Katie McKy
Columnist

When Katie McKy was a teacher, she tended to lean against her chalk sill each day. The chalk dust would put a fine, skunky streak on her rump, which always pleased her students.

Now that lives in a basement in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, plying the writer’s life, she grows progressively paler: looking rather chalky all over. Had someone told her that the writer’s life is very much like Gollum’s life, with a lot of mumbling and self-loathing, but sans the pretty “precious,” she might have remained in a classroom.

On those rare occasions when Katie does emerge, squinting, to procure potatoes or Shredded Wheat, she tends to scare store clerks, for isolation makes her very much like a wide-pawed puppy, which is fine when you’re a quadruped covered with golden fur, but unsettling when you’re a biped with a topknot. Optometrists could make good diagnostic use of the pupils of the people that Katie meets.

Prior to writing in a basement, Katie taught emotionally disturbed children in Appalachia, Roxbury and on a reservatio n. And no, that doesn’t explain everything. 

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