Ki Longfellow

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KI LONGFELLOW

Born December 9, 1944
Staten Island, New York
Occupation Writer, screenwriter, playwright
Nationality American
Writing period 1980s to present
Genres Fiction
Subjects Varied
Influences
[kilongfellow.com
thesecretmagdalene.com Official website]

Ki Longfellow (aka Pamela Longfellow), born December 9, 1944, is an American novelist and playwright. Best known for her 2005 novel on gnosis told through the Biblical story of Mary Magdalene [1], The Secret Magdalene (republished in March of 2007 [2]), she is also the author of China Blues and Chasing Women.

Contents

[edit] In the Beginning

Ki Longfellow was most likely born in the Mount Loretta Orphanage on Staten Island, New York. At her birth, World War II still raged and her mother, Andrea Lorraine Kelly (b. November 17, 1928) had just turned sixteen years old. For some period of time, the baby was left in foster care as the teenaged Lorraine worked at any job she could find. Left alone for long periods of time, Ki contracted pneumonia, and was removed from the home, only to be placed in another.[1] Within two years Lorraine and her child left New York to resettle in Marin County, California. Longfellow’s biological father remained a mystery until just before Lorraine's sudden and unexpected death from an embolism in 1972 when she admitted he was a full blooded Iroquois Lorraine had met in an unnamed New York City art school. It was then that Longfellow discovered that her Irish/French mother was ashamed of her child's heritage.[2] In Marin, Ki lived with her mother's married older sister, Rosemarie Anderson. But from five or six years of age on, after Lorraine met and married a Naval man, Ki's childhood was spent on naval bases, including Pearl Harbor, Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia, and in her grandfather's house in Larkspur, California's Madrone Canyon. It was her adopted grandfather, Lindsay Ray Longfellow, Longfellow looked to for a sense of "family." [3]

Longfellow attended and graduated from Redwood High School in Larkspur. In her junior and senior years, she took only those classes that interested her, cutting those that did not. Determined to become a writer, she spent as much time as possible on the houseboats moored along Sausalito's once shambling boardwalks and docks with painters, poets, and musicians, as well as discovering what still remained of the Beat Generation in North Beach, the area of San Francisco where artists of the day lived and worked.

At nineteen, Longfellow suddenly and unexpectedly experienced what she now considers gnosis.[4]) At the time, not understanding her experience and enduring increasingly severe panic attacks, she voluntarily entered the State Mental Institution at Napa, California where she was diagnosed without benefit of a doctor as a "severe psycho-neurotic." Six weeks of enforced heavy sedation and barred windows made it clear that "help" was not something offered by a mental facility. Nor was understanding. But it was that experience that finally found expression in her version of the life of Mary Magdalene: The Secret Magdalene.

[edit] Groundwork

On June 21, 1963, Longfellow gave birth to her first child, the painter Sydney Longfellow. In 1967 they moved to New York City where Longfellow worked briefly as a fashion model and then for CARE as a jobbing writer. For one year she moved to Montana where she lived on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation as a member of the Peace Corps (Vista Volunteers, domestic division). For another year, she sailed to Europe, living for a time in Nice and Paris. Back in New York City again, she worked for the promoter Bill Graham in his Millard Booking Agency, where she met the manager of the English folk band Fairport Convention and moved to Hampstead, England, north London. They were married in 1972. This marriage lasted five years, during which Longfellow wrote from time to time for English music magazines.

Longfellow returned to California in 1975. In 1977, she flew back to England to retain her English residency status, and there she met and married one of England's most beloved and certainly most eccentric multi-talented personalities, Vivian Stanshall. In 1977, she and the ex-frontman for the Bonzo Dog Band moved onto a houseboat moored on the River Thames between Chertsey and Shepperton. On August 16, 1979, they had a baby, Longfellow's second daughter, Silky Longfellow-Stanshall. During this time, she devoted her skills to Vivian in the belief his work was much more important than her own. They wrote radio plays together as well as songs. In 1980, Longfellow edited Vivian's only book, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End & Other Spots, published by Pete Townshend, who had founded Eel Pie Publishing. She also helped him on the script for the film version of Sir Henry at Rawlinson End which would star Trevor Howard. In late 1982, Longfellow discovered the Thekla, a ship she rescued from the shipyards of Sunderland and sailed to Bristol as a theater and restaurant and, she hoped, as a refuge for her hard-drinking, valium-addicted, husband. The restaurant failed, but the theater thrived, as well as its reputation as a music venue. In early 1983, Vivian joined her on her Old Profanity Showboat.[5]

In 1985, they wrote, produced, and staged to great acclaim[6] their comic opera, Stinkfoot,[7] aboard the Thekla. Stinkfoot was a surrealistic melding of an allogorical tale of New York City alley cats and the internal turmoil of Stanshall's intense struggle as an artist. Intending to be a painter, he'd turned instead to the "easier" world of popular entertainment. His confusion and grief underlies Longfellow's magical world of "All is Illusion." Later it was transferred to London's West End, where it was partly financed by Stephen Fry, but without Longfellow's or Stanshall's participation, it was not a success. In 2004, Ben Schot's Sea Urchin Editions published a celebration of the Old Profanity production of Stinkfoot with an introduction by Longfellow.

The Secret Magdalene's Crown/Random House cover, 2007
The Secret Magdalene's Crown/Random House cover, 2007

At the end of the Old Profanity in 1986, both Longfellow and Stanshall moved into the Bristol home of their friend, the actor David Rappaport, where Longfellow finally began writing in earnest. Her first two books were China Blues, a historical thriller set in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1923, the year President Warren G. Harding died mysteriously in the Palace Hotel, and Chasing Women, a screwball comedy murder mystery set in New York City just after the Great Crash of 1929. Both novels were successful, in particular China Blues (published in a bidding war by Harper Collins in 1989) which was optioned by the producing team of Zanuck and Brown. Her second book, Chasing Women was optioned by an Australian team of female writer/producers and enjoyed a remarkable voyage through Hollywood, an experience which taught Longfellow a great deal about the mainstream movie business. Nothing in either of them would have afforded insight into Longfellow's actual life or experiences. But that, as she said in an interview for a New York radio show devoted to books [8] (aired in May, 2007), was partly camouflage, partly affection for mysteries and thrillers, but mostly a matter of learning her craft.

In 1990, she again contracted pneumonia, again due the lack of care by a care giver, this time a physician. Seriously close to death, she underwent an emergency operation at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol which turned out to be ineffective. That she recovered was thought by the attending physicians to be a complete mystery.

[edit] A New Voice

From mid 1990 until Vivian’s death in March, 1995, she divided her time between a small farm in Vermont and Vivian's flat in Muswell Hill, London. Both she and his daughter Silky hoped that Vivian would grow out of his destructive habits, or be forced by ill health to stop. Her second book, Chasing Women, was published in 1993 while Longfellow was living in Muswell Hill. At Vivian's death a year and a half later, Longfellow stopped writing for a few years, only slowly regaining her voice, a voice very different from her earlier writing. In her work now runs a struggle with the loss of Vivian, her almost Dickensian birth and childhood, as well as a deep stream of spiritual yearning and a realization of the gnosis she experienced at the age of nineteen, as well as her own brush with death in 1990.

From then on, she published under the name Vivian had woken from a dream years earlier declaring was hers: Ki (pronounced as in "sky").

In 2006, Longfellow was invited to contribute to Dan Burstein's non-fiction book Secrets of Mary Magdalene. (CDS Books, 2006)

Her novel, The Secret Magdalene (Eio Books edition) is being adapted as a feature film by the noted director Nancy Savoca. Savoca won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for her first movie, True Love.

For the moment, Longfellow lives on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe working on her latest book about the 4th century mathematician and philosopher, Hypatia of Alexandria, Egypt. It is intended to be the second volume in a trilogy on the Divine Feminine.

[edit] Books

  • 1989 – China Blues (as Pamela Longfellow) – Harper Collins (Britain), Doubleday (US) [3]
  • 1993 – Chasing Women (as Pamela Longfellow) – Harper Collins (Britain)
  • 2003 – Stinkfoot, a celebration of the Comic Opera (as Ki Longfellow-Stanshall with Vivian Stanshall) – Sea Urchin Press (English language, Holland) [4]
  • 2003 - Walks Away Woman, (currently being considered as a feature film.)
  • 2004 - Houdini Heart, (currently unfinished)
  • 2005 – The Secret Magdalene – (as Ki Longfellow) Eio Books (worldwide)
  • 2006 – Secrets of Mary Magdalene – (contributing writer) CDS Books [5]
  • 2007 – The Secret Magdalene – Crown (Random House, English language world rights)
  • 2007 - Hypatia's Cat (working title, work in progress)

[edit] Movies

  • 1978 - Sir Henry At Rawlinson End, Charisma Films
  • 2007 - The Secret Magdalene, (pre-production)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ The Bristolian: a short lived magazine, article published in inaugural edition, May, 1988.
  2. ^ Discovery: an English Radio Two interview aired in 1990.
  3. ^ Discovery: an English Radio Two interview aired in 1990.
  4. ^ Discovery: an English Radio Two interview aired in 1990.
  5. ^ All this was filmed by the BBC, and aired in September 1983 on Omnibus, a BBC documentary program, as "The Bristol Showboat Saga".
  6. ^ Three reviews are reproduced here.
  7. ^ See this.
  8. ^ Multicultural Radio Broadcasting, Inc. (MRBI)

[edit] References