Kate Wenner     Interviews  with the Author

         Kate Wenner's debut novel SETTING FIRES comes on the heels of her twenty year career as a journalist, first as a free-lance New York reporter who published work in the New York Times, the Village Voice, and Soho Weekly News, and then as a producer for ABC "20/20," where she spent fourteen years doing ground-breaking reporting on such issues as Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Repressed Memory of Incest, and many other award-winning segments that examined family and cultural life in America. Kate is also the author of SHAMBA LETU, which chronicles the year she spent as a volunteer in a communal village in Tanzania while she took time off from her undergraduate work at Harvard.

After Harvard Kate received a Michael Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship and spent a year and a half traveling throughout Central and South America and living for a year in the Andes in Peru. For her early work, Kate was awarded a CAPS Grant for Fiction from New York State. In addition to continuing to write fiction, Kate is devoted to her family, her husband and their two teenaged children, to the study of contemplative Judaism, and to spending as much time as possible exploring nature and the outdoors.

      NO MATTER how humble the circumstances, each of our parents has led a richly detailed life, full of successes and disappointments, trauma and triumph, drab spells and periods of intense color. Sadly, though, few of us think to ask our parents and relatives about their life histories while we have the chance: And when they are gone, there are unsolved mysteries, unanswered questions and, of course, plenty of regrets.

        Journalist and former ABC-TV producer Kate Wenner is one person who decided to pursue the story of her father's past before it was too late. Shortly after he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, she began asking him questions about his life. She videotaped their talks so her children would have a visual record of their grandfather, how he looked and talked, his voice and gestures; they'd have a good chance of understanding the lessons he'd learned from his life. For her, she says, it was a great way to spend time with her father, and become closer.

         Wenner's newly published first novel, Setting Fires (Scribner, $24), grew out of this period, she says. In it, a middle-aged woman draws nearer to her ailing parent by recording his memories, even as the two prepare for death's approach. The experience of hearing her father confront the traumatic events of his past, says Wenner, inspires the daughter to face the difficult truths of her own life.

        Like her fictional heroine, Wenner, married with two children, divides her time between a Manhattan apartment and a rural Connecticut retreat. And, as did the parent in the book, her own father - who died in 1988 - was willing to tell and retell his life story, eventually revealing a secret he'd carried with him all his adult life. Letting go of that secret, Wenner believes, allowed her father to die in peace.

      "They were truly wonderful conversations, full of love, history, insight, amazing closeness between us, sometimes sad, but never at all depressing," says Wenner. Out of them, she's made a short documentary film, Time With My Father, which will show at Jewish book fairs and elsewhere, and she's creating a Web site (www.interviewing parents.com) to help others feel comfortable with the idea.

        Wenner strongly advocates making the attempt: "There's so much to learn about your parents, and about yourself in the process. My dad died when my children were toddlers. Now they are teenagers, and their memories of him have faded, but when they sit and watch the tapes with me, they know him and can actually continue to learn from him. The films have become a family treasure for me, for them and possibly for their children as well."

      "The trick is getting over your own fear of their dying," says Wenner. "Don't think of doing this because you are afraid they are going to die, do it because their story can help you understand your own life better."

     Kate Wenner's first novel touches on teshuvah and the burning desire to get at the truth about family.

        If a book that confronts death head-on can be uplifting, Kate Wenner has done it, in an auspicious first novel, Setting Fires (Scribner). The two fires referred to in the title offer unseen sparks, that, amid the danger of consuming flames, light the way to meaning for the main character and her dying father.

       The book makes for great reading as these late August days have that hint of the holidays approaching. Wenner's presentation of the theme of teshuvah - and its impact on her characters' lives - will touch readers as they begin their own process of returning and forgiving.

      Annie Fishman Waldmas, a documentary filmmaker who lives on the Upper West Side, receives two devastating phone calls: One message is that her country house is on fire, and soon after, she learns that her father is potentially very ill. As she and her husband, a photo editor, hear more about the fire, their suspicions are raised that it was anti-Semitic arson, possibly tied to several other fires in the area in Jewish-owned buildings.

        At the same time, the news about her father grows worse, and although their relationship has been rocky at times, she is drawn closely into his circle of care. At the advice of a rabbi she seeks out, Annie, who'd never before been involved in Jewish life, tries to spend as much time as possible with her father. Rabbi Lowenstein emphasizes the importance of coming to terms with one's life at the end, of seeing life as a gift, of forgiving and feeling forgiven. With Annie's encouragement, her very successful but distant father begins to talk about his life - his "manufactured" personality - with a certain candor and self-awareness. He tells her for the first time about a fire in his childhood, one that has haunted him for more than 50 years. As Annie seeks the truth about her fire, the truth about her father's fire shocks her, and gives her new insight into her father's life and her own.

      This is a story of rebuilding family, of returning to Judaism; Wenner, an award-winning television producer who worked at ABC's "20-20" for 14 years, also deals with social issues like anti-Semitism as she tells the day-to-day story of her characters' multi-layered lives. There's also a veil of mystery as Annie, and later the FBI, investigates the fire. Wenner is a skilled writer, and pulls all these elements together well.

      Although Setting Fires is fictional, there are many parallels to the author's life. Her father died in 1988 and before his death, she grew close to him and learned of a fire that brought him much shame, and also of a real fire in her country home. "These were such transformative experiences for me that I really was compelled to write about them," Wenner says in an interview with The Jewish Week near her Upper West Side home, explaining why she wrote this as a novel rather than a memoir. "My father's dying was a teaching for me in the power of truth, and that may be why I wanted to write the heart of it as truthfully as I could, while setting the story itself, and the characters who told it, in a fictional world."

        As her own father was dying, Wenner videotaped her conversations with him, and has just completed a short documentary film called Time With My Father, which she'll show as part of her book tour this fall, and at Jewish film festivals later on. In the film, Wenner's father tells the story of his fire. He also says good-bye, expressing great love for his family and the knowledge that in the end he was loved. "I couldn't go out in a better way," he says. "The time has come." His daughter comments, "He fought his way out of his past to provide for our future."

        In videotaping her father, Wenner applied what she had learned as a television producer, to try to create an environment of trust so that people could find the courage to talk about themselves. She urges people to take the time now to get their parents' stories onto videotapes. The keys to doing this, she says, are asking simple questions and "listening well, with real generosity." And she encourages people not to hold back from asking about the things they really want to know - for those are the things that people really want to talk about.

        Around the time of her father's death, Wenner reconnected with Judaism. About teshuvah, she says she has learned that "a real turning can happen even at the last minute. Dying can bring life into sharp focus and be an opportunity for healing that not only helps the dying person face death, but also frees the next generation, and generations to come."

        "I think that the notion of teshuvah is one of the most extraordinary gifts, to find ways to have a new beginning, to have the community's support in that once a year."
 

   

From  iUniverse.com, October 2000 A Burning Story of Denial and Honesty   Kate Wenner on Setting Fires  By  Ann Abel

      Fire. As metaphors go, it's hard to think of any more powerful: Devastation, regeneration, the  Phoenix rising from ashes. Pain, illumination, truth, things reduced to their essentials.

      Kate Wenner knows about fire. In 1988, during
the final months of her father's life, he told his  children that he'd been involved in an arson as a  teenager and had harbored that secret his entire  adult life. Around that time, Wenner's country  home burned—arson, a hate crime. She has  parlayed those powerful events into Setting Fires  (Scribner), a first novel as uplifting as possible for  a work of fiction with themes of death and  anti-Semitism. More importantly, it's also about  overcoming denial, finding truth and treasuring  family and religion. The novel argues—convincingly—that that which does not  kill us does indeed make us stronger. A  conversation with the author makes that point  just as clearly.

      Fiction 101: Write what you know. Psychology  101: Write about what you need to work  through. Wenner has done both tasks admirably.  In several ways, her life parallels that of her documentary-maker heroine, Annie Fishman  Waldmas. Both are Jewish baby boomers who  divide their time between apartments on  Manhattan's Upper West Side and rural retreats  in Connecticut. Both also once had to divide it  between an ailing father and two young children.  Both reconnected with their Judaism during these  difficult times, and, of course, both share the  confluence of fires in  their country homes and in their father's pasts.

  Deathbed Confession of Arson

      "I really did make up 95 percent of the story," says Wenner, over tea  in her well-appointed apartment. "But what's real is where it came  from, in that I did have these two fire things that happened. [My  father's] revelation of his secret was a very powerful transformative  thing for him and for us.… In the same period of time, I'd had this  arson in my home in Connecticut. So the fact of these two fires  coming into my life over a short period of time—you know, there's  got to be a reason for this. It's too much of a coincidence. What do I  have to learn from the fact that there are these two fires? One  starting in one generation found a way to continue on, in another  form, in another generation. I became very interested in the idea of  how unfinished business in one generation can become the work of  the next generation."

      As her protagonist did, the author interviewed and videotaped her father during his eight-month battle with stomach cancer. It was then that she discovered the healing power of facing a difficult truth, a lesson she considers the most important of her life. The overcoming of denial is a powerful theme in the book as well, and it's one that Wenner has found resonates with readers.

  Generational Conflict Over Denial and Honesty

      "People tell me they have to read it with a Kleenex for a bookmark,  particularly people who have lost their parents," she explains. "It  speaks very much to people in my generation, the baby boomers, because we're right at this junction where our parents are dying and we're facing our own mortality. This is a generation that values honesty and contact and communication, more than previous generations. We want to get to the truth of things, while our parents' generation was all about denial—the truth will hurt you. My generation [feels] the truth will help you."

      Wenner recently completed a short documentary film, Time With My Father , from her interview tapes, and she plans to show it at Jewish
book fairs and film festivals in November. She has also started two Web sites, interviewingparents.com, which tells about her conversations with her father and serves as a resource for others who want to create similar legacies, and settingfires.com, which provides information about the book.

  Journalism as Training for Fiction

     Setting Fires may be Kate Wenner's first novel, but it's certainly not her first writing. She was still a teenager when she published her first book, Shamba Letu , about the year she took off from Harvard to spent as a volunteer in a communal village in Tanzania. In the twenty-odd years since, she has written for the New York Times , the Village Voice and Soho Weekly and spent fourteen years as an award-winning producer at ABC's 20/20 . A few years ago, she put journalism behind her. She says she left television because she was
tired of all the traveling that kept her away from her husband and two teenage children, but admits she "always secretly hoped that one day I would get to write fiction."

      Although she doesn't intend to return to reportage, she's grateful for the experience. She remembers being a journalist as "fun. It was great. I learned a lot. It's great training for writing fiction, because particularly in television, your job is to work with people's voices and to listen carefully. You know, you're interviewing, you're in the edit  room, you're listening over and over again to how people talk, and thinking about the structure of language. And also for a piece of television to work well, it has to have a beginning, a middle and an  end. A good television piece is all about the structure."

  Walking Off the Pier

      After years of cultivating and airing other people's voices and stories, Wenner is excited about the chance to use her own. "Not necessarily my actual story, the facts," she clarifies, "but to speak from my own voice and my own concerns and my own whatever-it-is that drives me. There's always something that drives a writer to a piece of
fiction, something fundamental she needs to find out or work out or explore. And also there's the tremendous fun of making up characters and finding out what they do. You make up a character,
  and all of a sudden they're doing something." Modestly, Wenner did not suspect Setting Fires would be the page-turner it ended up being.

      Of course, the writer's life is not all fun. Wenner writes in the book's acknowledgments, "The daily work of writing a novel feels a little like repeatedly walking off the end of a pier." She still thinks so and doesn't think the insecurities ever go away. "You're constantly battling a sense of self-doubt," she elaborates, "but that just goes with taking a risk, trying to write something that really comes from someplace, really challenging yourself." Nevertheless, Wenner is already at work on a second novel, back at the end of her pier.

  Ann Abel was the assistant editor at the Rolling Stone Press. She is  now a freelance writer living in New York City.

Setting Fires by Kate Wenner ISBN: 068483748X

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