My novel Cyan Magenta Yellow Black won the awesomely named Big Moose prize from Black Lawrence press. It will be published in September 2025. Read an excerpt here.
MERIT BADGES: A NOVEL
Winner AWP Award for the Novel and Friends of the American Writer Award
Follow four friends as they move from junior high to middle management. Meet Quint, whose rebellion frays into self-destruction; Slow, who struggles to become the world's first teenage father figure; Chimes, who fears losing his friends while picking up a 7-10 split; and Barb, who escapes the judgment of Minnisapa only to return by dark of night. You'll feel as if you've always lived in Minnisapa. And you'll never underestimate nice kids from the Midwest again.
"Impressive vitality, droll wit, and affecting nostalgia. Eminently readable." -- Publisher's Weekly
“A beautifully crafted, perceptive and often funny evocation of some extraordinary, ordinary people. -- Shelf Awareness, Robert Gray’s Top 10 for 2010 (Bookseller Recommendations)
ABOUT KEVIN
Raised in the farm country and river towns of southeastern Minnesota, Kevin Fenton lives in St Paul with his wife Ellen and his greyhound Evie. He got a slightly better education than he deserved at Beloit College, the University of Minnesota Law School, and the University of Minnesota MFA program. He works in advertising.
Recent Writing
Ambivalence Cafe (Great River Review): an essay about being 17 in Winona, Minnesota in 1976 and creating imaginary Rolling Stones albums, and about the role of music in shaping who we are. Find it here.
Hope’s Propulsive Sinews (Notre Dame Magazine): a meditation on hope that begins with a consideration of Margaret Atwood and Flannery O’Connor but proceeds to an appreciation of the women who raised me. Find it here.
LEAVING ROLLINGSTONE: A MEMOIR
"Leaving Rollingstone is the most important memoir to come out of the Midwest (or anywhere) in years, an indispensable work of American autobiography."
--Patricia Hampl
In 1959, Kevin Fenton was born into a happy family on a small farm in the tight-knit village of Rollingstone, Minnesota. He was born lucky—buoyed by love and energized by rock and roll. Soon, however, the farm was lost; the village school closed, and the family fractured. Thus began a sometimes self-destructive search for new ways to define himself—in friendship, in art, in words. Leaving Rollingstone is about the small town he left behind and the city he chose. And ultimately it’s about the enduring values and surprising vitality of small town Minnesota.
Read the Star Tribune review.
What I’m Reading
James by Percival Everett
Craft terms such as “point of view” can shrink into technicalities, political terms such as “privileging a viewpoint” can soften into buzzwords, and, at least if you’re in my business (advertising), every new invocation of the power of storytelling can make you gag a little.
In Percival Everett’s James, which retells the story of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective, those terms solidify into profundities. As a fiction writer, you are constantly thinking: This is why point of view matters; this is why stories matter. But you’re also thinking: What’s going to happen next? Will these people I care about be okay? How will they get out of this?
It works as moral experience because it works as a story.
The Fight by Jennifer Manthey
Jennifer Manthey’s The Fight reminded me of why I’m proud to serve on the Trio House board. With some digressions, it explores a single question—the adoption of an African boy—through a book-length sequence poems.
The result is a straightforward, quotable, intelligent, and sometimes scathing conversation with herself:
Before
I took away your country,
I panicked:
How quickly it would cloud
Between us.
Later in the book, she references “the betrayal/I know I’ll be.”
Manthey has chosen poetry as the place to have this conversation, and it’s a good choice. This conversation benefits from the quiet reframing of enjambment (see above) and the illuminations of metaphor (“how the windows arch high/as the cloak of a villain”) and juxtaposition, including poems about Varina Davis, first lady of the confederacy, who also adopted a Black child.
