Photo by Jessie Tierney
Fit for a queen: Author Stephanie Kuehnert wants you to be a rock goddess
By Kathleen Keish
Published: July 11th, 2008 | 4:25pm
There isn’t much about Kuehnert’s debut novel, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone that isn’t rocking. The title is derived from the Sleater-Kinney song, “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” in which the now-defunct trio declare its desire to be “the queen of rock and roll.” Emily Black, the protagonist of the novel, yearns to dominate the stage as a rock goddess, a figure Kuehnert emulates both in her writing and her own life. “[The novel] is pretty much my tribute to the female musicians who have just given me strength and inspired me since I was a teenager,” Kuehnert says.
Music plays a significant role in the novel outside of the title as well. In an attempt to reconnect with her mother, who left her at a young age to follow the punk-rock music scene, Emily forms her own band. Kuehnert calls the novel a “mother-daughter story with a punk rock soundtrack.”
Though Kuehnert often finds her muse through music, it was writing that initially captured her imagination. Raised by a feminist mother (“My mother was the kind of person that made her own baby food in the ’70s and ’80s,” she says) and actively participating in the Midwest music scene, Kuehnert was originally inspired by one pioneer in particular. “I’ve wanted to be a writer basically since I read Laura Ingalls Wilder books when I was a little kid,” she says. “I just wanted to tell about my time the way she told about her time. My life wasn’t nearly interesting enough, so I just do fictional stories instead of non-fiction.”
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1979, Kuehnert’s family relocated to Chicago’s Oak Park suburb when she was 8 years old. Much of her writing is influenced by her Midwest upbringing, including her next novel, Ballads of Suburbia, due out next summer. “The Midwest doesn’t get all that much credit for stuff, and I like to show this different side of us, that we’re not just trapped between the two coasts and we’re not just farmland and there’s a lot of exciting stuff going on,” Kuehnert says. “[In] many ways [it’s] my tribute to the Midwestern music scene and the Chicago music scene as much as it is to women.”
WRITING I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE
After briefly living in Madison, Wisconsin, and attending Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Kuehnert finished her bachelor’s degree and received her masters at Columbia College Chicago in June, 2006. I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, which came out on July 8, originated as her master’s thesis. “This one I wrote in different pieces, different parts of the story at different times,” she says. “It took longer to arrange it, and figure out what would be included and what wouldn’t.”
Tying into her feminist roots, Kuehnert was an active participant of the riot grrl scene in the ’90s. She self-published several zines, one of which was featured in Francesca Lia Block and Hillary Carlip’s 1998 self-publishing sensation Zine Scene. “It’s just basically where I found my voice, was writing zines. That’s where I really started to take myself seriously as a writer,” she says.
Some of her literary influences include cult-favorite Francesca Lia Block and fellow MTV author Laura Wiess. While at Columbia, Kuehnert met several people who continue to influence her to this day, including Trainspotting author Irving Welsh. “Going to Columbia, we’re taught to write what’s taking our attention at the moment,” she says. “I wrote the scenes that were taking my attention first and then I kind of strung them together.”
The end result of this compilation was I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, which Kuehnert thinks has an inspirational message below its punk-rock context. “The big thing about this one is I think it really teaches a lesson about what happens when you follow your dreams, the success that you can achieve,” she said. “But also, it shows what happens if you run from your nightmares, as opposed to facing it head on.”
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ABOUT THE BOOK
I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone (MTV)
By Stephanie Kuehnert
352 pages
$13.00
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