Interview - Kate Laity

I was at the brilliant Magus event at the weekend and our own (yup, she visits us therefore she is ours) Kate Laity was presenting. So it should come as no surprise that at the end of the first day we took off to a local pub where I suspect the barman deliberately turned up the bad music since it wasn't exactly busy but there we are, you are used to the random background noise in my interviews by now.

Kate and I started out discussing her academic career and why it is that Medievalists were such quick adopters of the internet. Working in such a specialised area the internet made a huge difference to the accessability to texts and ideas.
Since we were at the Alan Moore conference we discussd comics and performance and the work she does with her students, creating a visual narrative and drawing performance into their work. She forces them to use social media in their studies, wish i'd had lecturers like that.

Kate's presentation was focused on geography, Moore is very focused on place, particularly Northampton while Kate loves to travel and move around so we talked about literature and resonance of place which is just a gorgeous phrase.

We moved on to Kate's fantasy writing and her love of fairy tales and working medieval magic into her stories. If you don't know what a donkey skin tale is, it's not gross, just go listen, she is fascinating on every subject but it was a real pleasure hearing her talk about mythology and female perspective.

We also talk about C.Margery Kempe, Kate's alternative identity under which name she writes erotic romance, but who is named after a fascinating historical character.

Kate is a wonderful interviwee so go and have a listen.

Kate's coverage of Magus, the Alan Moore conference can be found on her blog with posts here.