Kathryn Kulpa

I grew up in Somerset, Massachusetts (pop. 18,234), a town where there wasn’t much to do except read and write--so reading and writing were what I did. My earliest efforts somehow managed to disappear, but I do remember a preschool piece about a talking duck and a story about a girl who wandered off into the woods behind her house, only to be discovered by the head of an international modeling agency. Clearly, I was not one to be bound by the shackles of literary realism. By the time I was twelve I had my own worldwide publishing empire, producing books, comic books, magazines and a newspaper. Unfortunately, all of these “publications” were hand-lettered on pieces of notebook paper stapled together. Distribution was, to put it mildly, limited.

But I kept writing, and after a few colleges I tried and didn’t like I ended up at Mills College, where I majored in English with a creative writing emphasis. I returned to New England to get my Ph.D. in literature at Brown University, but I decided I preferred creative writing to criticism and got my M.A. instead. I worked at the usual succession of low-paying, part-time and temp jobs, from bookstore clerking to proofreading police reports for a local paper (favorite story: a wayward bull was apprehended for looking into a woman’s picture window) to a temp gig handing out plastic cockroaches at a carnival ring-toss booth. Meanwhile, I kept working on my writing. I’d been trying to get published since age 15, when I sent stories (typed by my mom) off to the New Yorker and the Atlantic. It still wasn’t happening, but a workshop I took with Rhode Island fiction writer Jincy Willett made me think that maybe my goal wasn’t so far from reality.

I went back to school, this time to the University of Rhode Island for a professional library degree. And, after a while, I started sending out my work again. Guess what? I still got rejections, but at least I was starting to get rejection letters from real people, instead of the 2” by 4” printed slips that broke my high school heart. Then, finally, I got my first acceptance. And my second acceptance. Unfortunately, they were both for the same story, which led to some awkward moments.

That story, “Elaine, I Love You,” was published in Seventeen in 1994. It took two more years of writing and revising before my next story appeared in print: “Insensates,” published in Jeff VanderMeer’s beautifully designed, genre-mixing journal Leviathan. I worked with writing groups, took workshops at the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference and the YMCA Writer’s Voice, and started publishing lots of different stories in lots of different magazines: Artful Dodge, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Bellevue Literary Review, Carve, Florida Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Margin, Parting Gifts, The Pedestal Magazine and QWF. I started to think about how some of my stories could work together in a collection. That collection went through many changes and several titles before being published as Pleasant Drugs by Mid-List Press in 2005.

Along with being a writer and librarian, I’ve also worked as an editor and teacher. Working for Merlyn’s Pen, a magazine of writing by teens, was fun because I got to read the work of other writers who, like me, started young. Later, I did fiction editing for Pif, an online zine, and I’m currently the editor of Newport Review, an online journal of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. I also teach creative writing--in my own workshops, at libraries and writing conferences and at the University of Rhode Island.

What’s next? I have two potential novels that I hope to complete in my free time (what free time?), but in the meantime, I’ve been writing a lot of flash fiction. I have also been privileged to share my life, furniture, laptop and food with some of the world’s coolest cats--my sweet guy Woody, who died in March 2008; the Princess Sophie and Duncan Mackenzie--who share a penchant for weird foods (pizza crusts, doughnuts, bean burritos, Kraft Dinner) and a tendency to drape themselves over whatever I happen to be working on.