The Kivi Weeks Blog!

The Gorgoneion today Here are three things about me:  I was raised on Greek mythology. I love live theatrical performances. I write. These bullets described very separate parts of my life until I was about 17.  For as long as I can remember, my mom has read me Greek Mythology books (the Percy Jackson series and the D'Aulaires' Greek mythology book are still among my favorites). I was a theater kid at school, although I didn't get cast most of the time. Most of my friends were theater kids, too, so landing a crew job instead of being cast wasn’t so bad. I got to spend time with my friends outside of school hours, which was certainly a plus.  I also wrote for fun in my free time. It was mostly fanfiction until I was about 16, when I started writing my own fiction.  My love of the theater runs pretty deep. I didn’t attend traditional, outdoorsy summer camp when I was a kid; instead, I participated in theater camp at the Guthrie. When I aged out of their summer camps, I ...

When I was a teen, I tended to write in the voice of a dispassionate scientist. I’d never had a creative writing teacher, so my written voice reflected the characters from the science fiction books I read. This came through in everything I wrote, even when that voice was totally wrong for my characters. When I was 16, I discovered a teen artist-in-residence program hosted by the National Park Service out of Isle Royale National Park, and I absolutely loved the idea of going to that beautiful island to write. I applied for the 2019 season with a short story about Lake Superior taking the shape of a watery humanoid. That story had a lot of problems with it, including that misapplied voice, and unsurprisingly, I wasn’t accepted. I was about as bummed as a 16-year-old could be, which is … considerable.  My mom encouraged me to try again the following year, so I did. I wasn’t such a kiss-ass that time — the previous year, I had written about Lake Superior because I thought the judges wo...