Susan Kenney

Even before she knew how to write them down, Susan McIlvaine Kenney had a penchant for telling stories. Born in New Jersey, she spent her early childhood in New York State, Pennsylvania and Ohio, where her father worked as oil company land manager. After her father died suddenly at age 48, Susan's mother took her three young children back home to live with her widowed mother and sister in the old family house in Skaneateles, a small village in Central New York. As her forebears on both sides of the family went back generations and local reminders of their presence were everywhere--street names, buildings, historical markers--Susan soon came to consider it her real home town. In her early 20s Susan moved to Maine with her first husband, the late Edwin Kenney, a professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, and has lived there ever since.

A graduate of Northwestern University with a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing, Susan holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Cornell University and has written several scholarly articles on the British novelist Virginia Woolf. Susan spent over 25 years teaching fiction writing at Colby while raising two children, finally leaving the classroom in 2007 to devote more time to writing. In addition to her novels In Another Country and Sailing, she is the author of three mysteries, Garden Of Malice, Graves In Academe, and One Fell Sloop. Her short story "Facing Front" was chosen for first place in the l982 Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and her novel In Another Country won the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award in l985. Her essays, book reviews and short stories have appeared in EPOCH, The Hudson Review, The New York Times Book Review, McCall's, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook and Family Circle, as well as numerous anthologies. Her novella “Escape,” published in the Winter 2005 issue of EPOCH, was named a notable story of the year in the 2006 Pushcart Prize Awards.

Susan is currently completing a second novella in her Tales from the Barbizon series. "The Opening" is a sequel to "Escape", as many years later Sara Boyd fields with mixed results an unexpected visit from her mother while Sara is in New York City. A planned third novella in the works will conclude the series. She is also working on an autobiographical novel, The House We All Come Back To, the crossover final narrative in a Skaneateles trilogy that so far includes In Another Country and Sailing. Her most recent publication, "How We Leave Her," (EPOCH: 2014 series, V.63, No.3) is an excerpt from that work.

Susan and her husband Anthony Corrado, a professor of government at Colby College, currently reside in central Maine. 

Susan Kenney writes:

  One of the questions I'm asked most often is "When did you start writing fiction?" A variation of this is: "When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?" My simple answer to both these questions is: "Before I knew how to write."
  I actually don't remember a time when I wasn't actively pursuing my dream of being a writer--in fact, planning my life around it. Well, why not? There were other successful, even famous authors in our extended family, which made the whole thing that much more plausible. When I finally did learn to write in sentences and paragraphs, sometime around third grade, I would regularly confound my teachers by turning an ordinary composition assignment into a story--for instance "Write something about the color green" became the tale of a mystical, ghostly dog named "Green"(perhaps inspired by my own late dog Smoky who had recently been run over right in front of our house, but who was not, however, green; that was the fiction part). Luckily for me, they mostly let it pass, some even fostering my aberration by praising my creativity and reading my efforts aloud in class, at which point I would turn the color red. But that minor discomfort didn't stop me from bending the rules of composition for a few more decades, even once--disastrously--in my first year of graduate school, when I wrote a satirical "dialogue" instead of what was supposed to be a critical analysis of Plato's Phaedrus, and almost got kicked out of the class.
  But the core of the answer is this: as far back as I can remember, I knew of my mother's long-held dream to become a famous writer. However, in the course of an eventful, even tragic life, she put her ambitions aside time after time, and though at her death she left behind hundreds and hundreds of pages of half-finished memoirs, sketches, notes and "scribblings," it was a dream she never quite managed to fulfill.
  I remember her telling me the story of her mother's reaction when as a young girl my mother informed her that she had decided to become a writer. "You'll never be a writer," her mother remarked. "You haven't got the imagination." Always resilient if not just plain stubborn in the face of such dismissive commentary, my mother thought to herself, "Well, if that's the case, then I'll just have to go out and experience everything. And I did!" She did indeed, and through her fascinating recollections and colorful narratives of the many events and experiences in her life, she not only passed her dream on to me, she supported mine in every way she could. Here is an account of what I consider my first conscious attempt at "fiction"and how my mother reacted when she found out.

Lesson One:

First You Change the Names

   The summer I was six years old we moved from Pittsburgh to Toledo, Ohio--my father, mother, brand-new baby sister and me. We lived in a nice house on River Road with a big yard surrounded by a dense, scratchy hedge I could barely see over. On the other side of the road and down a steep bank was the Maumee River. I would have loved to explore, but I was not allowed to cross the road by myself, or even go down the sidewalk any farther than the block we lived on. My mother was busy with the new baby and since I wasn't in school yet I hadn't had time to make any friends my own age, so I spent the hot summer days playing in the yard by myself. Some days I would walk along the sidewalk on my side of the street as far up as where the block ended, but I never saw any children anywhere in the vicinity. My mother would drive me to the library to look at books and even take them out, big picture books that she or my father would read to me at bedtime, magically translating the thin dark lines of letters into words that revealed the story in the pictures and gave the children in them names like Betsy, Sally, Laura, Alice and Mary Anne This also also happened to be the name of the pretty older girl with golden hair who lived next door to us with her five brothers and sisters in Skaneateles, where we lived the year I was three. Sometimes when my mother was tired or busy she or her younger sister would baby sit me in their big old warm cluttered house. Other times I would wander across the yard to their house on my own, where they treated me as if I were just one more kid in their large family. I idolized them all, but most of all I adored Mary Anne and wanted to be just like her when I got bigger. What I missed most after we moved away was spending time with her and her family.
   In any case, left to my own devices that summer, I was lonely for company. Next door to us in Toledo lived a family named Coyle--Mr. Jim and his two sisters, Miss Helen and Miss Cattie. They were about my parents' age, and owned a family-run funeral parlor of which Mr. Jim was the director. They were very friendly and if I was outside they would say hello over the briar hedge that separated our two yards, and often step through an opening that had been cut through long ago to chat. They had no children for me to play with, but if I went over to their house Miss Helen and Miss Cattie were always happy to see me and would invite me in for cookies and lemonade. If I set up a tea party with my dolls on our screened-in front porch, Miss Helen would often join me and talk with me and admire my dolls and talk to them too.
  We had been there about a month when Miss Helen told us that their cousins, or perhaps it was a younger brother and his wife--but more important, a family with children about my age--had bought a house three doors down on our side of the street and would be arriving soon. Children my age at last, just down the street! Eagerly I awaited the day they would arrive and I could introduce myself and make friends.
  Much bustling and excitement accompanied the announcement from next door that the family had finally moved in and were getting settled. That afternoon I questioned Miss Helen about them incessantly until she finally said, "Well, why don't you go see for yourself? Tell them Aunt Helen sent you."
  My mother and baby sister were napping, so I walked three doors down the street, turned into the long driveway, went up the steps, rang the bell next to the door that was wood halfway up with a screen on top just like the one we had on our screened-in front porch, and stood there patiently waiting. Finally a pretty but somewhat tired-looking woman came and looked through the screen to see who was there. She was about my mother's height, wearing a house dress tied at the waist in front, hair pulled back in a loose braid except for some strands she proceeded to blow away from her face. "Hello?," she said a peering through the screen. When she finally looked down and saw me she seemed surprised. "Oh. Well, hello there, little girl."
  "Hello," I replied. "Miss Helen told me you had moved into the neighborhood and you have children my age, so I came over to introduce myself."
  The woman put a hand over her mouth as though to suppress a cough, but her eyes crinkled up and I could see she was smiling. "Why how nice," she said. "Won't you come in?" She opened the door and turned to go back into the house.
   As I stepped inside to follow her I saw she was holding a tiny baby against her shoulder who promptly gurgled and spit up on her, though she did not appear to notice. I followed her through the front of the house, still filled with crates and boxes, into the kitchen.  &nbsp"Do please sit down," she said, smiling at me. I took a seat at the kitchen table.
  "I'm Carol Coyle," she said. "And what is your name, dear?"
   I opened my mouth and before I knew it, out popped "Mary Anne."
   My cheeks were burning, but before I could take it back, Carol Coyle said, "Oh, that's a very pretty name, Mary Anne," as she sat down across from me, offhandedly jiggling the tiny baby on her shoulder without seeming to pay much much attention to it.
   Well now, what to do. But wait. Hadn't the White Rabbit insisted on calling Alice "Mary Anne" when that wasn't her real name at all? And hadn't she finally given up and decided to be Mary Anne until further notice?
   "Do you go to school, Mary Anne?" Carol Coyle asked.
   A done deal. "Oh, yes," Mary Anne answered, "This fall I'm going to be in first grade and learn to write in cursive and read chapter books all by myself."
  "Oh, that's wonderful," she said. "I have a little boy who must be just about your age. He's not here right now, but I'm sure he will be very glad to meet you, Mary Anne."
   I couldn't help smiling. Oh, the magic of it. Mary Anne sat up straight in her chair. Just like that, I had become a character named Mary Anne in my very own story.
  Mrs. Coyle and I chatted for a while longer and I felt a little shiver of happiness every time she addressed me as Mary Anne. In my guise as Mary Anne I told her that my mother also had a little baby, that my father worked in an office downtown but traveled a lot, that we had a swing set and a sandbox in our backyard that her little boy could come play in--and of course the baby when it got bigger. By now the baby was starting to squirm and make small impatient gurgling noises, so I knew it was time for me to go. As I got up to leave, she said, "Thank you for coming by, Mary Anne. Oh but wait. You didn't say where you live. I hope it's not far?"
  "Oh no, " Mary Anne said airily on her way out the door. "It's just three houses down, next door to Miss Helen's. I walk down this side of the street by myself all the time."
  And away I went, back down the street, wearing my new identity as a girl named Mary Anne.
                                             [To Be Continued]

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