Interview: Caroline Kessler
Caroline Kessler is a poet, editor, and community builder. Her poetry and prose has been published or is forthcoming in The McNeese Review, The Susquehanna Review, Sundog Lit, Profane, Rivet, Superstition Review, among others. She is the co-creator of The 18 Somethings Project, a virtual writing adventure. She has taught at the Yiddish Book Center and Washington University in St. Louis, where she earned an MFA in Creative Writing. Originally from outside Baltimore, she is living in Jaffa, where she is a 2017-18 Dorot Fellow in Israel and at work on a collection of lyric essays, The Geography Problem.
SP: How does your religious background influence your writing?
CK: I grew up in an interfaith home—my mother was raised Catholic, and my father was raised Jewish. They decided to raise me and my younger brother in the Jewish tradition, while celebrating holidays like Easter and Christmas as well. We attended a Reform synagogue and Hebrew school, which became a very rich and relevant place for me starting around the time of my bat mitzvah, when I was twelve, turning thirteen. I felt a deep connection to Friday night prayer services, the music, and the liturgy, which continues to this day. At the same time, I felt a tension, the duality of having parents from different religious backgrounds…albeit backgrounds that share a lot in terms of monotheism and ritual. My journey through faith / doubt / ritual is an ongoing one, and often emerges in the form of particular questions in my writing.