Author: Katy Kelleher

Hope Gangloff has been spying on me.

~ Katy Kelleher ~ 1 Comment

hope2
It’s been a strange, exciting, unnerving couple of weeks. I took up smoking again, I quit smoking again. I stopped drinking, then I drank all the wine. I followed my gut, and I ended up dizzy, sick, happy, relieved.

But seriously, on the whole, things are going really, really well.

I made the decision a few weeks ago to leave my full-time job as managing editor at Maine magazine and strike out into the world of freelance. Not because I didn’t love my job—I did, which is what makes leaving so crazy and hard—but because I love writing even more. I’ll still be freelancing for the magazine (hurrah!) and I’m also going to have more time to work on personal projects, like my short stories and my poetry and this here blog (double hurrah!).

But being home all the time also means I spend most of my day in various states of odd-dress/undress. It means I slouch around in sweatpants for hours before deciding suddenly that it’s time to break in that pair of heels that never fit. Too lazy to put on an outfit, I end up in heels and a quilted down vest, chewing on the end of a honey straw and trying to decide whether it’s worth it to put on pants (the answer is usually no).

I was going to say something more profound about Hope Gangloff’s languorous young ladies, but it’s late and I do have work to do tomorrow. Instead, I’ll just let them be.

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She’s talented, that’s for sure. Check out Hope’s website here.

Just because it’s pretty: Amanda Charchain’s too-cool nudes.

~ Katy Kelleher ~ 2 Comments

amandacharchainAmanda Charchain has some amazing photographs of nudes in the woods, girls frolicking in fields, and desolate, lonely landscapes. It’s all great, but this picture is just so perfect—a piece of brightness and color for a rough, cold Thursday.

I’ve got a crush on Nicoletta Daríta de la Brown.

~ Katy Kelleher ~ 1 Comment

nicoletta darita
Beautiful lady out of Baltimore makes beautiful art—particularly her embroidered trashbag series “El Barrio Bodega.” The colorful ones are my favorite, but there’s also a fantastically tacky-ugly-pretty gold one, too. “Growing up in Brooklyn and Harlem I’d visit my block’s bodega daily, with pennies in hand, and leave with priceless treasures,” she explains on her website. “More than just bags, they reflect a sense of pride for my neighborhood and are a symbol of my cultural identity.”

More here.

Bloody good stuff: illustrators cover Angela Carter.

~ Katy Kelleher ~ Leave a comment

Company of Wolves by Sidsel Sorensen Angela Carter is the fairy godmother of modern fairytales. Twisted and clever, Carter turns the classics upside down, subverting them in sensual, strange, provocative ways. I like it! Can you tell?

And if there is anything I’ve learned from working at a magazine, it’s that great stories need great visuals. Well, maybe they don’t need them (the oral tradition would beg to differ) but they definitely benefit from the right images. Knowing that, The Guardian issued a call for entries for Carter’s best work. The results are just fantastic. My favorite is this one: Sidsel Sørensen draws “The Company of Wolves.”

See them all here.

A side effect of reading.

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Reading by Pablo Gallo

When you read a really, really great book, it changes how you perceive the world. I was talking to a fellow writer friend about this a few nights ago. We couldn’t quite pin down what we thought about this—it’s at once freeing and scary, intimate and distancing. It feels as though you’ve invited another writer to come live in your head—or crawled inside theirs.

I tried to think about the last book that made me feel drunk on words, and I have trouble bringing one to mind. I think it must be The Empathy Exams, a series of essays by Leslie Jamison about pain, the body, compassion, femininity, and other slippery subjects. On the other, fictitious hand, One Hundred Years of Solitude still makes me feel strange and a little dizzy every time I read it. The Unbearable Lightness of Being turns me into a overly touchy yet emotionally reticent partner. Margaret Atwood makes me bubble and fizz with nebulous anger and self-righteousness and Toni Morrison makes my heart hurt in a way that is sweet and uneasy. I just hope that I don’t lose each of these tiny personalities that forms inside my skull. I like to think they snarl together (like a mental rat-king of great authors and ideas) and wait for when I’m ready to use them. Maybe they do.

It’s my goal in life to write one thing, one book, that changes the way just a few people look at things. I want my writing to ask people to really, truly look at each other. To see them in a new, hopefully more forgiving, light.

Image by Pablo Gallo

Ian Davey’s flights of fancy.

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feather-painting5-550x480Artist Ian Davey paints exquisite and delicate scenes of nature on an unusual canvas: swan feathers. Naturally, much of his work depicts birds, alongside other kinds of flora and fauna. Naturally, I’m impressed.

I actually just wrote “I’m obsessed,” but that’s not true, is it? No, I’m impressed and awed and a little in love with the work others do, but looking at Davey’s impossibly detailed, impossibly delicate pieces, I’m reminded of what true, genuine, nearly obsessive passion looks like. He must love what he does. There must be something sweet and quiet about creating each piece. It’s probably like how I feel when I leave the room and it’s just my characters playing on a page (not me anymore, not a writer working, toiling away with a lock of hair in my mouth and a furrow growing between my eyes as I stare, stare at the words). It must feel something like that.

I think that’s why I’m drawn to artists who do this kind of dexterous, focused work. Like Jenine Shereos or John Stortz. It’s easier to spot with visual artists, but there are writers who work the same way. Some writers paint with huge brushes and gesture wildly. Their characters tend to barrel into my mind, knocking down defenses and inserting their speech patterns on top of my own. But then there are writers who sneak up on you. It might take longer to swallow those first chapters, but once I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, I tend to stay there for a long, long time.

We can go swimming.

~ Katy Kelleher ~ 1 Comment

If there is one thing I hate about spring, it’s the waiting. Waiting for your first truly warm day. Waiting to wake up to open windows and not a pile of snow. Waiting to swim.
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Swimming is the most sacred act of summer. All other warm-weather rituals pale in significance when compared to the first hesitant steps into lakes still cold from mountain run-off, ponds yet to become fragrant and discolored as leaves and twigs and small, nimble fish live and die and stew in their shallow edges. I can remember my first swim of almost every summer. Feet bare in the sand (bare feet—another pure joy that never loses its sweetness!) eyes stubbornly stuck on the place where, I imagine, I can no longer walk on tiptoes and keep my shivering chest above water, the place where I’m forced to embrace the water or retreat. I’m not the run-and-dive type. For me, it’s a slow walk. First my lower legs (that’s easy). Then my thighs (harder). As the water comes up to the top of my bikini bottoms, laps at my navel, I realize I’m in for the full immersion. That’s the point where there is no going back. One step, maybe two deeper, and then I always let go. Spread my arms out and fall forward, as though I’m leaning into the arms of some trusted beloved. Fall, and then swim.

swimmers2I can’t find image credits for either of these images. So if one is yours, please forgive. They are both so inspiring—one sinister, the other sweet, but both made me thirsty for summer.