Weekend Guide: How to Keep Time
with Kevin M. Kearney
“A vivid, beautifully written story. I didn’t want it to end.”
一 Alex G
“A charming novel about two brothers and their father attempting to undo lifetimes of quiet pain, together. Set in National Park, New Jersey and the adjacent Pine Barrens, How to Keep Time searches for magnificence in a place holy to me.”
一 Bud Smith, author of Teenager
Kevin M. Kearney is a writer whose work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He’s Fiction Editor for Rejection Letters and a Staff Writer for PopMatters. HOW TO KEEP TIME is his first novel.
That’s the official word. Kevin is an all-around wonderful guy, accomplished writer, and a solid drummer (no keeping time pun). Kevin and I played a show together in West Philadelphia in 2011. Then we connected on Twitter eleven years later. His band, Arches, really fucking ripped — I miss this era of rock, but that’s another post.
Kevin and I got to chatting on the internet, he sent me his novel then moved across the country to San Diego. The plan was for me to interview Kevin about the novel, ask some questions get some typed answers — but I saw this as an opportunity to try something a bit different!
We zoomed and had a lively chat about strange basement shows, writing, feeling like your creative output sucks, the dividing line between North and South Jersey, John McPhee, a brief Ween sidebar, and of course, Kevin’s first novel 📕 How to Keep Time 📕.
I really dug this book. If I were to blurb it, it would go something like this: a beautiful portrait of a family in sustained crisis, set against the backdrop of a forgotten New Jersey.
If you are a fan of Scott McClanahan, Bud Smith, or anyone else who can effortlessly illicit the dark, and the light side of loss — Kevin Kearney and How to Keep Time will be a joy for you to read. Seriously.
Pre-order for How to Keep Time is up today from Thirty West Publishing House. It comes out on 11/4.
Here is the proof that this was a video. I may have to put this behind a paywall. See you at the launch party 🎊 .
"Despite all of the magic in front of him, he was still in New Jersey"