Law-school classes fertile ground...for writing novel

By Rachel Keener's third year of law school at Wake Forest University, this is how some classes went: Keener, a budding fiction writer, worked on the bones of what would later become her first novel, The Killing Tree. Her husband, Kip, also in law school, took notes for both of them.

This usually worked well, the Keeners said, except for one day during their Conflicts of Law class. It wasn't a large class. Rachel was typing away, feverishly. She thought that the professor was teaching. "My husband kept kicking me, kicking me," she said, "and finally he passes me a note: ‘He is not talking. You should not be taking notes right now.' I was the only one furiously taking notes, because I was really writing. Everyone else was just sitting."

People usually go to law school to become lawyers.

Rachel Keener became a novelist. The Killing Tree (Center Street, 2009) was published this month.

And since graduating from Wake Forest in 2002, Keener, 30, has pretty much spent most of her time being a mom and a writer -- and not practicing law. She worked briefly for Womble Carlyle Sandridge and Rice after graduation, on a trial team that among other clients, defended R.J. Reynolds in tobacco ligation. But she never returned from maternity leave after she had her first son in March 2003.

"I think it would have been more difficult if it had been a job that I loved, if I had been in a practice group that I knew was the perfect fit for me," Keener said. "But I didn't feel that and at this point, I had the bones of The Killing Tree and I had already felt what it feels like to do something I loved, and so I had that contrast there, and then I had a baby, too, and so everything just came together and made it an easier choice than it would have been."

Growing up in rural eastern Tennessee, Keener loved reading and writing. She remembers scribbling poetry on a napkin, and on her desk during fourth or fifth grade. She also remembers having to clean it off. She met Kip in their AP English class in high school, in Kingsport, Tenn. Rachel was the class star, Kip Keener remembers.

But in college, she went the practical route -- political science at Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tenn., followed by law school. And then, something stirred.

She started writing little scenes during her first year, "creatively venting" in between the boot-camp life of a first-year law student -- including a civil procedure class taught by a professor infamously nicknamed "Mad Dog" -- writing briefs and studying course outlines for exams. By her second year, she thought she had a novel, and into her third, she was working on it during class, tapping out a story on her laptop about an 18-year-old woman who aches for something more than her rural, isolated hometown, Crooked Top Mountain, a place run on coal mines and hard, dead-end jobs. Close to exam time, she would switch her focus back to class and study.

"The funny thing is we would rely on my notes," Kip Keener said. "But she would always do better than me because she's a better writer."

"I knew that I had this desire to write, but once you're in it and you're in the system and you're doing well in classes, it didn't make sense for me to quit then," Keener said. "There are some classes and some cases that are wonderful, and they're reasons people become lawyers in the first place. But the day-to-day grind of learning civil procedure and things like that, it was dry, and I just think naturally I'm a creative person, and I felt a void. I felt something missing."

Rachel Keener was born in rural southwestern Virginia but didn't grow up there. Still, her mother's hometown -- Grundy -- stayed with her, and shaped The Killing Tree, where place is as much of a character as people. Crooked Top is a kind of cross between Grundy and eastern Tennessee "or just rural anywhere, where that feeling of choice isn't as apparent."

Keener's grandfather was a coal miner who went to the mines at 16 and died of emphysema, or miner's lung. Her great-grandmother assisted with delivering babies and healed people with herbs. Keener grew up hearing stories about her family and visiting them, particular during summers when her mom, an elementary-school teacher, was off. The mountains made a big impression on her. "I remember standing in my grandmother's backyard and looking up, and there was so much land above me still and I remember just being in awe of that."

In The Killing Tree, Mercy Heron has graduated from high school. A long life of working at the local diner and living with her half-crazy grandmother and rigid, emotionally-stingy grandfather stretches out before her. But Mercy is a dreamer -- under her bed she keeps a shoebox stuffed with magazine clippings of oceans, a place as different from mountains as a place can be. She doesn't have many choices, but she longs for them. And then she meets Trout, a migrant tomato picker, and her world opens up.

It was Kip who pushed his wife to look for a book agent.

They researched the publishing process and figured out you pretty much need to have an agent before you have a publisher. In the fall of 2001, Kip started mailing out excerpts of The Killing Tree to a list of agents. They didn't expect anything to happen quickly.

Writing a book, then getting it picked up by a publisher is "like talking about winning the lottery," Kip Keener said. "At that point, writing the book was a labor of love and something that I was passionate about, and passionate about pushing her to finish. From my side, I don't have the time commitment and all the creativity and agony of the writing, but I do get to see the joy it brings her."

But for first-time authors, the publishing process takes patience. It took Rachel about six years from the time Kip started contacting agents to the day she heard that she had been offered a book contract.

Kip remembers that day. "She tricked me. She called me and said I've got some really bad news about the book."

So he drove from Salem Investment Counselors, where he works as the chief compliance officer, to the Keener' home in Clemmons. There was a letter from Rachel's agent taped to the front door announcing a book deal. "So I opened up the door and she's crying tears of joy," Kip Keener said.

Keener is working on her second novel, The Memory Thief, which is scheduled to be published next year. She writes on the weekends and in the evenings for a few hours while Kip cleans up the kitchen from dinner and puts their two boys, Abram, 3, and Kiplan, 6, to bed. Sometimes she makes a cup of green tea. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata is always on repeat on her computer's CD player. She doesn't hear it as she writes -- it's part of a ritual that divides her day and gets her ready to write.

That law degree? Maybe someday it will come in handy. And Keener likes her wind-about path to writing. And whenever she complains about student-loan payments, Kip tells her that The Killing Tree might not have been written if she hadn't gone to school.

"If nothing else, it helps me write some legal scenes," she laughed.

■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.

Keener at 2 events

You can catch local author Rachel Keener at two local readings and book signings in April.

On April 5, she'll be reading at Central Library, 660 W. Fifth St., at 2:30 p.m. And on April 9, she'll read at the Winston-Salem Barnes and Noble at 7 p.m., 1925 Hampton Inn Court.

For more information, go to www.rachelkeener.com.