Meghan Kenny Books in Order

If you want to start with her short fiction: Love Is No Small Thing
If you want a quiet, character-driven novel: The Driest Season
If you want the full range of her fiction: Love Is No Small Thing → The Driest Season

Meghan Kenny grew up in Connecticut and New Hampshire, though her family has deep roots in Wisconsin. She studied English and creative writing at Kenyon College, then earned an MFA in fiction from Boise State University. Those two places, one in the Midwest and one in the Mountain West, helped shape a writer who pays close attention to landscape, silence, and the things people do not say out loud.

Writing came first for Kenny, but photography was close behind. She has said she is a visual learner and observer, and that what she sees tends to spark a story more often than what she overhears. That helps explain why so much of her fiction feels built from sharp moments: a room, a road, a field, a face, a pause that changes everything.

She likes stories that catch a life in motion, then hold it still long enough for you to really look.

At Boise State, Kenny studied with writers including Robert Olmstead and Mitch Wieland. Many of the stories that would later appear in Love Is No Small Thing began in those late-1990s and early-2000s workshop years. She has spoken warmly about that small program and the close friendships it gave her, along with the feeling that writing could be a serious life.

The road to publication was not quick. She finished a draft of her story collection, queried agents, and heard a version of the same answer again and again: they liked the writing, but wanted a novel. So she put the collection aside, kept writing stories, and started working on longer fiction in 2007. It took years, and both books eventually found homes separately, Love Is No Small Thing in 2017 and The Driest Season in 2018.

Love Is No Small Thing is a story collection about people trying to understand love in its many forms, romantic, parental, uncertain, and sometimes badly timed. Readers who like it often respond to Kenny's clear sentences, her attention to class and family friction, and the way she lets ordinary scenes carry real emotional weight. Many of the stories use male narrators, a choice Kenny has said helps her step outside herself and explore voices that feel less familiar.

The Driest Season grew from an earlier short story that won the Iowa Review Award. Kenny expanded it into a quiet, searching novel set in drought-stricken Wisconsin during World War II, where a teenage girl named Cielle finds her father dead and tries to understand the loss without letting it destroy her family. The book also has a personal thread: Kenny has said the spark came from a family story about her maternal great-grandfather in Boaz, Wisconsin.

Again and again, her fiction returns to love, grief, longing, and the uneasy distance between the life people expected and the life they got.

She has also spent much of her working life teaching. Over the years she has taught at Boise State University, Johns Hopkins University, Franklin & Marshall College, and Gotham Writers Workshop, and she has taught English and creative writing in school settings as well. That mix of writer and teacher suits her work: she does not outline much, prefers to write her way into discovery, and has said revision is her favorite part of the process.

Kenny has lived in places as different as Idaho, Japan, Peru, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore. Through all that movement, her fiction keeps circling back to intimate questions: how people stay, how they leave, and how they live with what they cannot explain. Her books are often quiet on the surface. Underneath, they are full of pressure.