Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelly Lundquist
Hi Kelly, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
So, I’m a writer and a writing teacher. Those two things have sort of always been connected for me since I decided to become a writer around the same time I decided I wanted to be a writing teacher (when I was sixteen years old in 1994). I was an English Major in college, got a Masters in English right after, began a PhD program I later dropped out of (for reasons made apparent in my book, which comes out October 2025), and then returned to school to finish an MFA in Creative Writing. I graduated from that program in 2007, and since that point have been writing. I’m primarily a nonfiction writer (my book is a memoir about my first marriage), but I’ve also published some poetry, and I enjoy the way that each style of writing informs the other for me. I currently teach in an AFA in Creative Writing program at a community college just outside Minneapolis.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Nope. Not a smooth road at all. My biggest struggles, honestly probably both as a teacher and a writer, have been internal. While I’ve had real external obstacles–the demands of full-time work and being a parent/spouse/daughter/sister, etc,–my biggest impediments to writing have been primarily internal. I once heard the writer Josip Novakovich say that the most important trick a writer needs to perform is to find ways to keep faith with their own right or reason to tell a story. Maybe for some people, that sense of faith is easier to maintain, but for me, the belief that it mattered what I said or that I had the skills to tell my story in ways that I’d be proud of were pretty hard to maintain.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I write memoir and poetry, though even my poetry is largely grounded in personal narrative. I think one of the skill sets that has sustained me is a really strong observational sense memory. I can tell you exactly what my first Taco Bell Enchirito (with three individual slices of black olive and tiny cubes of minced white onion on the top of it) tasted like in 1980 when I was three years old and watching a televised replay of Young Frankenstein with my parents in our living room on Benning Road in Jackson, Mississippi. I’m most proud not just of that ability to recall, but also of the work it’s taken me, over many years, to develop the ability to craft those recollections into scenes that feel alive to me (I can’t speak to anyone else’s experience of them, but I am proud of them). I think I’ve honestly also been really lucky in my life. My book is about my first marriage, and I’ve had the support not only of my first husband, but of my second (current) husband to tell it and to spend years returning in my mind to that time. I think having that support, not only from them, but also from my parents and brothers and extended family, has made it easy to tell stories in a way that I hope feels more openhearted than not. I’m not so much proud of that quality as grateful for the generosity I’ve experienced that’s made it a little easier to write a personal history with a more gentle lens that I might otherwise have employed.
What do you like and dislike about the city?
I live outside Minneapolis. Not sure which city is being referenced here.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kellyfosterlundquist.com/
- Instagram: @kellyfosterlundquist
- Facebook: Kelly Foster Lundquist
Image Credits
Izzy McIntosh, Ben Lundquist, Anna Johnson
