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2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 24 COURTESY OF TITUS BOUCHER AND DONNA KAIN, ECU DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
INSOMNIA WELL SPENT a review by Donna A. Gessell Kat Meads. 2:12 a.m.: Essays. Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2013.
DONNA A. GESSELL is a Professor of English at the University of North Georgia, where she teaches literature and composition. An award-winning writer of fiction, drama, nonfiction, and poetry, KAT MEADS is a native of Eastern North Carolina who lives in California and teaches for Oklahoma City University’s low-residency Red Earth MFA program. She holds a BA from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA from UNC Greensboro. 2:12 a.m. received a Gold Medal in the essay/creative nonfiction category of the Independent Publishers Book Awards. In 2014, Meads’s most recent one-act play, Matched, based on the Highland Hospital nurse who confessed to starting the fire that killed Zelda Fitzgerald, was performed at the Silver Spring Stage One-Act Festival in Maryland, where it was awarded for direction and production. Another of her plays was published in NCLR 2009, which also includes an interview with the author. And her novel, The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan (Chiasmus, 2006; reviewed in NCLR 2008) is the subject of a chapter of NCLR Editor Margaret Bauer’s new book, A Study of Scarletts.
There’s good news for insomniacs: sleep researchers report that wakefulness is a natural part of the sleep cycle, an ideal time to accomplish valued activities. In her new collection of essays, 2:12 a.m., self-reported insomniac Kat Meads does just that, as she escapes the tyranny of her insomnia by mapping places, people, and events that she has known. These details in turn captivate her readers with Meads’s relentless drive and curiosity as she revisits her thoughts and elusive dreams. Her essays produce an energy that can keep readers awake at night. The book is at once a product of insomnia and a compendium of insights produced by the insomnia of Meads and of others. In the preface, “Night and Its Houndings,” Meads explores the causes of her insomnia, asking “to get to dream(s) interrupted, where else to start?” The stranger she describes and her attempts “to make the uninvited disappear” prepare readers for “rough and rougher nights ahead” and “no solution to the plight of wakefulness and what wakefulness exaggerated.” She warns readers, “A revolt of the body and the mind is insomnia,” and “The first, faint
ringing of the mortality bell is insomnia” (9). With revolt in our own bodies and minds, mortality faintly ringing, we are off on her “red-eye tour of the world at large and the world within” that insomnia brings (10). And what a tour it is. In the seventeen essays she constructs a personal topography with imagery so vivid that it becomes accessible to everyone. In the first section of essays, Meads’s North Carolina childhood in Currituck County with its “skirted” yards is plotted out and then updated with tales of development as “farmers, unable to sustain a family of four on profits from corn and soybeans, started selling off parcels to developers with intentions to further subdivide” (35). Counting herself “as the last of the Currituck provincials,” Meads frames the growth and subsequent economic and social change of Eastern North Carolina in tales rendered as familiar as family gossip. The scenery is at once familiar yet changed, inviting yet repulsive. We are left, like the subject of the essay “The Rise and Fall of Sheriff Glenn Brinkley,” regretting mistakes, just as “he gnaws that bone day and night and night and day” (44).
ABOVE AND RIGHT Kat Meads (right) talking to a women’s literature class at East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, 4 Sept. 2008; also pictured, NCLR Editor Margaret Bauer (left) and Fiction Editor Liza Wieland (facing Meads)