Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney

Thursday, September 7, 2023

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 for the X.J. Kennedy Prize and published by Texas Review Press in Fall 2022.

Rooney's new novel is From Dust to Stardust.

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

Back in January, I asked my friend Cassandra Gillig—who always has the best book recommendations—if she had read any books lately that I absolutely must know about, and she recommended Jill Johnston’s The Disintegration of a Critic.

Released by Sternberg Press in 2019, it’s a collection of 30 pieces that Johnston—feminist, cultural critic, and lesbian icon—first published in her weekly Village Voice column between 1960 and 1974. Cassandra described the texts as being “all so messy & fun” and said that they “frequently veer into a terrain of almost too off-topic before getting back on track in a way nothing else could.” Now that I’ve finally gotten around to reading the essays, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Every page is full of goofy wordplay and poetic lyricism and astute political observations and clear-eyed cultural commentary, like when she writes “Life is a raincheck to oblivion” or explains that:
It is not easy to see. Outside the theatre, living as we do, most of us see very little with our eyes wide open. In action the eye absorbs space forms to function; in repose the eye becomes a facial decoration as sight turns inward. And our training is such that when we do look for non-functional reasons, it is usually at something huge and spectacular, like cathedrals or sunsets. And even then it is rare to see more than a general outline. Or to see more and still enter. That is the crucial transition, from seeing to entering. Not only crucial but mysterious so I won’t say any more except to note that I think that most people who go to dance concerts don't see very well, not even dancers, sometimes especially dancers, and most often critics, who must attend special classes in becoming blind.
Johnston gets the reader to see and to enter. And Cassandra never misses.