ALUMNI PROFILE:

Swallowing Dreams Whole

In the lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan, fiction writer Kellie Wells, M.F.A. ’91, tells how from an early age she recognized “how persuasive words can be.” She pauses to think. “Potent,” she says a moment later. “That’s a better word.”

Word by word, sentence by sentence, Wells crafts her stories. “I write very slowly,” she says. “In paragraphs rather than pages.”

That approach has built a body of work that has garnered the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction, publication in prestigious literary magazines, and most recently, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, which has brought her to New York.

The cadence of language and the unconscious element of idea generation are two aspects of writing that intrigue Wells. It is not surprising, therefore, that her language casts a dream-like spell on readers, engaging their imaginations with oddball and often shockingly vivid imagery.

Her first collection of stories, Compression Scars, is being publicized on Amazon.com as “eloquent and original … vibrantly captur[ing] the oddities of both the everyday and out-of-this-world.”

In the story “Swallowing Angels Whole,” for example, protagonist Aimee Semple McPherson, a preacher with many stories, many truths, questions the ways of the world around her. She wonders whether “[Darwin] had felt the walk out of the water into the light click in his own bones, the weight of that forward movement pressing down on his skeleton. Bones remember. The ache that starts at the base of the spine is a bone memory of another posture.”

The evening of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards ceremony, sixty-five floors up in the pavilion of Rockefeller Center’s illustrious Rainbow Room, the best word to describe Wells and her writing was lofty. Overlooking a cloud-enshrouded New York City skyline, the literary world’s top publishers, agents, and editors assembled in late September to honor six emerging writers.

The writers are all women in the early stages of their careers who, in the words of the foundation, “demonstrate exceptional talent and promise.” Others to receive the $10,000 award this year are: Eula Biss, Adrian Blevins, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Ladette Randolph, and L.B. Thompson

A saxophone’s soft jazz filled the partygoers ears, fancy finger foods filled their mouths, and the names of future literary giants claimed their minds’ attention as author and philanthropist Rona Jaffe announced each winner.

Literary greatness, however, was not of foremost importance to young Kellie Wells. She was aware of words’ potency, yes, but did not immediately gravitate toward them.

“I was not one of those kids who wrote all the time,” she says. Only after college, when she found herself in a copywriting job at a public television station, imprisoned behind the strict confines of thirty-second spots, did she see the path that lay ahead of her.

“I found myself yearning beyond the thirty seconds,” she remembers.

Rona Jaffe (left) and Kellie Wells)

Wells had earned two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Kansas, Lawrence—the first in English, the second in journalism—and decided to test out the limits of fiction and poetry by enrolling in the M.F.A. program at UM in 1989. She received an extra incentive when honored with the University of Kansas Kate Stephens “Get the Hell out of the Midwest” fellowship for graduate study. It stipulated that its winners attend graduate school east of the Alleghenies or west of the Rockies. (Missoula, she says, was “exotic” in comparison to her hometown of Kansas City.)

“Being in school was something I was good at and enjoyed,” she says. “I was casting for an identity and couldn’t find one. I stayed in academe because I knew who I was when I was there.”

After earning yet another M.F.A. with a concentration in fiction from the University in Pittsburgh, she decided to make a career for herself in higher education. She studied abroad in Berlin and Hamburg, gained fluency in German, and received her doctorate in English and creative writing from Western Michigan University in 1999.

Though she says she “never lets naiveté get in my way,” she was struck by how demanding teaching was. Now an assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, she does not get much writing done during the semesters she teaches. She simply does not have much to give to the creative side of things; teaching consumes so much of her energy.

To teach literature, Wells says she must first craft aesthetics and defend her positions. Students often ask her why she refers to certain readings, and she must be able to rapidly produce articulate answers. This process, she says, pushes her forward to do the work—the thinking—that she perhaps wouldn’t do on her own.

“It allows me to change, revise, and grow in a way that comes quickly,” she says. “I’m forced to be reflective all the time.

“Lots of writers who teach complain that they have no time to write,” she continues. “But for me, the only way to survive academia and writing is to see the symbiosis—how one feeds into the other.”

The Rona Jaffe Foundation bestows cash awards on its winners in the spirit of providing them with a cushion of time during which they can achieve a high level of reflection and creative output. Some winners use the money to cover the cost of childcare; others pay the rent for cubicle space. Wells plans to journey to Egypt to research Queen Hatshepsut.

At work on her second novel while making finishing touches on her first, she says her characters often get interested in subjects about which she is not personally knowledgeable, like ancient Egypt. “Sometimes an image pops into your head and attaches to this one character,” she says.

Her second novel, tentatively titled Fat Girl, Terrestrial, is still in the “embryonic stages.” Yet Wells already knows that one character, an amateur Egyptologist, would be interested in going to Egypt to visit Queen Hatshepsut’s tomb.

Wells says her writing process is two-pronged. At times she becomes grounded in language first, getting to character through language. Other times there is a character dilemma that she wants to work out through prose.

Her first (not yet published) novel, Skin, is set in the mythical town of What Cheer, Kansas. In this work Wells explores various crises of identity simultaneously. In what she describes as a “Midwestern magical-realism” genre, What Cheer residents grapple with big abstractions of body and spirit and work out the “consequences of the imbalances” in their daily lives.

Creative ideas like this one have been attracting attention to Wells for years. Nancy Zafris, fiction editor of the Kenyon Review, is a good friend of Wells’ from the days when Kellie was a student at the University of Pittsburgh. Zafris says she remembers Wells as a shy and unassuming student who had a mind full of thought-provoking ideas.

“She’s just so smart,” Zafris says. “She expresses herself really, really well and has an extraordinary vocabulary. At the same time, she is very modest, shy, and thoughtful. When she did say something, you wanted to listen to it.”

The class Zafris taught in the early 1990s was a literature class; the students handed in little of their own creative work. Yet, something about the way Wells talked about the readings provoked Zafris to ask for a writing sample. And what she saw—the beginnings of the title story in Compression Scars—blew her away. She urged Wells to write to an agent, which resulted in Wells getting representation.

“I sort of see her as a female David Foster Wallace in her own way. I hope she rises to the top. She’s the best literary fiction has to offer,” Zafris says.

Though Wells says she has been fortunate throughout her career, the past year has been exceptionally propitious. She published in the Gettysburg Review and the Kenyon Review, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, moderated a panel discussion on “The Figure of the Female Grotesque” at the Associated Writing Program’s annual conference, and landed her assistant professorship at Washington University.

She has come a long way since winning the “Get the Hell out of the Midwest” fellowship. Having been launched “into the stratosphere” after dwelling in obscurity for many years, she says, “This past year has been dizzying.”

Booklist reviewer Carol Haggas called Compression Scars a collection “of luminous short stories” that “reflect both the fragility and the flexibility of the human spirit. Emotionally and physically damaged as they may be, Wells’ characters struggle with scars that are both internal and external, though they often fail to realize which of the two is the more disfiguring.”

Haggas also recognizes that the characters appear to be saved by “inner strength and sublime compassion that compel them to assist others in singularly unconventional ways.”

Wells says that she is pleased that critics are picking up on the refuge her characters find in compassion.

“A lot of the world’s ills exist fundamentally as a result of a lack of empathy,” she says, adding that she is intrigued by the small places in which people find hope.

Jodi Werner is a freelance writer who lives in New York City.