Hi, I’m Kate.

I’m a literary essayist whose primary instrument is my own experience. I don’t believe myself to be a special subject. My experience is simply the only thing I have continuous access to.

I spent much of my life inside ways of thinking and seeing that told me what experience ultimately meant. Raised a fundamentalist Christian, I was taught the visible world was full of invisible explanations: God, sin, salvation, purpose, eternity.

After I left that structure I started noticing many of its underlying habits had survived. I kept needing experience to arrive at a final explanation, and I kept looking for one under different names. My writing has increasingly become an experiment in what happens when I don’t supply one.

What does a human life look like without Final Interpretation? Not without thought, story, comfort, meaning, identity or interpretation. Those are part of being human. I’m interested in what happens when these sit side by side with not knowing what all of this ultimately is.

This has made me curious about how experience takes shape.

A Writer gathers around the activity of writing. A Mom takes a position in an argument, and the son across from her looks different because of it. Attention circles something until it feels like the center of the world. A watcher takes up residence in here, and everything else becomes out there. Something feels unresolved, and suddenly the whole scene organizes around the need for resolution.

It’s not that I want to know whether these organizations are right or wrong. I want to see how they form, what they do, and how they move.

That’s one reason I write in the first person.

I’m both the material and the instrument of observation, a mobile aperture looking at the world while sometimes noticing the aperture itself.

My material includes marriage, parenting, a body, religion, books, aging, travel, language, writing, death, breakfast, walking—whatever gets my attention and holds it.

My working discipline is something like this: look closely, and let the conclusion stay proportional to what I find. I want my essays to think hard and remain faithful to what can actually be encountered. Through them, I resist the move from this is what I see to therefore, this is what Reality means. Then I see what holds.

I keep returning to ordinary experience. Not because I think ordinary life contains some hidden Ultimate Truth, but because it’s the only place I can look. I’m also interested in scale: how far what’s found can honestly go.

My life is what I have access to.

I want to see what happens when I look.