Hawthorne Books

“WRITING THE WORLD WE WANT TO LIVE IN”: AN INTERVIEW WITH MEGAN KRUSE written by Shannon Perri

This past spring I came across Megan Kruse’s novel, Call Me Home (published last year by Hawthorne Books). I read its description online and thought it might be something I’d like, something to give me inspiration for my own writing attempts about family and place. It turns out, I was quite right, though I couldn’t have predicted the degree to which this book would come to affect me. Kruse’s sharp yet evocative prose and fully realized tangle of characters make this a novel that will forever live next to my bed. It’s October now, and I still can’t let go of the characters.

Shannon PerriIn your essay titled “The Driving Force of Desire” you talk about traveling and moving often, and writing, as early as age nineteen. When did you first begin writing? When did you start to consider yourself “a writer,” if there’s a difference for you?

Megan KruseI can’t remember ever thinking of myself as anything but a writer. I think that’s one of the greatest gifts I can imagine—to always have the sense of who I wanted to become. I wrote from the time I could write—and I remember the frustration—I still feel it often—of not having the skills to articulate what I wanted to say. That desire, to say exactly what I felt, drove me to pursue writing, to pursue craft. I wrote my first novel at nineteen and my second at twenty-three—both clunky and faulty and mercifully unpublished, yet in hindsight inexorable steps toward the future.

Despite that certainty, I only allowed myself to identify as a writer in public—to say aloud that this is what I do, what I want to do, after my first—well, technically my third—novel was published. I wish now that I could go back and give myself permission to believe in myself, to own what I wanted so badly. The pull of affirmation as a means to ownership is strong, particularly in a field like writing where success is fickle and undefined. Now, I think of all the decisions I made, to pursue writing at the expense of stability, to continue down a very unclear path—and I allow myself to think of them as building toward something. Still, I wish that I had allowed myself a bit more confidence before that, a little more light.

I will say that even though I didn’t allow myself to publicly own the identity of “writer,” I always nurtured a certainty, secret and strong, that this was my path, and that allowed me to let go of some of the doubt, the questioning of whether or not to keep going. That’s something I think is essential—to stop questioning whether you are going to keep going, and do.

To read the entire interview, go to Entropy.