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Author of fiction and nonfiction, poetry and plays, Kat Meads grew up in Currituck County and lived in North Carolina until her late twenties. She received a BA in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Then she left for New York where several of her short plays have been produced. Now she lives in California. A year after her appearance at East Carolina University's fourth annual Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming in 2007, Kat Meads returned to ECU to read from her work and visit classes. The morning after giving a reading in a room filled to capacity, Meads spoke to Margaret Bauer's class on Southern women writers and to Liza Wieland's fiction writing workshop. Bauer's class had read Meads's novel The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan Benedict Roberts Duncan, and Wieland's class had read a selection of her poetry and creative nonfiction. Students were encouraged to pose questions to Meads, but they hardly needed prompting. What follows illustrates the depth of their enthusiasm and Kat Meads's profound engagement with their questions.
LIZA WIELAND: Kat Meads comes to us from California directly, but she is a native North Carolinian. Having said that, I wonder what it's like to write about this place, eastern North Carolina, from the vantage point - or the disadvantaged point - of California.
KAT MEADS: Well, I've been in California now for eighteen years - which amazes me - but I spent my first twenty-seven or so years, the formative years, in North Carolina. I like to think that where you live in your first five years establishes your sense of place as a writer, a spatial set-up that stays in your head. I still feel very close to North Carolina and my hometown of Shawboro in Currituck County. I grew up in the same house my parents married in. We never moved. They never moved. All through my adulthood I was able to go back and visit, sleep in my childhood bedroom, observe changes within the community. Generational responses, generational patterns are very interesting to me - and I hope my work reflects that interest. The way one generation rebels against what...
