Masters Series: Cate Kennedy

Kate travelled to Castlemaine to record this interview in person with Cate Kennedy in her beautiful home amongst overflowing bookshelves. The day was a total joy and involved cake, op-shopping, visits to beautiful spots around town, much perusal of the bookshelves and Kate being sent home with homemade jam and books for her kids.

Kate attempted to edit down this episode, she really did, but Cate Kennedy just shares so much writing wisdom it was hard not to leave it in full. Settle in with a cuppa if you can.

Cate Kennedy has published several collections of both poetry and fiction. Her story collections Like a House on Fire and Dark Roots are widely studied in Australia and her poetry collections include The Taste of River Water, Signs of Other Fires, Joyflight, and Crucible and Other Poems. She is a two-time winner of The Age Short Story Competition, and a recipient of the 2013 Steele Rudd Award, the 2002 Vincent Bucklet Poetry Prize, and the 2001 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, among others. Her highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, won the People’s Choice Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2010 and she is also the author of travel memoir Sing and Don’t Cry.

Kennedy works as a writing teacher and advisor on the faculty of Pacific University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program in Portland, Oregon, and received her PhD in Creative Writing from LaTrobe University in 2021. She lives in Castlemaine, Victoria on Dja Dja Wurrung country.

The conversation covers:

• Cate’s early reading habits and reading for pleasure

• How Cate gets the feeling of ‘dancing over to the desk’

• The delights of Billy Collins – Introduction to Poetry

• Using an avatar of self in writing which Cate also discusses in this recording of a Words In Winter event

• The significant moments of joining Writers Victoria and submitting short stories to the Sisters in Crime Scarlet Stiletto Awards

• The early support of poet Ron Pretty and Five Islands Press

• Cate’s experience in Mexico and writing the memoir Sing and Don’t Cry

• The importance of limitations and constraints. Cate says: ‘I like a small canvas’

• Kate poses three of Cate’s writing advice quotes back to her for comment:
  • Plot can be described in 3 words: Things get worse. Make things worse. 
  • The internal logic of the story must be satisfied in KYD – ‘A Good Ending is Only the Beginning’
  • A good resolution can’t be made out of thin air—it needs to be formed from the elements you have already introduced in the story in KYD – ‘A Good Ending is Only the Beginning’

• The problem of rescuing characters instead of making things worse for them.

• Writing the short story Cold Snap – published in the New Yorker as Black Ice. Cate says: ‘Limitation is a marvellous thing in fiction. Marvellous.’

• Cate’s interview in Rachel Power’s – Motherhood and Creativity: the divided heart

• Cate reading poetry on Radio National including the poem ‘Eating Earth’ about the experience of miscarriage

• Cate’s rousing speech on giving up people-pleasing at Jacinta Parson’s launch for her book A Question of Age

• Invisible labour (Kate mentions the launch of Hermina Burns’ new poetry collections

• Cate reads a new poem ‘DIY Flatpack Therapy’

• On their Castlemaine adventures, Kate and Cate visited – Taproom, Castlemaine Vintage Bazaar, Das Kaffeehuas and Lot 19

• They also visited the amazing exhibition ‘Return’ – photographs by Helge Salwe and words by Cate Kennedy

• Cate’s love of collaboration and her various collabs with singer and musician Jen Lush

Books Cate picked up at the op shop

• Ali Smith – How to be Both

• Amanda Lohrey – The Labyrinth

• Favel Parrett – There Was Still Love

• Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist

Cate’s advice for writers:

• Keep going. The map is made by the walking.

A special note: Cate sent an email after the convo lamenting that she hadn’t passed on the following advice – her favourite – from Annie Dillard from her fabulous book on writing The Writing Life:

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Cate recommends:

Lisa Moore – Degrees of Nakedness and Something for Everyone

Claire Keegan – Small Things Like These