Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
N C L R ONLINE
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PHOTOGRAPH BY DONNA KAIN
RANDALL KENAN COMING THROUGH THE FIRES THAT ARE THE POSTMODERN WORLD
ILLUSTRATION BY KAREN LEE; COURTESY OF NCLR;
I came across Randall Kenan’s short story “When We All Get to Heaven” a year or so after the Virginia Quarterly Review published it in 2013.21 As I relished the voice, music, cadence, and Southern presence of the main character, who has a day’s pedestrian odyssey around New York City, I got to thinking about catching up with the author. So I did what we do these days: I searched him out on social media – and discovered he is indeed still Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill and teaching creative writing there as well as at workshops around the country. As we worked at finding time for this exchange, Randall noted, “Students’ final paper[s are] due . . . and I am getting emails from conscientious freshmen at the rate of one every thirty minutes!” Kenan remains passionately engaged in his teaching as well as his writing, and he confirms my own long-standing view of his spiritual imagination’s interplay with art and mystery. Kenan writes, as he told me during our interview for my NCLR essay a decade before, “out of a tension between rational and irrational ways of understanding, and how hard it can be to reconcile a rational view of the world with the irrational reality of lived, hands-on experience.”22 In addition to his own award-winning books, which were out by the time I spoke to him for my earlier essay, Kenan recently also edited and wrote the introduction for The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin and The Fire This Time, which continues and expands the conversation on “racial nightmare” started by James Baldwin in his book The Fire Next Time.23 He is the recipient of a Guggenheim, a Whiting Writers Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, a Lannan Foundation Residency, and he has been inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The following conversation took place by email in the early summer of 2016.
COURTESY OF NCLR
SHERYL CORNETT: Since our last interview ten years ago, congratulations on your induction into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Since that conversation, too, you have a new collection of essays, The Fire this Time, in addition to other works in progress. I understand there is a novel in the making and another collection of short stories. Will your readers-in-waiting be able to enjoy it soon? RANDALL KENAN: Has it really been ten years? That astonishes me.
Difficult to process. The novel I’ve been working on is actually entitled There’s a Man Going Round Taking Names. It’s a rather long, historically inflected novel, and it’s taken me much longer than I expected, but I
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ABOVE TOP Randall Kenan at the Eastern
North Carolina Literary Homecoming kickoff dinner, Greenville, NC, 22 Sept. 2012
ABOVE BOTTOM NCLR 2006, which
included Cornett’s interview with Kenan
Discovering the Story: A Film Adaption of Randall Kenan’s ‘The Foundations of the Earth’,” NCLR 21 (2012): 94–107.
Randall Kenan, “When We All Get to Heaven,” Virginia Quarterly Review 89. 2 (2013): web.
Sheryl Cornett, “Smitten by Victoriana: Randall Kenan’s Down East Boyhood with Books, Storytelling, and the Power of Language,” NCLR 15 (2006): 11–17. See also in NCLR, Harry Thomas, “‘a wanderer on the earth’ and ‘a son of the community’: Place and the Question of Queers in the Rural Souths of Lee Smith and Randall Kenan, NCLR 17 (2008): 117–30; and Elisabeth Benfey,
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Randall Kenan, The Fire This Time (Melville House, 2007); The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (Pantheon, 2010). SInce this interview, Kenan has edited The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food (Eno, 2016).