![]() ![]() ![]() Kate and I, now living far away from one another and both sheltering at home in the second month of the pandemic, reconvened (part of) that writing group over email to talk about the fruits of her labor, and bringing a book out during a global pandemic. Now, that very same novel, Kept Animals, is out in the world, a sprawling but tightly controlled book about California, horses, family, class, race, love, and violence kaleidoscoping out from a ranch in Topanga Canyon in the early 1990s. This was my first exposure to the life of a working writer-Milliken had just won the Iowa Short Fiction Award for her book of short stories, If I’d Known You Were Coming-and I was awestruck by her commitment to what seemed like the very daunting undertaking of writing a novel while also fulfilling her other obligations as a person. I remember specifically that she once checked herself into a motel for two nights, the longest she could get away, to plug away at a massive revision she was supposed to be sending to her agent. ![]() Kate was deep in the weeds with a long, epic-sounding novel that she was working on in pieces around her other responsibilities, which included raising two young kids. I met Kate Milliken when we both lived in the Bay Area and our mutual friend, the novelist Edan Lepucki, convened a small writing group to exchange pages and encouragement. ![]()
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