Judith was awarded a 2011 Pushcart Prize for "Certainty," from Great River Review.

Half in Shade

Available Spring 2012

(Coffee House Press)

Half in Shade is a series of lyric pieces written variously to, from, or around old photographs found in family albums and scrapbooks. Among the predictable photos I found playful moments, oddball scenes, remnants of our national history. Often, I had no way to identify the subjects, and no one I could ask, but they provoked a train of thought that allowed me to explore both fact and fantasy. Some of the pieces are seriously playful. Some are playfully serious. The shortest is a paragraph, the longest is 30 pages. But each, in one way or another, delves into the mystery of another life, another time. Since each photo was locked in its own era, I wanted language to bring it alive in new ways—to give it contemporary significance . Thus my challenge as a writer was not to describe, but to interact. Not to confirm, but to activate and resurrect. — Judith Kitchen

REVIEW

"But say, I recently read a gorgeous collection of personal essays coming soon from Coffee House Press: Half in Shade, by Judith Kitchen, who has written and published in all genres. As with many true stories (fiction and non), the book is funny, delightful, whimsical, mysterious, and also sad—and in the course of the narrative, the author asks, rhetorically, of writing nonfiction (of saying, as best she can, what it means to her personally to be human and mortal): "How dare I make something beautiful?" But to make something beautiful is not just our writerly privilege—it's our responsibility, too. And the question for writers, no matter the genre, has to be, "How dare we not?"" — Dinah Lenney, in The Gamut, USC blog