From the ages of five to eighteen, Monique de Varennes lived in a series of boarding schools; the stories she read and sometimes wrote during those years were her delight and her escape. Her
work as an editor and writer ranges from the frothy to the dark. She has written two books for children, which appeared on lists of Best and Honors books. Her short stories for adults have been published in literary journals and anthologies. “Cabeza,” which appeared in the journal Calyx, received a Pushcart Prize. Monique studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received her M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is working on a memoir
of her odd childhood and quirky, secretive family that was sparked by the essays she wrote for this collection.
Website: moniquedevarennes.com
Born mid-century in the Midwest, a middle child of five, Kathryn Hagen made her way to New York at age seventeen to study fashion design at Parsons School of Design and painting at the Art Students League. Her adventurous spirit and creative compulsions have been fueled by art, local and international teaching, exotic travel, trail marathons, and creating design and academic textbooks. Her many years of teaching fashion design include two decades at Otis College of Art and Design and six years as Chair of Fashion Design at Woodbury University. She has also taught writing, as well as fashion and art history for universities in China and at CSULB in California. Her published works include Illustration for Fashion Designers, Portfolio for Fashion Designers, and Garb: A Fashion and Culture Reader (Prentice Hall). More recently, she completed the first book in the E-Race Trilogy, a future speculative series exploring artificial intelligence, genetics, and Utopian innovation.
Reading words saved Tinker Lindsay as a child. Writing words has saved her as an adult. She loves to explore humanity’s innate paradoxes, and lives and works under the Hollywood Sign, an appropriately ironic location. Tinker is an author, screenwriter, and conceptual editor of others’ works. A WGA member, her produced films have featured a depressed shrink (Hector and the Search for Happiness, with Simon Pegg and Rosamund Pike); an insecure policeman (Security, with Marco D’Amore); and a stressful vacation (A Sudden Case of Christmas with Danny DeVito and Andie MacDowell). Lindsay’s short film Catch and Release, adapted from her titular short story, deals with micro-aggressive misogyny, wrapped inside a solar eclipse. Published books include The Rule of Ten series about a Buddhist detective struggling to balance mindfulness with murder. Currently she writes whatever tales show up asking to be told – preferably in collaboration with people she loves. Enter ALTERED: STORIES WE FOUND IN OUR CLOSETS. May you enjoy reading these essays as much as she’s enjoyed writing them, alongside her sister-scribes. May you also be inspired to write your own.
Website: tinkerlindsay.com
Emilie R. Small is a Los Angeles-based television writer, screenwriter, and author. She has written for numerous television productions, including Trapper John, M.D., Hotel, Family Medical Center, and St. Elsewhere, for which she received an Emmy Nomination for the episode
entitled “Newheart.” She is a member of the Writers Guild of America West and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. She received her B.A. from University of California Los Angeles and her M.A. from New York University in History of the Modern Far East. Emilie has recently completed her first novel, which takes us on a journey of self-discovery with a West Coast college girl in the late 1960s: an illegal abortion, student demonstrations against the Vietnam war, and sexual awakening in an evolving love relationship, as she tours the West with her hippie friends’ rock n’ roll band. Given the clothing theme of ALTERED: STORIES WE FOUND IN OUR CLOSETS, Emilie, who is not a fashion maven by any means, couldn’t imagine what to write, but finding an old fishing vest in her closet evoked such strong memories that the story just flowed from her pen.
Barbara Sweeney studied Fine Art at the University of Southern California, advertising design at Art Center College of Design and Spanish language at the Instituto Cultural de Oaxaca, Mexico. She survived a Catholic childhood, Colorado Outward Bound Wilderness training and a career in advertising, earning awards from the New York and Chicago film festivals and a Lulu for ethnic advertising. Along with actress Patricia Bethune, Barbara co-authored What Can I Do?, a handbook for caregivers. She’s been a guest speaker at Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena, and taught seminars for Encore Media in Denver, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and The Open School in Los Angeles. Her poetry has appeared in multiple quarterlies and anthologies, including The American Scholar and The Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry. She is represented by Anna Olswanger, Olswanger Literary, LLC.
Website: basweeney.com
Contributing Authors
Bev Baz is a reader, writer, assemblage artist, singer, rodeo clown, and bon vivant. The proud owner of a chest filled with unpublished novels, stories, and essays, she loves to write but not so much the other stuff. Possessing a restless spirit and wanderlust, she’s worn many hats in her life but most recently toiled as a Story Analyst for film production companies. She was forced to retire from writing reviews and synopses when her sanity was threatened while reading the eight thousandth chase scene. A longtime resident of her beloved Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles, Bev fled when the area was overtaken by hordes of young men sporting Snidely Whiplash mustaches riding penny-farthing bicycles. She now lives peacefully in the liminal mystery of the vast Mojave Desert.
Adventure and drama are in Lucretia Bingham’s blood. She grew up on an isolated island in the Bahamas where she and her brother hunted sharks and treasure as much as they went to school. As a freelance travel writer and photographer, Lucretia Bingham’s credits include publication in Vanity Fair, Conde Nast Traveler, Los Angeles Times Travel Magazine, Islands Magazine, Smithsonian, and Saveur. She has also published four novels, all of which are available on Amazon.
Website: lucretiabingham.com
Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D. is an evolutionary catalyst, contextual disruptor, poet, and freelance mentor who has been a pioneer in the field of body intelligence and relationships for over fifty years. She describes her purpose: “I feel through to the heart with laser love and evoke essence through deep play.” She is co-author of twelve books, including the bestselling Conscious Loving, At the Speed of Life, and the new Conscious Loving Ever After: How to Create Thriving Relationships at Midlife and Beyond, as well as a book of poetry, A Waterbaby Contemplates Dry Land. Katie has been a successful entrepreneur since the 1970s and has developed a unique experientially based coaching program that has trained hundreds of coaches in the U.S., Asia, and Europe.
Website: hendricks.com
Hilary Dole Klein is a memoirist, journalist, photographer, and editor. Raised in Florence, Italy, and Santa Barbara, she left home at fourteen for boarding school, Stanford, and NYU. After collecting two degrees, one husband, and three children, she returned to Santa Barbara and began her writing career. Amid stints as a food editor, restaurant critic, and writing teacher, she’s written hundreds of articles on artists, travel, health, romance, pests, films, astrology, heroes, and her family—who eagerly await her switch to fiction. Hilary has also written or edited eight books, including Santa Barbara Cooks and Tiny Game Hunting, and was the founding editor of Destination Wine Country magazine. A series of articles she wrote for the Santa Barbara Independent were made into a Lifetime movie, A Mother’s Fight for Justice, nominated for a Humanitas Award.
Website: hilarydoleklein.com
Patricia Stiles worked professionally as an illustrator, a model, and a popular Professor of Fashion Illustration at Otis College of Art and Design, but she reserved her deepest love for writing. Her fiction was published in literary magazines and was recognized in a number of literary competitions, including the NY Stories Short Fiction Contest, the William Faulkner Competition, New Millennium Writing, and The Speakeasy Prize judged by Amy Bloom. The essay that appears in these pages was previously published in the anthology Garb: A Fashion and Culture Reader. Pat was a founder and guiding light of our writing group and a beloved friend. She died in 2023.