My grandma name is Mimi, which I promptly adopted as my creative pseudonym. My given name is Kareylyn. Although I come a family of artists and writers, when it comes to painting I have felt paralyzed for most of my adult life; likely due to a university art teacher who pulled me aside and told me I could paint anything I wanted for the final assignment and he would give me an A grade.
Taking him at his word, instead of painting as per what he asked the rest of the class to do, I painted an iris flower that reminded me of the flowers we picked near the river behind our house to place on my father’s grave every year, beginning when I was 6 years of age. The teacher gave me a C, and had no recollection of our conversation.
Fast forward 30 years to the day I just started scribbling out of a need to journal through color and no words. Since then, the creative process has become one of my meditative, Zen-like practices that allows me to slow down and simply be, which is a state of being in my soul that has been harder to access in recent years, due to witnessing a suicide in 2019.
With a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Utah, author of the School Library Journal starred review high fantasy novel, Secret Speakers and the Search for Selador’s Gate (which sells now at a 73% discounted price of a whopping $4.99), lately my writing consists of digging deep to find the funny by writing about THEGAP—things that haven’t gone as planned. And my life has had a lot of THEGAP. Those writings are on my blog, Keep Digging, Girl. You can click on it on the menu.
K. Pressman 