Kendra Atleework
Kendra Atleework is the recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and was selected for The Best American Essays, edited by Ariel Levy. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and now lives in Bishop, California.
Twitter: @KendraAtleework
Instagram: @Kendra.Atleework
Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?
Early drafts of my book Miracle Country were peppered with references to the musician Joanna Newsom. She’s a harpist who grew up in Nevada City, a small town on the opposite side of the Sierra Nevada mountains from mine. She makes a strange kind of folk music that reminds me of my parents’ band, which I grew up listening to at square dances. And her lyrics are poetry. Like me, she’s preoccupied by her relationship to home, the mountains, the creatures in the mountains, and California. I’ve been obsessed with her since I was sixteen. Copyright rules meant I couldn’t incorporate her lyrics, but there’s one Joanna Newsom reference hidden in my book.
Favorite non-reading activity?
Besides the obvious (for anyone who has read my book or followed me on social media) wandering around in the mountains and the desert, I have one unusual hobby that is definitely more of an obsession, and that’s aerial silks. When performed by me, it’s a much less graceful version of what the Cirque du Soleil people do when they’re swinging around and wrapping themselves with fabric high in the air. Google it to see what it’s supposed to look like. When I do it, it looks like aerial ballet being executed by a lumberjack (evidence of this occasionally appears on Instagram). But I am improving! I can now do *one* pull-up. Doing anything off the ground feels so liberating and it’s such a physically taxing activity I have to completely stop thinking and worrying and get out of my head. And you can put on really loud Taylor Swift/Lizzo while you do it. Also, back muscles.
Vacation druthers… City or Rural destination? Why?
I live in a really small town. That’s what my book Miracle Country is about—my decision to leave the city life I’d led as a young adult (never could quite get the hang of it) and come back to this town with five stoplights, in a county of 18,000 people that’s the size of Belgium. I’m most at ease in the middle of nowhere. But because I live rurally and spend most of my free time getting even farther from people by going off trail in the nearby mountains, I have a thing for visiting cities—specifically in Europe, because they’re so pedestrian friendly, and specifically during the tourist off-season. Nothing beats walking for twenty miles on a frigid day in Berlin, absorbing the history.
Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?
My high school was very rural and very small (350 kids total, 50 in my graduating class). We were a California public school with limited resources. The books we’d get in English were often missing covers and pages. I was also a terrible student and spent most of my time skipping school and sneaking to work at my waitressing job. My family was supportive of me going to college, for which I was very lucky. But when I got there and found out I was actually expected to do homework, I sank like a rock. I went to a good liberal arts college surrounded by kids from prep schools and I felt like a bumpkin. Years later my mentor told me it was to my advantage as a writer that I came to college mostly feral. No one had corralled my thinking or made me obsessed with rules and grades. Eventually I learned how to combine academic rigor with creativity and boom, I had arrived. But for a while it was a little rough.
What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?
When I’m being an author, I’m posting on Instagram, doing interviews, talking with people about my book. I love doing those things, but it’s not why I’m in this business. At heart I’m a writer, and that means I’ve forgotten my social media passwords and I’m lighting twenty candles and pacing around my house in the middle of the night listening to witch music and muttering. Reading constantly. Walking the canals by my house, sidestepping cows, while the next book swirls around in my head.
