Ki Longfellow
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Ki Longfellow (aka Pamela Longfellow), born December 9, 1944, is an American writer. Best known for her 2005 novel [1], The Secret Magdalene (republished in March of 2007 [2]), she is also the author of China Blues and Chasing Women.
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[edit] Early days
Ki Longfellow was born on Staten Island, New York, but within two years was taken by her mother, Andrea Lorraine Kelly (barely sixteen at the birth of her first and only child), to Marin County, California where Lorraine met and married a Navy man. (Longfellow’s biological father remained a mystery until just before Lorraine's death in 1972 when she admitted he was a full blooded Iroquois. It was then that Longfellow discovered her Irish/French mother was ashamed of her child's heritage.[1]) Her childhood was spent living on naval bases, including Pearl Harbor, and in her grandfather's house in Larkspur, California's Madrone Canyon. As a child and a teenager, it was her adopted grandfather Longfellow looked to for a sense of "family."
Longfellow attended Redwood High School in Larkspur. In her junior year there, Longfellow virtually stopped attending classes, instead taking the bus to Sausalito. As often as she could, Longfellow spent her days 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 knows was gnosis. She voluntarily entered the State Mental Institution at Napa, California where she was diagnosed as a "severe psycho-neurotic." Six weeks of enforced heavy sedation and barred windows taught her that "help" was not something offered by a mental facility. But it was that experience that finally found expression in her version of the life of Mary Magdalene: The Secret Magdalene.
[edit] Looking for work
Longfellow gave birth to her first child, the painter Sydney Longfellow, in 1963. In 1967 they moved to New York City where Longfellow worked briefly as a model and 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). For another year, she sailed to Europe, living for a time in Nice and Paris. Back in New York 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 with him 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.
[edit] Finding a voice
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 Vivian Stanshall. In 1977, they moved onto a houseboat, moored on the River Thames between Chertsey and Shepperton. In 1979, Longfellow gave birth to Silky Longfellow-Stanshall. During this time, she devoted her skills to Vivian in the belief his work was much more important than her own. 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. In late 1982, Longfellow discovered the Thekla, a ship she would rescue from the shipyards of Sunderland and sail 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.[2]
In 1985, they wrote, produced, and staged to great acclaim[3] their comic opera, Stinkfoot,[4] aboard the Thekla. Later it was transferred to London's West End, where without Longfellow's or Stanshall's participation, it was not a success.
[edit] A different voice
At the end of the Old Profanity in 1986, both Longfellow and Vivian moved into the Bristol home of their friend David Rappaport where Ki finally began writing in earnest. In 1989, Harper Collins published her first novel, China Blues. From 1990 until Vivian’s death in 1995, she divided her time between 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. Her second book, Chasing Women, was published in 1993. At Vivian's death, Longfellow stopped writing for over a year, only slowly regaining her voice, a voice very different from her earlier writing. In her work now runs a deep stream of spiritual yearning and a realization of the gnosis she experienced at the age of nineteen.
From then on, she published under the name Vivian had woken from a dream years earlier declaring was hers: Ki (pronounced as in "sky").
[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]
- 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)
[edit] Notes
- ^ Discovery: an English Radio Two interview aired in 1990.
- ^ All this was filmed by the BBC, and aired in September 1983 on Omnibus, a BBC documentary program, as "The Bristol Showboat Saga".
- ^ Three reviews are reproduced here.
- ^ See this.
