On Thursday, NIU welcomes back Kenneth Womack, professor, published author and alumnus, to give a lecture in Reavis Hall Room 211 at noon to 2 p.m.

Being an English major and aspiring writer myself, I was interested in interviewing someone who had studied under many of the same professors as me, walked the same halls, and seems to be accomplishing many of the goals shared by most of the students in Reavis on any given day.

However, no matter what your professional goals or areas of academic study are, it is always encouraging to see an NIU alumnus doing great things.

Phil Case: Could you tell us a little about yourself and your time at NIU?

Kenneth Womack: I came to Northern in 1992 to join the doctoral program in English and study editorial and literary theory. I graduated in May 1997, with a Ph.D. in 20th-century British literature, and that fall I joined the faculty at Penn State University’s Altoona College. I was brought on board, along with 20 or so other new faculty members that year, to help build a liberal-arts college in order to provide students with a small-college alternative to our much larger University Park campus. I currently serve as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and as Professor of English and Integrative Arts. It’s been a whirlwind experience–I feel like I only just left DeKalb to head off to Pennsylvania.

PC: What will your upcoming lecture at NIU be about?

KW: I plan to read selections from my first novel, John Doe No. 2 and the Dreamland Motel. It’s an edgy, comic novel that traces the shadowy background of the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995 from the perspective of the mysterious (and fictive) John Doe No. 2, one of the original suspects in the attack.

PC: I noticed that a couple of your books were co-edited by NIU English professors, Dr. William Baker and Dr. John Knapp. How influential was your time at NIU in regards to your writing career?

KW: My years at Northern have made all the difference, quite frankly. A great doctoral program like NIU’s English program teaches you, among other things, how to become a professional. And in this case, I learned very explicitly how to work as a professional writer–how to be able to consistently produce text, if you will, which is the great writerly challenge anyway.

PC: Much of your non-fictional work is about the Beatles. What drew you in to researching and writing about the Beatles in particular?

KW: I have been thinking about the Beatles as a kind of artistic fusion for decades. But when I would seek out similar ideas amongst the literally thousands of Beatles-related books, I found that literally no one was exploring this critical aspect of their achievement. In my work, I study them as a kind of evolving art object–as an aesthetic project that takes them for fairly primitive musical origins to truly dizzying heights of success. At Penn State, I have developed an Integrative Arts course entitled “Introducing the Beatles” in which we explore these concepts. It’s been very rewarding in a professional sense, but it’s also been a heck of a lot of fun.

PC: You mentioned your recent novel. Can you describe what the publication process was like?

KW: I composed my first novel in 2008, and the process was incredibly fast-paced, given my administrative commitments at our college. I researched the idea over the previous winter and was able to write the balance of the book in around eleven weeks. When I’m in the midst of a project, I can typically produce around 500 to 1,000 words a day–and much more when I am really in a groove. Again, I give a lot of credit to my graduate curriculum at NIU, where I learned how to produce text in fairly short order.

The dark side of my writing process is that I write fairly furiously in order to bring a project to fruition, so I often experience a kind of post-partum depression afterwards. I am not saying this in jest. When you’ve finished a large project–whether it’s your dissertation or a novel or what have you–there’s a period afterwards in which you are quite suddenly disconnected from this thing that you had been working on so feverishly and with such commitment to produce. And then it’s gone.

My advice to writers is a bit of a cliche, I’m afraid. The old dictum is that “writers write always,” and there’s a lot of truth to that. You can’t produce text and finish a 70- or 80,000-word book without working consistently to produce the end-product. And I’m not just talking about the writing aspect of your project. I tell my students that the writing is only part of it. You also engage in what I describe as a lot of “pre-thinking” about your subject so that when you sit down at the keyboard, the material is already there, working its way through your synapses.

PC: Do you consider your recent novel, John Doe No. 2 and the Dreamland Motel, to be historical fiction or non-fiction?

KW: It’s definitely a work of historical fiction. While the principal figures in the bombing are real, I am writing a fictitious back story about the events that led up to the April 1995 attack. The vast majority of the novel is fiction, especially my central character and narrator JD, who originates from the idea of the alleged second suspect in the bombing, after Timothy McVeigh of course, who was believed to be involved. But we learned, even during that first few weeks, that there hadn’t been a John Doe No. 2 at all, that he was the product of faulty eyewitness testimony. Hence, when I was thinking, years later, about a narrator for the story, I thought, “There’s my guy. I’ll tell the story through the lens of a person who never even existed.” The beauty of that is that it allows you to provide an edgy layer of distance between the reality of the subject, which is tragic and terrifying, and the unreality inherent in the act of storytelling, which is about speculation and invention.

PC: Do you find that working with a true story to be restrictive in that it requires you to work within the framework of a narrative that has already been established or liberating in the sense that you get to add a new perspective to such an important historical event?

KW: The nonfictive events of the bombing were restrictive in the sense that I had to work within a very rigid timeline in which JD and Timothy McVeigh travel around the country in advance of the terrible events in Oklahoma City. I made it even more restrictive by forcing my characters to fit within a more subtle framework involving Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But I suppose that’s the English major in me.

But you’re absolutely correct about the liberating aspects as well. Once I succeeded in merging my shadow narrative with the historical timeline, I found that I had a lot of freedom to allow JD and Timothy McVeigh to get into adventures, much like Huck and Jim, as they made their way through the backwaters of America’s underground militia culture. And McVeigh’s back story is a rich text for adventure-making. In the years before the bombing, he visited Area 51 and the ruins at Waco, while also engineering a robbery, so there was no shortage of plot points to explore.

PC: Do you have any forthcoming publications in the works?

KW: I have found, as with my nonfictional work, that completing one novel only begets more excitement about writing new ones. Hence, I’ve written a second novel, just this summer, entitled Windows. It traces the last day in the life of the staff of the Windows on the World restaurant high atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It’s about celebrating their lives and experiences, as opposed to the terrible manner in which they perished.