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Thomas E. Kennedy, Interviewee 
Duff Brenna, Interviewee
David Applefield, Interviewer
Kennedy: I would like to start, if I may, with a question that has always intrigued me--the extent to which a story can be accessed, or the degree of consciousness a writer brings to the writing. How fully can fiction be understood? Do other people ever surprise you by pointing out things you yourself did not fully see?
Brenna: I don´t think fiction can ever be fully accessed or understood. After I´ve written a book and gone through the multiple drafts and revisions, I think that I understand everything in it, every word even, but I probably don´t. Things slip into your writing that you´re not aware of. An essay I read about The Book of Mamie pointed out parallels between Mamie Beaver and Steinbeck´s Lennie in Of Mice and Men. Those observations enlightened me. I can see they are very true. There is no getting away from it, Mamie with her great size and strength and inarticulateness is akin to Lennie to some degree, as is their intimate, earthy association with nature. I´ve had other surprises, too, things critics have said in their reviews, some that are way off base, others that I´m delighted with and that actually teach me something. Such revelations point out that a hidden consciousness often dictates the creative process. The mind has a subtext that its critical self seems to know nothing about. What we understand of our work on the rational, day-tripping level is undone by the dreamy, uncanny layers lurking beneath the surface.
Frank: Okay Duff, but isn´t it dangerous for a writer to be alerted to this "subtext?" Isn´t this the literary equivalent of genetic engineering?
Brenna: Depends on the writer. I like learning about the subtext. It tells me something about the characters and the story and how in tune my subconscious is with what I think I´m doing. Knowing your subtext can enrich the story and give it a direction that it might not have taken otherwise. All books are engineered to some degree every time you revise. Even Kerouac´s work was "engineered." Though he might not admit it.
Frank: Tom, how have readers surprised you?
Kennedy: For me intuition is essential. I don´t want to have an intellectual understanding of a story I am writing, if ever, until long after it is done. I need not to have. And surprisingly, after groping through the dark of the character´s actions to find the story, a fairly clear kind of ´meaning´ often proves to be there anyway, constructed by my unconscious or whatever. If I understood the thing from the start, I would never write the story because if my writing doesn´t yield a discovery to me, it is pretty worthless from my point of view as a writer. I write to understand, to discover what is there--not to explain what I already know. Sometimes after a public reading, the audience will ask questions, and it amazes me how smoothly the essence of a story is grasped by at least one of them--an essence which to me was inseparable from all the story´s elements (voice, character, plot, language, movement, process) and which somebody suddenly sums up in a sentence. If I had grasped these instant summaries in advance, the "cliche gong" might have sounded in my head and killed the story for me before it was born, but once the story is written such a summary is okay. Other times, however, a reader´s comment might seem beside the point--like the guy who once asked me why three sentences on page twenty-something of one of my novels began with an ´S´ or another young fellow who asked me why there is sex in my fiction.
Frank: So, Tom, why is there sex in your fiction?
Kennedy: You got to get it somewhere! That´s one of the writer´s perks... imagination. No, really, sex matters, and I worry about some of the young Americans I run into on college campuses these days who seem positively terrified of sex. Not too long ago I was sitting in a cafe in Copenhagen watching all the incredibly beautiful Danish women in their summer dress and who should come literally marching down the street but a contingent of American youths with banners flying in the breeze on which were emblazoned the words NO SEX NO CRY! These kids were trying to picket Danes to institute premarital chastity! To give up free love! What a fucking misunderstanding! Akin to sending an army of uptight missionaries to 19th century Tahiti!
Frank: Duff, how great a role does intuition play in your writing?
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