Interview with Author Kyle Joseph Kennedy

Kyle's story "Dishonest Tender" is a short piece with a lot of different elements we loved from the first time we read it: humor, a dystopian (yet quotidian) setting, playful use of language, and a fun dose of absurdism. Learn a little more about the author in a short interview below!

Why write? 

Like I imagine is true of many young people, my first experience with writing expressively came in an attempt to woo in my formative years. Earnest poetry. Rhyming "love" with "dove," "world" with "girl." It’s a near rhyme! I started playing music in my late teen years, and paired that romantic and angry writing with music. A songwriter friend, one of the best writers I’d ever met, this guy Joe O’Connor (aka Joseph O’Seph), asked me one day if I ever write stories because some of my songs were narrative, so I gave it a shot. I turned a bad song into a bad story, then started writing more, sharing them with him and a few others. It got its hooks in me. I juggled music and prose for several years until the music slowly died away, leaving the prose writing behind like a cicada shedding its husk. Writing is how I learned to express myself, to explore ideas, and crucially, to think.

Do you have a favorite book that broke your brain a little (or a lot)? 

Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You. My god, that story about teaching swimming lessons without a pool, practicing diving onto the bed and the backstroke across the tile floor. After reading “The Classics” for so many of my early years, that kind of writing, it’s still with me decades later. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This did the same thing to me more recently. I feel like I think about that book once every week or two.

If you were a cryptid, where would you live? 

If I were a cryptid, I’d be a parasite, maybe the Japanese kanmushi, burrowing into the spine of my partner, ruining their posture, but always staying together. 

What other lit journals are you into right now (and what do you like about them)? 

I really love what Hugh is doing over at Turn & Work, with the intersecting coverage of music and literature. I’ve been writing flash lately, so I do a lot of reading at Flash Frog, HAD, Tiny Molecules, Matchbook, SmokeLong, and Wigleaf. Those places really do churn out gut punch after gut punch. 

Do you have imposter syndrome when you write? 

I have imposter syndrome everywhere I go. Who gave me the authority to pick out these avocados? I don’t know what I’m doing. Check the color under the stem? What am I, a surgeon? 

Do you enjoy editing? Why or why not? 

I love editing. It’s where I usually find the story. I tend to discovery-write. I’ll either be hit with a line or an idea and just sort of vomit onto the page to see what comes out. By the end, I usually have an idea of what the piece could be, but then going back and refining it, that’s the good stuff. Specifically, I find editing on printed paper to be immensely beneficial, once I’ve gone through a couple digital edits to really figure out the story. 

When did you realize you were weird? 

This is not the moment I realized I was weird, but it’s stuck with me as confirmation. When I was playing music, we booked shows anywhere we could. Mostly coffee shops, bars, and basements, but occasionally other opportunities would arise. Now, I played angry sadsack anti-folk. I screamed about God and love and sex. I was not everyone’s favorite performer. We booked a show for some reason at an ice cream shop, and I remember singing this song where I repeat the line “I’ll bite and I’ll chew and I’ll rip and I’ll shred until I lose my teeth” several times, getting progressively louder. I remember the song ending to a smattering of applause and looking over at a family who just wanted their Superman ice cream, and thinking “Oh, right.”

What font do you detest? 

I know they’re easier to read on computers and phones, but I hate sans serif fonts. HATE. Have a little class, a little panache, you feckless unadorned embodiment of mediocrity. Do something with your life. (Paging Dr. Freud!) 

Kyle Joseph Kennedy is a writer from Metro Detroit, Michigan. In a previous life, he performed sadsack midwest anti-folk to half-filled cafes, basements, and bars. Now he sings silly songs to two little  monsters and writes during lunch breaks to ward off the demons of suburban Millennial ennui. He is six feet deep in the querying slush piles, seeking a home for a novel about a fascist takeover of a small midwest school. A list of publications can be found at kennedykylejoseph.wordpress.com