The gentleman who conducted these critique group sessions at a writers conference, the first ones I had ever attended at such a venue, was author Ken Kuhlken. Since then, Ken and I have kept in touch, and I am so happy he has agreed to join us here on the Florida front porch, all the way from Sunny California.
Welcome, Ken! Give us a quick bio.
In fifty words or less, who is Ken Kuhlken?
A while back it occurred to me that the only time I am truly
content is when playing golf or baseball or softball or hanging out with
friends or family or reading or writing. Now, the only one of those I could
even hope to make a living from is writing. So that's what I feel called to do.
What educational background do you
have?
I
sort of went to high school, but other concerns, like death and illness, (as
detailed somewhat in Reading Brother
Lawrence) intruded, so I didn't begin to do what
my Zoë has done this year, which is apply to many fine schools. I instead
went to San Diego State, which, at the time was much more challenging than it
has since become (I know because I taught and worked as an adviser there for a
dozen years). And after I decided high school teaching was awfully hard on a
guy whose attention drifts all over, I tried to find the best school for a
graduate degree in fiction writing and learned it was the University of Iowa. I
applied and got turned down. I was admitted to a summer session and had a
class with John Irving who then told the people to let me into the regular program, and they did. So I spent a couple years in Iowa City and earned an MFA degree.
I didn't know that. We lived in Des Moines for a couple of years and had some interesting times with one professor from that college who disagreed with my assertion that Wiccans worshipped alongside satanists, loosely speaking. Stirred up quite the hornet's nest...Small world, for sure!
Are you married? Single? Have kids?
To answer this, read "Old Man, New
Baby."
For all the pet
lovers out there, answer this question: Do you have any?
My cat began 2019 with a urinary tract blockage, which cost
plenty for emergency care. After that, we learned he was epileptic, which means
we need to medicate him three times each day. And during all this, I have found
that many people consider spending lots of money to save the lives of their
dogs reasonable, but can't understand why anybody would spend much to save a
cat. This puzzles me.
What makes you
cringe?
My office partner and close friend at the University of
Arizona wasn't usually judgmental, but coming from a family of Brahmins in
India, he had high standards for behavior. If somebody acted out of accord
with those standards, he took offense and considered that person uncivilized,
which to him was the gravest transgression. Example: a contractor gave him a
price for a fence then charged about twice the estimate, with little
explanation. That man he declared uncivilized, and told him so.
Lately, I cringe at behavior I consider uncivilized. Like
profanity for no good reason. I have a coffee cup with a Mark Twain quote:
"If angry, count five. If very angry, curse." I go along with that,
but I prefer civil language, and the same holds for my reading, writing, choice
of movies and television, and even comedians. Unless profanity serves a valid
purpose, I much prefer to avoid it.
Everybody seems to
have a bucket list. Do you? If so, what’s on it? If not, why not?
I
want to become a perpetual tourist.
My wife and I do too. I know you can write about places and sell articles to magazines that cover travel...to cover your travel expenses...hmmm. Excuse me, Ken. I think I hear my retirement calling.
Besides
storytelling, what talents do you have?
At one time, I was a very good golfer. Not great, but
very good. As a kid, I played baseball well, but then I switched to golf. And I
think I have become, over many years of trying and learning, a pretty good
father.
Besides the usual things authors
face, has there been an unusual event that changed your perspective about being
an author?
My
grandma, with whom we lived my first nine years, was an accomplished painter
and storyteller. I learned to appreciate stories more than anything, and
attempted a novel in eighth grade. When I was fifteen, my dad died, and then my
mom got hospitalized for months with spinal meningitis. While she was gone, my
best friend, another only child, moved in with me, and we became ever closer.
Then he died in a car accident. And circumstances leading up to his death
presented a whole world of mysteries I am still trying to resolve. My way of resolving
mysteries is to tell stories about them.
Do you have a crazy,
interesting, behind-the-scenes story about the publishing world you’d like to
tell your readers without boring them to death with industry gobbledygook?
My friend Alan Russell and I traveled together for book
signings. We catalogued our misadventures in fact and fiction, in Road Kill
and No Cats, No
Chocolate.
Of all the
stories/books you have written, which one is your favorite? And what compelled
you to write this story?
Since my favorite is always the one I finished last, I'm
going to tell about For America,
which is actually five short books.
For America has been a long time coming. The story began when I
rode in an old Dodge pickup with my friend Laurent to Iowa. Later, I wrote some
pages about the trip and called them "The Gas Crisis."
Raymond Carver, a wonderful
writer of mostly short stories, told about waking one morning and thinking of
the line, "He was vacuuming when the telephone rang." So he sat and
wrote that line and kept writing until he finished a remarkable story.
On a larger scale, the same
happened to me. I began writing about a road trip and got carried away. My
daughter, Darcy, at age five, noticed me standing in the kitchen staring at
nothing, and remarked, "Oh no, crazy ol' daddy's working on the grass
crisis again."
The story took me over. I have
long felt that, though I often interrupted to write other novels, this one I
was destined to write.
Do you ever receive
negative reviews from readers? If so, how do you respond when you see them?
If I expected everyone to appreciate what I write, I would
either have long ago learned to write by some genre formula or gone mad. I
write what I feel inspired to write and try my best not to expect any
particular reaction, though I'm human enough to hope my stories will touch some
people.
If you had one person you could
meet (think outside the Bible here) and could spend as much time as you wanted
with that individual, who would it be?
Marilyn
Monroe comes to mind. And not only because she was fun to look at. I mean, we
could talk about Arthur Miller, Joe DiMaggio, and maybe JFK.
And
I would love to spend an eternity hanging out with each of my kids and my
grandson. It seems I never get enough time with them.
What’s the craziest thing you have
ever done?
I
had a solid job teaching creative writing at California State University,
Chico. It was a lovely town and pleasant work, and they gave me tenure, made
me an associate professor, and my colleagues and students were mostly a
delight. But the way things turned out, when my kids were in San Diego and my
mother was getting old, I gave up that job. Hardly anybody gives up a tenured
professorship unless they get offered a better one. Lots of people, even my
mother, said, "No way. You really are crazy."
Why do you live where you live?
Where
I live, in San Diego, most people seem to think it's not only the best place in
the world to live, but that it's the only place a reasonable person would care
to live.
Though
I've spent most of my life in the San Diego area, I've also lived for lengthy
spells in Chico, California, Iowa City, Iowa, Athens, Greece, and Tucson,
Arizona. I would be happy to move to any of them again. Mostly, where I
live has to do with people. Where most of the people who mean most to me are,
that's where I want to be. If they scatter all over the place, I intend to do a
lot of travelling.
Is
there anything else you’d like to share with our readers about you, or anything
we didn’t cover?
Recently
my Darcy convinced me to start listening to audiobooks. She steered me to
Audible, which I found okay except that it costs about $15 a month for one
audiobook, and then it tries to sell me others. I can easily consume an
audiobook a week, so I checked out Scribd, which I had encountered a while
back, and found it much better in several ways. With Scribd I get all the
audiobooks and ebooks I can use for $10 per month. And, just as exciting, lots
of my books are available on Scribd in ebook (not yet on audio, though I hope
to remedy that). So, dear reader, if you join Scribd, you can read a trilogy of
Hickey family crime novels, the entire five books that make up For America, and more of my work, all
from Scribd, for hardly anything. Also, I have communicated with Scribd people
about a couple issues, and they are mighty responsive and civilized people. I
am a big fan of Scribd.
Ken, it's been a pleasure having you here on the Florida front porch!
Readers, if you wish to follow up on this interview and check out Ken's writing, subscribe to his newsletter, or find out more about him in general, here are some sites you can visit:
To reach him, go to kenkuhlken.net
or join him at Perelandra College.
Until next time, may God bless America, and more importantly, may America bless God!
Living here in Central Florida, we get a great deal of news about NASA, Spacex, and the International Space Station. Probably more than the rest of the country only because on a clear day or night, we can see the launches from Cape Canaveral in the sky to our east. Even seventy miles away. They are spectacular, especially at night. And as you might imagine, people travel from all around, setting up chairs, tents, and even campers along the coast to view the orange glow of the rockets.
