Kevin Fenton's "Merit Badges"

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Kevin Fenton lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota and works as an advertising writer and creative director. His fiction has appeared in the Northwest Review, the Laurel Review, and the Emprise Review. His writing on graphic design has been anthologized in Looking Closer 2 and Emigre No. 70: The Look Back Issue.

He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School.

Here he shares his thinking on adapting his new novel Merit Badges for the big screen:

A screen writer has already started thinking about what the movie might look like, so I don’t want to prejudice his work. But I can say what movie inspired the book, even though the structure wound up spanning many more years: Barry Levinson’s Diner. That sense of showing a world formed by friendships, that oddly vital nostalgia, those great lines, the characters who were part boy, part man. My friends and I quote it over and over again. I wanted to make readers feel about Quint, Slow, Chimes and Barb the way I feel about Fenwick, Boogie, Shrevie, and Beth.

Learn more about the book and author at the Merit Badges website and Kevin Fenton's blog.

The Page 69 Test: Merit Badges.

Writers Read: Kevin Fenton.

--Marshal Zeringue