We had the pleasure of speaking with NHCC English faculty, Kelly Lundquist about her upcoming book Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage releasing October 30.
Thank you Kelly, for making time to answer our questions! Let's get into it!
What inspired your memoir?
This book was inspired by my first marriage. We were married for five years and over the course of that relationship, a lot of things happened. One of which is that I found out that he had been through conversion therapy as a teenager and that he was closeted. This was not information that he gave me when we were dating or at any point prior. There were a lot of times when he hinted at it, or sideways suggested it, but that was what was actually happening within our marriage. But, also over the course of that relationship, I was going to grad school. I was changing my mind about a lot of things, learning new things and getting a lot of new perspectives. I was sort of slowly deconstructing from the religious tradition that I grew up in. And so, by the end of our relationship, we were living in Chicago, and I was working on my PhD in queer theory. We lived in Chicago with all of my best friends at the time, and the neighborhood was called Boystown, which is this historically queer neighborhood. All of my best friends were gay men, and meanwhile, I still didn't know that my husband had fallen in love with someone else. There's layers and layers of irony! Like, literally the night before he got outed to me, I was at a bar called Cocktail in Boystown, and I was dressed as Liza Minnelli for Halloween. Anyway, we were able to split up really beautifully, because it ended up that he was in love with somebody else. So, I knew that was kind of the end of things. It was still a really painful experience. But the split up at the end couldn’t have gone any better and it was great. That was why I wanted to write about it. I thought, you know, we're still very good friends, we just had brunch about a month ago, he still lives in Chicago, and we stayed close. I felt like it was a beautiful story, that also had these kind of tragic, comic elements in them. I thought it would make for a funny, sad story, that’s also sweet. Whenever people are getting to know me, this is always one of the first things that they find out about. They learn that this is part of my history, and it makes up my personal story. It was usually received well when I shared it, too. I started to notice if I was telling the story to people, and especially if I was talking to one of my friends who was a gay man, or someone who was just getting to know me, they would always die laughing when I told that story. But it was never mean laughter. Since I knew what people's reactions were, I felt like I could make this into something that would be a compelling story.
Who do you think will connect most with your story, is there a specific audience?
I think so far, the most responsive people seem to have been gay men who have read the book. Which I don't think of as an audience, obviously, that's a very complicated and layered demographic. Everybody's different and not all gay men like the same stuff. I think they found the premise funny, but I believe they like the tone of the book too, the way that I write about my ex-husband shows that there's a lot of love and affection there and plenty of nuance. And I think people have connected with that a little bit, and he doesn't just come off as this flat, stereotypical character. So, to some extent, that's been a population of readers who have responded to this story. But then I also think about the groups of people who have deconstructed from a more conservative belief system, or who have changed over the course of several years in their lives. I've noticed a lot of people who seem to connect with the story are coming from similar backgrounds. So, in terms of the groups of people who I've heard the most from so far, those have been the two biggest groups I would say. But you know, that’s one of the trickier parts…marketing a book is like trying to identify to a pretty granular extent, who your book is for. And it's always just a guess, because you never can completely determine that ahead of time. In terms of the people who I've heard from the most, those are the two groups of people that come to mind.
How long did it take you to write the book?
About 20 years! Haha! Yes, this has been a work in progress for a long time. We got divorced in 2004, and we split up in 2003. So, in December of 2003 that’s when I started writing about it. And I’ve been writing it ever since then, (in some form, or other)! I have a bunch of different visions for what it could be, because I knew it was just one of those important things that I knew I had to work on immediately. Like, I knew that this was going to be the thing that would define the rest of my life. I knew that this event and this change in me was going to define everything else. And I knew I wanted to write about it. But when you're coming right off of an experience like that, you don't have the perspective, or the distance to really be able to write about it. Some people can do that, but I was not one of those people. You need time to process it and figure out the implications of what it all means.
Do you think teaching had an impact on your writing style?
Oh, for sure! I mean, I taught my first college English class in 1999, and we had just gotten married then. As an English teacher, you're very aware of things like situational irony and that kind of stuff. So, I was already assessing my experience through those lenses. Especially from the different literary theories that I was studying, like queer theory. That was very much shaping my perspective of that experience, even at the time!
When you teach writing, you end up reading people's stories a lot. I tend to teach a large amount of narrative writing. And so, you have a glimpse at the pieces of writing that feel compelling and alive. You notice patterns that arise when you're constantly reading other people's writing. Then I help them to make it more alive than it already is, and that's part of how I see my role. There’s a cliche among writing teachers and we always say, ‘Show don't tell’ and I believe there’s truth to that technique. It has always been evident to me that if somebody grounds their writing in bodily experience, sensory detail and concrete realities, it's much easier to enter into that moment. Especially if they're not constantly commenting on the moment, or pulling you out of it, they just let you stay in the moment. One of the narrative decisions I had to make with this book was how much of it did I want to be reflective and how much of it did I want to just be a story. I ended up landing on the idea that it's mostly a story, with some little theoretical bits mixed in. I’ve learned a lot from years and years and years of teaching, because you're always learning as you're teaching. I learned for myself how to do those things, how to make a scene feel evocative, or engaging and how to show not tell. Also, practically speaking, the reason I got this draft done in 2017, was because my officemate at NHCC, who used to be the program director at the Loft Literary Center, invited me to a manuscript group. These were people who met once a month and wanted to submit their pages for a manuscript. That was kind of the immediate impetus for this iteration of the book. So, being a professor and working here also positively affected me that way.What about balancing teaching, and writing. How did you do that?
Well, there’s a little bit of a story that goes along with this whole writing process. I have an 11-year-old daughter, and a lot of this book was written in the middle of the night when she would have a nightmare and come crawl into bed with us. She’d be asleep on my left side and thanks to those experiences, I taught myself how to type on my phone only using my right thumb. People make fun of me now when they see me doing it, but it just became this default thing! I’d be awake, unable to sleep and then start thinking about the stories that I wanted to tell in this book. And that’s how it went! I wrote most of the book on my Notes app in the middle of the night. Then during the daytime, I’d upload it, reshape it and put it all together. That’s a nice thing about being a faculty member, you do have some flexibility in terms of your schedule. As long as you can stay on top of the job part of your job, like responding to emails, giving feedback on papers and be as efficient as possible, it's possible to work that in. But time has been a huge stressor for me. Trying to make sure that I allow myself not only the time, but time when I have the energy and the bandwidth to entertain some of these ideas.
You poured a lot into this book, what was the most challenging part of writing it?
I think believing that it mattered what I said. It was challenging to believe in the story itself and have faith in it. There were 1 million times in those 20 years when I’d say, ‘Yeah, I'm not going to do this. It's not working, I'm stuck. I should just give it up!’ Or I felt like ‘Who cares what I have to say? Why would anyone want to read this? This is a stupid story.’ I had all those thoughts! More than anything else, even more than time, I think self-doubt was my biggest impediment. Because it's hard! It's especially hard to believe in a project for a long period of time and if it doesn't seem to be gaining traction, or if you can’t sustain consistent momentum with it.
On the flip side, what about the most rewarding part?
I think a lot of people, when they start a longer, creative project of any kind, it's hard to believe that it’ll ever actually feel finished or be a complete thing. And over the summer, I recorded the audiobook, which was really meaningful to me. Because that was the first time I got to see the book done. It was a clean copy, and it was done! I knew there was literally nothing else I could change; it was all set. I felt really proud of it as I was reading through, and I was like, ‘Okay, this is amazing. This feels incredible!’ I was crying while I read it, and I lived this story! I knew what happened, you know, I had written it. But it truly affected me, and I felt really gratified by that. It was an amazing feeling to be like, ‘Oh, my God, this dream that I've had for all these years…It actually happened!’ That's an amazing feeling and I've never experienced anything like that at this scale before. I feel incredible about that, and it was very rewarding!
What did it mean to you to be featured alongside such prominent authors in the She Reads list for Most Anticipated Memoirs of Fall 2025?
It was really hard to take in, honestly! I couldn’t believe it and I wasn’t prepped for that at all! I think 30 minutes after I got that news, I had a meeting with Melissa Leimbek and Dena; and I try not to talk too much about the stuff going on with my book, just because this is my job. These are two separate parts of my life. But I did tell them the news that morning, I laughed and said, “Okay, I'm going to try really hard to be present in our meeting, but I just got this announcement, and I don't know how to absorb that information and make it a part of my reality.” So yeah, it took a little while for the feeling of accomplishment to set in. During this whole process, I’ve received good news in the funniest and most random places. I got this endorsement from the person who's my favorite writer in the whole world. And when I got it, I was in the dentist's office with my daughter as she was getting one of her molars pulled out. That's been very much my experience, every time something major happened, it's been in the midst of me, folding clothes, or cleaning the toilet, or there's been something very mundane happening beside it. I think about it this way too, I'm 48-years-old, so I’ve spent most of my adult life wanting to do this. I think I'm still adjusting to the reality of, ‘Wait, okay, this has happened now.’ It's weird!
Do you think the recognition has impacted you as a person, as a writer, or as a teacher?
I think the recognition makes it easier to talk back to the part of my head that wants to constantly be criticizing me. It does make a little bit of a difference to have some evidence, like, yeah, you did this thing. If you've never written a book, it's hard to believe that you can be a person who's written a book. And then once you've done it, you're like, ‘Okay, now I kind of have an understanding of how this all happens, and I understand the process a lot better.’ I'm already working on my second project, and I have a lot more confidence now heading into it than I ever did before. Because back then it felt like at any moment, it could’ve just fallen apart altogether. It felt like that, pretty much up until I actually got the book contract. So, in terms of my own confidence, I think there was a definite shift. I do feel more stable and confident and steady with my belief that I can do it again. But it's also really daunting, honestly, because it's a pretty big deal. I think there was immediately some feelings of imposter syndrome in my head saying things like, ‘People are going to read this and think, oh, it’s not that good, she’s not that good.’ I don't know if I have an allergy to letting good news be good news, or what it is, but it's hard sometimes to accept it and let it sit with you for a while.
What do you hope your students, or colleagues take away from your story?
Hopefully it helps my students feel like it's possible to do whatever their version of this thing is. That it's possible to do it when you're working full time, or you have a family and a life and friends. I want them to know that it's still possible to do the things that are driving you and do something that you're passionate about. You know, I don't primarily teach English majors, or creative writing majors. I teach college writing, more frequently than anything else. Every student who comes through NHCC has to take that class. It's like the one class on campus for which that's true. So, I think, you know, whatever their version of my book is, I want them to know they can do it. Especially for my students who are women. Oftentimes they are juggling so many things, and many of them are moms, many of them have full time jobs, and are going back to school. I would hope that my students take away some kind of encouragement in that way from my story.
What advice would you give to a student who dreams of being a published author?
Oh, man, honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think that the self-doubt thing is the biggest hurdle for most of us. Or feeling shame, or the belief that we should’ve done more already, or we should know more than we do. I think that’s a much bigger hurdle for people to jump over than the lack of time, or the lack of motivation, or discipline, or all these things that we tend to project onto an unfinished goal. I tell my students this a lot, but I feel like I hardly ever encounter laziness. I think shame is the thing that's actually happening, or fear under the surface. I’ll say this, in 26 years of teaching, I've never met a student that didn't want to do well, like, they didn't start the semester wanting to fail. That's never happened to me one time. I always have students with the best intentions, who really want to learn, and they try their best. I think what happens often is life interferes, and then you start the spiral where you're slowly, retreating and kind of turtling in to protect yourself. I wish that was a thing we could talk about more. Because I think it's very easy, especially when you go to a writing conference, or even just in English department meetings sometimes to try to sound like you have it together. It is very common to hear colleagues say things like, ‘Oh, I just had this poem accepted.’ But I don't think we talk enough about how hard it is sometimes to not have anything happening and still believe in your ability to write. If there’s a year or two years that passes by and you don't have anything published, and you haven't written a new thing, it's very easy to lose your faith entirely in that. And I'd like to see more conversations about that just across the board.
When does your book officially come out?
October 30! That’s when the big launch event is. The books are actually finished now. They do exist currently as a physical thing in the world. I just got my first copy a few weeks ago! Which is crazy. My friend Mark worked on the design, and I was really lucky to be able to contract with him independently to do the cover art, because publishers have their own in-house designers who usually do that stuff. But he's been one of my best friends for the last 20 years and he just happens to be an amazing designer. I wanted him to be able to do it, and I was really grateful they let us do that!
Are you going to try to get on any local news stations?
Well, Chris Hewitt, the guy who reads books for the Star Tribune, he has read my book. He posted about it on Instagram, but I don't know if it's going to end up in the Star Tribune. My publicist is doing media outreach for each of the events. I do have an event at Magers & Quinn Booksellers on the sixth of October. And there's a possibility that I'll be at the Twin Cities Book Festival the same weekend. We're finalizing the details, but I will have some local stuff going on for sure. So presumably, there will be some press about it! Also, I live in Monticello, and our local paper is covering it and doing a story, so that's fun! I’m trying to take advantage of all the opportunities! I will be traveling to different states this fall to promote the book on a little book tour. I’ll be visiting Texas, Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, Mississippi, California, Tennessee, and Connecticut. When I’m in Dallas, I’m going to be featured on Good Morning Texas. That’ll be my first TV appearance, and I am super excited!