Kathleen Kilcup
Author Interview - Kathleen Kilcup
Author of Between the Light and Me: A Memoir of Beauty and Violence
Between the Light and Me is a stirring exploration of the ways in which darkness and light bleed together in both the world and the human heart.
Just one month before September 11, Kathleen Kilcup enlisted in the US Army with all the fervent idealism of an untested teenager. Between the Light and Me is her unflinching account of encountering violence―both in the military and beyond―and a desperate, sometimes ill-conceived search for God that sustained her through addiction and trauma, on the long road to true freedom.
Tracing her singular path from a juvenile detention center in Utah to linguistic training in California, from a wildland firefighter crew in Tahoe to a lavender farm in Oregon, Kilcup explores the entanglement of violence and beauty in her own life as she hungered for something genuine while starving herself and getting blackout drunk. “I wanted something real and painful and beautiful, the mystery underneath the mystery. I wanted the truth,” she writes.
Written with a poet’s uncanny knack for the luminous detail, Between the Light and Me is a riveting portrait of modern spiritual hunger manifest in barracks, chapels, bars, and church basements where communion tastes like stale coffee sipped from Styrofoam cups. This is memoir as spiritual investigation, written for anyone who has ever wondered how grace might find us in the places where we least expect it.
Author Interview - Kathleen Kilcup
Author I draw inspiration from:
Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory. It's not the best novel I've ever read (though it's up there), but I can't seem to shake Greene's hold on me. There's something about his work that is so deeply alive to reality--a willingness to cast the whole philosophy of Christianity onto the barbed wilderness of human experience to see what takes root, what grows. I sense a mixture of courage and desperation in his literary voice that syncs up exactly with my own desire for a naked kind of truth, an existential march on the world of literary pretense.
In the Power and the Glory, Greene weaves this incredibly tense moral tapestry. The warp is made out of cowardice, alcoholism, terror, and violence. The weft is "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God" (Brighton Rock).
Author Interview - Kathleen Kilcup | Author I Draw Inspiration From
Favorite place to read a book:
A sunlit room in a quiet home (ideally my own). These days are filled with the buoyant and incessant needs of my children. Sunlight isn't hard to come by, but quiet is. Sometimes I fantasize about a day in the not-too-distant future when I'll be able to sit by a window and read for hours on end. But then one of my sons will inevitable kiss my cheek or nuzzle me with with a voluminous head of hair, or run into the house from the backyard carrying a strange iridescent bug, and I'll realize again how happy I am, even without the luxury of limitless reading time. I guess what I’m trying to say is, my favorite place to read is anywhere I find myself reading.
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with:
Peggoty from David Copperfield. I think I'd just like to hear her rant a bit about the elevator (she's very funny), but I might poke around to see if I couldn't get her onto a topic closer to her heart. She has a beautiful, bull-like heart.
The truth is that I love her and her family and would want to find a way to invite them all to dinner. A few hours in an elevator wouldn't really satisfy.
Author Interview - Kathleen Kilcup | Book Character I’d Like to be Stuck in an Elevator With
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author:
I don't think I had a moment like that. Writing has been something that I've done in the margins of my life since childhood, but I never envisioned myself as a writer. But many years ago, when I was in the Army, writing took on a kind of existential intensity for me. I must have been around nineteen then, and I wrote in a mode of survival. But I still didn't imagine myself as a future author.
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook:
Paperback. I like the sensory expereince of reading a paper book--the 'shh' sound of the page turning, the physical sense of climbing through the book, front to back. Hardback is sometimes okay, but they are too heavy to hold over my head when I read lying down. I've never read an ebook.
The last book I read:
I just reread Phil Klay's Redeployment, a stunning collection of short stories about soldiers deployed to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Klay just has such a piercingly observant mind and a knack of moral and psychological realism. If you haven't read him, do yourself a favor and pick up literally anything he has written.
Author Interview - Kathleen Kilcup | The Last Book I Read
Pen & paper or computer:
Laptop. I edit as I write, often pausing over sentences and rewriting them several times until I figure out what it is that I really want to say. It's great to be able to do all of that without the hassle of whiteout or eraser marks all over the paper. But sometimes I'll write poems by hand, and that always yields a different kind of thought, a different cadence and density of image.
Book character I think I’d be best friends with:
This is an interesting question. I can't say that I've ever thought about being friends with a fictional character before. Maybe it's a lack of imagination on my part.
I don't know if we'd be best friends, but I would love to know Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov. By the end of the novel, he becomes the kind of person I love best in the world, the kind whose faith has been tested on emptiness (to paraphrase RH Thomas) and has therefore matured towards a kind of wise embrace of the suffering world in all its particular, demented glory.
Author Interview - Kathleen Kilcup | Book Character I’d be Best Friends With
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a:
I can't really imagine a life without writing and at the same time I wouldn't call it my career. Mostly I am a mother to small children, so writing takes place in the margins of my life. But if it weren't writing maybe it would be music. I used to play the cello and would love to return to it someday. In fact, I've hypothesized that if my ear hadn't been trained in music early on, I wouldn't be half the writer I am. It was the first language I loved.
Favorite decade in fashion history:
I have absolutely no idea. Now? I'm kind of a jeans and a T-shirt girl.
Place I’d most like to travel:
Greece: I'd need at least a month. I'd want, of course, to visit all the historical and religious sites. We'd zip all around the mainland on mopeds, then we'd head out to the islands to watch the water and wander through olive groves. I imagine sunlight thick and slow like sap, and all our speech and movement would be golden and languorous, and I would love it. But more than anything, I have this image of sitting in the Mediterranean sun eating little bits of fruit and sharp cheese, a straw hat shading my eyes and the sound of goat bells clinking in the background.
My signature drink:
Drip coffee, splash o' cream.
Favorite artist:
Oh geez, this is hard. Favorite? Just one? Okay, here's something: I've been really into the artist Ivanka Demchuk lately. Check out her "Annunciation."
Number one on my bucket list:
I want to take my boys backpacking in Yosemite someday. I've gone backpacking there four or five times, and it's absolutely holy ground for me. The smell of sunburnt sap. The towering redwoods. The great bodies of granite rising out of the earth like breaching whales. The mountains. The achingly long, dusty paths. The shady groves filled with lupine. The boys are 3 and 6 now, so it'll be a bit, but I cannot wait to show them that world.
Also, Greece.
Find more from the author:
https://substack.com/@kathleenkilcup
https://www.facebook.com/kathleen.kilcup/
About Kathleen Kilcup:
Kathleen Kilcup
Kathleen Kilcup is a poet, essayist, and author of the memoir, Between the Light and Me. Her work has appeared in Salon, Image, The National Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside and a MA in Religion and Arts from Yale Divinity School. She currently lives in Oklahoma with her husband and sons.
