Author Spotlight: Ann Kathryn Kelly

Ann Kathryn Kelly won 2nd prize in Non-Fiction in the Northwind Writing Award 2024 for her story “The Color of Heartache”. It is an honor to feature her Q&A here on Raw Earth Ink as part of our promotion of truly exceptional authors.

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Q & A

Candice: Ann, first, thank you so much for your beautiful submission. What stood out to the judges was the enduring strength of your storytelling and the vividness of “The Color of Heartache.” What inspired this story to be written? I understand you experienced a brain tumor, can you share more of how this led to this story in its entirety? 

Ann Kathryn: Thanks for this opportunity to chat, Candice! Winning a writing prize of course validates the work put in, but when the recognition is tied to a piece that is particularly meaningful to the writer, it makes it all the more special. I’m honored and grateful to you and Executive Editor tara caribou and all the judges for believing my essay worthy of your award. I’m looking forward to seeing it in print in The 2024 Northwind Treasury anthology!

This essay remains one of my favorites. I vividly remember the day I started it. I was sitting in my living room on a Sunday morning, having coffee. I had joined a creative nonfiction (CNF) writing class just a week earlier, and was thinking about which part of my memoir draft I wanted to workshop with classmates in the upcoming week. With this particular class, the focus was on writing about the body. My memoir is all about that—specifically, my brain—and that Sunday morning I decided I wanted to write a standalone essay to workshop instead of a memoir chapter.

The reason for this was tied to, at that time, a current news story that brought up painful memories of a person in my life, my sister-in-law Jane Ann, who had been pivotal with other family members in helping me through the ordeal I wrote about in my memoir.

CD: Let’s stay with this for a moment. How did you begin and why did you decide to submit it to an award?  

Ann Kathryn: As I mentioned, I’d signed up for that CNF essay class through WOW! Women on Writing in June 2018. Quick detour, for a moment, while I shout-out the incredible WOW! community that has elevated my writing life. I’ve met talented and generous writers, taken some of the best craft classes, and along the way became a WOW! columnist for their popular “Markets” newsletter that is sent to 50,000 email subscribers every month.

I count WOW’s founder, Angela Mackintosh, as a true friend—though we’ve yet to meet in person in the seven years we’ve been critique partners. Ang is one of my top trusted readers, and her feedback on my various essays and memoirs through the years has been transformative. I can’t say enough about how Angela lights up aha! moments for me every time she reads one of my pieces. Her feedback, her spirit, and her knowledge of the writing industry, both creative and business-wise, is a gift.

So, Ang and I were in that WOW! class together—focused around “What Our Bodies Have to Say.” As the first week of class was ending, news of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s suicide was announced.

As outlets vied with each other over every awful detail—how Bourdain did it; who, if anyone, might have driven him to it; what it meant for his daughter, his girlfriend, his TV network—I sat down to write. I had my “in” into writing a new essay for the class rather than workshop another previously written piece from my memoir. Tying in our bodies was required for that class, so my brain surgery ticked that box. Then I braided in the Bourdain news, along with a third braid about Jane Ann. On that Sunday morning, in my favorite rocking chair that faces a sunny turret in my Victorian, I tapped out on my phone a first draft of what would become “The Color of Heartache.”

Forty-five minutes later, as I re-read a very rough draft, I knew it was something I could work with. For me, news of Bourdain opened a way to write, for the first time, about Jane Ann’s suicide years earlier. Several drafts and almost a year later, I submitted my essay to The Coachella Review and it appeared in their online summer issue in 2019.

So, this is where the latter part of your question comes into play: submitting for an award. I think all writers share disappointment when something inside their heads and hearts that they’ve worked so hard to bring into the world is published and then … nothing. It disappears. I experienced that with this essay. I also think it happens more with standalone prose pieces or poems published online; less so, with novels or memoirs because the physical manifestation remains. One can hold a book, but an online piece can feel impermanent. I wanted this essay to find a printed home and that’s hard to do when something has been published online. Side rant for a minute, but I wish more journals, magazines, and anthologies were open to reprints! When I saw that The Northwind Writing Award was open to reprints and offered a chance at print publication in The Northwind Treasury anthology, I sent it in. It’s so meaningful for me that this essay will now live on in print.

CD: “The Color of Heartache” is raw with a lot of emotion that is intense. Many people who endure half of what you did would not be able to put those experiences down on paper, which is one reason we were drawn to your remarkable ability to do just that. If you had to say, what is the key message for you in this?

Ann Kathryn: I’ve heard that actors receive this advice early in their careers: “Don’t cry for the audience; make them cry for you.” As writers, we’ve heard it phrased: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

I shed some tears while writing this essay—while reliving the wonderful memories of how Jane Ann supported me and the hole that remained, and still does, for our family after she was gone.

My surgery, and the months leading up to and following it as I recovered, took its toll on my family. But to endure what followed a year after, with her death, was devastating. While part of the essay’s focus is on questions that will never be answered, I wanted to highlight Jane Ann’s innate goodness. My family and I now understand that she put everyone around her first—family, friends, her own pets and all animals, in fact—but to the exclusion of herself. My mother will sometimes say when any of us recall that time: “Jane Ann, it seems, loved everyone but Jane Ann.”

What a heartbreaking statement, but a true one. And it’s a tragedy that plays out too often, around the world, with people struggling—sometimes in plain sight, but often in silence. That’s why I wrote that, sometimes, families and friends may not be aware of the demons that drive someone we think we know so well. We don’t know all of their fragilities. Living in the wake of suicide is tragic, yes, but also maddening. Those left behind often feel blame. They feel helpless and hopeless, ironically the very feelings that compelled the person to do it.

CD: The story has several themes, obviously a main one being your experience with the brain tumor and then the idea we do not know someone even when we think we do, in relation to suicide. This is a very universal theme that few have the courage to address. And you address TWO huge themes in one paper. Did it start out that way? Did you always see the parallels between the two situations? 

Ann Kathryn: I wasn’t thinking about tackling big topics or themes simultaneously when I started the essay. If I had, it might have intimidated me and caused writer’s block! With the parallel angle, though, what struck me and made me want to write this was when I read an online article while in that writing class about Anthony Bourdain’s ashes being held in France until clearance was obtained to fly him to the United States. It immediately took me back to when my mother and I were with my brother Pat, Jane Ann’s husband. The whole family had flown from New Hampshire to their winter home in Florida to be with him. Everyone had returned home when my mother, Pat, and I were the last to board a flight to bring Jane Ann’s ashes back to New Hampshire for burial. I remember how surreal it all felt, knowing we had her urn with us in a suitcase. Reading about Bourdain and his flight immediately put me back in Florida, eight years earlier.

CD: We thought it was remarkable you could write so much in three pages. When did you begin to write in the non-fiction genre? How does it distinguish itself for you as a genre? Why are you comfortable with it?

Ann Kathryn: CNF is my comfort zone, for sure. I started writing CNF essays in 2017, about two years after I began my memoir draft. I’ve tried writing fiction a few times, but I get stymied. I can’t decide where I want to open a story or where I want it to lead. I could write fiction using nonfiction as my base, of course, and change names and identifying markers but I’d rather just write it from the get-go as CNF.

A big part of this has to do with me being the narrator, rather than writing something from a fiction narrator’s point of view. Knowing I’m in the CNF head space and will express things from my POV allows me to feel things differently than what I might feel if I start something as fiction—even if I know that what I’m writing about is couched in nonfiction! And, changing my name to Amy wouldn’t work for me. I find it easier to sink into memories and try to make sense of what’s happened when I’m the narrator. And then when I think about trying to write fiction where I would imagine brand new experiences and characters, well, that sounds complicated. I admire writers who can so deftly world-build and deliver a convincing story.

CD: Do you see non-fiction as being an opportunity to write about our experiences and relate them to bigger experiences and then reflect that back to the reader, or is non-fiction something else in your opinion? 

Ann Kathryn: Definitely the former. Writers know we need to identify and bring forward universal threads in any piece we create. That’s our entry point into holding reader attention. They must relate in some way to what we’re writing about.

With CNF, this doesn’t need to be a one-to-one match. In my essay “The Color of Heartache” not every reader will have had experience with one or either of my topics: open-head surgery for 12 hours, or suicide.

Yet, many readers will identify with having received a serious diagnosis at some point. If not them, maybe it was a loved one who got the diagnosis, and they grappled alongside a spouse, parent, child, or friend through the rollercoaster swings of medical appointments and the fear of the unknown; the helplessness they would feel as the bystander. It’s often harder to be relegated to the sidelines than it is to be the patient who is often too sick to be aware of everything. In my memoir, I portray how my family did what they could to help from the sidelines every day. In this essay, that comes through by turning a dining room into a bedroom. Through white vinyl sneakers from Walmart, and homemade soup, and fistfuls of flowers.

And while some readers will tragically have experience knowing someone who died by suicide, others will not—but as humans, we all share the ability to put ourselves in others’ shoes. This means we can extrapolate how that would feel: the devastation. As long as the reader identifies in some way with the narrator, they will turn to the next page and the next. We will have done our jobs, taking them along with us.  

CD: The judges were attracted to the way you were able to achieve feeling so quickly and intensely in this medium. Death and disease/illness is a universal theme, but you manage to talk about greater subjects like attachment, and how much we really know other people. That’s philosophy at its best. Did you recognize that you were expanding into a philosophical consideration at times? 

Ann Kathryn: It would sound impressive to say I consciously chose to explore lofty philosophical teachings, but I didn’t set out to do that. That said, though, attachment is a central theme in my memoir. I often say my family was as vital as medical specialists in saving me both before and after my brain surgery. Many of my CNF essays, some that are excerpted from my memoir but some that I write fresh, often tackle attachment in some way because I also think attachment is a rich topic for many CNF writers.

CD: Are there some quieter sub-texts here? Share any you want to. 

Ann Kathryn: Survivor’s guilt.

In a nutshell, my memoir examines mysterious symptoms I lived with from birth to age 40 due to an undiagnosed brain tumor. The tumor was not cancerous but being neurovascular, was fed by blood. It resembled a raspberry with chambers that would fill, hemorrhage, then flatten before starting the next cycle. Each bleed may only have been a teaspoon’s worth, but was repeatedly absorbed by my brain, causing a range of symptoms. When I received a diagnosis at last—I had a cavernous angioma—pieces of my lifelong puzzle fell into place. It now made sense why I’d limped since childhood. Why my eye crossed at age four. Why I had cycles of crushing headaches from childhood into adulthood. Why I developed, later in life, nonstop hiccupping and dry-heaving.

The brain stem is the worst part of the brain to have something wrong; not that any part is ideal. It controls breathing, heart rate, consciousness. After diagnosis at 40, I had to choose between risky open-head surgery on this small but critical brain stem, or allow my angioma to continue bleeding, bringing more health deficits and the potential for a catastrophic hemorrhage. My surgical team talked with my family about the possibility of me needing full care in a nursing home, despite their best efforts. Miraculously, I came through my surgery: 12 hours, face down on an operating table as the team cut the back of my skull open. I was back at work part-time three months later. While elated that I survived, I also felt at times survivor’s guilt, especially when I spent a month in a brain injury rehab where most patients there would never go home again.

And then, Jane Ann was such a source of support to me before and after my surgery—my whole family was—yet, a year later, she was gone. Survivor’s guilt is complex, as we balance relief and gratitude for making it through something huge and continuing our lives, while others around us do not make it. We’re left to contend with unanswered questions of why.

CD: How did your medical issues related to the brain tumor affect you in terms of coming to writing, and staying in writing? I would imagine you still have some personal battles there, that can’t be easy to navigate at times. Does writing work as a catharsis to some of that? 

Ann Kathryn: I’m still learning what a lifetime with a bleeding brain tumor taught me, and still has to teach me—because I believe we all continue to unearth meaning from our experiences throughout our lives, even when a particular threat is in the rearview mirror. Writing about that time, and what my life looks like now years after surgery, where I’ve picked back up with my career, home life, and international travel, is rewarding but also bittersweet sometimes.

About two years after my surgery, I also started volunteering with a nonprofit in my local area that offers therapeutic services (speech and occupational therapy) and arts programming to people living with brain injury from tumors, strokes, or severe accidents. I’ve been leading weekly writing workshops for their summer arts program; one hour every Friday, through the summer months. The experience has been a meaningful way for me to give back, specifically to people living with brain trauma. I love helping them discover and write their own stories of survival and resilience.

CD: In your lifetime thus far, have you observed a shift in how people read in terms of whether they do or not, and how this influences their ability to be, say, empathetic or aware of things that non-fiction was historically a good medium for? 

Ann Kathryn: I think society’s collective attention span—both today, but also going back several decades—has been completely reshaped by surface-level consumption, which in turn has impacted our comprehension and consequently our ability to find common ground and meaning from shared experiences. With each year that passes, people spend less time sitting with “any” piece of content, be it mainstream news or literary. They give anything a few minutes, tops, before bouncing.

We’ve been conditioned—all of us—to skim, skim, skim. That’s why social platforms do so well. They’re built around this “get in and get out” mindset. The sub-100-character tweet. The 10-second TikTok reel. Quippy hashtags. The shorthand young people use when texting. “AFAIK” … “ICYMI” … “FWIW” … “JLMK” …

A generation of young people are literally losing language. I sound dramatic, but I think people’s dismissal of taking the time to read—and even write in full sentences!—is a loss. As a memoirist and essayist, of course this makes me sad. Writers are not built to scratch the surface. We’re built to spend days, weeks, months—years sometimes with bigger projects like a book—where we tighten and rephrase and polish. It sounds torturous to someone who is not a writer, but it’s where we get our energy.

It’s gratifying, therefore, when someone spends time reading something we wrote. But that’s happening less and less. Many people are choosing not to linger over written content. And, to appreciate, you often need to linger; to sit with a piece and feel what you feel after reading something that delighted or surprised or saddened you. But instead, people gulp down soundbites, tweets, reels, shorthand.

Memoirists and essayists will likely never get over wrestling with doubt and questions of: “Who cares about my experience? No one will want to read this.” So when a literary journal says they want to publish a piece, or a contest like yours specifically applauds a piece, and then readers read it and maybe someone responds to let the writer know how it affected them, that’s a shot of pure adrenaline. Of gratitude.

That’s why we, as writers, keep doing this. Because we’ve reached someone.

By the way, want to know what I think the worst text shorthand is? “TL; DR”—which means “too long; didn’t read.”

I hope some of your readers stayed with us to get this far. And I want to thank you again, Candice—and the whole Northwind team—for spending time with my essay, thinking about its message, and talking with me about it. It’s been a real pleasure.

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To read The 2024 Northwind Treasury, including Ann Kathryn’s winning piece, you can purchase it in paperback on Lulu, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon, or as an eBook on Kindle. To see the list of contents and winners, visit our winner’s page.