Boundless Creativity
In Episode 67 of the Exhale Podcast, Adrienne interviews author and creative writing professor, Cate Kennedy, about writing across the genres of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They discuss protecting the life-giving quality of your creative practice, resisting hustle and competition, and finding joy in the work of both writing and motherhood.
Bio: Cate Kennedy is the author of three poetry collections, a novel, a memoir about volunteering, and two collections of short stories. Her work has been widely anthologised and her stories are taught on the school curriculum in her home country of Australia. She works on the fiction faculty at the Pacific University's low-residency MFA program, and teaches workshops on her favorite subjects: fiction writing, structure, the power of metaphor and the joys of storytelling. She is currently at work on a new poetry collection and a long-brewing novel-in-stories, as well as a fictional diary exploring humans' fraught relationship with fragile natural environments, set in the South Pacific. She is the mother of a seventeen year old daughter, had her first stories published when her daughter was five months old, and has been juggling the so-called 'work-life balance' ever since.
Quotes:
“When I talk to my daughter now about when we were living on the farm when she was little, and we used to just wander around and look at fallen nests and, and pick up feathers and go down to the river and. Those are the times that she remembers, not the times that we were doing lots of structured activities.
I like that emptiness because that seems to be what I'm striving for now [creatively], to try and clear my mind of distractions and busy work to get back to that feeling of wandering around inside an idea and picking up the little leaves and feathers and carrying them and wondering why I've picked up those and arranging them in new ways in my writing.” —Cate Kennedy
Links:
Explore more of Cate’s writing in the free writing resource Adrienne created—Writing Across Genres: Exploring Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction
Adrienne referenced Cate’s short stories “Cake” and “Waiting,” which explore motherhood and pregnancy loss and can be found in Cate’s award-winning short story collection, Like A House On Fire
Cate’s poem “The Zen Master” can be found in her poetry collection, The Taste of River Water
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