Kevin Fitchett is at The Masters
Five years ago, when Kevin Fitchett was a Fine Arts Work Center fellow for the first time, he mostly worked on poetry. Now he’s back, and fiction has taken the front seat. The reason is simple: “I’m better at it,” he says. He’s here to finish his novel, The Masters. But in Fitchett’s work, the boundaries between poetry and fiction — and his life and art — are porous.
The two forms have always co-existed in Fitchett’s writing. He studied both poetry and fiction while getting a master’s in creative writing at the University of Mississippi. And during his first FAWC residency, he worked on an earlier version of the novel. Fitchett still writes a poem once a year, he says, but most of his poetry now feeds his book: “I’ll have a character say my best poem ideas in dialogue,” he says.
The Masters follows fictional poet Ken Pritchett as he travels with his father to Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club on the eve of the Masters Tournament (which begins this year on April 10). Ken and his wife are in a trial separation, which has made him “kind of unhinged,” Fitchett says. “He calls the feeling élan,” — which means a vigorous spirit of enthusiasm. “He’s fired up. He can swim in a frigid river and not even flinch. He’s happy. And he’s horribly sad.”
– Eve Samaha
To read the full article in The Provincetown Independent, visit here.
