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Kyle Minor is on the rise.
Minor, a UT visiting professor of creative writing, is getting noticed for his work - Random House named him one of "The Best New Voices of 2006."
UT administrators caught Minor after reading an essay he wrote.
"The essay is called 'You Shall Go Out With Joy and Be Led Forth With Peace,'" Minor said. "It's an essay about a bully I knew when I was 12, a starfruit tree on my property and how they related to each other when I was older."
Minor said his reasons for choosing to come to Toledo were simple.
"I got offered a job, a chance to teach creative writing and not composition," he said. "It let me spend some time thinking about short stories and things like that. Another reason the University of Toledo is an attractive place to work is because I get to work with two world-class poets, [Professor of English] Rane Arroyo and [Associate Professor of English] Tim Geiger, and a fiction writer, [Associate Professor of English] Jane Bradley, whose stories are beautiful in the way I want my own to be."
Minor said he doesn't always write about himself.
"In short fiction, we sometimes write 'in kind,' where we write like ourselves," he said. "Sometimes I write "out of kind" to see a different way the world works, and make meaning out of it."
He said a writer of fiction has an obligation to write both ways.
"Fiction authority arises from an accumulation of details," Minor said. "Writing out of kind makes you get those details right."
Kyle has fans who think he gets those details correct, such as Minor's friend and fellow author Donald Ray Pollock.
"Kyle is one of the most uncompromising and honest writers I've ever come across," Pollock said. "He never shrinks away from a subject just because it's tough. His work is beautiful, intense, wise, vicious and, yes, sometimes breathtakingly sad."
Erin McGraw, who taught Minor when he was a graduate student at The Ohio State University, agreed with Pollock.
"His work combines a forcefullness of expression with a real purity of vision," she said. "Everything Kyle writes is characterized by a sense of direct, highly channeled power and so, it's hard to forget anything he's written."
McGraw said UT students aren't the only people who should know who Minor is, everyone else should know him as well.
"Kyle is a literary star who is rising very, very quickly, with publications in a number of the best journals in the country, a writing prize citation from the "Atlantic Monthly," and inclusion in Random House's new anthology of important young writers," she said. "I'm convinced Kyle will be on the literary scene, here and abroad, for a long time."
Pollock agreed.
"This will probably be the only chance most [UT students] will ever have to meet or interact with a writer in the beginning of his career who is destined to become one of the great literary figures of their generation," he said. "Good Lord, why miss an opportunity like that?"
Minor started his collegiate career at Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana, followed by going to Antioch University for screenwriting and fiction writing. Afterward, he went to OSU to finish a second master's degree in creative writing, and he also studied fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
Minor said he enjoys all the praise he is receiving.
"I'll take all I can get," he laughed. "It's very hard to find an audience for literary work. I want to find as many readers as I can. I like to have readers."
Minor said he felt it was the writer's job to give a minority report.
"We live in a culture where there is a right answer for every question," he said. "When pressed, we give the expected answer to avoid being called wrong. In fiction, the 'right' answer is often wrong. It is the writer's job to be impolite, unkind sometimes, even a little bit obstinate, in order to tell the story. Writers look at the balance of great generosity and of great pettiness - no one wears the black or white hat."
Minor has also received attention for his novella, a longer short story, titled "A Day Meant to Do Less," which was published in the Gettysburg Review.
"Most of the novella is in the point of view of a 70 year-old woman nearing the end of her life," Minor said. "She is probably the character farthest from me. I'm proud that I found a way to live through her for most of the novella. That felt good."
Minor said fiction is about the "inarticulatable spaces."
"It's about things that are important to us, but we can't express these things on the nose," he said. "Somehow, fiction writers must share this with the readers. That's the magic - balance one against the other."
Minor will read his work at Calvino's: Got Wine Shop in Cricket West on Central Avenue on Wednesday at 7 p.m.
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