Kathe Koja

Ahead of its time.

I could smell and taste it.

. . . the lives of Tess and Bibi still haunt me.

I just read this AGAIN. I think I’ve read it 4 times now?

A strange and compelling novel. I didn’t like any of the main characters but I came to care for them and dreaded the inevitable horror awaiting them at the story’s end.

. . . in walks Kathe Koja, changing all the definitions of what horror is and what it’s supposed to represent in one fell swoop.

Those aren’t blurbs, those are real readers reacting to SKIN. And now SKIN’s on its way into ebook format, via Roadswell Editions, to bring the love and pain and big machines to readers who know the story well, and those who’ve yet to meet the duo of Tess Bajac and Bibi Bloss. Cue the bass, start the solder melting! The girls are back in town.

If the characters in books could vote . . .  I had that conversation today with a reader, and we agreed that all my YA heroines – from tough Rachel in straydog to visionary Maggy in The Blue Mirror, the Hazel and Lily duo of Headlong, thoughtful Dana of Kissing the Bee, and courageous Hilly of Going Under – would approve this message 100%.

This election in the States is not only about what happens today, it’s about what will happen to our daughters, granddaughters, sisters, nieces, students, friends, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

V is for Vote. Sing it, girls!

Good morning! Consider this: if E.L. James married James Patterson, she’d be E.L. James Patterson! Think of the juggernaut that would ensue!

Now consider Anna Barbauld, via a recent New Yorker article about women’s reading habits through history:

“It is pleasant to the mind to sport in the boundless regions of possibility; to find relief from the sameness of every-day occurrences by expatiating amidst brighter skies and fairer fields.”

Love that “expatiating” more than I can say: for its hope and its reality both.

Now consider David Belcher writing in the New York Times about the new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights:

“[E]ven the most moor-obsessed among us would be hard-pressed to recall the second half of the book . . . With such a convoluted plot, not to mention hundreds of pages of period British colloquialisms, screenwriters face enormous challenges in dialogue and characterizations.”

Really? “Moor-obsessed”? “Convoluted”?  Though a passionate fan of the book, I won’t bother to defend Mlle Bronte, she doesn’t need any help from me. But: that convoluted plot and those colloquialisms, that unremembered second half, make up the glory of the story, what makes it real, a pitch-perfect example of Anna Barbauld’s “expatiation.”

Or (our last consideration) “fiction’s intimate palpability”, the wonderful phrase from James Wood’s excoriation of Tom Wolfe in the New Yorker: one of the great passports for the reading expat. Not, note, ex-Patterson. Which circles us back to the bone again. Chew on!

Translation is the tightrope discipline. Not only must one convey the grammatical sense of what’s being written, the narrative’s got to make it across the divide too: and then, well then there’s the art  Ever try to do it?

KINK will be published in Poland and straydog (again) in South Korea: time again to offer my great thanks to those who bring my work to languages beyond English. A great translation is two books in one, and I salute all translators!

There’s something really exhilarating about this: you love someone’s art, you decide you want to be part of making it happen. And having partnered with commissioning patrons – real people, who decided they wanted to make some art in the real world – has shown me how well it can work, how seamlessly, and how much fun it can be.

So if you like my work, here’s how it could go:

1. You decide you want to make it happen.

Maybe it’s Under the Poppy – you’ve been to one of the Poppy events, you’ve heard or read about them, you want to take the brothel to the next and ultimate performance.  There’s a contact page on the Under the Poppy blog specifically for patrons.

Or maybe it’s my fiction: a private reading from Under the Poppy, complete with naughty puppets; or The Cipher, staged in a backroom in the dark. Or it might be a readers’ theatre for young people, using Talk, or a real-world discussion about bullying and Buddha Boy.

Or maybe you’re ready to go for actors or masks, a la “Bottom’s Folly” (here, with performer Scott Van Sice, the Bottom mask, and me).

2. You contact me, kathe AT kathekoja.com.

3. Together, we figure out the event parameters – what gets made, what gets paid, the date.

4. Fun is had.

For an upcoming benefit for Market Studio Kitchen, I’m donating an evening of performative fiction – the bidder wins, I come and read from a work of his/her choosing. Want me to come and read to you, create an event, make something one-of-a-kind? Have verbs, will travel . . . Let’s have some fun.

My desk these days is a crossroads of works in progress: SKIN coming out in ebook via Roadswell Editions; a new novel, BREATHE, making its way toward publication later this year, also from Roadswell; THE MERCURY WALTZ  to be published next year – those latter two yet to have their covers completed or trailers filmed – and the work-in-progress being written every morning . . .

The Under the Poppy performance events have their own desk. Actually, they have their own workspace, next door, where the costumes are.

Whew.

This is fun.