To Drive or Not to Drive

I'm in Hamlet mode. Hamlet was a Libra.

I just found out my Montana prof Kevin Canty is reading Tuesday in Winston Salem. I live 5 hours away in Athens, Ohio. Compared to Missoula, this is close, but it's not really that close. And it's the last week of the quarter. Freshmen are piling up outside my doorstep. Body count is high.

And I'm pretty sure the house I own in Durham is crumbling at the brick level, about to teeter right off these stumbly piers it was built upon in 1928. But I can't seem to make it there to deal with it. That distance, an extra hour, feels way too far to drive. Probably forever.

Somehow, that I lived in North Carolina for fifteen years seems to matter.

This is where I need my MFA friend Anne Marie, who would say, "We are going. We are DEFINITELY going."

I probably won't go.

But it sure would be awesome to go.

Kevin Canty at 2010 SLS

Montana's Kevin Canty to teach at Summer Literary Seminars in Montreal, Summer 2010.

Montana MFA Faculty News: Kevin Canty

It’s no exaggeration to say Kevin Canty transformed my fiction. I’m not saying that I’m a genius now, but if you saw what I was writing before — well, you would understand. Spring semester of 07 was a transformative, if horribly painful molting that involved multiple nights of tossing, turning and hand wringing. But at the end I was a better writer.

It’s also no exaggeration to say that Kevin is one of the best short story writers working today. Maybe I’m biased but I don’t believe so. I can like you as a person but not like your writing.

I like Kevin as a writer and as a person and he has a new collection out, Where the Money Went. I’m waiting until I move to order it, so that it will arrive at my house, but I have heard two of these stories at readings and I loved them. KC has this amazing way of creating stories that feel effortless even as you are transported to this familiar, yet alternate universe.

And he’s great reader.

If you have a chance to attend these readings, do it.

I already missed the plug boat for New York City, July 8, at Joe's Pub, but apparently it was sold out anyway.

Upcoming:

July 14: Shakespeare & Co., Missoula,
August 4: Elliot Bay Book Co., Seattle
August 6: Powell's on Hawthorne, Portland

Here’s where Elle recommends Kevin as summer reading.