In the Spotlight...

Kevin St. Jarre

by

Dustin Martin

The Aroostook Review sits down with novelist Kevin St. Jarre
to discuss teaching, writing, and business as usual.

AR: Who is Michael Hawke? How did he come about?

KS: Well, I was writing these thrillers for Berkley Books and they wanted a house name. That was great with me because I never wanted to write military thrillers anyway. What it enables them to do is, If I only want to write one book—or three books—I can stop, and then someone else can be “Michael Hawke.” It’s something a lot of people don’t know but I hear people say “Ah, I love so and so. He’s a great writer.” And he is actually three different women that I know.

So I wrote those three books, and if there’s going to be a fourth book it won’t be me. I’ve taken that as far as I can take it—or I want to take it. But I mean, it was a good experience, you know: learning how to write a book.

AR: Speaking as a novelist who broke into the market writing genre fiction, what would you say is the appeal of writing for a specific audience or interest?

KS: The appeal is you know that you do have a ready-made audience and you know what they’re looking for. That can be limiting in some ways, but in other ways it’s helpful. It’s a comfort zone. And you know it’s is fun. It’s a fun way to write. I mean, people spend years on novels, but I think the second novel I wrote, I wrote in, let’s see, four and a half months—mostly with a kid crawling over me. It’s a fun write. But it’s not a genre that I want to—you know I’m still writing thrillers. I’m working on a thriller now but the “military action thriller” just isn’t where I want to be. Yeah, so there’s good sides and bad sides of writing genre fiction. But, you know, it’s always a tricky thing because people say that there’s “genre fiction” and then “Literary fiction.” You start wondering “well is literary fiction just another genre, is that a kind of mini audience in it of it self. Maybe this particular audience likes the genre where characters are focused on instead of plot. That’s an ongoing discussion. I don’t think we’ll solve it here.

AR: How has writing for genre challenged you as a writer? Has it made you a better writer?

KS: Definitely, Genre fiction is like any other writing. I mean, I’ve written everything from technical writing to poetry to nonfiction to, you know... It’s always fun to work within a set of parameters, to push the edge of those parameters, to try out new and interesting things. I mean, in the thrillers, the military thrillers I wrote the protagonist is a woman. So even that’s kind of different in that field. You know, usually it’s this great big macho guy. There’s always a way to find an envelope to push. I look for that. Within genre fiction you look for a way to make things interesting and fresh—to follow the formula but still have an interesting slant on things.

Genre fiction writing, by itself, hasn’t made me a better writer. But I think any kind of writing--I mean, making grocery list, even; any time you write you get a little better. And then revision is the key, of course. I always liked that—I don’t know who said it but—somebody apologized for a letter being two pages long and said “If I would have had more time it would only be one.” That’s the real key to writing, I think. Anybody can barf up a bunch of words but the revision after, cutting it down, bringing it down to what you want it to be. That’s the real key.

AR: Your résumé reveals you to be a man of many walks, but your passion and commitment to the craft of writing seems to be a thread that binds them all together. When did this passion first surface?

KS: The first book I ever sold was to my Dad. When I was very young, I wrote and illustrated a little book, bound it with a stapler, and he bought it for 10 cents. As I recall, it was about a boy who ran and ran and ran. My parents later bought are a typewriter and then when word processing came along, look out. I’ve always loved telling stories and for me it was always easier to write them than to say them.

AR: While inventing yourself as a novelist, which writers would you say influenced you most? What about those writers that influence you today?

KS: When we were growing up, my Mom always made sure we had a novel to read. My brother and I would finish our books and she’d head out to Acadian Cards or Brooks to buy us another. Identifying novelists I found influential from that period would be tough. When I was about 10 years old, my aunt bought me Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings set. I found them fascinating and challenging, which was also fun. As a kid I enjoyed Lord of the Flies, and some YA books like one called, Ghost of the Gravestone Hearth. Later I enjoyed Tom Clancy, Stephen King, and other pop fiction in addition to some of the traditional stuff like George Orwell, Harper Lee, John Irving, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, and Joseph Heller. I was also influenced by the books I hated by authors like Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Eliot. They were accomplished writers, but I knew what I liked aesthetically and what I didn’t. Writers of fiction who are still influencing me today are John Irving, Cormac McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Kent Anderson, and Joseph Conrad. There are many. I’m also of course influenced by nonfiction books, poetry, the back of the cereal box…

AR: After publishing your first three novels you returned to teaching. What brought you back?

KS: I knew when I was in high school that I wanted to be an English teacher. I went into the military, lived a little, and then afterwards finished my university work to finally become a teacher. One day, at my first teaching job at a high school in Aroostook, the veteran teacher in the next room told me what he was making after twenty years. If I remember correctly, it was $37,000. This was in 1997 or so, but it really sunk in that if I worked very hard, and was the best teacher I could be, that after 20 years I’d be making what many of my college classmates would earn their first year out of college. So I left for the corporate world. My starting salary was $42,000 with stock options and an annual bonus in the neighborhood of $5000. It really is a shame what teachers how little teachers are paid. So after working for a software firm, with annual raises in the neighborhood of 20 percent, and promotions, and more stock, and more bonuses, with global travel for my job, I realized I wasn’t happy. While traveling and living in hotel rooms at least one week per month, I began writing in the evenings. This led to finding a literary agent, who then sold my books to a subsidiary of Penguin Putnam. This wasn’t like winning the lottery, but it gave us the financial wherewithal for me to return to teaching without feeling the financial pain as acutely as we might otherwise have. I just love to teach, and especially teaching others to write. Noble High School in southern Maine offered me a position there as an English teacher, which led to being the head of an English department of 13 amazing teachers. After my first few months at Noble, I knew I’d made the right decision to return to the classroom.

AR: Considering your current MFA candidacy at the University of Southern Maine, it hardly seems as though you are through writing. But what professional shift does this change of pace mark, as far as your views of fiction and the publishing industry are concerned?

KS: My MFA candidacy has little affect on my views of the industry. It’s a business. I’ve never stopped writing really, and occasionally that industry buys my novels, poetry, short stories, nonfiction articles, or even technical writing. Most of the time they tell me, “No thanks.” The change that the MFA program represents is a new opportunity for feedback. Accomplished writers from across the country are professors in the program, every one of them a published writer, novelist, and/or poet. They push us hard and the criticism can be rough. When I show my friends and family my writing, they usually respond, “It’s really good! I love it! Keep it up!” When I shared a piece of writing with a mentor named Richard Hoffman, a professor in the MFA program who is also a professor at Emerson and a brilliant writer, he replied with a long critique which began with the words, “I’m disappointed.” When you’ve been patted on the back for your writing since childhood, and someone responds with that and then provides 100 examples to back it up, it’s an eye-opener and a great opportunity for growth and learning. My views of my own fiction have changed only in that I’ve returned to what I like to write instead of what I was paid to write. I prefer to write thoughtful fiction and less so the thrillers I’ve had published. I’m working on a novel now about a man, tortured by his past, trying to understand the nature of evil that men do. My latest mentor, a great novelist named Mike Kimball recently referred to this latest work as having a “controlled creepiness.” I think I like that. (Laughs.)

AR: So I guess the next question we’re all dying to know is: how do you find the time to both write and teach?

KS: This is the million-dollar question for every creative person with a day job. Some get up early, some live alone, etc. I have a family who hates it when my office door is closed. They are supportive, but they also don’t like having a family member missing, and I can’t blame them. Luckily, the army taught me that I don’t need much sleep. I typically sleep from about 12:30am to 5:30am. Everyone in the house other than me is asleep by 10pm at the latest, and usually earlier. Occasionally, I’ll pick a Saturday and just let myself get in the zone and I’ll lose a day to writing. But it’s true, it isn’t easy to write and teach at the same time, and I coach soccer, which I love. Still, like anything else in life, if you wait until you someday have the time to do it, if you tell yourself, “There will be time later on in life,” you will never do it.

AR: How would you say “thinking like a writer” informs your decisions as a teacher? What about “thinking like a teacher” and writing?

KS: First of all, both decent writers and good teachers are storytellers. If you are a teacher and you are not part performer, then in your students’ eyes, you’ll likely just be the person who passes out handouts, detentions, and grades. Palonsky wrote a book titled, 900 Shows a Year about teaching high school, back when we had 45-minute periods, which probably worked out to many more than that. How does my thinking like a writer inform my teaching? Well, for one, I think it’s important for the audience to not be constantly aware that the entire thing is contrived. If the students can somehow feel that they are not a collection of teens captive in a school, but instead a group of bright people involved in a discussion facilitated by someone who cares about each of them and their success, everything will work better. This is like writing a book in that an author doesn’t want the reader to be continuously aware that he or she is being asked to enter the “reader’s trance.” You want the audience in both cases focused on the puppet, not the strings. I think writing a lot of dialogue also makes one conscious as to what one sounds like. As a teacher, I’m aware of when I or someone else begins to sound like a character, like that ridiculous, burned-out, cynical teacher from the movie the Breakfast Club. Remember that guy? You hear your words and you realize where they are coming from. I guess as a writer, I pay attention to what a character’s motivation is, even when the character is me. When I realize my words are attempts at controlling kids rather than teaching them, I can take a step back, relax, and rewrite my next lines. As far as writers being teachers, I think most writers are trying to share something, in my fiction I try to pose “what if” questions, and I hope the reader will come along for the exploration.

From novel-in-progress

DEEDS OF MEN

by

Kevin St. Jarre

He hopped into the Jeep and drove around Pelletier Mountain, more of a hill really, and up Dalton Road to the Johnston farm. Jack drove around the long curve of the driveway before coming to a stop and putting the vehicle in park. He looked out toward the barn and saw Keenan Johnston coming his way, in that tired but purposeful farmer walk.

Jack’s feet weren’t on the ground before Keenan called out, “Hey, Jack, how you been?”

“Keenan,” Jack said, “Heard you called in for me?”

Keenan’s two daughters came slamming out the door, flying off the porch, and into the drive, the younger chasing the older.

“Mariah! Taylor! Slow down and leave the door on the house, will you?” Keenan called. It wasn’t harsh, just loud enough to be heard over two laughing girls. The spring-loaded door clapped again and Keenan’s small son, Kenny, tried to catch up with his sisters.

Jack smiled. “Why aren’t they in school?”

Keenan smiled back. “Couldn’t make myself do it. We were getting a couple sheep in today and the girls wanted to be here. And if they stay home, there’s no way Kenny’s going anywhere.”

“You spoil them,” Jack said, teasing.

A woman’s voice called out, “You’re right about that.”

Jack looked over at the porch. Keenan’s wife, Carol, barely five feet, and pretty, stood there grinning at them.

“Nothin’ wrong with a father doting on his girls,” Keenan replied, “Especially when he works them as hard as these two.”

Carol waved him off and went back into the house. The men laughed at her feigned frustration.

“Keenan, what did you call me about?” Jack asked.

Keenan paused, his smile came down a notch, and he said, “You know, I feel sort of silly about it now, but this morning in the barn. Come on, I’ll show you.”

They went to the barn, through the big open door, the smell of animals growing stronger with each step. It was cavernous inside, the lofts nearly empty. Cows moaned in scattered harmonies throughout. Cats played in a corner. They walked between the rows of dairy cows, and the twin conveyor belts of manure that lay in tracks behind the animals. Keenan stopped and pointed up at the far loft. Up on a timber, a cross-member of the roof, lay small brown lumps.

“Birds, Keenan?” Jack asked, remembering caterpillar stories.

“Barn swallows,” Keenan said, the smile gone, “They’re dead, Jack.”

Jack looked again. All along the thick, rough-hewn timber were swallows. As if neatly placed there in a row, evenly spaced. Maybe twenty of them.

“Eighteen of them,” Keenan said, “All facing the same way, I’ve been up there.”

“How’d they die?”

“Not a thing wrong with them that I can see,” Keenan replied, “Necks aren’t broke.”

Jack squinted. “Poison?”

“Okay, Jack, but why would eighteen poisoned birds fly up there, line themselves up, and die?”

Jack said, “Someone put them there.”

Keenan shook his head. “The ladders were weren’t touched. Timber neither, except where the birds landed. Wing marks in the dust too, they were alive when they got there.”

Jack stared up at the birds, dumbfounded. “This isn’t silly, Keenan.”

“Damned if I know what did it,” Keenan said, “Called the state to send a vet out here, make sure it’s not that bird flu or something.”

Both men were looking up at the dead birds when a shrill scream behind them made Jack jump.

Mariah, Kenny, and Taylor all ran up and grabbed their father’s legs with both arms, laughing.

One said, “Hi, Mr. Killarney.”

“Hi, Mariah.” Jack smiled down at her. “How old are you now?”

“I’m six now, first grade.” She smiled at him, top two teeth missing.

“I’m five!” Taylor offered.

Then of course it was Kenny’s turn, “I’m free!”

Mariah rolled her eyes. “He’s three.”

Keenan laughed. “Okay, okay, let me go, run along, stay out of trouble.”

The kids ran off.

“Keenan,” Jack said, “Let me know what the state says about those birds.”

“You want a picture or something?”

Jack looked up again, “Naw, they’ll be dots in our grainy black-and-white newsprint. But let me know what they say killed the birds, alright?”

Keenan extended his hand. “Sounds good. We’ll see you around.”

Jack took it. “You bet, thanks for the call.”

He left the barn and headed for his Jeep. He got in, pulled away, and in the rearview mirror he could see the Johnston kids chasing each other in a circle, with Keenan watching them play.