Artemis Sparke and the Sound Seekers Brigade by Kimberly Behre Kenna

Kimberly Behre Kenna’s debut novel Artemis Sparke and the Sound Seekers Brigade, “the story of a twelve-year-old girl who conjures up help from deceased ecologists to save a Long Island Sound salt marsh from certain death,” is coming out in 2023. ( And as Jessica Vitalis talked about in October, you’ll likely find more than one community along the way.)

That’s one reason Kimberly Behre Kenna, who talked with Writers’ Inlet this month, said if she had to give one piece of advice to our group of writers, it would be this: reach out to other writers. We can feel shut out, unheard-apart, rather than connected. And the delicious ease of solitude may morph into the frustration of bitter alienation as our writing struggles to find its way in the world. We can’t make that link by staying in the heady realm of solitude. We need to reach out to the public network-whether we work to entice editors or agents, or build our own platforms to entice readers, or a bit of both.Ĭonvincing others that our work deserves a readership can be one of the most difficult things about the writer’s life. Nodes of connection from one person’s solitude to another’s.īut the line drawn from writer to reader, that brings words from private drafts to public pages, isn’t as easy as connect-the-dots, and is much harder for us to control than what our pens produce on quiet coffee-fueled mornings. That yearning has been with writers for millennium-to take private thoughts and through sheer artistry and grit, transform them into words crafted so well they link us inextricably with readers, like the stars connected by our ancestors into constellations that shine on forever with significance. While at other times all we want is to share what we find there with readers. Sometimes it seems all we want is to dwell there, in that quiet, creative place, and work and rework. Hunkering down to carefully craft what you want to say-whether plotting a climatic sequence or artfully developing a metaphor-can feel quite intimate.

Or drawing notebook from backpack and crawling onto a mossy boulder to describe a blue butterfly’s silence.

before the sun comes up and the four-year-old gets out of bed, fueled by the steam of coffee and the mist of morning. There’s something delicious about the solitude of drafting a piece of writing.

Artemis Sparke and the Sound Seekers Brigade by Kimberly Behre Kenna