Q&A with Kara A. Kennedy, debut author of "I Will Never Leave You"

Hello from the peak of unprecedented times 📅

Literally it is Sunday afternoon and I was taking a nap and startled awake just in time for my roommate to inform me that Joe Biden has stepped aside and is not seeking reelection anymore. It’s been a week. It’s been a month. It’s been a freaking unprecedented time, and I’m tired. I think we’re all tired.

On the bright side, I spent the past nine days in Tennessee visiting my friend Christine and her family. It was restorative and healing and joyous and I loved every second of it. I miss them already. Friendship is beautiful and I’m so obsessed with all my friends. I’m about to watch some other friends graduate from VCFA, and other-other friends have had good news break, and I’m just. Delighted. And speaking of friends, and good news, and delight! 👇

Welcome to the interview 🗣️

This week I’m honored to have a Q&A with none other than Kara A. Kennedy! Kara is the debut author of I Will Never Leave You, a suspenseful YA ghost thriller. She’s also my manager, yay! Below is the quick synopsis of her book, and then we’ll dive right in!

Karis Rogerson: How did you first get into writing as a way to tell stories?

Kara Kennedy: So my whole life I always really used writing to just process everything, to process anything that happened to me. My mom is a writer, so that really kind of introduced me to writing, I think, as an outlet and as a creative venture when I was really, really young.

I would make up stories before I could write, so I would just, like, say them out loud and my mom would type them. And the first thing I remember fully writing was A Wrinkle in Time fanfiction, which my mom transcribed for me. And it was because I didn't like the ending, and I was like, “I'm gonna make my own.”

The first time that I was really like, “oh, I would like this to be something I do professionally,” I was in middle school and I was really into Sarah Dessen and I just fell in love with YA. And I was like, I love these types of stories and I want to do that. And so that's kind of what put me on my trajectory and I never considered any other path for college. I knew that this was basically the thing I wanted to do.

KR: Apart from career obligations, why do you write? What drives you?

KK: Sheer, like, determination. I think that it's just been something that I've just done for so long that I don't know how [not] to use that as a method to like process things that happen to me.

I always have been someone [for whom] everything that I write has a little bit of my own personality or lived experience. I find it really hard to write something that has nothing to do with something I've experienced at all. So I think that it's just always been something that has helped me process difficult things in my life.

I don't know if it's healthy, but the way that I viewed traumatic things that have happened to me have been like, if nothing else, I can use this in my work.

KR: What draws you to ghost tales & spooky stories?

KK: Man, it's another answer where I've always been like that. I always really loved ghost stories, scary stories. I always wanted to read them, watch scary movies, be told scary stories. Even as a kid, I just loved it. I definitely come from a family that is very much into ghosts and believes in ghosts.

And I have so many real life ghost stories that I could tell you sometime. I've lived in a lot of haunted places somehow. I've always found it fun and that's a true answer, but I think the deeper answer is I kind of started experiencing death in terms of going to funerals for family, friends, family members, pretty young.

And so it was explained to me what death was and what death meant when I was really little, like two. think that I always had a interest in life after death and in what happens when we die. I lost my grandmother when I was eight and I was very, very close to her.

My book is is dedicated to her and to my mom. It was always just this theme in my life, which sounds dark, but I don't think it is. I think that it's just something that I've always been processing in my own way. And again, processing it through my work. I think that ghosts particularly and I Will Never Leave You [specifically], I use it as a metaphor to explore different stuff.

So I use it as a metaphor to explore, you know, difficult relationships, abusive relationships, where the end can be really foggy and like trauma like that can cling to you like haunting. And I just found it was an interesting vehicle to explore that. So I think that, in some ways, I will always kind of revisit ghost stories or have those spooky elements in my writing, because I think that it's a really interesting vehicle to tell lots of other stories.

KR: And what about kidlit?

KK: It just kind of started with me being a kid, being a teenager, and that was my world, and writing in that space, writing in that world, that's what I read. And then I think, honestly, just as I entered my 20s, it still was just a really compelling space for me to write in.

I feel like as I was in college, it was really that boom of like Victoria Aveyard and John Green and like, and The Hunger Games, like so many major YA series coming out, and standalones. And I think that I just felt like it was a really exciting space to write in.

And then as time went on, I just feel like that age [has] so much material. There is so much that you can talk about in terms of platonic friendships, romantic relationships, relationships with your family. It's all so rich. And it all feels so intense and all-consuming. And I was very much a teenager where everything was the end of the world.

Everything was the worst thing that had ever happened. Like, every relationship was so important. And I just think it's a really exciting and fun space to write in because you can be so dramatic.

KR: Can you share something about I Will Never Leave You that you are excited for readers to discover?

KK: In terms of less talked about, I think that the book comes across as [something that] sounds like it’s going to be a really sad book, which obviously in a lot of ways it is.

I think that I, by nature, love the joke. It’s a book about an abusive relationship. It's a book about a girl who's lost her mom. She's lost all these friendships because of this abusive relationship. She's, you know, being framed for murder.

Like, it's not a good time, but let's laugh about it. I hope that people find those breathing moments, which I was very intentional about including, so that it's not a very heavy book.

One of my favorite characters to write was Rowan, who is kind of introduced to be, like, the anti Alana, who basically represents a relationship Maya could have that would be positive and fun and funny and lighthearted and not about controlling her.

KR: So what inspired the book?

KK: Oh my gosh, a lot of things. I knew for years that I wanted to write a book set on a lake because my extended family has always lived on lakes. I spent a lot of time at lake houses growing up and even now, and I just think the atmosphere is great. Like you can do so much with that kind of setting. So that kind of came first was like, I want to set a book at a lake. It's creepy. I started the book literally right as COVID lockdown hit. It was like April, 2020. So I had nothing.

I had moved back from Los Angeles with no job, no money, no friends, I wasn't with my family because I was isolating away from them. And there was really nothing I had going on. I was like, let me try to write something. And the first draft of I will never leave you was really bleak and a really quiet and like, nothing happened.

And it was just me processing a situation that I had left in LA. Over time it grew to be about more than that. But it wasn't a thriller when I first wrote it. That idea came to me when I wanted to enter Pitch Wars and I was like, I think I can make this hookier. If I make this a thriller. And then it kind of all came into place at that point.

But as I talked about, it's very much me processing a relationship I was in that was very difficult. And my recovery from that was extremely difficult and recovering from it during COVID lockdown was even more difficult because I had almost nothing else to do but sit and process it. And that's an example, I think, of me being like, I am gonna make something good out of this crappy hand I've been dealt if it kills me.

KR: Can you recommend 2-3 recent reads?

KK: I love Us in Ruins by Rachel Moore, and I’m obsessed with Our Infinite Fates by Laura Steven!

Alla prossima 👋

That’s all from me today, friends! Make sure to check out I Will Never Leave You and show Kara some love on Tuesday, her debut day!

— Karis xoxo