Katherine Keenum

Blog post alert: Material culture matters in historical and fantasy fiction. Rare survivals of decorative paper cutting by schoolgirls in the 17th century found under floorboards at Sutton House could prompt a telling detail in a story, but it would matter whether you were writing about a curator's discovery, life in the 17th C, or an imaginary world. Particularly for historical fiction, it would be important to know just who had access to such cut-outs in a world where paper was expensive.
 
For three more delightful examples, click here. And for context, click here.

Exhibition alert: In Where the Light Falls, I had one of my characters report briefly on an excursion to the Cirque Fernando, where his party saw Miss La La hang by her teeth from a trapeze. The incident was, of course, inspired by Degas' painting, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando. I didn't actually dramatize the visit, and I'm glad now that I didn't; for it was only this spring that I learned from Denise Murrell that the performer in Degas' painting was biracial. If I could, I would now go to the new exhibition, Discover Degas and Miss La La at the National Gallery in London! The whole matter of Black people's experience in Paris in the 19th C is a rich area for exploration by historians in many fields and fiction writers alike.

A Valentine's Day time sink: The 100 Ballads project and website! "Broadside ballads were single-sheet songs that sold for a penny a piece. This website concentrates on over 100 resoundingly successful examples that you can investigate through recordings, images and a wealth of other materials." For example, A Courtly new ballad of the Princely wooing of the/ fair Maid of London by King Edward shown here.

Website alert: Christine Hadsel's prizewinning book, Suspended Worlds: Historic Theater Scenery in Northern New England, has just introduced me to a whole category of Americana: the big theater curtains that could be rolled down in town halls, granges, and opera houses for live performances in the period just before the movies. This could be invaluable for a story set in small town in, say—1908! You can see lots of examples and learn about them at Hadsel's website Curtains without Borders.

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Imagine a group of internationally known, avant-garde artists building an amusement park together in 1987—attractions by Salvador Dali, David Hockney, Michael Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein (with music by Philip Glass, no less). An over the Big Top extravaganza. So delicious! So Tom Stoppard! So It-couldn't-happen now! Only wait: it can happen now, at least Luna Luna is being revived; and one day next year, you may be able to visit it in a city near you.

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Over the years I've enjoyed collecting images to illustrate terms and allusions in Greer Gilman's Moonwise. For this year's reading, it was "Who'll dig his grave? I said, the owl," which comes from The Death and Burial of Cock Robin. What specially tickled me was discovering the Cock Robin Card Game published by Mcloughlin Brothers in the latter part of the 19th C. In brief, players first have to correctly identify the verse that goes with a picture or vice versa. Then when all the cards have been identified, the rules turn it into a sociable party game of forfeits. Right there historical fiction writers have a use for the tidbit.

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Blog post alert: Sienna McCulley, a 2021 intern at the American Antiquarian Society, recently posted Quicken the Thought — The Game of Authors. The card game was first published in 1861 and has gone through countless iterations, as can be seen in a published compendium.

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When I sent my characters to the Cirque Fernando in Where the Light Falls to see Mlle. La La perform, I had no idea that the real woman painted by Edgar Degas was a mixed-race performer.  Read More 

Sometimes interests converge. A recent post on The Gangs of Paris at the Victorian Paris blog sent me investigating the story-telling, tough-guy, tough-gal Danse Apache or Apache Dance (pronounced ah-PAHSH in both French and English), which originated in France and quickly moved to the American stage in 1908.  Read More 

As a follow-up to my last post, here’s a quick look ahead at naughty behavior in New York City in 1908, the setting for my current work-in-progress. I came across Robert Henri’s portrait of the dancer Mademoiselle Voclezca in a 1995 exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. More astonishing to me than the painting were several paragraphs about a craze for “Salome dancers.”  Read More