Written by Aria Eyde. Graphic by Aria Eyde.
Welcome to the first edition of Chronology. This column finds people in the creative community who are working on a project or pursuing a career they are passionate about.
Everyone has a story to tell beyond what they do — even if who we are inevitably bleeds into what we create. In my column, I ask: what is it that you love? Why do you love it? And who are you besides that?
This month, I interviewed Professor Shawn Kerivan, a writing professor who teaches journalism and creative nonfiction. Outside of his job as an educator, he has published four books (though he says he has written about 15). His book, “Name the Boy,” is a collection of short stories that he wrote during his graduate program. Kerivan has spent his life writing, teaching, fishing, and raising his two sons.
Summer is over, but the Georgia stickiness is lingering into autumn. On a sunny Friday morning, I met with Kerivan in Arnold Hall to hear more about his life and experience.
Where did you spend the majority of your childhood, and what was it like there?
I spent the majority of my childhood in a little fishing village south of Boston, and it was bucolic in the extreme. I was a little kid in the 70s, before suburbanization started to set in. The town was called Marshfield, and it’s exactly what it sounds like, lots of marshes. I lived in Green Harbor.
My dad was a lobster fisherman and all my friends’ dads were lobster fishermen. We all grew up on the water. The town would swell in the summertime, and all the city people would come down from Boston to rent cottages, which are all gone now.
Are there any specific memories that stand out when you think about that place?
I remember being a little boy on my father’s lobster boat. He would take me out on the boat and let me steer, and I would watch him pull lobster traps.
Me and my friends would ride bicycles down the road in the spring and fall, because there was no traffic down there. It was so empty. In highschool, when it got warm in springtime, we would skip school and go down to the beach and have parties. All my friends had boats, so we would go out on the boats all the time and fish.
And in the summertime, my grandfather would take me clamming. We’d go out to the marsh flats and dig clams. There’s lots of specific memories I cling to and love.
How did you find out that writing was something that you liked to do?
I didn’t find out. I just recognized one day that it’s what I was spending all of my time doing.
As a kid, I was a precocious reader. I was a big fan of newspapers. We had three newspapers delivered to our house every day, and I would read them all — especially sports.
Whenever I read a sports story that didn’t reflect the baseball game from the night before, I would sit down at a typewriter and rewrite it. I’d follow the same structure and style, but I would write it in my own words, including the things I thought were important.
When I got to high school, my first English teacher said that I wrote different from the other kids, and she wanted to know how I got that way — that always stuck with me.
In college, I majored in journalism. I probably should’ve majored in creative writing, because that’s what I really love. But I love journalism too.
So, I continued to write. I wrote little stories off to the side. I lived in Boston after college with my roommates, and I used to drive them crazy ‘cause I was always downstairs banging away on my typewriter.
What made you start pursuing writing more seriously?
I met my wife, she’s from France. She was in the United States getting her MBA. When she graduated, she got a job offer in France, and it was exactly what she wanted to do.
She said, “Look, here’s the offer, we can either move to France and take this offer, or I’ll stay here with you, and you can go back to school and get your master’s degree.”
I thought about it. I was very much a homeboy, so it was a big deal for me. But I had this reckless notion of, like, “Let’s just do it. I don’t speak French. I don’t know where we’re gonna live. I don’t know how things are gonna go, but let’s just do it.”
So we moved. I couldn’t work right away, so I was alone in our apartment during the day, and I had to sort myself out. I would go to the post office, go shopping for food, and do errands. But I had so much time on my hands that I just wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote.
I sent my stories back to the United States to get them published, and I got rejected a lot.
I got my first short story published, and then I started to get more published. And in the meantime, I was trying to write novels. I would sometimes write a whole novel in around 10 weeks. Sometimes I would write 100 pages a week. Everything was just coming out of me, and it was a great time to develop.
There might be one novel there that’s interesting enough to continue to work on. But for the most part, it was my proving ground, my learning ground.
Why do you like writing?
I use the word enchanted. I’m enchanted by the act of having a thought, and putting it down on a piece of paper, and it becoming something completely different. There’s the thing that’s in your head, there’s the thing you put down on the page, and then there’s the thing that you read, and it’s like you can see the transformation.
Is this where you pictured you’d be when you were younger?
No. I figured I’d have a business. I figured writing would be a part of my life when I started publishing stories, but I figured I’d be a businessperson. I didn’t have any pretensions of being the next great thing.
What’s your life like outside of teaching and writing?
When I’m here and I’m teaching, I’m doing almost only that, and it’s really hard to fit my own writing in. But I’ve found some ways to get the rhythm going, so I’m working one day a week on my writing now.
In the summertime, I go back to Vermont, and that’s when I do most of my writing. I wrote a ton this summer; I work every day. Everyone has their different habits. Mine is to get up, do some stretching, drink some water and coffee. Then, I’ll write until my brain hurts, until nothing is happening anymore.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a memoir of the time between when I was nine and 13-years-old. I’ve got the draft mostly down. I’m into draft seven by now.
And then I started another story. I don’t know if it’s a short story or a novel yet. It’s about a guy who lives next to a mysterious farm, and then a stranger comes to town and mayhem ensues. That’s all I know. I’ve probably written 25 pages of it.
Out of everything you’ve done, what are you the most proud of?
Giving my two sons the kind of family that I didn’t have, and raising them in the mountains of Vermont. I owned a bed and breakfast with my wife, and it allowed me to be there for them. We could be there every minute of every day, whether they needed us or not, they knew they had this piece inside of them. We were like gravity.
And I think publishing that first short story. It’s something you never forget.
In what ways do you think writing affected the trajectory of your life?
Probably everything. I mean, it’s a part of everything for sure. It’s almost like a minute doesn’t go by when I’m not thinking about it. So it feels woven into me and it’s part of the fabric of my consciousness.
As our conversation wrapped up, Kerivan said something about writing that stuck with me: “But you forget it, your core, you’re just alone with your words on a page. And it sounds scary, but it’s so nurturing. So I love it.”
