Gina Nutt: Your prose poetry collections each have their own echoes or, as in The Strange God Who Makes Us, a series like “Memory Unit.” Here we have a blend of poetry and fiction, characters moving through the strange setting they occupy. Could you share a bit about your process in approaching longer sustained work? What has carried over from standalone prose poems and what’s different?
Christopher Kennedy: My best answer is that I had no intention of writing something longer initially. I was writing what I thought were unconnected prose pieces that felt more like short fiction than prose poems, though don’t ask me what the distinction is, just a feeling mostly, and the fact that Gian DiTrapano, the late founder of New York Tyrant and Tyrant Books, had been asking me for something, and I wanted very much to work with him on a book project.

So, at first, I was thinking the book would be a collection of short fiction pieces, but as I kept writing it seemed obvious that I was telling a long story. The voice was the same, and the scenes were accumulating a bigger picture feel, so I started thinking in terms of a novel. Gian saw what I had and encouraged me to go in that direction, so I did.

As it turned out, I had no idea how to make that transition, but I finished a full draft of about 200 pages, which I sent to Gian and then found out a few days later that he had died. I found it very difficult after that to go back to the manuscript. It’s only recently that I began to engage with it again, and I started to get a better sense of structure, which has made a big difference. It’s still a work-in-progress, but it’s getting there.

GN: The cinematic landscape here is infused with surreal elements, eerie landmarks (some of which may be familiar to those who’ve spent time in Syracuse), and a mythic aura. There’s a dead lake, an occult sundial, a burning house, to name a few. What drew you to these symbols and this surreal space? How do myths relate to the texture of a place?
CK: Growing up in the Syracuse suburbs is the short answer. Long answer: I wanted to find a way to capture what it was like to come of age in a post-industrial landscape at a time when drug culture was becoming the norm for some of my generation. Onondaga Lake, once pristine and beautiful, had become a cautionary tale, and I saw that same kind of pollution happening to me and my friends. Introducing chemicals where they don’t belong has disastrous results, but at the time it felt like progress. Mind expansion and industrial and technological innovation have a lot in common it seems to me. Stick to what works well, and you might be okay. Get out of control, and what seemed a movement forward can become an inevitable dead end. I thought I needed to find a figurative way to capture that reality.

The mythic is one way, as is the surreal or absurd, and that’s my comfort zone generally, so it didn’t take long for me to head in those directions.

The other element is the location in the first section of the book. The Octagon House, as you know, is a real house in Camillus, NY that’s now a museum. I located it next to the lake and housed it with adolescent males as a nod to the toxicity that I associate with the UFC. Going into the octagon suggests violence, and the undercurrent of violence is present in the first section of the book.

GN: In “The Hum,” the narrator tells The Driver: “Whenever I’m in a car, I never feel like I’m going to something. I always feel like I’m going away from something. But it feels like we’re going to something tonight.” The narrator’s literal observation seems infused with an existential hum, which is threaded throughout these pieces, and reflective stillness. What’s on your mind when calibrating movement and still moments in your work? How do you pinpoint that balance?
CK: That scene is based on something that happened to me and my friends. There was a hum that we could hear every night coming from somewhere nearby, and one night some of my friends set out to find its source. We speculated wildly about what could be causing it, as you do when you’re eighteen or nineteen, and one of my friends was a reporter for a local weekly, so he thought he had a good story opportunity. As it turned out, it was coming from the landfill and was nothing of any great interest. What I wanted to show was how exciting it is to think you might discover something amazing and frightening, something your parents don’t know about that you do, and then to have it be a letdown. That’s something I imagine every generation experiences in some way. You want to be unique, and instead you find out incrementally that you aren’t that different after all.

As for the balance between movement and stillness, I wanted actions and reflection on those actions. I was always the person in my friendship groups who was thinking this is a bad idea, and I was almost always right, but it never dissuaded me from being there. It took a lot of mistakes to get to a point where I removed myself from those types of situations.

To that end, in the manuscript, I wanted the narrator to have that introspective quality, however skewed it was by the things he’s doing to influence his ability to discern reality. I used The Driver’s character as a counterpoint to Iggy Pop’s The Passenger. He’s the catalyst for everything that happens in the first third of the book, and by default, the narrator is along for the ride.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
CK: Well, fashion-wise, I’d have to say my twelve-dollar cargo pants purchased at Costco. They’re remarkably sturdy for the price and are surprisingly appropriate for any occasion I might be a part of.

As for books, I’m reading The Vegetarian by Han Kang and I Don’t Care by Agota Kristof, and over the past year or so I’ve read all of Rachel Ingalls, Some New Kind of Kick (Kid Congo Powers memoir), Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, and The Guard by Peter Terrin. There are many more, but those come to mind.

On the music front, I’ve been listening to MJ Lenderman, The Hard Quartet, Faye Webster, Alex G, Idaho (their new album is great), Mark Eitzel, PJ Harvey and random YouTube stuff by all types of artists. I tend to go down various rabbit holes on YouTube and have been pleased to discover new-to-me artists that way.

As for restaurants, All Night Eggplant is my go-to for diner quality fare. I’ve been going there since I was a teenager when it was in a different location and literally open all night. It was the only after-hours option when the bars closed, and the crowd was usually a little out of control. An interesting fact: Many years ago, Burger King threatened to sue the owner for having a burger on the menu called the Whopper. He changed the name to the Vhopper, and they were placated.

Since I’m mostly in my apartment or on the Syracuse campus, the architecture I see most is the storage facility in view from the window in my home office, the Hall of Languages building where my work office is located, and the Huntington Beard Crouse building I see out my work office window. Of the three, HL is my favorite. It’s the original building on Syracuse’s campus and a Second Empire style masterpiece that inspired the Addams Family house. On my walk to and from the parking lot, I see Krause College, which is another beautiful building, and allegedly one of the inspirations for the house in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. That’s a close second.

The storage facility is a solid third place, though. Not for its architectural qualities, which are non-existent, but while I’m writing I like to imagine what people might have hidden away in there, so its value is utilitarian as opposed to aesthetic.

Ultimately, I’m most inspired and energized by my students, current and former. I feel very lucky to still be teaching and to be on the sidelines cheering on those students who have gone on to publish books I admire. It’s a gift I never would have imagined would play such an important role in my life.