Katherine Keenum

Blog alert: While chasing around for links to Angela Thirkell and WWII, I came across a post on her pre-novel, Pomfret Towers at the blog, Clothes in Books. The site is new to me and what a find! Good for readers and authors alike. The photo shown here appears in the post to illustrate the apricot-silk-lined rabbit-fur cape given to shy Alice Barton by her mother to give her confidence on her first ever weekend away from home alone at a house party. To help visualize it from the front, click here. And for a write-up of the novel with images of various covers for it, click here.

Are you drawn to topics in fiction? I tend to like novels in which a house is a major character. I'm also drawn to fiction written by British women during the Second World War—not historical fiction set during the war, but novels written for the home front while the outcome of the war was very much in doubt (Angela Thirkell's Cheerfulness Breaks In ends with a major character at Dunkirk and his wife unsure whether he has survived). To my great joy, I've just discovered Henrietta's War and Henrietta Makes It Through by Joyce Dennys. What's more, Dennys is a female artist new to me. Almost too good to be true!

 Read More 

Photographs like this one of a horse ranch in Ventura County can obviously be helpful to a fiction writer who wants to set a story in the present-day California countryside. When I saw it, though, my first reaction was: Strip away the vegetation and that could be a manned station on a harsh, alien planet. My second thought was: Or narrow the valley and fill it with greenery and it could be in Middle-Earth. Writing exercise, anyone?

 Read More 

In his introduction to a collection of Talking Heads (Series 1), Alan Bennett writes that a television monologue is a "stripped down version of a short story, the style of its telling necessarily austere. 'Said' or 'says' is generally all that is required to introduce reported speech, because whereas the novelist or short story writer has a battery of expressions to chose from ('exclaimed', 'retorted', 'groaned' lisped'), in live narration such terms seem literary and self-conscious."

 Read More 

Website alert: An article in the Guardian, Tate Britain acquires first painting by pioneering English female artist overlooked for a century, brought to my attention Louise Jopling again. As an artist and suffragist, she is definitely someone my Palmer characters, Jeanette and Mattie, would know about! And wouldn't the show at the Tate gratify them? For more of Jopling's work, click here.

Image in the Public Domain via Wikipedia

Website alert: A news item, Face of 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman revealed, alerted me to a BBC documentary. If you subscribe to Netlfix and are interested in how paleo-archeologists work, it is well worth watching. I loved a reenactment near the end in which a fearful young Neanderthal woman in need of help approaches an equally wary group of Homo sapiens. Instead of the expected story of violence, it shows how the two species could have interacted peacefully—a happier thought than abduction and rape as the source of the Neanderthal DNA in most of us! A shortcut to the findings is a summary article at Science Direct: Archaeologists unveil face of Neanderthal woman.

 Read More 

This photograph of a Flying Golden Fleece ram fresco found in Pompeii seems to me emblematic of all the excavations in the ash-and-rubble-buried city. Treasures keep emerging from darkness into the light. It can also create the optical illusion of a rough gravel road running back into a cave entrance. Lilliputians? Moles? A case where misreading may prompt new creativity!

Website alert: The decorations on elaborate antique maps can often supply information or inspiration to fiction writers. For instance, in my current fantasy novella, there's a short passage involving a silver mine. The borders of Seutter's map of silver-mining in Saxony are full of exquisite details which supplied just the images I need. The map is found a great source, 18th century cartography, a section of World Revealed: Geography & Maps at the Library of Congress. Check it out!

Website alert: Pennsylvania German folk artist's Lewis Miller's sketch of Princeton, New Jersey, in September 1847 is taken from a National Gallery of Art project, a History of Early American Landscape Design. The website is a great resource for picturing settings. Besides allowing you to visualize Princeton as a surprisingly rural town, this particular image also suggests the device of keeping an illustrated journal—maybe by of your characters!

See the black nurse in a turban on the far right? In her award-winning catalogue for the exhibition, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (2018), curator Denise Murrell points out that the population of Paris in the 19thC was much more racially mixed than many people realize. She contrasts Manet's Children in the Tuileries Garden to Lobrichon's Promenade of a Paris Crèche on that very ground.

 Read More