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Deborah J. Ross, the editor of Lace and Blade 4, is posting a series of interviews with the contributors as a lead up to the book's release on February 14, 2018. (Have you pre-ordered yet?) This week, my interview went up. Check it out for some background on how I came to write "Gifts Tell Truth" and general chat about my writing.

I'm excited to have an Alpennia story published in a mainstream SFF context. Although I have a number of pieces of Alpennia short fiction planned, what I don't have is a clear plan for how to get them to readers. "Three Nights at the Opera" was always a free giveaway from the start, in part because I wanted to have an appetizer to offer people who'd never read anything of mine. And I have plans to make advance access to Alpennia shorts one of the benefits of subscribing to my mailing list, especially for the pieces that are more in the way of character sketches rather than free-standing stories. But the weird neither-this-nor-that nature of the series makes it hard to identify potential publication venues. In essence, "Gifts Tell Truth" was written specifically for the theme of Lace and Blade. The specific story wasn't one I'd been planning to write all along.

The eventual end-game, once the series as a whole is complete, will be to put out all the short fiction in a convenient collection, but that's quite a ways down the road.

What "fill-in" stories would you love to read about Alpennia? Especially if I'm not constrained to telling stories centering on the lesbian characters?

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 37 (previously 18c) - Book Appreciation with Kathleen Knowles - Transcript

(Originally aired 2018/01/20 - listen here)

Heather Rose Jones: This week we welcome Kathleen Knowles back to talk about historic fiction that she really has enjoyed reading. Welcome!

Kathleen Knowles: Hello!

H: So, why don’t we start out, you had mentioned that you’ve read a lot of, that you started getting interested in historic fiction by some early authors in that field. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your favorites there?

K: Well, I think the one writer who I greatly, greatly, greatly admire, although she isn’t, certainly isn’t known for lesbian romance fiction or lesbian historic fiction, is Mary Renault. One of the first books I ever read as a gay person was The Persian Boy and I just loved it. I thought the writing was really, beautiful and the story was really romantic and the fact that it was set in ancient Greece and she seemed to describe it so well. I just thought it was great and I read everything else she wrote as well. Unfortunately, the one book that she ever wrote about lesbians, it wasn’t a historic one, it was, I think, contemporary, although it would have been in the 40s.

H: It’s historic now!

K: For her, her contemporary period of time.

H: Yes, yes.

K: It’s almost impenetrable to read. It’s not the greatest.

H: What’s the title?

K: The title is, oh my god, I’m blanking on the title sorry.

H: I’ll look it up and I will insert it in here somewhere.

K: Ok, so but the idea of gay fiction and historic fiction, that was planted in my head when I read Mary Renault. I started doing that almost 40 years ago. So, on my contemporaries, who I really, really enjoy. One is Rebecca S. Buck, these are both Bold Strokes Books writers as I am. One is Rebecca S. Buck, she has a couple titles out, you’ll have to look those up.

H: I know she’s got one about a highway woman because I was looking at it the other day, I’m going to do a special episode on that. I think it’s The Flintlock and the Locket or something like that?

K: Yeah, there’s that one and another one she wrote about a young museum worker. I can’t remember the name of it now, I’m very sorry. That was great. And my all-time favorite is Justine Saracen. Justine has written all kinds of different historical periods, from Biblical to WWII. It’s pretty amazing how she can dig up all of these… she makes… she says, “The best thing about writing historical fiction is you can pick something that there’s not much known about and then you can make all sorts of stuff up!” That’s how she likes to put it for historical fiction. The one, I think my favorite was the Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright and it was about the Nazis and WWII and the destruction of Berlin. It’s pretty intense.

H: Yeah, I think I’ve heard her read from that one.

K: Really worthwhile as is her recent one about the Soviet fighter pilots who were women. They had a women’s… squadron of women who were fighter pilots. And that was really true in the Soviet Union in WWII.

H: Yeah, that one’s The Witch of Stalingrad, right?

K: Yeah, The Witch of Stalingrad, and I don’t know how to put it but Justine’s really special and it’s really fun to know somebody like that and actually be able to talk to her every now and then. So those are my two real favorites as far as… Two super favorites and one other that I really like, Rebecca Buck.

H: Uh huh. Well, thank you very much for sharing some of your favorite books with us.

K: Well, you’re welcome. Anytime!

Show Notes

In the Book Appreciation segments, our featured authors talks about her favorite books with queer female characters in a historic setting.

In this episode Kathleen recommends some favorite queer historical novels:

• The Persian Boy by Mary Renault (gay male fiction)
• The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault (contemporary to when Renault write it in the ‘40s)
• The Locket and the Flintlock by Rebecca S. Buck
• Truths by Rebecca S. Buck
• Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright by Justine Saracen
• The Witch of Stalingrad by Justine Saracen

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

Links to Kathleen Knowles Online

• Website: Kathleen Knowles at Bold Strokes Books
• Twitter: @knowleskathy
• Facebook: Kathy Knowles

The second category of Jae's Lesbian Book Bingo 2018 challenge is Historical Fiction. Check here for the thread with suggestions of books for this category, and for a chance to win prizes if you comment.

As I announced previously, since I don't read enough books to have a chance at filling my bingo card, I thought I'd play along by writing short fiction pieces for each square, using a historic setting and tying them all up loosely in a single overall story. But what do I do for a historical fiction category given that I'm trying to do the whole thing in a historic setting? Obviously the solution is to include something that is historical fiction for the characters in my setting! We're still following the same two characters currently, but I've switched viewpoints. (There will be more characters later, but they'll all connect up in the end.) At this point, I've sort of narrowed down the setting of the current ficlets to the Nine Years' War some time in the early 1690s. I'm dodging making too-specific references to what military action my heroines might be taken part it since I haven't pinned down a more specific date (or exactly which regiment they're with). If you're interested in more details of passing women in the military in the Low Countries and Germany in this general era, there's no better source than The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe by Dekker and van de Pol.

My book Daughter of Mystery will be one of the featured book suggestions for the fantasy category, but my work fits in a lot of different categories on the bingo card. For those who might be visiting here for the fiction and brainstorming for ideas for their bingo squares, here's a brief rundown of what categories the Alpennia books and my self-published novelette fit into.

• "The Mazarinette and the Musketter" (self-published novelette, see links below for information on all books) - LGBTQIA+ characters (bi women, trans man), historical fiction, you might possibly fit it into "women in uniform" since a Musketeer uniform is a key plot point.
• Daughter of Mystery (Alpennia #1) - friends to lovers, butch/femme (sort of), fantasy, historical fiction
• The Mystic Marriage (Alpennia #2) - LGBTQIA+ (one main character is demisexual), friends to lovers, age difference, fantasy, I think you could even use "workplace romance" since the romance develops in an alchemy lab, historical fiction
• Mother of Souls (Alpennia #3) - friends to lovers, fantasy, historical fiction, LGBTQIA+ (since both women are bi), but I'd rather people didn't use it for the "women of color" square because I'd prefer people to chose own-voices books for that in preference to mine

And now, on with the fiction!

All the Stage is a World (Lesbian Book Bingo: Historical Fiction)

The only thing more miserable than standing sentry through the wet miserable night on the edge of the army camp would have been sitting inside the walls of the town we were besieging. No, even worse for everyone would come when the siege broke into open battle but I mostly avoided thinking about that before time and tried to forget it afterward. The dark was thick with the smoke of campfires and the orange glow of them was scattered across the fields like a hellish reflection of the stars above.

Lena—no, I needed to think of her only as Pieter, and I’d only called her Lena for a few days anyway. Not long enough that the name should seek to betray us like that. Pieter shuffled a few steps to keep her legs warm. Another hour at least before we’d be relieved.

A trickle of wet fell into the collar of my uniform coat and I adjusted the wide brim of my hat to send the rain somewhere less uncomfortable. “Are you cold, Pieter?” I asked.

She snorted. “Of course I’m cold, Martijn! Times like this I wish I hadn’t traded skirts for breeches.”

Skirts for breeches, a job serving beer at De Leeuw in Zendoorn for the army life, but I knew she didn’t regret the gamble. I saw it in her eyes ever time we marched past towns and rivers she’d never seen before. No matter how sore our feet were or how quickly sleep seized us when we made camp, that look of wonder and surprise never dimmed.

I moved closer and huddled against her for a little more warmth but she stepped away with a shake of her head.

“You never know who might be watching.”

She was right. As bad as it would be for anyone to guess that we were women, it would be worse if they decided we were too-affectionate men. Sharing a bedroll for warmth was one thing, but embracing while on watch was another. The pleasant tumble we’d had back in Zendoorn rarely had a chance to be repeated.

“I’ll tell you a story to pass the time,” I offered. Even the stories I’d grown tired of were new to her. “What would you like?”

“Tell me about…” She thought in the darkness for a while. “Tell me a story about people like us. Tell me that we aren’t alone. You said you’d had sweethearts before…”

I didn’t want to tell her about Mayken, not all the private memories. But… “I know a story about people like us. I saw it on a stage when I was in London. A grand story set in olden times with pagan gods and two girls just like us. Would you like that one?”

“Oh yes!”

I tried to remember everything I could about the play, all confused with shepherds and gods and comic rustics. In the end, the play had left me shaking and filled with questions.

“Once upon a time, there was a band of shepherds who had angered the god Neptune, I don’t remember why. But Neptune demanded that every ten years they must sacrifice the most beautiful and most virtuous maiden in the land. You might think that fathers would be proud to have beautiful and virtuous daughters. Neptune wasn’t the only god in the story. The virgin goddess Diana roamed the woods near where the shepherds lived, and she loved chaste girls. Or you might think that the shepherds would encourage their daughters to be a little less virtuous, if it meant they would live. And the goddess Venus was happy to encourage them in that. But men are strange creatures, so they protected their daughters’ virtue carefully and the mourned what came of it.

“There was a girl named Gallathea who was so pretty and so pure that her father was certain that she would be chosen as the sacrifice, so he took her away to the woods and commanded her to dress in men’s clothing and hide herself away until after the choice was made. Gallathea was embarrassed to wear breeches and a doublet—just like you were at first, Pieter. I still remember how you blushed looking down to see your legs showing! But she did what her father commanded and went to hide in the woods.

“And there was another beautiful virgin named Phillida.  Her father was also certain that she would be chosen to be the sacrifice. So he took her aside and said she must disguise herself as a man and hide away in the woods until Neptune had received his due. Phillida thought it was an immodest thing to do, but she obeyed her father and she, too, put on breeches and a doublet and went to hide herself.”

“Well that was a silly thing!” Pieter said. “Wouldn’t anyone notice they were gone? Wouldn’t they remember two such pretty girls and ask what happened to them?”

“Hush,” I scolded. “It’s a play. People do silly things in plays. Now let me continue. So Gallathea and Phillida chanced to meet each other in the wood, and of course each one thought that the other one was a boy. A very pretty boy.” I smiled at Pieter in that way I knew would make her blush, though I couldn’t see it in the dark. “And they fell in love.”

I couldn’t see her, but I heard her sigh—a quiet little sigh that I remembered from times when I’d touched her just so.

“Both Gallathea and Phillida, they each thought they were in love with a boy, you see? And while they’re hinting at being in love with each other, Diana’s virgin huntresses meet up with Cupid and mock him and he decides to make them all fall madly in love. Some of them fall in love with shepherds and some with Gallathea and Phillida, thinking they were men, but Gallathea and Phillida fall in love without Cupid’s help. But when they each see that the other spurns the love of Diana’s ladies, they begin to suspect that the other might be a woman in disguise.”

Pieter gave another disgusted snort. “I know you said people do silly things in plays, but why would they think that? There are lots of reasons to spurn a woman who’s chasing after you.”

“Ah,” I said, “but they both are thinking a lot about being in disguise, so maybe it just seemed more likely to them. Let me finish. Do you want a story or not?” It had worked to distract us from the cold, but now I wanted to tell Pieter how it ended.

“So Gallathea is worried that if Phillida is really a girl like her, then her love won’t be returned. But if Phillida is a boy like she seems, then falling in love puts her chastity at risk. And Phillida is thinking the same thing. And at the same time, the shepherds pick a different girl to be the sacrifice, but Neptune won’t take her because she isn’t pretty enough. And he gets mad at the shepherds for cheating him, and he’s mad at Diana for making girls all worried about being virgins and then Diana and Venus have a fight about whether it’s better to be in love or to be a virgin.”

“They don’t sound like gods, they sound like people arguing over the price of cabbages in the market.”

We both giggled at that, because it was true.

“Anyway, the fathers confess what they had done when Gallathea and Phillida come back and then the two know they’ve both fallen in love with a girl, and they’re unhappy because they think it means they can’t be together but they swear to all the gods that their love is true and they’ll never love anyone else.”

Pieter gave a little sigh again, but this time it was the kind of sigh you give when you see people being happy. I felt a bit of worry twisting up my belly, because I think Pieter thought we were in love like the girls in the play. And I…I wasn’t sure. I liked her well enough, but I wasn’t sure about being in love. Not like Gallathea and Phillida were in love.

“What happened next?” Pieter asked all in a rush.

“Venus tells everyone that love will triumph and that she’ll turn one of them into a boy so they can get married.”

“Oh.”

There was a long silence after that. I couldn’t tell what Pieter was thinking, just that she was disappointed in how the story ended.

“Martijn.”

“Yes?”

“Martijn…would you want to turn into a boy if it meant you could marry the girl you loved?”

I’d thought about it. I’d thought about it when I'd seen the play. I'd thought about it when I’d been with Mayken. We’d talked about getting married and me leaving the army to settle down with her. And I just…I wasn’t sure. In the army I was Martijn and Martijn was a soldier and a man. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to be Martijn for my whole life. Not even if it meant I could marry Mayken. That was why she’d stayed behind and I marched away.

I shook myself to push the memory away. “There aren’t really pagan gods, you know. They can’t do that. Only God can make miracles and God isn’t going to make that kind of miracle so it doesn’t matter. It’s just a story.”

I don’t know what I would have said after that, but I saw a lantern bobbing in the dark and two voices called out the sign. We answered with the countersign and the watch had changed.

Back in our tent, it took an hour of holding each other close to warm up enough to sleep. I lay there wondering what happened to Gallathea and Phillida after the end of the play.

(copyright 2018 Heather Rose Jones, all rights reserved)

[Continue to the next installment]

* * *

*Historic note: John Lyly’s play Gallathea was first performed in 1588. I haven’t yet pinned down the precise date of these sketches yet, but my current approximation is during the Nine Years’ War of the Grand Alliance, in the 1690s. It’s extremely unlikely that Lyly’s play was still being performed at that date, though some plays of the era did have long runs through multiple revisions and adaptations. But I’ve taken the liberty of having my character see a performance.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 36 (previously 18b) - Interview with Kathleen Knowles - Transcript

(Originally aired 2018/01/13 - listen here)

Heather Rose Jones: Welcome to the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast. Today, we’re having an interview with author Kathleen Knowles. I knew her as Kathy, back a long time ago when we worked at the same biotech company together. Welcome, Kathy.

Kathleen Knowles: Hello!

H: So, I have to start out by saying I am tickled to death at bumping into you again in the context of writing lesbian fiction, because, wow, it’s been like… you said 25 years?

K: Yes, I think so. In the early 90s when we worked at Xoma Corporation.

H: Yah, right before the axe fell and we all got laid off, right?

K: I think I left before that, but yes.

H: Ah. Yes. So, and here we are again!

K: Right, and we met at the Golden Crown Literary Society, last year? Is that right? Or was it in New Orleans?

H: Ah, well, that wasn’t last year. That was two years ago, but I went and heard you at a reading in San Francisco. You and a couple of other Bold Strokes Books authors were reading and, here’s the embarrassing thing, I think at that point it hadn’t clicked in my mind that I already knew you. I figured it out later.

K: Right.

H: So, how did you get interested in writing historical fiction? Why don’t you talk about that a little bit?

K: Well, I’ve read historical fiction. I realized the other day when I was thinking about it for this interview that when I was a teenager, I read a lot of things and some of the things I read were actually romance fiction that were historically based. And I can’t remember too many of the authors names, but I remember thinking that I liked the part of it that had to do with history and with history detail. I always loved reading historical stuff when I was a student and when I came out, I started doing a lot of reading in LGBT history and I’m very interested and have a read a great deal about different periods of time and different people. So, when I decided I wanted to write, and I will say I got started in fanfiction, but the idea that I had was almost automatically going to be historical romance and set in San Francisco, because I like San Francisco history a lot.

H: So, you mentioned you did a lot of reading in LGBT history. Any particularly favorite periods?

K: I don’t have any particular favorite periods, I have favorite authors. Lillian Faderman’s writings on lesbian history and Martin Duberman’s books, I really enjoy. I like biographies. I’ve read a lot of different biographies of people like Vita Sackville-West and Radclyffe Hall and other people. A lot of different people. Those are the kinds of things I like to read.

H: And for your own fiction, I noticed that you’ve got a set of three books, now I’m not sure they’re a set, but you’ve got three books set in San Francisco right around the turn of the 20th century. Two of them have the same pair of characters, is the third one actually connected?

K: The third one is connected. They’re more or less a set. For the third one I made the characters from the first two books, Beth and Kerry, I made them secondary characters and focused on a new set of main characters. So, that’s kind of the style that Bold Strokes Books likes to use if you’re writing like a series of some sort. So, you could consider them a set of three.

H: So, we have Awake unto Me, and then A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and that’s the first two with the same main couple.

K: Yes.

H: And then Two Souls, which is the third book. Do they come in that order?

K: Yes, that’s in order.

H: Because then Two Souls deals with the San Francisco earthquake.

K: Right.

H: I noticed that that’s a bit of a favorite fictional touchstone for people. You aren’t the only person who set a lesbian story around the time of the quake. What drew you to that particular era, or is that a really silly question?

K: Well, first of all, I started out, and I’m not sure why I picked the turn of the century in particular, it sort of just evolved that I wanted a… I started with a war-time setting, which happened to be the Spanish American War. And when I thought about that and thought if what if I ever wrote anymore books and continued this story, that it would naturally go to the San Francisco earthquake. I don’t know what it is about earthquakes, you know, you live in the Bay Area too, but earthquakes are something people talk a lot about, and it’s very much identified with San Francisco. The 1906 earthquake, lucky for me, has a huge amount of things written about it. Plenty of sources for different kinds of details, whatever basic part of it you want to focus on, you can find something out about it. And I thought it would be an interesting thing to have my characters go through. All of them, basically six characters in the book, and they all have various ways of dealing with the earthquake. It’s a disaster, it makes people react in different ways. So, that’s what I was interested in.

H: It’s always a fun thing to throw at characters to make them react in extreme situations like that.

K: Oh, I think so, yes.

H: So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what goes on in the books? A little plot synopsis.

K: Ok. In the first book, Awake unto Me, is when the two characters, Beth and Kerry, meet and they meet with a person that they have in common. And they… one’s basically an orphan and had been adopted. She was orphaned when she was a young teenager and she was adopted by someone. And grew up, up to that point that she was adopted, in the Barbary Coast, which is a pretty hard-core bad part of town. That’s Kerry. And Beth grew up in a very middle-class family but had a history of abuse by, I think it was the family minister. So, they sort of meet by chance because the guy that, the doctor who adopted Kerry, Beth ends up in nursing school and he’s one of her professors. That’s how they meet. So, the first book describes their courtship, how they met, and how they fall in love. And there’s a separation in it, where Beth is sent off to war in the Philippines as a nurse and she’s gone for quite a period of time. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but basically they get together and they become lovers. In the second book, which a lot of people don’t like to read what happens after the happily ever after is what they like to have in their heads, and they’re done. They’re basically, I’ve heard people say, “Well, I’m just done.”

H: “I don’t want to know if it doesn’t work out.” Yanno?

K: Yeah, it all worked out, everything’s great. But I tend to think that sometimes things are a little more interesting later on when you’re trying to keep a relationship together and there’s all kinds of pressures on relationships and I presume that wouldn’t be any different even if it was 1900. It wouldn’t make any difference, there would still be issues and problems and people would have to work through in order to keep their relationship going. So that what the second one, The Spark of Heavenly Fire, is about. It’s about how they get through a really rough period in their lives and manage not to break-up. Finally, Two Souls… Beth and Kerry are there, they basically live with Beth’s former professor who, and she’s now become a doctor instead of a nurse and her mentor and his romantic partner, I have unmarried… I make a big deal about the fact there’s an unmarried couple, so another doctor. And they live in a big house, I basically picture up on Fillmore Street, the upper part of Fillmore street. And another doctor who is living with them for a time, moved out from New York. Her name’s Norah, and Norah actually… Kerry’s the one that introduces Norah to the woman who becomes her love interest, because her, Abigail, Abby, is not a doctor. The only main character… well, she’s a doctor, and Kerry is a cook. But Abigail is a Naturalist and she’s based on a real person, that I was quite impressed when I heard a story of. That’s what happens is, basically the earthquake is what happens, and that’s what they all have to deal with in various ways. Of course, all the people who are doctors are working on issues. Basically, they’re helping refugees in Golden Gate Park, they’re taking care of medical issues for refugees. And Abigail is a member of the California Academy of Sciences, has other issues to deal with. Kerry was a cook at the Palace Hotel, which burns down, and she’s injured during the course of the earthquake and so she’s dealing with an injury and having lost her job. So, that’s the plot of the third book in the series. So, most of the focus is on Abigail and Norah, because it’s their love story and it’s about them falling in love and becoming partners. That’s it.

H: And as you say, living there in San Francisco as you do, there are enormous historical resources for the era and for exactly what went on and what peoples’ lives were like. I’m wondering about resources for developing the relationships of these women. What were some of your challenges or your favorites parts about setting up their relationships in a historic context?

K: I think for anybody who writes historical fiction, romance fiction or other kinds of fiction, is understanding that people have the same emotions, I believe, they have experienced the same sort of emotions that we do in the present day. But they’re not always going to be expressed and, particularly, sexuality was really repressed around the turn of the century. It just simply wasn’t something that people talk about, but I just remembered, one of the reasons why I did pick the turn of the century to start with, Heather, is because at that point there actually did exist, at least in technical literature and in the minds and views of psychiatrists and other doctors, there was a concept of gay identity. They had named it, they had given it names, they knew what lesbians were and they knew what gay men were. So, those concepts existed, and I used the fact that a lot of my characters were doctors, particularly the one from New York, to point out the fact that people actually knew they existed, they had a name for it, it wasn’t a mystery of any kind. So, they could, to a certain extent, discuss it. Although, the part that’s difficult for people falling in love is there’s…. they don’t know it, none of the characters, at least at first, they don’t understand what it is that they’re going through, and they don’t have a name for it and they don’t call it anything until they found out later. I’m speaking Kerry and Beth. They find out later, from their friend, the doctor from New York, Esther, what it’s called. You know, she says this is something that happens to certain people and it’s not like it’s a terrible thing. Of course, I had to give them some supportive secondary characters, I didn’t want it to revolve around peoples’ horrible reactions to it. So, I figure San Francisco was a place, is a place, it certainly was a place from the very start that absorbed a lot of different people form a lot of different places, so I think of San Francisco as a place where nothing can surprise anybody.

H: Yeah, and I always like to look at it that, you know, it’s not erasing the fact that many peoples’ lives in the past were awful, but we as authors get to choose which stories we want to tell. And there were happy stories that can be told.

K: Yes.

H: So, where do you want to go in the future in your historic writing? What projects do you have in mind to work on?

K: That’s a great question. My co-worker, I guess, other writer, another writer I admire very much, who writes for Bold Strokes books, Justine Saracen is here pen name, has always told me, she said, “WWI! That’s the place you’ve gotta go!” She writes a lot about WWII, some really excellent books, but she says, “WWI is where you want to go! That’s the period of time that nobodies paid very much attention to! You oughtta do that!”

H: I was going to say, I will argue that pre-twentieth Century is what nobodies doing, but yah, within the 20th century, I’ll take that.

K: Ok, that’s funny. I think the WWI period is really interesting, but I think what I might be more interested in, even though it’s the same general time-frame, is the beginning of the US suffragist movement. Insofar as I know, California was one of the states that women got the vote a bit before the entire country, but I’m not sure of the exact year of that. It’s something I ran across. So, I’m thinking I want to write a story about a Suffragist and another woman from some sort of background I haven’t figured out yet, write a romance novel with that background. Women getting the right to vote. And the other one I want to do is actually WWII in San Francisco, or post WWII San Francisco when all the soldiers and the sailors, who were essentially dismissed from the service if they were found out to be gay, they basically stayed in San Francisco and Los Angeles and started gay communities. That’s where it all started is right after WWII. So, I think I’d like to write a story about that period of San Francisco’s history. One more, because I’ve been interested in and slightly obsessed with for a long time – the Paris of the 1920s, pre-1920s, post WWI in the 1920s. So much has been written about it, a lot has been written about that period of time in terms of the actual history of it, the facts surrounding it. You know, Natalie Barney’s salon and Gertrude Stein’s salon and the publishing that women did in Paris during that period. But I think I’d like to fictionalize someone, possibly the reporter Janet Flanner, the New Yorker reporter who wrote the letter from Paris. She arrived in Paris with a lover in toe, but I think I might just get rid of that and have it be somebody, meet someone in Paris.

H: Yeah, you can always just use her as a model.

K: Yup. So, those are my three historical periods so far.

H: Uh huh. Any other topics you’d like to talk about before we start closing this up?

K: Well, I write contemporary fiction as well as historical fiction, but most of the time, ultimately, I think I’m writing historical fiction even when I’m writing contemporary fiction and it’s because I like to have a context for peoples’ lives, I mean, my life has a context. It doesn’t really occur in a vacuum and it occurs with a lot of other stuff happening around it. Partly because I live in San Francisco and I’ve lived her for a very long time, and I’ve been out for a very long time. I like to use a something, the book that I just got published this month deals Indiana’s Religious Freedom Act, in 2015. That’s the background of the story. So, I think I’m always, almost always basically writing historical fiction.

H: Uh huh. So, where can your fans and readers find you online if they want to learn more about your books or follow you on social media?

K: I am on Facebook under Kathy Knowles, you can just look me up. And I’m on Amazon, I have an Author’s Page that I need to do some maintenance on, but I can be reached through Bold Strokes Books Publishers on my page in Bold Strokes books. There’re all kinds of ways to get a hold of me. Especially by email or by Facebook. And I tweet once in a while.

H: Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure having you on the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast.

K: Thanks for asking me, Heather, it was really great.

Show Notes

A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.

In this episode we talk about:

• Kathy’s interest in reading about the LGBT history of San Francisco
• Her favorite historians, including Lillian Faderman, Martin Duberman
• What inspired her three connected novels set in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, culminating with the Great Earthquake
• Historic eras Kathy would like to tackle in future books, including the US Suffragist movement, post-World War II San Francisco, and the Paris salon culture of the 1920s
• Books mentioned
  • Awake Unto Me by Kathleen Knowles
  • A Spark of Heavenly Fire by Kathleen Knowles
  • Two Souls by Kathleen Knowles

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

Links to Kathleen Knowles Online

• Website: Kathleen Knowles at Bold Strokes Books
• Twitter: @knowleskathy
• Facebook: Kathy Knowles