Q&A: kate lemery

A Conversation with Kate lemery

by Thaer Husien

A Washington D.C. transplant from Iowa, Kate Lemery worked for the Smithsonian Institution and National Gallery of Art for a combined fifteen years before moving on to raise her three children and focus on her literary pursuits. She has since written for the Washington Post, Fiction Writers Review, and Peacock Journal, to name a few.

Lemery’s story, “Drawing Lessons” is a cousin of her novel-in-progress, An Artless Girl, in that she uses art in each to inform the narrative. In each chapter of An Artless Girl, the heroine recalls a different masterpiece of Western art, and the themes they invoke help the heroine better understand her experiences. Lemery’s goal is to finish a good draft of her first novel to send to literary agents later this year.

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What do you think served as the germ or seed for this story?

​I think there are still a lot of girls out there with low self-esteem, who value themselves so little that they start dating the first guy who notices them, who may or may not be right for them. And because they’re so grateful for this notice, they can overlook or forgive warning signs in the guy’s behavior – little cruelties or various shows of disrespect – that can signify increasing danger for her and make the girl’s sense of self-worth plummet to a place where it’s hard for her to leave him. I wanted to shine a light on this problem.

Do you have a special place that you retreat to while writing/specifically for this story?

I do all my writing in the same place – on my computer desk in the kitchen. There’s a lot of light in the kitchen and a window that looks out upon a tree that is very popular with neighborhood cardinals. One day, I’d like to have my own room, with a door I could close, for writing.

In regards to you becoming a writer, is there a specific memory you can draw on as to when you knew this was a talent you were meant to pursue professionally?

I often wrote stories and poems as a kid. But even though I always loved English class, and ended up majoring in that in college, I didn’t think a career as a fiction writer was a serious option for me. I expected I’d use my English degree for a career in P.R. I don’t write like Hemingway, and I was under the impression that one needed to write like Hemingway or one of the other giants of literature in order to be a real writer.

In college, I did my spring term junior year in London. One of my classes required that we write a lengthy travel journal for our final grade. After my professor returned mine, I saw that he’d written in the margins that he thought it read like a real book and that I should consider becoming a novelist. I had a lot of respect for this professor and his views on literature, so his comment meant a lot. But I didn’t act on it until years later.

In the story, we encounter paintings, specifically fixating on Ginevra de’ Benci by name. What was the intent there and how do you believe it reflects Amelia – if at all?

Art lifts Amelia’s spirits and revitalizes her. She wants to reconnect with her cousin Christine, so Amelia brings her to the National Gallery, which Amelia imagines will put her in a good frame of mind and make it easier to share her big news. Also, Amelia hopes Christine might appreciate that she’s being shown a special collection, including a rare painting by Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de’ Benci, and that this might put her in a better mood to receive, and act favorably upon, Amelia’s news.

Two other times in the story, art (specifically an unnamed Rococo watercolor and a Dutch oil painting, A Mother’s Duty, which is not actually in the National Gallery’s collection) will cause Amelia to have dramatic realizations about her life. The first she won’t act on, but the second she probably will.

What was your hardest scene to write and why?
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The flashback with Amelia and Matt on the bus was the hardest for me to write. Years ago, I’d witnessed something similar on the metro—a boyfriend’s public meanness to his girlfriend, encased in a “joke”—and it always stayed with me. I’ve wondered what happened to that couple so many times. I hope she left him. When I was drafting that scene, I cried, and the sentiment stayed with me for several days.

What literary pilgrimages have you gone on that have influenced this piece?

Visiting art museums, around D.C. and elsewhere, inspires my writing. Not only are museums filled with gorgeous images, but they’re usually quiet places where I can collect my thoughts. I have a master’s degree in art history, and I think that art is even more impressive once you know the stories behind it and the symbolism and meaning the artist intended. When I go to art museums, I sometimes invent little narratives for the figures within a painting or photograph or I imagine what situations might have taken place in certain landscape paintings.

Like Amelia, being around art makes me happy. There’s something about being in front of an image in real life, seeing the artist’s hand in it, that sends me dreaming. But art reproductions in books never have the same effect.

Do you have a method for dealing with Writer’s Block that you’ve found as the perfect medicine?

I’ve never experienced writers block, but I have the opposite problem. I have only a couple hours a day to work on my writing, so when I’m on my computer I’m focused. I typically have to stop writing before I’ve gotten out all I wanted to say. So, until the next time I can sit down again at my computer, I have ideas, snippets of dialogue, and phrases swirling around my head, bursting to be incorporated in my prose.

Occasionally, I won’t know exactly what I want to say in a particular scene I need to write. In those cases, I pull an Anne Lammot and type out a crummy draft that I can revise later. Also, if I’m having trouble with a particular aspect of my writing, I’ll think about that right before I fall asleep. I find I often work out the problem in my dreams and have a solution when I wake up.

What is an aspiration of yours (within the realm of writing) that you continue to pursue?

​I’ve been working on my first novel for seven years, since my sons were three and one-year-old. So, for their entire lives, as well as all of their younger sister’s life, they’ve known my top goal is to finish and eventually publish that novel. I hope one day to take my kids to a bookstore where I can point at a tangible copy of my novel and say, “I did this. I had a dream and I made it happen.” I hope that might encourage them to follow their own dreams and not quit until they’ve been realized.

http://katelemery.com/