Meet the Author: Kathryn Kimiecik Foley
This week in our ongoing "Meet the Author" series, we spoke with Kathryn Kimiecik Foley, author of I Love You Kiss Me Goodnight and The Air of Millenia.
Kathryn Kimiecik Foley (who also publishes under KMK Foley) was born in the Black Dirt area of New York State, where she is fifth generation Polish American. After attending OCCC, SUNY Binghamton, and Memorial University of Newfoundland, she worked for the Arts Council of Wyoming County, NY; the National Park Service; as an Executive Secretary; a Nursing Assistant; and was a school bus driver. She lived in Newfoundland, Canada for many years, and relocated to Florida, NY in April 2022, where she now lives with her husband and takes care of her mother full-time. She considers this the best time of her life.
Describe your book, I Love You Kiss Me Goodnight, in 25 words or less.
This poem of 10,000 words is a true narrative epic written within an exotic and geographically stunning and disorienting landscape: Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.
What inspired you to write this book?
My lover was a culturally similar man, slightly older, lively, and mad about me. Our cultural dissimilarity to where we lived glued us to each other. Words poured out of me while we were together and for a few months after it ended. At the time, I didn’t recognize any kind of genre. While I knew it told a story, it made no sense to me. Was it a diary? Was it 100 poems? Eventually I accepted that the narrative was one big poem. I also hid the manuscript away for decades, but I gave a copy to a dear friend who would keep it safe in case something happened to me or I lost it.
Tell us a little about the book writing process.
I Love You Kiss Me Goodnight was written exactly as the dates and times indicate. The chapters are separated by the successive months, so there are four chapters. The few sketches came much, much later. At the time, I was doing fieldwork, which requires daily note-writing about who I meet and what I did all day living in one tiny community. The poems came out instead. It was just everyday life with extraordinary newness. I consider all my poems non-fiction. I’m nearly always the narrator. No secret there.
What do you do for fun when you're not writing?
Lately I’ve been coloring. I’ll be embroidering a bit this winter. I read non-fiction almost exclusively. I’m doing a huge project now about the Black Dirt.
What's the next project you're working on?
I’m editing The Book of Whack, made of materials I wrote/drew during a three-month period of severe mania that saw me sign myself into a psychiatric hospital for a little less than three weeks. The works are one-page things I have no genre name for. They flew out one after another. My brain was solving a problem but I didn’t know what the question was. The works include words and symbols that I couldn’t read for a long time. Some are still unreadable but they don’t scare me anymore. At the time, I put all of it into a giant binder but it petrified me so I hid it away for years. It turns out they were experiments in language that I’ve continued to work on all my life. This book will be the first in a series of perhaps ten. Each book will be about 75 pages. The series is both about poetry and will include my own poems as well. I have also written self-guided lessons to improve reading comprehension at any level, which will be in the same series.
What advice would you give to an aspiring author?
While I appreciate the desire for a writing routine, I don’t keep one. On the other hand, early mornings and late afternoons seem to be productive for me. My actual advice comes from professor Neil V. Rosenberg when I asked him how to start my thesis. He said if I could write and study for three hours a day, I’d get it done. I’ve never had writer’s block because I prefer sanity to fetishized angst, which is what many English Departments demand. My second book, The Air of Millenia, includes Buffalo Chill and God Breath Math, three distinct poetry cycles I had from 1993-2012.
What are you currently reading?
“Archeological and Paleoenvironmental Investigations in the Dutchess Quarry Caves, Orange County, New York” by Robert E. Funk and David W. Steadman, Persimmon Press Monographs in Archeology, 1994 (available through the Ramapo Libraries). These caves overlook the Black Dirt. The book is full of graphs and things like that which I pretty much have ignored so far. It’s the local content I read. Two hearths and tools that date to at least 12,000 BC have been found there.
Tell us about one of your favorite books or a book that changed your life.
I read Call it Sleep by Henry Roth around 1990. It was written in the 1930s, I believe. It is an amazing novel written from a six-year-old’s perspective. The boy is a rural Jewish immigrant whose parents move to NYC in the early 20th century. For me, this boy’s stream of consciousness written in astounding Yiddish dialect is almost unreadable but accurate without being written in a condescending way. For me, Roth is way better than James Joyce. The book has gone in and out of fashion. Shortly after, I wrote a very brief 200 word piece called “I am Five” that remains my best work. One editor desecrated it while another editor and famous novelist at the same company said it was “really quite beautiful” but refused to publish it. I guess they didn’t get it.
Do you have a favorite quote from a book?
There’s one sentiment from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that I can’t quite quote and couldn’t find the sentence the last time I looked for it! He writes something about the male character who, all his life, hopes and actually anticipates seeing the woman he loves but was rejected by, around every corner every day of his life while he goes about his daily life, something like that. It struck a chord.
Who are some of your favorite authors?
For novelists, I read Maeve Binchy’s books many years ago. The Lilac Bus and The Copper Beech were favorites. O. Henry remains probably my favorite. It’s hard for me to pick a non-fiction writer. I don’t get “creative non-fiction.” I do like to read autobiographies and biographies. I took a class from Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland, an African American activist and playwright, who taught those subjects. Bruce Springsteen’s book was fantastic. Truman Capote’s is also excellent.
I Love You Kiss Me Goodnight and The Air of Millenia are currently available in store and online.