Kathryn Craft

Kathryn Craft is well known figure in the literary world of Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. For 19 years she wrote hundreds of features and reviews for the Allentown Morning Call newspaper and other publications. Over the past decade she has served in many capacities on the board of the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group, including two terms as president and twice as the chair of GLVWG's annual Write Stuff conference. She also sits on the board of the Philadelphia Writers' Conference, is a member of the Liars Club (a group of Philadelphia-based authors), blogs, and gives talks on writing and publishing to schools and writers' groups. She has a Masters Degree in health & physical education from Miami University of Ohio and currently lives in Doylestown. Her debut novel, The Art of Falling (Sourcebooks), released on January 28 and her second, While the Leaves Stood Still, is due from Sourcebooks in Spring 2015.

BETHLEHEM WRITERS GROUP: I knew you were going to be a difficult subject to interview as your writing, your literary life, and your focus on healing and wellness are deeply intertwined.

Kathryn Craft: Can I just interrupt and thank you for that sentence? It really made me think. Thank you for it.

BWG: As we are a writers group, I want to focus on your immersion in the craft of writing and your experience in the current state of publishing. Your novel The Art of Falling is receiving rave reviews, but you have been quoted as saying you could paper your house with rejection slips and that you submitted your novel 113 times to editors and agents. What gave you the faith to persevere in the face of such rejection?

KC: Well, you nailed the answer—faith. When my first husband committed suicide in 1997, I had already been writing for the paper for fifteen years. I was a writer, and a writer learns and discovers and analyzes through the written word. When I met my second husband, who was much more supportive of my writing, my inner novelist sprang to life. It felt like my calling to write stories that pushed people to the brink of despair and then allow them a way to claw their way back. I needed to do this for myself, for my children, and for my community. So I set to work on what I could control—the quality of my writing, learning about the publishing industry, upping the quality of programs for writers like me in the area—and surrendered the timing, which I could not control. The trick was to hang in there until I had a product that connected with the right agent. For me, that was agent 113.

BWG: Can you describe your experiences between working with traditional publishers and the path of independently publishing?

KC: Not really, since I always knew I'd need an agent and a traditional publisher to distribute my type of work widely enough to find its audience. The obvious comparison, though, would be that if I had jumped off the traditional path in order to publish on my own desired timing, my work would not have been as fully developed. That would have been a shame because with input from an editor I had pitched to (but who ultimately declined), my agent, and then my two Sourcebooks editors, The Art of Falling really matured in its final two years.

BWG: Your publishing situation has me a bit confused: You have independently published your debut novel The Art of Falling but at the same time you are represented by the Donald Mass Literary Agency, one of the best known New York literary agencies. Could you explain this relationship?

KC: I can clear it up quickly: I did not indie publish. There are many uses of the word "independent" in publishing these days, a term self-publishers co-opted for their use. Sourcebooks, based outside of Chicago, is a large independent publisher, meaning that it isn't one of the "Big Five" corporate publishers. But it has various imprints, an editorial staff, an art department, a marketing department, a publicity department that is doing more for me than most major publishers do, a distribution network through Ingram and Baker & Taylor, access to the major industry reviewers—all you need to successfully publish and distribute a book in today's competitive market. It's also making money, so is a business model worth studying. Its founder and CEO, Dominique Raccah, wins award after award for innovative entrepreneurship.

BWG: In an interview with another journalist, you are quoted as saying, "I love stories of miraculous survival." Is this the fundamental spark that ignites your creativity?

KC: Not really, I just happen to enjoy all of the philosophical quandaries raised by such stories—but this will no doubt be my only novel with that kind of spectacular opening. I think the most fundamental question I am drawn to, over and over, due to both my husband's suicide and my own late awakening to my passion for creative writing, is: what is it that makes us believe that life is worth living? That question is much more fundamental and relatable, and is basic to any character that would interest me.

BWG: This is a compound question: How many years did it take to write this first novel and how many re-writes or drafts did you go through before you decided you were finished with it? And did you have a support group that helped you work through it?

KC: It took me eight years and some twenty drafts (that's a guess) to write the novel. Two major factors slowed things down: it was a complex story structure for a debut novel (intertwining past/present story threads and an ironic story line), and my protagonist and I were healing at the same time: she from physical injuries sustained by a fourteen-story fall and the suspected reason she may have fallen, and I from the suicide. I'm sure there were times my protagonist and I held each other back, but we both made it out stronger women.

I started out with a critique group but quickly learned that the format wasn't right for me. My main feedback came from full manuscript swaps with two trusted, experienced critique partners.

BWG: You have been quoted as saying the writers who greatly influenced you include Ann Patchett, Khaled Hosseini, Margot Livesey, Barbara Kingsovler, Roland Merullo, Marisa de los Santos, Regina McBride, and Danielle Young-Ullman. What do you take away from such a disparate group that helped form your own craft?

KC: Ooh, great question. First, style. Each of these authors writes with a spare style that nonetheless resonates with the rich, careful layering of image and meaning. Not a word is wasted. It's never about just the mentioned wristwatch—it's about the passage of time. Which means it's never just about the story—it's about all of life. I love their attention to poetics—the way the words sound, their rhythm, and the way structure alone (of a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter) can convey meaning. I love the way they invite the reader into the co-creative process, so the story feels part yours. They also seem inside my head. Although diverse, as you said, we have similar concerns.

BWG: You also run a manuscript service, WritingPartner.com, that offers manuscript evaluation, line editing, synopsis writing, etc. Are you finding a large market for such services? Does this aid your own writing? Or does it take away from the limited amount of time that you have for your own writing?

KC: As editors edit less and writers seek to self-publish, there is a growing market for such services. It was tough the first few years because nobody knew who I was, but my reputation grew and now I have as much work as I can possibly take, because of the reduced time you mentioned. I am now writing fiction on deadline for the first time in my life and have had to get greedier with my time.

Editing fiction for others has been the single most beneficial thing I've done for my writing career. I realize that not all writers have the inclination or the natural analytic aptitudes to do it, but truly—the more manuscripts you can put your eyes on, the more you'll learn what to do and what not to do, and the more you'll understand the entire publishing process, and the role of agents and editors.

BWG: Without an MFA (the standard ticket for teaching writing), or a list of novels behind you, is it hard to convince would-be writers that your manuscript services can give them what they need to become published writers?

KC: I relieved myself of that burden by never promising I can get anyone published. I can't control the market any more than anyone else can. But if they want to enter the writing process more deeply, and add techniques to their toolbox, and get to know their story better so they'll be more equal to telling it in an effective way, I can show them how, by using their own manuscript as workshop material. If in the process we raise their manuscript to a level that will snag the interest of an agent or publisher, that's a bonus. And that does happen. For real writers, though, the developmental process is reward enough for the money spent, along with the greater confidence and the intuitive sense that they are closer to their goal. And this new focus will improve the manuscript to the point that if it is possible for an agent to connect with it, they will. It's happened over and over, and I now have a satisfied base of repeat clients who are believers.

BWG: What common mistakes or faults do you find from beginning writers who work with you in your manuscript services?

KC: Most don't really grasp storytelling structure yet, so have failed to use it to involve the reader in the tale and invest him in the protagonist's predicament. Second to that is probably lack of understanding of premise, which is how you figure out what conflict is relevant to your project. After that would be unintentional prose bloating that creates a barrier between writer and reader. I get it—these were my rookie problems as well. After the writer receives one of my written evaluations, she gets it.

BWG: The Art of Falling is a very personal novel pulled from your own experience as a dancer and a young woman fighting body issues. Your second novel, While the Leaves Stood Still (Sourebook, Spring 2015), is based on the 1997 incident that surrounded the suicide standoff that resulted in your husband's death. How do you find the courage to delve into and reexamine such painful moments in your life?

KC: Haha! This could be an answer too complex for me to answer, its true source hidden deep within my psyche, its manifestation influenced by nature and nurture, genetics and spirit—or it could be as easy as I like the color green. Who knows? But I can tell you I've never wanted to live in a fantasy. I want to glean all the meaning I can from my life's experiences, and will not turn from the lessons they have to offer. It is not always easy, and I have grieved anew while writing this second book, but the story is mine to own or ignore, to make use of or dismiss. The fact that it feels like a calling helps. If God wants this story in the world God will give me what it takes to tell it, and if my soul tears in the process, God will repair it.

BWG: Both of these books are deeply personal: Why did you choose to express yourself through the novel format rather than writing them as memoirs?

KC: The easy answer is that all great fiction is deeply personal.

The more pragmatic answer: back in 1998, when I was first inspired to write about issues surrounding the suicide, memoirs were not as widely accepted as they became in the mid-2000s. Even so, while working on The Art of Falling, I took breaks to draft a memoir. The Art of Falling is a work of pure fiction, driven by questions raised after the suicide and my knowledge of the dance world. If Penelope Sparrow was born to be a dancer—in spiritual terms, if God infused her with that passion—would God devil her by short-changing her body so that she couldn't bring it to fruition? Or could our limitations actually help define our creative contribution? I wanted to see how these concerns might play out in my protagonist's life.

At the same time, I felt moved to lay down a record of our own story—what we went through and how we negotiated it, for my children and me—and I benefited from further healing by shaping it into a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

I was still considering a memoir right up until The Art of Falling got its contract. That was a game-changer—why work like the devil to find an audience for my fiction then jump tracks and build a new audience for my memoir? Not everyone likes both forms.

Re-reading the memoir material as I am now, while writing my second novel, I am still overwhelmed by the enormity of it. Fiction projects allow me to examine a slice of it at a time—the memoir has enough material to power many novels. While the Leaves Stood Still will focus on our actual experiences, especially as concerns the emotional development and the police action, and show how even a tragic story can offer up glimmers of hope.

Hope: that is what we writers need, and finding it and sustaining it is the great challenge of our lives. Hope is what makes a great story, on the page and in our lives. And because hope is what we all need to get up each morning, it will continue to be the unifying factor in all of my writing.

BWG: Thanks again for taking the time to work with us and we hope The Art of Falling receives the great success it deserves.

KC: Thank you!

Interview by BWG member Jerome W. McFadden