Writing - Bio
Page 1

Download Bio

Kathleen, 2010 Fellow at the newly formed Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony in Provincetown, Mass., reads on a regular basis at The Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village.  She thanks the Café’s Curator, Angelo Verga for his continued support.

Kathleen is a member of Irish American Writers and Artists, the International Women’s Writing Guild and the American Irish Historical Society.  She holds a B.A. in Theatre with a minor in English from SUNY at Albany (1981).  She has taught as guest artist at Bennington College, VT.

As a member in the Acting Unit of The Actors Studio, she often writes from improv and sense memory exercises.  For example, an actor uses an Affective Memory to explore physical sensations during a past emotional event, concentrating on the five senses rather than the feelings of the event or even ‘remembering’ what happened.  Kathleen then writes in first person the experience of the recalled memory. 

The result is writing that springs from the page with sensory detail and an authentic voice.  Long-time members of The Actors Studio, including Ellen Burstyn, are fascinated by this original use of Affective Memory and full of encouragement.

Thus, Kathleen continues to investigate a major theme of her work, sleepwalking.

NON-FICTION

Her current project, SOMNILOQUIES, A MEMOIR OF SLEEPWALKING, explores Kathleen’s twenty-year history of sleepwalking and sleep terrors (from age 11-30) including the origins and history of somnambulism in her Irish American family, dangerous episodes she nearly didn’t survive, her attempts to ‘self medicate’, the severe accident that finally brought her into recovery from the malady and her varied roads to healthy sleep.

Click here to read more