Kevin P. Keating: Fiction, Essays & Commentary

New Novel Releases June 1, 2025! Available now for pre-order.   Comprising three interlinked novellas,  Bridge of Dreams: A Speculative Triptych  centers around a young woman who embarks upon a spiritual quest over the span of three different lifetimes.  In "Gwendolyn Greene and the Moondog Coronation Ball of 1957," the Soviets are preparing to launch a dog into orbit. The Americans, in an attempt to stay competitive in the space race, select a remarkably intelligent dog owned by a 14-year-old girl from rural Ohio. But only Gwendolyn can explain the mystery behind her beloved canine's extraordinary gifts.  "Hilda Whitby and the Heavenly Light of 1857," takes place in an Ohio frontier town and concerns the trials and tribulations of a brilliant female chemist who has just lost her son to a devastating explosion. Wanted for questioning by authorities, Hilda travels along the Erie Canal, meeting an assortment of curious characters until one fateful night when she f...

From the February 27th edition of Litro Magazine :   Except for a confusing and ultimately consequential semester her junior year in college when she abruptly withdrew from her accounting and finance classes and enrolled in Fundamentals of Classical Music, Amalie had always considered herself a conscientious, practical-minded woman whose interest in music extended no further than listening to Top 40 radio during her morning commute to the office. The only reason she enrolled in the class at all was because she had a crush on the cute graduate student teaching it. Said to be a wunderkind who was destined to become a great composer of film scores, the next Erich Wolfgang Korngold or Bernard Herrmann, he sat hunched over a baby grand piano while delivering lectures on Ennio Morricone and his beloved John Williams.  READ THE ENTIRE STORY HERE

  After working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio, KEVIN P. KEATING became a professor of English and began teaching at Baldwin Wallace University, Cleveland State University, and Lorain County Community College. His essays and stories have appeared in more than fifty literary journals, and his first novel,   The Natural Order of Things ,  was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His second novel,  The Captive Condition ,  will be released by Pantheon Books in July of 2015. He lives in Cleveland. VISIT PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE AUTHOR'S PAGE

From the May 28th edition of Bandit Fiction: An hour before dawn, when he finally returned to the house, Mother had a large leather-bound book under one arm and a swollen left eye from a strong right hook, a fat lip and a chipped front tooth, a pair of bloody crosses slashed into his tattooed forearms, and a nasty bruise on the back of his neck that bore the hallmarks of busted bar stools and smashed tabletops. The children, watching from the front window for the first buzzards of the season, could hear Mother panting like a beaten dog from a block away. He lowered his broad shoulders against an icy gale and bellowed for more whiskey, more beer. On unsteady legs, he struggled through knee-deep snowdrifts left by last night’s late winter storm. Under a cold, blue beam cast by the full moon, Mother staggered up the porch steps and, with a triumphant smile, kicked open the door. READ THE ENTIRE STORY

  From the Spring 2021 edition of The Cafe Irreal: She came again last night, the old woman, to pick apples from our tree.  Through my den window, I saw a familiar figure in a crocheted shawl shambling across the backyard. Unable to concentrate on the botany book my wife had been urging me to read, I opened the sliding glass door and stepped outside into the crisp autumn air. From the shadows I watched her pluck a cluster of small, red apples from the lowest bough and hold them close to her cloudy blue eyes. After a careful inspection, she discarded any misshapen, wormy apples and then with surprising agility filled the brown paper bag at her feet. She's been coming here for weeks even before the apples were ripe, but I've never felt compelled to shake my wife awake and ask her to witness the peculiar scene. These days my wife, because of her snoring and weird, nocturnal outbursts, sleeps in the guest bedroom. READ THE STORY HERE

From the Summer 2020 edition of  Potato Soup: Samantha Serpentini is an insufferable little warthog. Associate editor of the school’s monthly newsletter, vice president of the Youth Leadership Council, quintessential overachiever, class snitch, she sits, arms crossed, high in the bleachers and slowly shakes her head so everyone knows just how displeased she is to be here. From beneath the bangs of her severe black bob, she glares at her teachers and in her most truculent voice tells them that the phony jousts at Camelot’s Court are “a sickening display of savagery.” Her carefully articulated outrage surprises no one. Fond of using modish words, Samantha seems to believe existence itself is a kind of affront to moral decency.  READ THE STORY HERE

From the Fall/Winter 2020 edition of The Maryland Literary Review: On any other summer day, someone would have spotted Anson flailing in the heavy surf, a conscientious mother lathering sunscreen on her toddler under one of the pastel umbrellas that dotted the beach, a divorced dad helping the daughter he hasn’t seen in two weeks build an elaborate sandcastle near the water’s edge, weekend boaters sunbathing aboard their pricey pontoons and bowriders, but on that unusually cool August morning, as a light fog rolled in off the lake, the beach was completely deserted. In the bay, anchored near the breakwall, a lone cabin cruiser named the  Lady Cordelia  bobbed up and down in the heaving white waves. Atop the grassy hill overlooking the lake, Sister Agnes picked plastic bottles from a garbage can inside the picnic pavilion and whispered prophecies about the creature rumored to lurk along the steep shale cliffs. On the fishing pier, two middle-aged men passed a brown paper bag ba...

From the Spring 2021 edition of The White Wall Review: Professor Jeffrey Deepmere stands alone under the great sandstone arch at the entrance to the riverfront memorial park. He reaches for the crumpled pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his pilled wool overcoat and strikes a match. It’s a shameful habit from his experimental phase with Quinn, but the occasional nicotine rush puts him in a creative state of mind and fills him with a sense of euphoria. Unfortunately, after taking a few desperate puffs, he traces with one trembling finger the familiar names engraved on the arch for all time. It has become a ritual for him, and he begins to suspect that he may require a stronger type of medicine. As a self-respecting Humanist, he rejects the grossly superstitious beliefs of the well-meaning locals, but now, above the swiftly flowing current, he perceives the low moans of the restless spirits rumored to haunt the river’s muddy embankment.  READ THE STORY HERE

  From the March/April 2020 edition of Better Than Starbucks: At twilight they make their way to the edge of a deep forest of Douglas fir and mighty hemlock. In single file they trot along a high limestone ridge overlooking an eight-lane interstate highway. One by one they weave their way down an icy switchback and then, to the blare of horns and screeching tires, dart across a steady stream of oncoming traffic. Somehow all six of them survive the perilous crossing. Near an underpass strewn with smashed bottles and crumpled cans, they quickly assess the terrain before moving on. For the next mile there are hills and trees, but soon the land becomes flat and barren as a windswept prairie. There are no sturdy oaks and hickories to shield them from the drifting snow, no rock ledges and caves where they might take shelter for an hour or two from the brutal winter gusts blasting across the great lake to the north. Here there are only roads and more roads. READ THE STORY HERE 

From the Spring 2021 edition of The Mark Literary Review: The music festival happened to coincide with Earth Day, and all over campus, taped to every lamp post and pinned to every bulletin board, there were propagandistic displays of pantheism— anthropomorphic planets spouting somber platitudes (“We were born to save the world, not spoil it”), mischievous woodland elves tiptoeing through lush gardens, whimsical pixies with pink flower petals swirling around their dainty ankles, alluring fertility goddesses draped in billowing lace robes of blue and green, their fingers fondling black irises and priapic mushrooms. Irritated by all of this trendy idolatry, Taylor averted her eyes and spent her evenings in pious prayer. She believed the season had a much more profound and sacred meaning. But now, as she traveled south to the river, she began to wonder if nature did indeed possess some subtle power to confound and deliberately mislead a person of faith. READ THE STORY HERE

From the Spring 2021 edition of The Cabinet of Heed: It took them three days by car before they reached the desert. Towards nightfall, in a dusty town in the high Utah plateau, they passed the Wishing Well, a store that, according to the weather-beaten sign, specialized in used and rare books. Tabby asked if they could stop, and Scott, against his better judgment, said yes. During their journey, she’d gone through three coloring books. He tried his best to ignore the strange modifications she’d made to each drawing. Sometimes, though, she tore a page from the book, thrust it in his face, and insist he praise her for her creativity. READ THE STORY HERE

From the 2021 edition of  Dissections: The Journal of Contemporary Horror: Ever since my divorce last summer, I’ve been renting this two-bedroom apartment in a converted warehouse not far from the lake. The building is more than a century old, a relic from the sweatshop days of the early twentieth century when children as young as eight and nine were sent at dawn by their half-starving parents to work twelve-hour shifts at the looms and presses. In my dreams I see them sometimes, the shades of those miserable little boys and girls, their faces sparkling with graphite dust, their tiny fingers working the spindles of those unforgiving high-speed machines. I have an 18-year old daughter who lives with her father. Had she been around in the days before the enactment of child labor laws, she would have been a professional saboteur. Within an hour of entering the building, she would have made sure every lever and gear had malfunctioned. What’s more, an entire army of cigar-chomping overs...

An essay in  X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Madeline and Sophie Ryan are identical twins. They are eight years old. They exude a rugged masculinity and are built like their merchant marine father — thick, solid, broad shouldered, with eyes so dark and glassy they seem to be made from perfectly polished pieces of obsidian. Mass murderers of spiders, flies, moths, and the exceptionally brilliant brush-footed butterflies that sail above the surface of the family swimming pool, the girls constantly hunt for easy prey. They’re also accomplished mimics who delight in doing impersonations of adults, aping their vocabulary with unnerving precision in a single singsong voice and then squealing with malicious, porcine laughter whenever their latest victim shoots them a weary and wounded look. They can be cruel to younger children but reserve the brunt of their wickedness for their long-suffering mother, relishing their roles as jailers and persecuting her in ways that only the most heartles...

From Assignment Magazine: For three consecutive nights someone with a fondness for fire and poetic spectacle has been burning the mailboxes on Île Saint-Ignace, one of the celebrated wine islands of the Great Lakes, and now, on the first Friday in September, twelve hours before the official start of the annual Barge Party, a dark tendril of smoke comes creeping across a cloudless summer sky, curling curiously around the old lighthouse, probing its copper weathervane, its obsolete lantern room and its great, pale gray blocks of fossiliferous limestone excavated a century ago from the abandoned quarry at the center, at the very heart of the island. READ EXCERPT HERE

An Essay in Cleveland Magazine : " Our minds, for better or worse, have adapted (one can plausibly argue   evolved ) to cope with the innumerable challenges presented by a human rather than a natural environment. Our restless brains are hard-wired to help us navigate not only crowded city streets and congested interstate highways but also the labyrinth of complex   interpersonal relationships.  It’s a world fraught with social pressures of every kind, made that much worse by online media with its armies of trolls and ideologically possessed Twitter mobs."  READ ESSAY HERE

An Essay in Assignment Magazine : " Any artist who is honest about the source of inspiration must contend with the power of the void, the abyss, the darkness, the thing that obeys no authority, the thing (which is no thing ) that devours and destroys predictable patterns of behavior and pathological systems of thought. This is not to say the abyss is without its dangers. The adverse effects of this self-dissolution and terrifying emptiness include neuroticism, depression, suicidal impulses, insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, psychosis, dysphoria, even alien abductions. And can you think of a single artist who hasn’t experienced at least some (or in the unusual case of Philip K. Dick all ) of these symptom s?" READ THE ESSAY HERE

Cleveland-area novelist Kevin P. Keating  is the 2018 John E. Nance Writer-in-Residence. Keating will reside for four weeks at the historic home of author, humorist, and   New Yorker   cartoonist James Thurber and receive a $5,000 stipend. He will begin his residency in late summer of 2018. Keating is the author of many short stories, essays, and reviews, and two novels:  The Natural Order of Things  (2014), which was a finalist for the  Los Angeles Times  Book Prize for a first work of fiction, and  The Captive Condition  (2015). Keating is nearing completion of his third novel, tentatively titled  In the Secret Parts of Fortune . He will be working on final edits of this project and drafting his fourth novel during his residency. READ MORE HERE

" The board of trustees announced the winners of the Cleveland Arts Prize Wednesday, May 3.  Two prizes are awarded to "emerging artists" currently living in Northeast Ohio or who have resided, worked, or studied here, and who show promise and have produced significant work. This year's winners include Kevin P. Keating a uthor of two well-received novels, The Natural Order of Things and The Captive Condition , and a prolific and widely-published writer of essays and short stories. A graduate of Columbia College and Cleveland State University, Keating is currently pursuing a degree from Southern New Hampshire University and teaching at Baldwin Wallace University." The oldest award of its kind in the United States, the Cleveland Arts Prize is a testament to the standard of excellence and quality of artists in Northeast Ohio.  In addition to artists, the Arts Prize honors individuals who have expanded the community’s participation in the arts and helped make ...

From Cleveland State University's Alumni Association: As a 27-year-old union boilermaker, Keating worked his way through college, earning his BA from Columbia College in Chicago and his MA in English from Cleveland State University. He recalls pondering the latest version of his master's thesis while his blowtorch melted thick sheets of steel in the dark pit of a dust collector.  Upon graduating with his master’s degree, Keating was approached to teach English Composition at Cleveland State and was happy to oblige. He also became a professor of English at Baldwin Wallace University, Lorain County Community College and Lakeland Community College. READ MORE HERE

From  Zocalo Public Square : For 10 years, on and off, I worked in those mills as a union boilermaker, earning my way through college and graduate school. At 7 a.m., with an acetylene torch in hand, I would climb into the black asbestos pit of a dust collector and begin cutting through enormous pieces of warped and rusted metal, all the while thinking of my unsmiling professors and how they remained unimpressed by the latest draft of my master’s thesis, an unwieldy tome by a 27-year-old pseudointellectual who’d fallen under the sway of Joseph Campbell. While my blowtorch melted the inch-thick sheets of steel, I tried to remember Campbell’s words: “Life is a wonderful, wonderful opera. Except that it hurts.” Read the Entire Essay Here