Kyle Minor

Untitled, oil on canvas, Frankentiénne

Starting today, and for the next six weeks, I’ll be the featured writer at Ninth Letter. The magazine is serializing my long epistolary story “In a Distant Country,” in six parts, putting up a new section once a week for the next six weeks. The story is a companion piece to my novel-in-progress The Sexual Lives of Missionaries. It takes the form of letters home by minor characters from the novel. The letters trace through the decades the observations and complaints of others about the fate of Sheila Brocken, an 18-year-old girl who marries a lecherous 42-year-old missionary she meets on a work trip to Koulev-Ville, Haiti. The letters begin before their marriage, and continue through her husband’s death in the dechoukaj uprising at the end of the Duvalier era, and on into an ever more uncertain future. Each installment will be accompanied by a painting by a Haitian artist. First up is an untitled oil painting by Frankentiénne, who also was the writer of Dezafi, the first novel ever published in Kreyol rather than French. I will post links to each installment as they are made available by Ninth Letter, and a link to the final PDF, which will include all six installments as the full version of the story:

Part One · Part Two · Part Three · Part Four · Part Five · Part Six

excerpt from companion novel-in-progress The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, at Guernica: http://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/2863/kyle_minor_7_15_11/

An excerpt of my novel-in-progress The Sexual Lives of Missionaries is now live at Guernica.

Reading from my novel-in-progress The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, at the Museum 21c Hotel, Louisville, Kentucky.

April has been good to me. I’ve spent most of the month plugging away at the novel, which is very, very close to being done, and an excerpt will appear in Guernica Magazine later this summer. I gave the first ten pages at test-run in Denton, Texas, at the University of North Texas’s literary festival, and in Louisville, Kentucky, in the Sarabande Reading Series at the 21c Museum Hotel. It was warmly received both places, which felt good and validating, as you might imagine.

“The Truth and All Its Ugly,” a short story, is now available for download on the Amazon Kindle, for $1.99. In the Devil’s Territory, my 2008 full-length collection, is now available as an eBook through the publisher, although it’s not yet in the Kindle Store. Amazon’s promotional copy for “The Truth and All Its Ugly” goes like so: A father, a son, a suicide, a pink piano, an axe, a robot, yellowjackets affixed to the eyes of Precious Moments figurines, and the news about how ‘dead trees got not one thing on milkweed and sumac, horsemint and sweet William.’ A tour-de-force at story length from Kyle Minor, award-winning author of In the Devil’s Territory. Available exclusively on the Kindle.

A few good people interviewed me the last few months:

1. I talked with Shawn Vestal, at Bark, the blog associated with the literary journal Willow Springs, about Barry Hannah, writing on the Internet, and revising my novel.

2. Charles Dodd White asked me about In the Devil’s Territory, the long short story, and HTMLGiant.

3. The good people at the Used Furniture Review asked super-smart questions, and I answered with news about “the drumbeat of that want.”

4. Erin Keane at the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote a lovely piece about The Sexual Lives of Missionaries and what it’s like to be in the process of finishing a first novel.

Also, the good people at Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast are offering a free MP3 audiobook download of “The Truth and All Its Ugly” here: http://www.miettecast.com/2011/05/09/the-truth-and-all-its-ugly/.

What’s next? I’m not doing anything in the month of May except revising my novel, playing with kids, and playing the Wurlitzer in my living room. I’m hoping by time I check in again in June or July that I’ll have some big news about the novel. See you then!

It seems so unlikely as to be almost impossible, but three years after publication, my story collection In the Devil’s Territory made the bestseller list in St. Louis, Missouri, thanks, no doubt, to the efforts of the good people at Subterranean Books, as well as the Noir at the Bar reading series. A big, warm thank you to the people of St. Louis!

Put this on auto-repeat, put on your headphones, go to the Waffle House, pretend you aren’t a father or husband or lover or payer-of-mortgage or somebody who has to get up at seven o’clock in the morning and lecture about Cynthia Ozick. Write fiercely till dawn. Repeat. Continue in rabid obscurity until forty thousand somebodies notice, or, if they don’t, continue in rabid obscurity anyway.

The novel-in-progress, The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, is all but done. It’s tough to let it go. It’s been at the center of my daily work for five years. Sometime in the next three or four weeks, I expect to give it to the deciders and see what its fate in the world will be. Here is a picture of the stacked-up pages:

The project I’m likeliest to complete next is a nonfiction book about Greg McCaw, my childhood pastor, who came out as a gay man and lost everything. You can see a preview of his story at The Rumpus.

After that, I’m planning to start a second novel and finish a nonfiction book about a kidnapping, an orphanage, an earthquake, and a rebuilding, in Haiti.

Some other things I’ve been doing:

1. “The Question of Where We Begin,” an essay about point of entry, suicide, and the origin of the world, at Gulf Coast.

1a. Nick Bruno printed a limited edition (75 copies) letterpress chapbook (with woodcuts!) of my story “The Truth and All Its Ugly,” which originally appeared in Surreal South and Harper Perennial’s Fifty-Two Stories (you can read it here.)

2. New essays out the next few months in Arts & Letters, Sou’wester, and Cream City Review.

3. A weird reviewish piece about Lydia Davis and Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird at The Faster Times.

4. An ebook edition of my 2008 story collectionIn the Devil’s Territory will be available later this year from Dzanc/Consortium, for Kindle, Nook, SonyReader, etc. (!)

5. I’ll be doing readings this spring in Blacksburg, Virginia; Columbus, Ohio; Denton, Texas; and St. Louis, Missouri. Details here.

6. I’m now Twitter-followable @kyle_minor.

Thank you for paying attention!

Former student, friend, and UN aid worker Karen O’Reilly carried a copy of In the Devil’s Territory with her when she moved to the Central African Republic. These chimpanzees found it in her bag. Of all readers, they are now my favorites.

My story “The Truth all All Its Ugly” is featured this week at Fifty-Two Stories, the new “Fiction Delivery Service” from Harper Collins.