Getting 2 Know Lee Kvern

BCB: What charms you?

Lee Kvern: What charms me are the little things that generally go unnoticed in this busy hustle life. The way a mother looks at her daughter when they sing together. How a father watches his boy first take flight on a bicycle and later (horrifyingly!) in a car. How a bat flies epiletic,  chaotic through the night air.

How customers stand in a Sobey’s line-up, how the women eyeball each other, how the men eyeball the women, how small children are oblivious of all this casual, intentional glancing about, summing up of one another.

How the earth looks in the morning; quiet, innocent, ready to begin again with best intentions this time, unlike yesterday when things went sideways somewhere else in the world, sad Norway, perhaps. Yet the sun comes up or the rain falls, and our charming earth stands ready to begin again, over and over endlessly.

Such charm, despite our human follies.

BCB: What is your creative process?

Lee Kvern: Simple equation: curiosity + misunderstanding = obsession. Often what charms me is also what piques my curiosity, what causes me to look harder at something that puzzles, some offbeat response to an otherwise neat situation. Then my obsession kicks into high gear and if it sticks with me long enough, I’m forced to write it down, work through it in some understandable way.

I love that scene in the movie Wonder Boys where the writer (Michael Douglas) and his editor (Robert Downey Junior) are sitting in a restaurant, and they take turns making up stories about the various people around them. It’s wonderful (hence the title), creative, funny, insightful. It’s what I find myself doing whenever I’m in that grocery line-up (as opposed to sizing up other women, shaking down some poor guy), instead I make up stories in my head.

Grounds, yes, for the psychiatric profession but nonetheless, we writers manage to make it work for us, as do all artists, I suspect. No muses, no mystical experiences, no bolts of jagged light from the black sky, just simple curiosity coupled with the fictional need to tell a story in some fashion.

Read an INTERVIEW with Lee Kvern.

Read more about Lee Kvern’s Novel The Matter of Sylvie