Rosie the Riveter closeup

Apply Acid and Scrub

Karin Kallmaker Cheers & Chocolate, LIFE + STYLE

Rosie the Riveter closeup
I got the proverbial fly up my fundament about the floor this week. About 75% of our downstairs (about a thousand square feet) is a light sandy Italian tile that doesn’t ever show much dirt. The grout color was “mobe pearl.” I don’t know what a “mobe” is but for several years now, the only “pearl” that described most of the grout would have been the name of Captain Jack Sparrow’s ship. Read More

From the hand drawn 1989 Naiad Press cover of In Every Port, a silhouetted women in blue gazes out an airplane window at clouds.

20 Years and 20 More

Karin Kallmaker Events and Appearances, In Every Port, Readers and Libraries, Stepping Stone

My very first book was published in 1989. That’s right – twenty years ago. In the last century. It could make a person feel old. But I feel grateful.

I could probably write volumes about the last twenty years, most of it only interesting to me and some of it not even. I think I’ll pass. Instead, I want to continue the theme of being grateful, because I’ve just arrived home after a wonderful trip, the kind of trip that most folks think authors do all the time, and most authors will tell you are rare. I hopped a flight to Dallas, the Big D. And I met about 60 lesbians I’d never met before. Read More

music staves with brightly color notes and signatures

Senseless Acts of Singing

Karin Kallmaker Cheers & Chocolate, Stepping Stone, Unforgettable

MaryPoppinsOriginalSoundtrack

It was a San Francisco moment. On Pride Sunday this past summer, I went up the stairs from MUNI to the street. I was on my way to the premiere of Hannah Free. As I reached the bottom of the short escalator to the street level a group of men burst into song. Ahead, another cluster turned and joined in. For about thirty seconds, there was musical theater in the subway station, and why not? Read More