Kanost's love of writing began while her family lived on the island of Saipan, north of Guam, where her father, a U.S. government employee, was stationed
Meet Patrice, the heroine of Rebecca "Beazley" Kanost's novel in progress, "By the Waters of Babylon." Kanost spends her days as a Service Response Center supervisor in plant operations, and her nights pursuing her calling as a writer.
Her pen name of Beazley was born in junior high school. "My sister and I were giving everyone nicknames. Mine is the only one that stuck. One girl said to me, 'You look like a Beazley.' I'm not sure what that meant," she says.
Kanost's love of writing began while her family lived on the island of Saipan, north of Guam, where her father, a U.S. government employee, was stationed. From the age of 8 until 16, Kanost lived on the island that was 14 miles long and 5 miles wide, and where her fascination for words took root. "I remember writing a short story in grade school about the origin of the word 'bother.' In my story, I made it the result of a brother trying to be a father. I've always fussed with words, teased them apart, thought about the logic of words and syntax. ... I'm a horrible sucker for puns - that comes out more in my poems." Kanost makes poetry books out of cardboard, collages and nylon stockings to give texture to the covers. She gives them to friends as gifts and has given one of her books to the John Hay Library.
Her father was transferred to Oklahoma City where she spent her senior year of high school feeling like an alien. "It was hard to be an American in America, where I didn't feel like one, I didn't know how to be one," she says. She worked on the school's literary magazine, writing poetry "about feeling lonely in high school ... very abstract things, very self-centered." After graduating, she enrolled in Earlham College, a Quaker school in Richmond, Ind., where her parents had attended college. "I didn't stay long - I finished two trimesters. But I got restless. I really wanted to see more of America," she says.
Kanost moved to Philadelphia, where she held several jobs. In 1977, she returned to Oklahoma and entered the University of Oklahoma, where she worked to pay for her tuition, majored in psychology and minored in English. She overfed her ravenous intellect to the point where she accumulated 30 hours of course credit above what she needed to graduate. In 1984, she graduated with a bachelor's degree and no job.
While working for an English professor she found her calling. The professor had a tape of Jerry Rothenberg, one of the last of the Beat poets, reading his poetry and invited Kanost to listen to it. "I was enchanted," says Kanost. Rothenberg came to the University of Oklahoma as a visiting professor the following year, and Kanost enrolled in his class on translating poems from one language to another. "It was very fluid. We were also translating from different writers in English to other writers and genres. We took a passage from a science article and translated it into a poem. We were playing around with translation quite a bit," she says. Kanost completed the master of arts program in 1988.
Around this time Elizabeth Robinson, an MFA poetry graduate from Brown who had a one-year teaching position at the University of Oklahoma, suggested to Kanost that she attend the MFA program at Brown. Kanost applied, was accepted, and received her degree in 1991 - and found herself in Providence with no job.
Living on the East Side of Providence with no car, she was attracted to the convenience of working at Brown, "and Plant Operations paid the most" of all the jobs she qualified for. "To me, it was exotic. I had never met people like that before. It was a whole new world to me," she says. Kanost has worked there for about six years and has volunteered in the Race Awareness Counselors and Educators (RACE) Program.
In addition to writing fiction, Kanost writes poetry and is a member of the Pitman Street Poets, which includes a handful of MFA graduates from Brown. Kanost is about a third of the way through her novel, a story about Patrice, a young woman originally from Oklahoma, who is working "somewhere on the East Coast." Patrice gets a message on her answering machine from an old friend and rascal, Rasper Jazzle. "She thinks he died on her answering machine, but she's not sure. She tries to call him back, but she can't find him and no one knows where he is. So she drops everything, quits her job, packs up her car and drives to Oklahoma," says Kanost. Along the way, Patrice "beachcombs" along the shores of her memories. But once she gets to Oklahoma, she can't find anybody. "She's forced to look at herself, which she never did before," says Kanost. It's a world full of memories of drifters, drunken sex, alcoholism, drugs and poverty. But Patrice begins to find pieces of herself and starts to put them back together. "I'm not sure how it's going to end. I haven't really decided," she says. Perhaps for Patrice - and for Beazley Kanost - the ride is the destination. - Linda J.P. Mahdesian