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Artist

On the eleventh anniversary of her joining the Image staff as Managing Editor, we are delighted to ask Mary Kenagy Mitchell to step out from behind the curtain and take a bow. When we first met Mary in 2000, Image had just moved to Seattle, her home town. She was a newly-minted MFA from the prestigious program at Arizona State, where she studied with Melissa Pritchard (who has also become a great friend of ours). Our philosophy at Image has always been that those who would edit must also write—and along with her application Mary sent a short story, “Loud Lake,” that we instantly wanted to publish (featured in issue 29). That story, subsequently reprinted in several anthologies, demonstrates that like all the best editors, Mary is also a superb writer. Set at a Christian summer camp in the Pacific Northwest, “Loud Lake” gives us a vulnerable protagonist: the shy, teenaged son of the gung-ho camp director. Embarrassed by his father’s zeal and extroversion and seeking solitude, the boy meets an unusual girl—a true outsider. That encounter leads to a flight for freedom—and a kind of reconciliation. All of Mary Kenagy Mitchell’s short stories feature main characters who are wounded and yet still searching—for love, acceptance, freedom, hope. The prose itself is never flashy, but lucid and clear, glimpsing depths that lie just beyond our view. It is artful, but reads with ease—the metaphors take their sweet time to creep into your heart and detonate the emotion that has been building. Eleven years later, we can’t imagine Image without Mary’s hard work, but we’re rooting for her to find the time to write the many other stories she has to tell.

Some of Mary Kenagy Mitchell’s work is featured in Image issue 29 and issue 53 among many other issues featuring interviews and web exclusives that she conducted. Read an excerpt by her here.

Biography

Mary Kenagy Mitchell serves as Image’s managing editor. Her short stories have appeared in the Georgia Review, Image (issue 29), Beloit Fiction Journal, and the anthologies Not Safe But Good and Peculiar Pilgrims. New work is forthcoming in Saint Katherine Review. She has received a grant from the Seattle Arts Commission and a special mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She graduated from Stanford University and holds an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University. She occasionally teaches fiction writing at Seattle Pacific University.

Current Projects
August 2011

I am a huge fan of the short story as an underappreciated form. I have a new story out in the Saint Katherine Review, which took me ages to write. I wrote the first draft when I was in graduate school but I had bitten off way more than I could chew, and I had to grow up a lot before I could finish it. I love the short story as a reader, because it’s bite-sized and dense, and you can read it in the morning and carry it with you all day, turning it around in your mind and letting it sink in. That’s why I want to write them, too — and also because, when you’re revising once, you can sort of stand in one spot and see the whole thing, how all the parts connect. I think a great short story can stand with any work of art for beauty and impact. Of course that feeling can be paralyzing when it comes to writing one, and maybe part of the reason I’m so slow. Also, I spend most of my days working from home while trying to stop my son from eating chalk and pulling over the furniture, and I haven’t really figured out a way to integrate writing, but I’m hanging on to a hope that I’ll get back to it again someday. When I was in graduate school there was a lot of emphasis on having a schedule and writing at the same time every day, and that worked great when I could organize my life around writing, but that train has sailed (though I know other people do manage it with small kids). Meanwhile, being an editor is a way of shepherding good writing into the world even if I can’t be the originator of it. I am a big fan of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey, and I see being an editor as a little like being a lady’s maid or valet, sort of straightening up people’s clothes and helping them look their best.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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