Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Ms Inkslinger’s Review

My publicist asked me what I wanted from the novel, Perfecting. I didn’t say, but what I thought was, I want everyone in the world to read it. That probably sounds egoistic and it probably sounds the tiniest bit crazy, but I think when you’ve had something in your head and have been fiddling with it for eight or so years, it starts to make some sense. Writers are communicators. We all want everyone to read our work, even if we say, Oh, it’d be nice to make a living at this, or Oh, it’s nice to have a few sympathetic readers. This is the great firewall! At my launch, Andrew Pyper interviewed me onstage and one of his questions centred around Curtis and his need to have followers. I said to him that Curtis’s pathology had to do with a need to be buttressed by a large group of admirers, that this need was quite common among gurus and cult leaders, and then I made the analogy of a writer being not so fundamentally different. We are preachers, of a sort, but quiet introverted ones, believing our ideas have veracity, and can stir and motivate people. So, the novel was something of a play on that too, with its incandescent tone etc. Pyper looked shocked and maybe a little scared. Nice.

Anyway, all that to say I have another fan! Thanks Ms Inkslinger. And welcome!!

©2009 Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Catholic Register

When I was researching Perfecting my youngest son still needed walking to school and I used to sometimes chat on the way with a neighbour who had formed a committee that met in the basement of a local church. I said to him once that I’d go if only it wasn’t in a church. I couldn’t place why exactly I had this aversion to churches but I have felt a certain claustrophobia to the buildings for some time. He said, “That’s too bad.” And I said, “Yeah, I’m trying to get over it. It turns out this novel that I thought was all about politics, is really all about longing, spiritual longing, and belief systems.” “Religion?” he said. “Yeah. Religion.” It scared the crap out of me to be writing this book, especially the very religious characters. And I mean sick-in-my-stomach scared. A religious person might say that was fear of the truth. A non-religious might quip, guilt.

In the end, I wanted the book to be read by both, and was curious about how such a reading would look. So, I am thrilled that The Catholic Register assigned the book, and that a teacher of theology reviewed it. Here’s a favourite snippet of the review:

Kuitenbrouwer treats us to the vision of a pelagian hell born from seeking perfection by human effort alone. Perfecting is St. Augustine’s worst nightmare come true. In the end, there is no resolution, no saving grace, only the bloody aftermath of revenge and unlove. We do not know how the surviving characters live on. Their fate is undetermined.

The full review is here.

©2009 Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

I (heart) Deborah

I don’t know who Deborah is but she commented on a (mostly) positive review in Now Magazine with this:

Perfecting’s main character is a woman, Martha, and she is a witness and the driving force behind the final, ultimate confrontation between an utterly evil father and the two sons he has used as tools of his own will. There is more than the flavour of Cain and Abel here, try Cain and Abel with father Adam as the meanest son-of-a-bitch on the planet, with two wives – one he sucks dry and the other is his handmaid and broodmare. Kuitenbrouwer draws the story of Martha’s search for a few answers into a complex web of religion, domination, and worship – the outcome of this book is shocking, horrific, and yet redeeming. ANY woman or man will find themself somewhere in this book, and in the end it will be a healing process. Unless it send you fire dancing . . .

When there are so few outlets for intelligent reviews anymore, it is nice to see that the general public is still reading with the sort of verve any writer would be pleased with.

Yuri of the Park

I had an extraordinary experience  last week.

Some time ago, I challenged myself to write a political/sexual fairytale. The story turned out to be quite graphic both in terms of sexuality and in terms of violence. It hung like a albatross around my neck for about 2 months, while I considered how I had wasted my time writing something that may never be published. I suspected it was too raw, pornographic.

A writers’ salon that I belong to held a spring celebration at the Toronto Writers’ Centre on Bloor street, and the host of the evening put a call out to anyone who wished to read spring literature (their own or the work of others). I thought for a few days and asked her if I could read from my strange little story, outlining the difficulties with it. To my surprise, and to my horror, she said yes. I carefully planned which short bit I would read so that I would stop just short of where things go, uhm, odd.

But when I read the excerpt, the women listening urged me to continue. “You mustn’t stop now!”

“But I must.”

And then the strangest, most wonderful, thing happened. I passed my story to the writer beside me, and said, “You can read it but I can’t read it. It’s a first draft. And it’s REALLY graphic.” The writer read a page or two and then passed it along to the next writer, and so it made its way around the room, being read here dramatically, there just straight, then with irony, with accents, with humour. This is a group of writers both beginning and quite accomplished, and once the story was finished, they admonished me for saying it was unpublishable. It was human. It was passionate. And it was neither erotica nor was it porn. It was new. One of the senior writers suggested that I was fightened of the very thing I had created. Yes, I thought, I am.

I dared myself to package it up. I dared myself to send it out to a few journals. So much of writing is in the risk of it.

©2009 Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer