Meet A.N. Kersey

A.N. Kersey’s prose flows with the grace of scripture turned against itself—the grotesque and the sacred mirror one another, and intimate accounts of humanity become parabolic, churning with an undercurrent of apocalyptic dread. Faith springs not only redemption and revelation but also doubt, hypocrisy, and devastation. Her works pulse with stark beauty and layered imagery, functioning like spiritual tableaus. A mystical hyper-realist, Kersey offers no easy answers, only the weight of hard-earned insight. Through outcasts, misfits, and the marginalized, she explores the burden of belief, where devotion and damnation intertwine. Her characters are torn between desire and penitence, duty and autonomy. Imprisoned to isolated existences, often by societal pressures, stigma, and fear, they live deeply internal lives, ensnared, struggling toward transcendence.

Follow the links below to read A.N. Kersey’s work!

Exiled and Living
The Book of Margery Kempe
Windows

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A.N. Kersey was kind enough to answer a few questions for us. Please enjoy.

When did you realize you were a writer?

I realized I was a writer at a really young age. Like most writers, I started around grade school. I remember being in the fourth or fifth grade, picking books from the library or other random hand-me-downs, and realizing what I wanted to read wasn’t written in what I found. So, I started to create my own — almost as a means to cope by creating a world I could control. My first story was about a frog dealing with loneliness, a complicated emotion I didn’t know how to manage or conceptualize and couldn’t find in other children’s stories. If I wrote it, maybe later on, it could be something I could pursue as an adult (lofty, I know). Even though I don’t still carry that goal of becoming a children’s book author, that early feeling of loneliness and isolation still follows my writing today. That pensive and sensitive little girl still lives on, wanting to figure out the puzzle of these intense emotions she doesn’t entirely understand.

What is your relationship to writing like? Do you love it? Hate it? Do you think your art comes from within you or do you believe in muses, or a divine spirit that uses you as an antenna? Further, do you write quickly and wash your hands when finished or do you labor day after day over one poem, scrutinizing every word choice?

My relationship with writing is complicated. I both love it and dread it. There’s always a sense of impending doom when it comes to starting a new project as if I won’t be able to live up to these intense, made-up standards I’ve created in my head. Those standards (perfectionism) can then block me from starting, getting caught up in my entanglement of doubt and paranoia or fear of being criticized or judged. I think a lot of creatives have this. But then, almost as if by magic, once I start, it goes away. I like to think that when I write, I’m channeling. Sometimes, when I’m in it, it feels like there’s a highway connecting me and this place – somewhere off in the ethereal – and the words and images are being sent through me. I probably sound insane. My grandma was also a writer; I imagine she has a hand in this. Maybe it’s magical thinking, but having an active imagination is a strong suit (and also torment) of mine. Then, when I’m done, I walk away. Except, I also have the “nothing is ever finished” curse. So, I’m unsure if that helps anything, and I will tinker with a short story for years and years until I feel it’s “done” (it never is).

If your collection manifested into human form, what would your first date be like?

A lot of my short stories have characters who are nearly or questionably undergoing some kind of psychosis. A first date with my short stories in human-form would probably be terrible – or amazing? They’d at least be a good story for the person on the receiving end of them. I almost pity the person who would have to endure a first date with someone like this. Maybe that’s my next short story?

We all have strengths and weaknesses in our writing, what are yours?

When pursuing my bachelor’s in literature for the first time, I dabbled in poetry quite a bit and found that I liked it more than I expected. I’m not good at it by any means, but it helped strengthen my sentences’ visual sense. I had this great professor at the time who really encouraged my writing. He advised me to incorporate my poetry into my short stories, like thinking of short stories as long-drawn poems. Instead of stanzas, turn them into paragraphs connecting them all. Reflecting on this now, the advice is obviously a no-brainer, but it made creating short stories make more sense in my head. It also opened up a new world of creativity for me, where the lines could be blurred like they are in poetry but still be in the format of a short story. I think of this now as my writing strength, making creating sentences more fun and explorative than formulaic. However, dialog will always be my weakness. I admire those who are good at it and try to study them often.

Tell us about the projects you are working on now and what’s next.

The project I’m working on now is extending “Exiled and Living” into a novella with the help of BarBar! “Exiled” is my most recent short story (that I don’t think is done by any means), and have plans to flesh it out more. What you see here is quite literally a first draft, save a few minor tweaks and edits here and there, so I look forward to really bringing Wyatt to life more.

What written work by another author lives rent-free in your head?

I have so many works that live rent-free in my head. “Gone with the Wind,” and how many times it made me cry or how traumatizing it was to experience war through Mitchell’s words and poetic use of language. “The Open Boat,” by Steven Crane, is another that I often think about. I haven’t cared that much about a character since reading it for the first time or needing to know what happens next to the people in such a desperate way. I remember turning the pages in a frenzy and needing to pause to slow down and not accidentally get too far ahead of myself. “To Build a Fire,” by Jack London, is one I recommend to people getting started reading short stories, so that’s another one. Lastly, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Márquez completely changed my life and writing. It was the first magical realism short story I ever read, and it opened up the possibility of narrative storytelling that will forever stay with me.