-APPRENTICE HOUSE AUTHOR-
Katherine Cottle
MY OTHER BOOKS
Baltimore Sideshow
Written by Katherine Cottle and Illustrated by Shannon Rowan
979-8668475506 $11.99 (2020) 118 pages
Cottle and Rowan form a dynamic duo of word and image, illustrating and illuminating the lost treasures of Baltimore's unique and often freakish history. Both words and images range from coarse to subtle, tender to gross. We have success here in this collaboration as words without images and images without words would fail to present this complete picture of "Charm City's" refined yet macabre past. Flip through this survey of strangeness and let your finger fall where it may. This well researched and cleverly crafted compilation entertains, fascinates, and will not fail to delight sober professors or Natty Bo inebriated grads alike. "Baltimore Sideshow" is a "charming" look at "Bawlmer's" flawed superheroes and their incubator, this strange and utterly unique city called "Baltimore."-- Ryan Tkac, Artist and Musician
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I Remain Yours.
Secret Mission Love Letters of My Mormon Great-Grandparents, 1900-1903
ISBN-978-1-62720-006-6 $23.95 (2014) 382 pages
I Remain Yours documents the past through the present by redirecting the epistolary form as a mode of cross-generational communication, exploring the reality that love and writing remain long after the end of the individual life span. Cottle collects actual postmarked love letters from 1900-1903, sent secretly between her great-grandparents while her great-grandfather returned to his parents' homeland of Sweden to serve a Mormon mission, and weaves in her own responsive love letters back to her deceased great-grandparents, written during a self-imposed 2 1/2-year mission to understand the gifts and weights of her inherited creativity. In addressing her lineage, both literally and figuratively, Cottle realizes there is a fine line between the dead and the living, her past and her future families, as well as within the links of predetermined loyalty and destiny.
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Listen to an inteview with Aaron Henkin: wypr.org/term/katherine-cottle
Halfway: A Journal through Pregnancy
ISBN-978-1-934074-50-3 $16.95 (2010) 224 pages
Halfway is a memoir that explores the state of transition. Existing both with and without a child, Cottle reinforces the challenges of residing between two worlds of human experience. She compares the halfway parallels of addiction, recovery, and terminal illness, as the lives of those around her mirror her own journey through the entrance to motherhood.
Though movie-like in its artful cuts from story to story, now to then, dream-time to real-time, prose to poetry, it suggests a movie that is perhaps too graphic to be made, one that is as unflinching as the title of the book's first section: The Clot Baby. The book is exhausting, horrifying, and deeply gratifying.
-Clarinda Harriss, author of Dirty Blue Voice and Air Travel
My Father's Speech
ISBN-978-1-934074-30-5 $9.95 (2008) 60 pages
My Father's Speech is a fascinating window into the world of growing up in coal country. There's not enough poetry, or writing in general, that explores the work-a-day world and the lives of 'ordinary' people. Katherine Cottle has given us an excellent example of what a good writer can do with such rich source material.
-Reginald Harris, author of Ten Tongues
Katherine Cottle's poems take risks, and spend time diving under the surface of questions about self, history, family, and religion. They took me into a world I knew nothing about, but found fascinating.
-Christine Stewart, Director, "Write Here, Write Now"
(Photo: Ma-kun-to-wip Valley, Utah, late 19th century)