Professor Luke Kennard discusses his writing career, why he’ll never stop being an absurdist and how his new novel is a rejection of demands on modern artists.
I came across it as a footnote in a social psychology article a few years ago and it immediately stood out to me. In the experiment, someone was employed to dress head-to-toe in a black rectangular bag and sit in silence in lectures and seminars for a semester. The professor was testing the other students’ reactions, which gradually went from hostile to accepting to affectionate. But I was more interested in the actor who accepted the role. It could be taken as a comment on masculinity – my narrator is male and he frets a lot. But I think it’s relevant now because we’re expected, if not forced, to be so visible and to live so publicly, especially if we’re trying to get anywhere as an artist. It’s a kind of rejection of that, I think.
At the beginning I tended to like undemanding temp jobs that paid just enough to live on and left me with plenty of mental energy to write in the evenings. You do get these odd commissions sometimes – a beer company wanted a sonnet, a high street bank wanted a poem on the theme of ‘home’ – which I turned down because it felt like an embarrassing use of whatever talent I had. I did once spend a year as poet in residence for the Canal and River Trust, which was fun, but there was also this overwhelming sense of not being particularly wanted, if that makes sense? My fee should have gone on dredging and maintenance. That’s probably quite a familiar feeling to artists and writers in the UK. We tend to treat anything creative with a certain amount of suspicion unless it’s making a significant amount of money. We lack soul.
My favourite Samuel Beckett scene is the anecdote in Endgame where a customer is berating a tailor for taking over three months to make him a pair of trousers when it only took God six days to make the world. “Yes, Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD! And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in three months!” And the tailor replies, “But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look at the world, and look at my TROUSERS!” I read that at a very formative age. I think my mum worried that I wanted the complete works of Samuel Beckett for my sixteenth birthday. Absurdism is really a form of protest. It’s a reaction to the absurdity you see in the supposedly respectable or aspirational, the insanity you see in the purportedly rational. So it’s quite an adolescent impulse, but not one I plan on ever getting over.
I’ve always written both, but fiction takes me a lot longer. There’s such a healthy small press scene in poetry, live readings, a sort of DIY culture. So if you do both, it’s quite likely you’re going to get some kind of a break in poetry first because it’s an economy of scale; it’s more accessible by default. With a novel you’re always asking someone to spend about eight hours reading you, and that’s just a hard sell, isn’t it, in this attention economy? I think I should probably still put “poet and novelist” in my biog rather than “novelist and poet”, though.
My routine is generally 9pm onwards when it’s not marking season. My best advice for maintaining your enthusiasm for a long project is to never finish a scene at the end of a writing session – leave something unwritten that you’re looking forward to going back to the next night. I love writing groups but I’m not part of one at the moment. If the timing works, I’ll swap draft manuscripts with a colleague or my partner, but it absolutely has to be reciprocal.
This is a really long game, and ultimately you’re building a body of work which is going to have high points and low points – things you’ll be proud of in twenty years and things you’ll wish you’d never written. It can take such a long time to get noticed in the first place and it’s easy to get discouraged, so it helps to be in a writing group or have some trusted friends you share work with. It’s worth sending work out very widely. When you’ve got a manuscript you love, spend a day looking at agents and their lists online and then send it to fifty people and see if anyone bites in the coming months. Overall, there are going to be times when you think you’ve ‘made it’ that turn out to be completely meaningless and times when you feel like you’re toiling away in delusional obscurity that may actually be the most important years of your life as a writer. If you genuinely love it, writing is something you’re going to do anyway. I guess also just find the work that you love and want to be in dialogue with. It’s an incredibly broad scene across mainstream and indie presses and you need to know where your work, your aesthetic, your idiosyncratic vision and style fits.
I’ve had some really great mentors. The earliest, and the first person to get me to take my writing seriously, was my secondary school English teacher, Paul Coffman, who had the extreme generosity to read and comment on my short stories outside of classes, when I was sixteen or seventeen. He hated my poetry – please don’t show me any more of that – but he was such a perceptive and brilliant critic, and he got me to really focus on character and detail, no matter how weird and experimental the work was. Because if you get that stuff right, you can be as aesthetically experimental as you like and it’ll still work. I can never repay that debt of gratitude aside from just trying to be a good teacher in his memory.
I’m working on a novel based on the ‘cursed manuscript’ plot in Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow. I’m trying to work my inaugural lecture and related papers on poetry and prophecy into a monograph. I’m also putting together a Selected Poems. It’s interesting looking at twenty years’ worth of poetry and deciding what to keep. It’s a privilege and also a surreal kind of stock-take where you calculate whether your life’s work really amounts to anything – a calculation I’m finding quite dependent on my mood on the given evening.
Professor of Creative Writing
Biographical and contact information for Dr Luke Kennard, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham.
