Meet Kerry Neville

Kerry Neville and Ridge Anderson

Kerry Neville is the author of the memoir Momma May Be Mad, winner of the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Memoir in 2026, praised in a starred Kirkus review, and featured on NPR's All Things Considered and RTÉ's Sunday Miscellany, and two collections of stories, Necessary Lies and Remember to Forget Me. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Brevity, The Washington Post, The Irish Times, and elsewhere. Her fiction and nonfiction have been named Notables in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. She was a Fulbright Fellow at University of Limerick in Ireland, where she was visiting faculty in the M.A. Creative Writing Program. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, and teaches at Georgia College and State University.

The theme for the upcoming edition of Chautauqua Journal is Intervals. How did the idea of Intervals contribute to your decision to submit your writing?

"Centaurides" is built out of intervals--one long sentence of things I love, and each "interval" ends on a colon, the punctuation of a pause, the interval between one breath and the next. Then there's the walk between the canter and the halt, the ten minute steeping time for a pot of Barry's, and the intervals of dark between street lamps that my son walks through in New Hampshire winter. The essay opens with Fanny Howe's premise: I won't be able to write from the grave, so let me tell you now. That's the largest interval: between alive and dead. The essay ends with "and you?" because in that last interval, what comes after the question belongs to the reader.

Have you noticed many changes in your writing since your experience working abroad in Ireland? 

During my Fulbright year in Limerick, I walked up to New Street three mornings a week to learn Irish from Dónal Ó Ceallaigh. He was eighty-nine. He wouldn't take payment. "I'm just happy you're learning this language," he said. "In this way, our language doesn't die, though we do. And me before you." Learning a language in middle age makes you a beginner in front of other people, which is good for my writer's ego! Dónal taught by ear. "Writing comes later," he said, so I learned to hear Munster Irish before I could spell it. That changed how I write, more for the ear than the eye. Irish also taught me that a word can hold a whole place. Dónal pointed out that Lemonfield, a town near Limerick, has nothing to do with lemons. It's the English sound of Léim an Fheadh, the place where the deer jump across. One mispronounced village holds a colonial history! My great-grandparents left their Irish behind when they emigrated, and I'm slowly carrying it back. My rescue dog Connor is now bilingual (okay, maybe that's exaggeration), though only for the words that matter to him: madra maith and dul ag siúl. Good dog, and go for a walk?

Do you have any projects that are taking priority with your time right now or that you are particularly excited about? 

Dónal died last September at ninety-six and left me his Irish language notebooks, a handwritten lexicon of Limerick/ west coast Irish, and nearly every word in them has weather, animals or mud in it. Bogaithín is a boggy, rushy corner of a meadow. Béiceachán is a premature calf that roars itself hoarse. Spadaráilí, a useless farmer who works the soil in wet weather (like me when staring at my computer screen hoping the words will grow in my boggy field). My new project is Ciúnas Gan Uaigneas: Silence Without Loneliness, each essay built on one word from the notebooks and a walk through the place where that word makes sense: Limerick, Clare, the Burren, the Aran Islands. I'm also revising Still, Life: Essays on Wandering and Wondering, the collection to which "Centaurides" belongs.

When you’re beginning to build a collection of your work, where do you begin?

Honestly, I don't start a collection. One day, I notice I've been writing one! The essays, like little bricks, come one at a time, out of whatever I can't stop thinking about: horses, my kids, my dog's belly, an Irish word for a muddy field. The mortar comes later--I cement them together according to how the individual essays are in conversation with each other across themes or, more broadly, a narrative arc.

Explore more of Kerry Neville's work here: http://www.kerry-neville.com