We recently connected with Kelley Kay Bowles and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Kelley Kay thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.
They just did a good job of, within the frame of whatever time period was age appropriate, letting me learn lessons through personal experience instead of forcing their own experiences on us.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Kelley (Kelley Kaye, Kelley Kay Bowles, Kelley Gusich) taught High School English and Drama for twenty years in Colorado and California, but her love for storytelling dates back to creating captions for her high school yearbook. Maybe back to the tales she created around her Barbie and Ken.
A 1994 MS diagnosis and many years of fertility struggles have (circuitously) brought Kelley, finally, to the life of writer and mother, both of which she adores. Death by Diploma, released by Red Adept Publishing in February 2016 and #1 for cozy mystery on Amazon in August that same year, is her debut cozy mystery, first in the Chalkboard Outlines® series. Book 2, Poison by Punctuation, was released April 24, 2018, and the latest, Strangled by Simile, was released in March 2022. Her debut Young Adult Paranormal, Down in the Belly of the Whale, received the 2017 Indie Book of the Year from Aionios Books, who published the book May 5, 2018. The first of The Meld YA Paranormal series: Magic, Please, was released July 3, 2022, and the prequel I Know it’s Daytime came out September 4, 2022.
She’s working on Book 4 to wrap up the Chalkboard Outlines series, and is continuing to work on The Meld series at the same time. She’s also working with her husband to raise two active and busy teenaged sons.
Kelley feels like everything’s gonna be okay!
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
I feel like people who are more right-brained see creatives as flakes and wishy-washers. I feel like one, too, and my process is definitely more tortoise than hare. I know how that parable ends, though, and I’ll keep on keeping on, no matter what. I think people get overwhelmed and just stop, but I read something in a book–I think it was a Stephen King or a Ray Bradbury book on writing, and it suggested that even one sentence a day will create a 40000 word book in a couple of years. Or at least a first draft of a book.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Go and experience art in any way you can. Public libraries are an excellent way to do this. If you have money to spare, spend it on art you’d enjoy, whether it’s paintings or concerts or whatever.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kelleykaybowles.com
- Other: https://linktr.ee/kelleykaybowles