What a time for an exchange student to arrive, Daria thought, especially one from another planet! Daria is one of Earth's youngest licensed breeders of endangered species, and she has enough to do caring for her menagerie without having to cope with Fen. Besides his color-shifting and endless questions, there is something about the way the lanky alien looks at her animals and his stubborn, even hostile refusal to talk about the creatures of his own world that makes Daria nervous. Fen, on the other hand, can't be happier with his new Earth family. Hoping for one pet, he lands in a zoo. Not one of his fellow exchange students, living in homes scattered across the Earth, has been as lucky, but each has found at least one animal to love, and all cherish the same wild, mysterious dream. With a sharp eye for human, alien, and animal ways, Kate Gilmore has written a challenging tale.
I went to Antioch College in the fifties--a gloomy time in many places, but not at Antioch, where intellectual curiosity, personal freedom, and comfortably left-wing politics were the norm. It was also the home of several remarkable theatre programs, and there I lost my heart to the stage and, not incidentally, to writing--first for the stage, later for other venues.
I participated in at least 80 theatre productions, many of these with the Antioch Area Theatre and Shakespeare Under the Stars, performing almost every theatrical task from directing to prompting. My verse play, Dark Wind Light Wind, was performed as the senior project of my friend Niela Miller. On the side, I played french horn and violin in the Springfield, Ohio and occasionally the Dayton Symphonies and studied both violin and horn with private teachers.
After college I went home to write more plays, a program that was derailed when I met my future husband, John Gilmore, a brilliant, if somewhat erratic player in the early days of computer systems design.
What followed were many years in New York, as well as Italy, London, Iran, and rural New Hampshire, two excellent children and no writing.
I wrote my first novel at the age of 50 something and am the author of eight other books, five of which have been published.
Rainbow Over a Dark Canal - An American girl finds first loneliness and misery, then love and joy while living for a year in Venice with her mother. Published as an ebook by Barnes and Noble.
Of Griffins and Graffiti - a caper in which a group of middle class New York kids paint the word 'peace' on an intercontinental jet.
Remembrance of the Sun - the love story of an American teenage girl and a young Iranian revolutionary just before the fall of the Shah.
Jason and the Bard - a young actor spends the summer at a great Shakespeare festival.
Enter Three Witches - a boy struggles to keep his new girl away from the three witches (mother, grandmother and housekeeper) in this home.
The Exchange Student - young visitors from a planet that has lost all its higher animals come to marvel at the zoological riches of Earth. Book I of The Animals of Chela trilogy.
The Caverns of Kwandalin - Scientists from Earth and Chela search for the frozen genetic material of Chela's long extinct animals. Book II of the trilogy.
Animals of Chela - Book III of the trilogy in which humans and Chelans unite to bring the extinct animals back to life and save them from hostile entities. Work in progress.
The Missing Menagerie - a 30 page, potentially illustrated story of an 11th century boy who lets his father's menagerie of mythical animals go free. For a younger audience than my other books. In search of a publisher.
