A Public Inheritance
Photo: Suzanne Calkins
University of Minnesota, Department of English
February 1, 2016
In her final year of the MFA program in Creative Writing, Kendra Atleework just won a $10,000 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. Her memoir manuscript has already secured her an agent, Janet Silver of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. This past fall, her first publication, the essay “Charade,” was included in The Best American Essays 2015. Three other essays were published in the past year. It's a lot of activity from someone who, after college, took a job at a historic San Diego residence because it was supposedly haunted. Eventually she gave up the ghost and moved to Minnesota to write about different sorts of hauntings: a mother’s early death from cancer, growing up in the arid Sierra Nevada mountains, the impact of politics and economies on a landscape.
How did your manuscript project begin? What drew you to the subject matter?
I came to Minnesota without having done much creative writing outside of undergraduate courses. I knew I wanted to write about my home region in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains of California, but I didn’t begin to understand how to narrate the book until I took a 1,400-mile road trip in the summer of 2014 to observe California stricken by drought. That trip allowed me to imagine the manuscript as a story about landscape, culture, and history, told through the narrative of a family.