San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
FOR THIS AUTHOR, NEW BEGINNINGS AND LOOSE ENDS
SANDI DOLBEE: AT 72, CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN AND MINISTER MICHAEL KINNAMON HAS PUBLISHED HIS DEBUT NOVEL, ‘SUMMER OF LOVE AND EVIL,’ A COMING-OF-AGE TALE DECADES IN THE MAKING
Frank Mccourt was 66 when he made his debut with “Angela’s Ashes.” Harriet Doerr was 74 when she published her first novel, “Stones of Ibarra.” Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 when she got “Little House in the Big Woods” into the hands of readers.
Now there is Michael Kinnamon, who, at 72, has published “Summer of Love and Evil,” a coming-of-age tale set in a small Midwest town against a backdrop of classism, myopia and unresolved issues.
It has been a humbling journey. “It’s very hard to catch on in this fiction world,” Kinnamon says. “A very small number of novels are actually published every year.”
And even if the novel gets published, the work of getting readers to take notice is only beginning.
Sitting in his Del Cerro home, flanked by a wall of books, Kinnamon says he got lucky when he sent “Summer of Love and Evil” to Publerati, an independent publishing house known for picking up literary fiction that might otherwise be ignored. Publerati snatched it up, releasing it this past May.
But small houses tend to have limited resources and influence when it comes to traditional mass marketing. “Plus,” Kinnamon adds, “many book stores don’t stock the books from smaller publishing houses.”
Frustration creeps into his soft-spoken cadence. This is not a world he’s used to. In his previous world, the albeit specialized world of religion, Kinnamon was a bit of a rock star.
A prominent Christian theologian, Kinnamon rose to become a well-known champion of ecumenical and interfaith cooperation and a popular speaker on the academic lecture circuit. He taught at seminaries and universities for more than 30 years, was the dean of two of them, and spent four years in New York as the head of the National Council of Churches.
He’s also an ordained Disciples of Christ minister who considers it a badge of honor that in 1991, he was not elected general minister and president of his Protestant denomination because of his progressive stands on embracing LGBTQ Christians.
Along the way, Kinnamon wrote or edited more than 20 books about religion. “People will say, ‘Well you had publishers before, so that should have given you an in.’ Heavens no,” he says. “The publishers I had before don’t do fiction, and the fiction publishers don’t care a bit about this other stuff.”
On the other hand, keep in mind that he did get his novel published. That is more than can be said for what happened to him a half-century ago. As it turns out, the story of Kinnamon’s journey into this world of fiction writing isn’t so much about reinventing himself as it is about a resurrection.
“The literature in retirement is not a new departure,” he concedes. “It’s a return to my original love.”
In the beginning
Kinnamon was a political science major at Brown University in Rhode Island when he went abroad to study in Tel Aviv, Israel, for a year. He was accepted at schools in London and Edinburgh but decided “it would be better to go to a place where politics was happening rather than being studied about.”
But Israel also is an epicenter for Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths, and Kinnamon found himself becoming increasingly interested in religion. When he returned to Brown, he switched to a religious studies major. For his honors thesis, he wrote a novel.
“It wasn’t published, mercifully, because it wasn’t good enough,” he says. “But it got me a grant to write a second novel.”
When that one didn’t get published either, he decided to go to the University of Chicago Divinity School to get his doctorate in religion and literature (he was later named that school’s alumnus of the year for 2013).
After graduation, he went to work for the World Council of Churches in Geneva, where he was immersed in theology. “It was like getting a second PH.D.,” he says.
From there, he began his teaching career: Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, eventually becoming its acting dean; Lexington Theological Seminary in Kentucky, where he was dean and taught theology and ecumenical studies; and Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis. In 2008, he took over as general secretary of the National Council of Churches, an ecumenical partnership whose members comprise more than three dozen Christian groups.
After a visiting professorship at Seattle University, he and his wife, Mardine Davis, who is an art consultant, moved to San Diego in 2015. It is here that he began his fiction writing in earnest.
Loose ends and a review
“Summer of Love and Evil” is set in a small town of Iowa in the summer of 1967. It follows a high school valedictorian named Charles who has a summer job working on a street crew before heading off to college. Charles is from a well-to-do family, while the street crew workers are among the have-nots. He also starts dating the boss’s daughter, which adds to his growing realization of the inequities of socio-economic status and how whole segments of society are rendered invisible.
There are other twists, including hinting at the beginning of the meth epidemic in smalltown America and corporations taking over local farms.
But classism is the central message. “I think in the midst of all the appropriate focus on race, we sometimes forget about class structure in this country,” Kinnamon explains. “So here’s this little town that has almost no racial diversity but this kid couldn’t even see these people who work on the street crew.”
Wanting to put a face on them “also is consistent with my Christian values of humanizing individuals and wanting us to see the reality of lives that otherwise get ignored.”
In his writing, Kinnamon says he tries to remember to refrain from preaching. “When I first wrote novels in my early 20s, I was filled with great messages. Now I want to tell a good story and let the ideas come through the characters.”
He admits he likes loose ends. “Life doesn’t feel closed to me,” he says. It is a book, after all, about one summer, one snapshot in time, told in a scant 229 pages (on my ipad).
These loose ends bothered the book review magazine Kirkus Reviews, which called the book “a sincere coming-ofage novel that fails to deliver on its promise.”
But Kinnamon, who notes that bad reviews are part of the deal, isn’t slowing down.
He’s about to tackle the final revisions on a novel he’s titled “A Rooftop in Jerusalem,” which weaves together a love story between an American and an Israeli over four decades. Waiting in the wings is an outline for a novel about a stalker called “I Permit Me to Kiss You.” He says another manuscript, “The Nominee,” is not ready for publication.
His published novel and these other projects draw on his own experiences — to a point. “I’ll tell you a secret that I’ve discovered is that the more autobiographical the writing, the worse it is,” he says. “So if I have a framework I can work from, yes that’s good because you have to write what you know, as they say. But the more I invent it and it’s fictionalized, the better it is.”
Postscript for a new year
Kinnamon is naming writers he admires. Among them: Marilynne Robinson, Anne Tyler and Julian Barnes.
“I sit there and marvel at the ability of these authors,” he says. “I don’t know that I’ll ever be there, but if I didn’t aspire to write that well, I would be selling myself and others short. So every day, I look forward to writing better than I did the day before.”
This coming Saturday, we turn the calendar to a new year. It is a time when our thoughts turn to new beginnings, moving forward, rededicating ourselves.
Think of Kinnamon’s words — about the desire to do better today than yesterday and, perhaps, better still in the new year than the year before. As resolutions go, whether you’re a 72-year-old rookie novelist or simply trying to make your way in the world, that one is a keeper.