asked my daughter, “What does your mother do all day?” My daughter answered, “Types.” I began submitting short stories to small magazines, tallied up at least 200 rejections, and eventually had nine stories published.

So how was your first novel published?

While I was writing short stories I was also working on a novel. Publisher’s Clearing House freaks, take note: How Close We Come was published because I entered a small press novel contest on the final day that submissions were being accepted. I won the contest and soon after How Close We Come was published by the small press, Warner Books bought the subsidiary rights and a year later brought the book out nationally.

Where do you get your ideas?

At heart I’m still a type-A, organized, seventh grade schoolgirl: I keep three-ring notebooks full of tabbed dividers with names like Situations, Characters, Marriage, Relationships, Scenes, Settings, Family, Children. I stick any idea that comes to me (and often it’s no more than one line) in these for trigger, genesis ideas. I also have files titled Food, Flowers, Funerals, Names, Dialogue, Christmas, Beach, and of course Miscellaneous, where anything else gets dumped. From these entries come many of the details and images that find their way into a particular scene, or just give me the giggles when I read them. Here are typical entries:

My Christmas presents have been wrapped for so long that I’m going to have to Swiffer them before I put them under the tree
Mushrooms and mules have no gender.
Clumsy angular graffiti on overpass that says “Marry Me Jacqui”
Someone who eats a green peppers like an apple.
Child picks up strictly decorative brass conch shell, holds it to his ear and says, Hello, Ocean?

Basically I’m insanely curious (I have alienated a friend or too by sincerely asking, “What do you do all day long?”) and am simultaneously addicted to The Ordinary. What people ahead of me in line at the grocery store have in their carts is as interesting to me as why a marriage breaks up or siblings go to war with each other. People write for a million different reasons but my two main motivations are that I want to tell a story–about an accident, an individual’s life, a summer--or I have something I want to say--about loss, or marriage, or children--and therefore invent a story in which I can say it. Though it isn’t intentional, most of my stories tend to involve letting something go--a relationship, a town, childhood, innocence, a time of life–which involves a heart-hurt. Not a broken heart, but an aching heart. I call this “necessary sadness.” It’s a bittersweet but necessary sadness that goes hand in hand with a loss of illusion. My novels are coming-of-age novels no matter the age of the characters.

So how much of your work is autobiographical?

None of the actual stories are autobiographical. Even Now is the novel with the most obviously autobiographical elements in that Hannah Marsh grew up in a small town in the mountains and went away to boarding school, but Hannah’s similarity to me ends there. (In other words, I haven’t been attracted to an Episcopal priest.) But there’s some degree of autobiography in nearly everything I write, particularly in specific details of a scene. I’ve had three children, so references to children are often taken from real life. The mean-girl-and-frilly-underpants scene from Even Now is a friend’s painful story about her child; my daughter used to play beauty parlor on my hair while I was stretched across the bed as in the opening of How Close We Come. The first paragraphs of The Last of Something mention an entire set of inherited porcelain accidentally being broken into shards. Though I was present when this event happened to a friend, by itself it’s not much of an anecdote. But combined with the character Claire’s insecurity, her mother’s premature death, and Claire’s financial straits, the shattered china story becomes part of who Claire is.

My characters are composites of people I know or know of, with a combination of traits and habits and appearances. Very few actual individuals are interesting enough to be full characters in themselves, and if they are, they’re usually not believable once transferred to the page!

What often becomes the most autobiographical aspect of my novels is the setting–the description of a town, a room, a house, a porch, a dock, a view, even a garden. I’m very much of a “place” person, attached to locales I’m familiar with or sentimental about, and rarely write a book that takes place somewhere I don’t personally know.

Did anyone in particular influence you -- a teacher, a family member?

An aunt had all my childhood poems typed and bound in a little booklet she gave to family members--does that count? And I was always given books as gifts. The two teachers I remember most fondly are precisely the teachers I gave small roles in Even Now: a sixth grade teacher who assigned a poem to be memorized each month and a fearsome eighth grade teacher who was a grammar fanatic, and did actually make a student write "A preposition is always followed by an object" across the wooden classroom floor, and occasionally tossed a textbook out the window to illustrate an active verb. The teachers who most influenced me, no matter the level in school, were English and literature teachers, and of these, it’s the ones who were passionate about their subjects, biased about their favorite writers be they Pinter or Shakespeare, whom I remember with the most fondness (or fear).

What’s your daily schedule like?

Writing time is like closet space: you use whatever you have and then want more. For many years my schedule revolved around my children. When they were small I hired babysitters, went to fast food restaurants, and wrote in longhand. (The scene in How Close We Come where Ruth walks into a biscuit joint and the counter help calls her by name? This was me.) With the $500 prize money from winning a short story contest, I bought a word processor, and worked up to a PC, then a laptop, and am now back to a desktop.

Eventually, sadly, children do grow up and go to school most of the day. Then I viewed my writing time as a regular job rather than stolen time. I got up very early to get domestic minutiae out of the way–laundry, school lunches, lists, phone calls, bills--and on a no-field-trips day, kept 8:00-3:00 pristine for writing. (To be honest, a lot of writing consists of looking out of the window, and I’ve written a novel in which the main character does just that.)

When the last child left home for boarding school, and I realized I could write 24/7 if I felt like it, I relaxed the discipline–and the solitude–a bit. I volunteer at my church, attend book and garden club meetings, and take on the occasional job such as teaching a creative writing course at the local college or grading standardized tests. Morning is still my favorite time to write. Errands, exercise, and domestic minutiae (see above!) wait until later in the afternoon.

Like any job, the writing life has disadvantages. There are bad days; squandered and worthless days of staring at the computer screen or thrashing on the bed or pacing the floor because the voice or point of view or tone or structure I’ve chosen doesn’t work and I can’t figure out how to make it right. Writing is necessarily a solitary endeavor, so there’s loneliness involved. Then again, I’m creating an alternate world where I can go live at any time.

What do you read, and what are some of your favorite books?

My favorite books, in that they had a tremendous effect on me at the time I read them, are

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Crossing To Safety by Wallace Stegner
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
At Weddings and Wakes and Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro
The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Other books I often recommend are

Montana 1948 by Larry Watson
The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks
Too Far To Go (stories) by John Updike
Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Edisto by Padgett Powell
A Crime In the Neighborhood and A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne
Waterland by Graham Swift
Ernie’s Ark by Monica Wood

At the moment, I’m reading everything I can by the English writer Patrick Gale, and I love anything Joanna Trollope writes. No question, I’m an Anglophile. I’m also deeply interested in retrospective fiction — stories in which past experiences are still affecting a character’s life and actions and decisions.