Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney

Sunday, September 4, 2022

Kathleen Rooney

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member

of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her recent books include the national best-seller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (2017) and the novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (2020). Where Are the Snows, her latest poetry collection, was chosen by Kazim Ali as the winner of the X.J. Kennedy Prize and will be published by Texas Review Press in Fall 2022. Her latest novel, based on the life and work of the silent movie star Colleen Moore, will be published by in September of 2023.

Recently I asked Rooney about what she was reading. Her reply:

Currently, I’m working on the research for a project that I hope will become my next novel. I’ve always been intrigued by Westerns and would like to try my hand at writing one. I’m fascinated, right now, less by the oft-told tales of the prairies and plains and more by the less-told ones of the mining communities that sprang up in the middle of the country.

I love research generally, but the moments when I find a book that points out something totally insightful that I’ve sort of intuited but not fully expressed to myself are my favorites. Right now, I’m reading such a book, Rocky Mountain Mining Camps: The Urban Frontier by Duane A. Smith from 1974.

He puts his finger directly on something I’d been observing for months, but not in quite so many words: unlike traditional cowboy stories or yarns of bringing law-and-order to rough and tumble tiny settlements, “The mining camp represented something different and, for the most part, new in the American frontier experience: urbanization” (4).

This concept of the “urban frontier” illuminates a great deal and is helping me put my own finger on why this milieu attracts me so much.