Left: Kenny Fries in Japan; Right: In the Province of the Gods book cover
Kenny Fries
In the Province of the Gods
A new memoir by Kenny Fries comes out September 19. In his Creative Capital project, In the Province of the Gods, Kenny spent time living in Japan researching how the culture views people with disabilities.
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For Kenny Fries, intersectional identities are second nature: he is disabled, gay, and Jewish, not to mention both a poet and a memoirist. And in his recent works he subsumes the identity of a foreigner. In his Creative Capital project, In the Province of the Gods, Kenny travels to Japan to discover how the country views disability, how mortality is portrayed there and what role gods play. The new memoir comes out September 19 through University of Wisconsin Press, and he will be traveling all over the world for its promotion.
“Kenny Fries writes out of the pure hot emergency of a mortal being trying to keep himself alive," says Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door. "So much is at stake here—health, affection, culture, trauma, language—but its greatest surprise is what thrives in the midst of suffering. A beautiful book." We spoke to Kenny about his new memoir ahead of its publication.
"How did Japan change my life? Answering that is difficult and the glib answer would be the answer is In the Province of the Gods, as the book charts these changes. One of these changes happens early on in the book when I realize that I was treated as different in Japan more because I was a gaijin, a foreigner, than because I was disabled. Overall, Japan provided me with a different take on things that enabled me to move my life forward during a very difficult time." - Kenny Fries
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Kenny Fries
Creative Capital 2009 Awardee
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Kenny Fries is the author of The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, winner of the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, and Body, Remember: A Memoir, as well as the editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. He was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone. His books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia. He has been a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan/US Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts; twice a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany); and has received grants from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange), Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College.
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