Guest Post, Kat Meads: Houses, House Trailers and Memory

Such Irrevocable ActsAlthough I repeatedly forget names and faces, I remember in crazed detail the interiors of houses I entered before losing my baby teeth. The slant of light, natural or artificial. The furniture. The furniture arrangements. Whether or not one couch cushion (more compressed than the others) showed evidence of a favored seat. Lamp globes and ashtrays, chipped or whole. Framed or unframed wall prints. Scatter rugs perfectly or imperfectly aligned with doorsills. Floorboard patinas. Even now, I’m a more reliable reporter of, say, the direction a chair faced in a room than the conversation that took place in and around that chair.

Given all that, I probably shouldn’t be surprised that what I remember most about my novels after they’re done are my characters’ homes or temporary lodgings—what’s in them as well as what’s not.  Kitty Duncan’s breadcrumb-y bedroom in The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan, for instance. Thomas Senestre’s light-starved apartment in Senestre on Vacation, for another.

But there’s been a bit of an expansion in my “dwellings fixation” with regard to my most recent novel, In This Season of Rage and Melancholy Such Irrevocable Acts as These. This go-around I seem to have fixated on three:

1) The dilapidated “Cracker” house of Mickey Waterman’s childhood that he visits daily for incentive.

2) The Scaff farmhouse that George Scaff loves and his wife, Leeta, loathes.

3) The trailer in the middle of a cornfield that Beth Anderson initially associates with the joys of motherhood but that becomes, after her miscarriage, a reminder of failure and the setting for visits from an accusatory, tuxedo-wearing god.

In proofing the novel for publication, I returned to the manuscript some months after my last revision. Theoretically (at least), the break might have changed my perspective, diminished the importance of those two houses and house trailer. Didn’t happen. Instead those dwellings took on even more importance, so dominating the text they almost, almost assumed the status of characters.

Or so it seemed to me.

My interpretation only?

Would any other reader feel the same?

I do know that I was never unaware of those three residences and the interlock of their compass points during the writing. Even when Mickey and George and Leeta and Beth were physically elsewhere—playing softball in another county, drag racing, earning a living at their various job sites—the contents and spatial set-ups of their lairs felt omnipresent to me, narratively insistent. I also dreamed incessantly about those spaces—my nighttime working out, I suppose, of what should/shouldn’t happen in or around those homes to satisfy plot. The book is finished, out in the world, published in August by Oklahoma’s Mongrel Empire Press. And yet I still dream about Mickey’s “Cracker” house, the Scaff farmhouse and Beth’s cornfield trailer.

Will I always?

Very likely.

Kat Meads’ New Novel is Now Out

Cover of In This Season of Rage...Kat Meads’ new novel, In This Season of Rage and Melancholy Such Irrevocable Acts as These is now available from Mongrel Empire Press.

Built on the premise that the ugly can break one’s heart more profoundly than the pretty, In This Season of Rage and Melancholy Such Irrevocable Acts as These portrays the changing South of the 1970s in a narrative that encompasses deceit, revenge, Pentecostal religion, coastal development and the disappearance of family farms.

Kat Meads is the author of 16 books and chapbooks of prose and poetry, including: 2:12 a.m. – Essays; Not Waving; For You, Madam Lenin; Little Pockets of Alarm; The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan; Sleep; and a mystery novel written under the pseudonym Z.K. Burrus. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a California Artist Fellowship, two Silicon Valley artist grants and artist residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, Millay Colony, Dorland, and the Montalvo Center for the Arts. Her short plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere. She is a three-time ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year finalist, and four of her essays have been selected as Notables in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Essays series. Her novel For You, Madam Lenin received an IPPY (Independent Publisher Award) Silver Medal and was shortlisted for the Montaigne Medal for thought-provoking literature. Her essay collection 2:12 a.m. received an IPPY Gold Medal. A native of North Carolina, she currently lives in California and teaches in Oklahoma City University’s low-residency MFA program.

In This Season of Rage and Melancholy Such Irrevocable Acts as These can be purchased at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Changing Hands, or your local, independent bookstore.