Meghan Kenny Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Meghan Kenny is an American author that is best known for her short stories and novels about love written from the perspective of male protagonists.

+Biography

Meghan Kenny’s earliest memories are of New Hampshire and Connecticut. That was where she was raised. She has come quite a long way since those early days, what with her Degree in English and Creative Writing (Kenyon College) and MFA in Fiction (Boise State University).

Meghan gets around on the literary circuit. She has made appearances at a number of workshops. Her short stories have also appeared in a litany of publications.

Meghan Kenny has had a creative mind since she was a child. Reading and writing came easily to her. She also realized that she had a knack for storytelling. For a while, that understanding drove her to pursue photography.

Meghan is a visual learner. Her inspiration has always come from the things she sees rather than what she hears. And even as an adult, Meghan spends a lot of time with a camera in her hands. The author believes that her love for short stories is driven by her passion for photography.

Photography as an art is designed to capture moments and Meghan believes that her short stories do the same. They capture tiny snippets of larger stories and highlight them.

While Meghan Kenny never stopped pursuing photography, her writing has always been her first love. The author came to fame when she published ‘Love is No Small Thing’, a collection of short stories she started compiling in college.

Meghan graduated from Boise State in 2002. At the time, she was one of the university MFA Creative Writing program’s first graduates. The program was administered by Robert Olmstead, a gentleman who taught Meghan in a freshman writing class in Pennsylvania.

The experience changed Meghan’s life, cementing her love for writing. As such, when Meghan eventually went on the hunt for an MFA program in the 1990s and heard that Olmstead was heading the Boise State MFA Creative Writing program, she did not hesitate to enroll.

It was during her days at Boise State that Meghan Kenny crafted the short stories that featured in her first published book. The Boise State MFA program was pretty small when Meghan attended it.

Her cohort only had four people. But Meghan appreciated every step of the journey. She made great friends that she supported and who supported her. The fact that they were so few meant that none of them ever fought for the attention of their professors.

Meghan and her classmate were also granted access to a litany of significant figures in the publishing arena from poets to fiction writers. The connections Meghan made at Boise State have played significant roles in her success.

After graduating, though, Meghan did not immediately go into fiction writing. Rather, she became a writing teacher and elicited great pleasure from imparting her knowledge to young minds. But it soon became clear that she wouldn’t be satisfied until she published fiction.

So she attempted to do just that. Meghan struggled to get her collection of short stories published. The many agents she queried loved her writing style but all of them wanted her to write novels.

Meghan Kenny took their words to heart and attempted to produce her first novel in 2007. She never gave up on her short stories though and continued to churn them out in between her attempts at getting her novel completed.

By 2013, Meghan had both her first novel and collection of short stories ready for publication. She secured an agent and attempted to get both books sold as a package to a publisher. However, no one was interested, not even the smaller, independent publishers.

Meghan learned later on that her two books were simply too different and publishers didn’t think there was a market for them.

The author eventually succeeded in selling both manuscripts separately. The short story collection was published first. The novel followed a year later.

Meghan Kenny spends a lot of time writing about love. She noticed the pattern in college when several people pointed out the fact that all her fiction revolved around the exploration of love.

The subject has always intrigued the author. More intriguing, though, is the fact that Meghan repeatedly writes from the perspective of male protagonists. According to the author, there is no challenge in what she does.

Meghan is fascinated by men. They make no sense to her, so the notion of writing stories that explore their depths appeals to her. Meghan believes that she is able to capture the male voice so accurately because men are crass and so is she.

Meghan doesn’t plan or outline before she writes. Her projects begin with a particular character and a specific voice. From there she simply sits down and allows her instincts to guide her.

Whatever mistakes arise, Meghan is happy to fix in the revision stage. This is where most of her effort is spent. It is also the process she enjoys the most.

+The Driest Season

Cielle was sixteen-years-old when she found her father hanging in the barn. The community is struggling under the weight of a long drought but Cielle is preoccupied with her own personal turmoil.

The Driest Season began as a short story that Meghan Kenny expanded into a full-length novel.
The book takes readers to Wisconsin in 1943. Cielle comes home from school one day to find that her father has committed suicide. Cielle cannot tell anyone about the incident, though, not without negatively affecting her family and their future on their farm.

She does what she can to cover up the suicide. Over the course of the book, Cielle matures, gaining an understanding of the stark differences between the outward personalities that people show and the internal struggles they might be hiding.

+Love is No Small Thing

This book is a collection of stories from Meghan Kenny. Each story explores the concept of love and all the forms it takes, not to mention the complexities it creates. Meghan looks at the parental type and the romantic kind of love, the elusive love and the kind that is eternal.