Kat Meads: Power Profile
Kat Meads book, Dear DeeDee, will be released December 4, 2020 (and yes, you can preorder it now at the link above!)
When I joined the Regal House family, I was invited to review some other Regal House titles, and I didn’t hesitate to pick hers because of my own Southern roots and fascination with letters and family. Kat, like me, identifies as an “exiled Southerner”, and I was enthralled by how many of us who have left the South are still wrapped up in it somehow.
Dear DeeDee is part memoir and part historical treasure. She brings us a haunted, feminist exchange, deeply rooted in family and community, and the forever-gripping relationship we have with the places that have shaped us.
I’m proud to feature Kat here and to lift up her work.
LH: What issues/ideas/questions do you find continue to circle through your work?
KM: I’m likely not the best person to make that assessment, but here’s a best guess:
1) The long-arm reach of the past.
2) Struggle.
3) Rebellious women.
LH: How do you engage with literary citizenship and its role in building a community of supportive writers?
KM: I recommend books—especially independent press books. I send frequent fan letters (as you’re aware from reading Dear DeeDee). If I come across a call for submissions that strikes me as a good fit for a student I’ve worked with, a writer at the beginning of her or his career, I send along the announcement with a nudge to submit. Currently I sit on the editorial board of the North Carolina Literary Review. When invited, I serve as a reader/judge for literary magazine and writing conference competitions. I read my writer friends’ manuscripts-in-progress and they read mine. Those of us living in the same territory meet for lunch to congratulate or commiserate, as the case may be. At the end of each year, I donate to a range of literary magazines, independent presses, women’s theatre companies and writer fellowships, as my finances allow. This year, because of the impact of the pandemic, I’ll be donating sooner.
LH: Self-promotion is a necessary task in today’s marketplace. How do you approach self-promotion and have your views changed on it over time?
KM: All of my work has been published by university or independent presses whose marketing budgets are limited, so there’s never been a time when I didn’t think I’d have to play an active role in getting the word out. In the last few years, I’ve made an effort to do more joint events: two-or-three person readings, panels, literary chat/art show combos. Those sorts of events seem to be more enjoyable for all concerned.
LH: What metaphor best expresses your creative process?
KM: My friend and colleague Allison Amend says there are two sorts of writers: bingers and plodders. I’m a plodder. My MO is to write something as often as possible. Which means I put a lot of faith in revision.
LH: What are you currently working on and why does it matter to you?
KM: Just now I’m writing a series of researched essays. One of those, a deep dive into how biographers have presented Virginia Woolf and her circle, will be coming out later this year in New England Review. The essays focus on women’s lives and women’s writing, abiding interests of mine. (As you know, more than a few of the Dear DeeDee letters are devoted to the subject.) If a Women’s Studies major had been offered at UNC-Chapel Hill when I was an undergraduate, I suspect I would have signed up posthaste.
LH: What writer’s work would you like to elevate here?
KM: You’re familiar with the quiz: if you could invite any writer to a dinner party, which writer/writers would you chose? My at-the-moment answer would be: Lucy Ellmann, Lucy Ellmann and Lucy Ellmann. I came late to her fierce and funny novels, but they are all such treats for the brain and terrific examples of what fiction can accomplish when disregarding “the rules.”
Kat Meads is the author of many books, most recently the memoir-in-letters Dear DeeDee (Regal House Publishing) and Miss Jane: The Lost Years, a novel (Livingston Press). She has received writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo and the Montalvo Center for the Arts. Her short plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. A native of North Carolina, she lives in California’s Bay Area.
Website: www.katmeads.com
Essays:
“Charming (to Some) Estelle”
http://www.full-stop.net/2020/01/15/features/kat-meads/charming-to-some-estelle/
“Cat and Mouse: Christie, Tynan, Redgrave and that Infamous 11-Day Gap”
http://www.eclectica.org/v23n4/meads.html
“Letter from California - Fire Season”
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/current-events/letter-california-fire-season-kat-meads
Essay on Mary McCarthy published in Eclectica:
"Mary McCarthy Performs Mary McCarthy"
