When Kristen Gentry took the stage in Bobbit Auditorium, she asked the audience:
“Is it cool if I just sit here and read?”
Met with various nods, Gentry sat on the edge of the stage, adding, “We can be all intimate and whatnot with one another.”
On Wednesday, in the final installment of the 2024-2025 AC reading series, Gentry read from her 2023 short story collection “Mama Said.” She selected an excerpt from a story called “Origin Story” before answering audience questions.
According to Gentry’s website, “‘Mama Said’ separates from the stereotypes of Black families, presenting instead the joy, humor and love that coexist with the trauma of drug abuse within communities.”
In an interview before the reading, Gentry said the book’s three recurring main characters – Angel, Zaria and JayLynn – are based on her and her cousins.
Finding the Path
From a young age, Gentry knew she loved to read and write, but she didn’t know any authors or creative writers. The only writing career that she knew of was journalism; she saw her father read the Louisville Courier Journal every Sunday.
“I was like, ‘Okay, even though I love writing stories and things like that, the practical way that I can see being a writer is via journalism,’” Gentry said.
Gentry studied communications with a focus on journalism at the University of Louisville, wrote for the Louisville Cardinal and took some creative writing classes. With the encouragement of one of her creative writing teachers, she applied for Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs after she graduated.
After she graduated from Indiana University with the MFA her teachers encouraged her to pursue, Gentry said she worked “terrible jobs” in Louisville before accepting a visiting professorship at The State University of New York Geneseo, where she stayed for 17 years.
In 2023, Gentry moved back home to Louisville to be closer to her family. For the past couple of years, she said she’s been writing, giving readings and promoting “Mama Said.”
How ‘Mama Said’ Came to Be
Gentry calls “Mama Said” the book she “didn’t plan to write.” Her graduate thesis was a short story collection centered around the question: “What does it mean to be Black?”
“‘Mama Said’ grew out of a sort of desperation to meet the page requirements of my thesis,” Gentry said.
When she was short on the page count, Gentry wrote two more stories to fill space, and they ended up sharing recurring characters and themes. Finding herself interested in the characters, she wrote another story, not for her thesis, but just for herself.
“At that point, it was the third story I had written with the recurring characters, and sort of just realizing that this idea of daughters whose mothers aren’t there because of drugs was recurring,” Gentry said.
At that point, Gentry said she realized she had something she wanted to pursue. However, she was concerned that she might be “writing too close to the bone” – in other words, she was writing stories very similar to her and her family’s experiences. She asked herself:
“Am I crossing a line here, writing this?’”
Gentry’s mother and aunts are addicts, something she and her cousins have had lots of conversations about, she said. After Gentry realized she was interested in writing these stories about her family’s experiences, she talked to her mother about it.
“She said, ‘Well this is your story too, so you have a right to tell it in whatever way,’” Gentry said. “That was all the blessing that I needed. So, I continued on and wrote the rest of the collection.”
Reading to Feel Less Alone
Gentry said that stories like the ones in “Mama Said” are important so that people who relate know “they are not alone in that struggle.”
“People turn to reading for different things,” Gentry said. “Sometimes we turn to it for entertainment, sometimes we turn to it for education and sometimes we turn to it for understanding, to feel like we’re not alone, that we’re not the only person to have gone through this thing.”
In talking about the reading on Wednesday, Gentry said she hoped that attending students looking for writing that makes them feel seen would find that.
Gentry added that she hoped aspiring writers in the audience would be “inspired to write, and find something that makes them excited about writing.”
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