Judith Kitchen

Judith Kitchen is the award-winning author and editor of several works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate. Her work has won the Lillian Fairchild Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and the S. Mariella Gable Award. She has served as judge for the AWP Nonfiction Award, the Pushcart Prize in poetry, the Oregon Book Award, and the Bush Foundation fellowships, among others. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Kitchen lives in Port Townsend, Washington, and serves on the faculty and as codirector of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

Interview

On Half in Shade: Dinah Lenney and Judith Kitchen in discussion

Dinah Lenney: Let’s talk about photos for a bit: you say you don’t have a camera and only take them reluctantly, but how do you feel about pictures of yourself? Have you ever seen one that you thought told the truth about who you are? Or the truth about your relationship to someone else?

Judith Kitchen: It was odd that I even began this project because I honestly do not like photographs, especially of myself. I hate having them taken, all the posing, and false smiles, and then the fact that they never look the way I imagine myself being. The first photo I’ve ever really liked of myself was taken for the back of the book—Half In Shade—by my friend Cheryl Merrill. I have only recently emerged from chemotherapy and have a small head of hair and so none of my other photographs seemed appropriate. She borrowed the spirit of the book and took a photo of me in an old mirror—and lo and behold, I looked the way I’ve always seen myself! Even without much hair. This is a trick I’d suggest for anyone who is unnerved by photographs because you finally appear the only way you’ve ever seen yourself.

I’m a little more interested in photography now that I’ve been examining these old family photos, but that’s more due to an increased awareness of the role of the photographer—that eye that shapes a scene for posterity. I realize that many of these pieces—they are really responses, I think— take the photographer’s view of things. Or at least ask the questions behind the picture. Outside the frame.

Dinah Lenney: That’s interesting that you took the photographer’s view, but it seems to me the photographer might have wanted to think he’d captured something definitive; whereas so many of your responses to the photos are preoccupied with what happened next and therefore brim with possibility and mystery. I’d say this is where you—the artist—and the photographer part ways, no?

Judith Kitchen: That could be. But I think there’s a kind of mindless snap for snapping’s sake in lots of photographs these days. Think of all those cell phones! I think what I wanted to do was respond to what I saw, to talk back to the photograph. In that sense, I am only an onlooker, the person sifting through the album. But I do know that I often felt as though I were standing in the place of the photographer—but without the inside knowledge of what the photo was “about.” And because so many of these photographs are of people I really didn’t know, there really was a mystery there, reinforced by the very age of the photo, the exoticism of the obsolete. I honestly didn’t know what happened next, except I did know what larger forces were at work on them at the time the photo was taken. Things they couldn’t then have been aware of.

Dinah Lenney: I guess that’s always true when we look at old photographs. Still, it’s strange to think you knew more about them (even the people you didn’t know) than they knew about themselves. And yet you weren’t there; you couldn’t know what they were thinking and feeling. So, on the one hand, how frustrating was it to extrapolate and conjecture; and on the other side of things, how satisfying? Is this fiction or nonfiction—does it matter?

Judith Kitchen: Yes, it matters to me that this be called nonfiction. It’s a nonfiction project, with elements of fiction in the individual pieces. How could I really know what someone was thinking? Even the “about to happen” part is only partial knowledge—only what did happen in that larger sense we call history. But any individual’s part in the large movements that frame their time can be minuscule. In the end, I think I wanted to connect to these people with whom I was supposed to be connected, so I tried to move back and forth, let my own sensibility impose some- thing on them, and let them insist themselves upon me. I found that to be an exciting process, one that allowed me to go only so far before I had to return to what I did or didn’t know. So it gave me real freedom, but reined me in. The resulting tension is—I hope—an integral part of the text.

Dinah Lenney: It absolutely is. It is exciting, even suspenseful in a way, which is odd because there isn’t one story here, strictly speaking. There are so many conversations and perspectives going on in this book, I am curious if your were writing with an ideal reader in mind?

Judith Kitchen: Frankly, when I was writing I didn’t think that anyone would be interested since they have their own ancestors to worry about. Then I wondered if someone out there might also like to triangulate the world in this way—self, object, history—and I guess I thought this just might be a new way to examine the past, and that someone might join me. Once I realized that almost everything was measured by wars—the sense that one was looming, or that one had recently ended—I think I relaxed into the knowledge that my specifics would help make someone else’s universal. But the reader is nameless, though now that you’re asking such interesting questions it might have been you, if I’d known you that long!

Dinah Lenney: Well, that’s why I wondered about the ideal reader. Because you do achieve this intimacy all the way through—it felt like you were writing to me. And it’s fascinating what you say about wars, because I think that’s true—or it used to be true—that war itself was a kind of universal and shaped the values of generations. It was when war served to unify people across class, race, and geography. So, I agree that your ‘specifics’ serve to remind all of us who we were and who our parents were.

Which reminds me, when in this process did you realize that you were searching for your mother? And did you develop your compassion for her before you began, or as you were writing?

Judith Kitchen: I don’t know that I was actually searching for her. I think I have a pretty good idea of who she was—a fairly conventional hard-working woman whose dreams for me did not go far enough. I was surprised to find the more playful photographs, and was curious as to whether she had a side I never knew, possibly a more fun-filled existence that the responsibility of motherhood may have dampened. And I’m not sure I have compassion either, so much as just a possible semi-understanding.

Dinah Lenney: But it does feel like compassion—it feels like love—the way you let her speak for herself; and she’s such a writer, such a “voice” on the page—did that surprise you?

Judith Kitchen: Well, I suppose I knew this would happen—that people would like her “voice” so much more than I do. It irritated me, all that energy, seemingly aimed at nothing. I found her young self to be too shallow for my taste, and I knew I’d sound judgmental (which I was), so I just judged myself to maintain the upper hand, so to speak. If I am honest, I still keep wishing she had had the kind of imagination to want more for herself.

Dinah Lenney: This is a good example of the complicity of the reader, since, for whatever reasons, you’re predisposed to judge, whereas this reader is not. Was she as tough on you as you are on her? Would she have liked this book?

Judith Kitchen: I think she would have liked the idea of it. The desire to delve into family. Though, in the end, I think I became less interested in family per se and more interested in how my family album was a kind of microcosm for the way this country was built. Writing it opened my eyes to the way the nation becomes one large jigsaw puzzle, of which we were a piece—or two, given the two different threads that brought my parents together.

Dinah Lenney: I agree—this account feels singularly American. But I’d say you do pull the idea of family and the ties that bind all the way through. For example your grandchildren are so present and so compelling; although come to think of it, you skipped the previous generation altogether. Was that a deliberate choice?

Judith Kitchen: There are two factors. I’ve always tried to keep my sons out of my pieces since they didn’t ask for a mother who pries into everything the way I do. Also, I have given them “space” in earlier collections, and this one seemed aimed at the far future, even beyond my grandsons’ lives. So that was the timeframe I felt I was working in.

Dinah Lenney: In the introduction, you say the book was written over ten years—but when did you come to this three act structure?

Judith Kitchen: It’s odd, because the long-ago first piece was “Trueheart,” and at the time I thought I was analyzing my mother’s journal, not beginning a whole foray into her albums. But then I’d find another photo, and have another idea, and pretty soon I had a number of these “things” that didn’t seem to have a name. Stuart Dybek calls this kind of short prose pieces “fragments” and I think that’s certainly a good description of the fragmented nature of the project. But I had sculpted the three sections (my father’s lineage, my mother’s young womanhood, and assorted snapshots) by the time I was diagnosed with an interstitial lung disease over two years ago and then breast cancer a year ago. And since I knew that I didn’t want to write yet another illness memoir—that format seemed to have very little to do with my experience or my attitudes—I suddenly realized that, like the people in the photographs, I was also looking into the unknown. By changing the title of the book and adding these pieces as a kind of coda to each section, I realized that I had finally orchestrated its final form, that the “uncertainties” brought those lives and mine into focus in real time. The dialogue of then and now became intense, as though there might be things we could teach each other.

Dinah Lenney: Tell me about Part III, punctuated as it is by chapters titled “Who,” “Where,” “What/Not,” “When,” “Why,” and “How.” Did those sections spring up like mushrooms or did you plan them?

Judith Kitchen: As usual, a bit of both. I wrote “Who” and that title was the only one I could imagine for that odd little girl with chickens on her head. After that, I think I realized that those old journalist questions would serve to reinforce the nonfiction aspect of the project even as I ranged into speculation and beyond. And how could you resist a photograph that is only identified as “not Aunt Gretta?” So after that I began to choose the titles somewhat deliberately, and for at least one piece, to write it specifically so that I could complete the journalist’s task.

Dinah Lenney: You mentioned Stuart Dybek earlier. Who else did you read as you were putting the book together? Who are your influences?

Judith Kitchen: Oddly, Stuart is always an influence, even when I forget about him. He has so carefully orchestrated his publications, with often ten years in between, so each book becomes refreshingly new. And his obsessions and mine overlap, but with emphases in different genres. I know, too, that the work of W. G. Sebald reinforced my desire to work from the photographs—and to depart from the photographs.

The true influences are probably devices—the fluidity of Mrs. Dalloway, the associative connections of William Gass, the philosophical questioning of Richard Rodriguez, the sense of impending history in Nadine Gordimer or Alan Furst, the unsaid and unsayable in Kathryn Davis, the emotional immediacy of thought in Edna O’Brien. To say nothing of poets—because I certainly aspire to the cadence and sound patterns of poetry. But which book have I absolutely loved? Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson. If I could break your heart with time and memory like that, well, I’d gladly break it.

Dinah Lenney: And how will you do that, do you think? With fiction? Nonfiction? What are you writing next?

Judith Kitchen: I have no idea what’s next. I have three unpublished novels that need revision, but I don’t know if I’m enough of a fiction writer to know how to help them out. One—I began it about six years ago—is about a woman who suspects her breast cancer has returned. Before she confirms her suspicions, she decides to take a trip across the country. I suspect I could bring some real-life knowledge to that book now, but it’s still too close, I’d need to wait a while. I liked her, though. Her name is Claire . . . Or maybe a new essay will just insist itself, and I’ll be off on another whole tack. Life always seems to throw up its little surprises.

Dinah Lenney is an actor, writer, and the author of Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir (University of Nebraska), and the co- author of Acting for Young Actors (Watson-Guptill). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Agni Online, and elsewhere. Dinah holds a BA from Yale and an MFA from Bennington, and serves as core faculty for the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she took an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She’s a core member of the faculty for the Rainier Writing Workshop as well, and a full-time lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California. She lives with her husband and children in Los Angeles.