Welcome to the 5 Questions Series. Each week, I’ll ask five questions of some of my favorite authors, editors, publishers, and other industry professionals. This week, I’m talking with Kevin Craig.
I’ve read several works of yours now (Pride Must be a Place, The Camino Club, This is Me in Grade Nine) and your voice when writing young queer people is so beautifully done. Do you generally gravitate toward writing young characters and why? (Ed. Note. I just finished Pride Must Be a Place and it’s living in my head right now. So gorgeously done, so relatable, and so very good.)
Thanks so much, Finnian! Yes, I definitely do focus on writing young characters. It was such a momentous time in my own life. Who we are—in our absolute core being—this is formed in those tumultuous years when we’re not yet fully formed and don’t have any of the coping mechanisms in place that would help us get through the joys, sorrows, and traumas we experience in that time. It’s possibly the most unfair thing about being human. We become while struggling to realize that we’re even alive. Childhood and young adulthood are so filled with lessons and failings and strife and beauty. It’s a well of literary fodder I don’t see myself ever leaving. I experienced so much trauma in that theatre, and I draw from it every time I sit down to write. Also, as an elder queer, I see an importance to put in place the literature that was non-existent when I was navigating my own idiotic deer-in-the-headlights childhood. I was a mad daisy, crashing through that time like someone who had exactly twenty years to live and I was desperate to live all twenty of them in a ball of flames. I was so intent on burning bright before I faded away, to paraphrase Jeff Blackburn via Neil Young. I was certain my trauma would kill me, so I dove into the chaos. And this is why I always return to that time and write young characters, even when I’m not writing young adult novels (Sebastian’s Poet and The Reasons are both adult theme novels with child narrators).
How has LGBTQ literature change since you were a kid?
I want to insert a sardonic shrill of laughter here. I could say that LGBTQ literature was completely non-existent back when I was a kid, but of course I would be wrong. It was not, however, mainstream. I personally did not find it back then. It was underground, bought in back alley places by adults and served in brown paper bags. Hell, being LGBTQ was underground. I was a kid in the ’70s, back when Ernie and Bert were roommate bachelors. I remember the first time I read A Separate Peace somewhere around 1977. I was highly skilled at manipulating that book into a gay unrequited love story. That’s what I did, I bent story to create something resembling what I wanted to see. Also Johnny and Ponyboy…I jerry-rigged that story too. My version was flimsy and ethereal and if I squinted it disappeared into the mist of reality. Oh my god, I loved Johnny Cade! Don’t even get me started on how perfectly he was cast later when the movie came out. I also loved Ralph Macchio. There was always a part of me that knew the truth, though…that a lot of what I read into a story wasn’t there on the page. LGBTQ literature is HERE now. That’s how much it changed. It exists. I thank the universe every day that today’s kids have access to literature wherein they can see themselves. Not having that was one of the biggest traumas of queer childhood back then. Literature has always been a place of refuge for children, straight or queer. The queer ones went inside for that refuge and didn’t really find it.
What book or story of yours are you most proud of?
That’s a real hard one. All my babies are close to my heart for different reasons. I love Sebastian’s Poet and The Reasons because they were my first. AND I wrote them at the Muskoka Novel Marathon. I wrote Sebastian’s Poet in 48hrs and The Reasons in 72hrs. First word to the last. They underwent editing, but the entire stories were written in those time frames and I’m most proud of the way they came together all at once like that. But The Camino Club is the one that means the most to me. I carried that entire story across Spain while I walked my own pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago. I had this vision that The Breakfast Club could be done so much more inclusively. Yeah, they had different high school cliques represented…for sure they did. But it was entirely straight white washed. I wanted to f*ck that up a bit. The world isn’t solely white and straight, as much as the 80s and earlier would have liked us to believe. The characters in that book absolutely haunted my Camino in 2014…I walked with each of them in my head. I saw it coming together as I walked through the towns along the way to Santiago de Compostela. I love that book so much! Those characters are real and I’m proud of each and every one of them.
If you could give one piece of advice to emerging writers, what would it be?
Write what you want to see in the world and don’t compromise that vision to fit into a marketplace you see accepting the work. Create the marketplace. Write true and write real…not to chase what you see out there, but to follow your own authenticity.
What are you working on now? (Ed. Note. Only another writer can ask this question of a writer. And we all go through these periods of ripening when the seeds go in the ground. They’ll sprout again, I promise.)
Sigh. I had a feeling you would ask this one, Finnian. I’ve been a disaster since the beginning of the pandemic. I can’t say I haven’t written anything. I even had two novels released in the midst of the pandemic. But I sometimes feel I have truly lost my mojo. I even crashed and burned on a contracted novel and had to give back my advance. I loved that book, too, but see my above answer…I compromised myself and agreed to make changes that I ultimately could not make. What they wanted me to change was the literal heart of the story. This has honestly crushed my soul, as I was writing the childhood sexual abuse novel I’ve been struggling to write my entire life. I don’t know if it’s the pandemic that killed my creativity or this handing over of my autonomy for the sake of an advance and a contract. Either way, I’m still trying to put the pieces back together. I am currently working on three books. One is a mid-grade about a boy who writes a play for his school’s play festival. One is a young adult about a nonbinary teen who goes to Paris with their father to bring their mother’s ashes back to her family. The teen has a meetcute and navigates family issues while falling in love in the city of light. The third book is a queer retelling of The Great Gatsby set in Toronto between downtown, the island, and the Village.
Bonus question: Have you ever taken a picture of a weird bird?
Oddly enough, I have. Probably more than one, actually. How do you know so well that people have such memorable relationships with birds? I once took a shot of a p*ssed off bird in Cozumel that haunts me to this day. Never, and I repeat…NEVER take a chaise lounge away from a bird in repose. They have as much right to be on that lounge as you have. In fact, if they were there first it would be pretty presumptuous of you to think they were only keeping it warm for you.
Kevin can be found on the web here and on their Instagram and LinkTree
Finnian Burnett 