The Query

To Whom It May Concern,

I write.  I love to write.  I also love to live.  I soak up the peculiarities of life, pull them in through my pores, my mouth, my delicate parts.  I fill up with the delicious funk of the underground, then spread it onto the page so I can look at it again, word-sculpt the experience, offering the reflection up to the weirdness from whence it came.

I am a storyteller.  My material is inspired by dreams, travel, people I meet and the multifarious jobs I have the privilege of working.  My resume is an amalgamation of teaching, care-giving, and healer occupations combined with various black market gigs.

I have served coffee, taught preschool, written ethnography and taken care of people living with multiple sclerosis.  I have been a massage therapist, a dominatrix, a circus acrobat, a grass delivery girl.  I have worked at an underground poker club, modeled, nannied, written children's stories, and organized music festivals.  For a while I was teaching yoga and infant massage at a water birthing clinic in Peru.  This morning I went to the senior citizen's center down the road and helped them make puppets.  

The list continues.  Most of the jobs have found me.  For whatever lovely reason, these ventures continue to present themselves fluidly and with graceful timing.  I have never been destitute, seeking to make money with the immediacy of fiscal desperation.  Rather, I am perpetually curious and "yes" has treated me well over the years.

I would like to write for you.  There are gorgeous stories that come from deep inside this country.  They are engaging, important and have the capacity to generate understanding and compassion. As a writer, a dancer, a pseudo-academic with an attraction to the cultural nuances of birth, death and sex, a non-threatening woman, able to connect with varied social groups, I am lucky enough to play in and reflect upon taboo spaces in this world. 

This is not a request to wax nostalgic on imagined better times, nor is it a memoir describing exciting lives I've lived.  This is the life I continue to live.  Mine is richly colored because I am part of communities that are marginalized through the social boundaries that dictate, not only legal from criminal, but fringe from mainstream, creative from hegemonic, ugly from beautiful. 

I would like to write for you.  There are stories that come from deep inside me.  I would like to share them.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Katrina Lys Pratt