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E.E. King is a painter, performer, writer, and biologist - She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals.
Ray Bradbury called her stories, “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought-provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.”
E. E. King
How the Monarchs Came to Utah, flash fiction, issue 54, March 2021
Her books include Dirk Quigby’s Guide to the Afterlife, Electric Detective, Pandora’s Card Game, The Truth of Fiction and Blood Prism.
King has won numerous various awards and fellowships for art, writing, and environmental research.
She’s been published widely, most recently in Clarkesworld.
King was the founding Director of the Esperanza Community Housing’s Art & Science Program worked as an artist-in-residence in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sarajevo, and the J. Paul Getty Museum’s and Science Center’s Arts & Science Development Program.
Her landmark mural, A Meeting of the Minds (121’ x 33’) can be seen on Mercado La Paloma in Los Angeles. King has also painted murals for Escuelas Para La Vida in Cuenca, Spain, and in Tuscany, Italy.
She’s worked with children in Bosnia, crocodiles in Mexico, frogs in Puerto Rico, egrets in Bali, mushrooms in Montana, archaeologists in Spain, butterflies in South Central Los Angeles, lectured on island evolution and marine biology on cruise ships in the South Pacific and the Caribbean, painted murals in Los Angeles and Spain and has been published widely.
Check out paintings, writing, musings, and books at :
Follow her at https://twitter.com/ElizabethEvKing
https://whatsinanafterlife.wordpress.com/
Get to know E. E. King...
Birthdate?
10/11/1900
When did you start writing?
2005.
When and what and where did you first get published?
My first story, “Dirk Snigby's Guide to the Afterlife” was published in Next Stop Hollywood, by St. Martin's Press, in 2007. I later expanded it into my first book, Dirk Quigby's Guide to the Afterlife.
What themes do you like to write about?
Death and Belief. is there anything else?
Also reality vs. belief. We see only a small percentage of available light waves, yet persist in trusting that what we see, or hear, is real.
Your dog sees and perceives a different world than you do (especially if you don’t have a dog) but it is no less real. A lot of my work has a biological/scientific base.
I think that most of the world’s problems are caused not by racism but by speciesism. We don't even try to understand the alien intelligence of other species and they could teach us a lot. Imagine navigating like a bird, or touching like an octopus!
I never really thought about it, but your question makes me realize that all my work deals with conflicting perceptions of truth and sometimes imaginary dogs.
I raise a lot of birds and beasts and they usually find their way into my work. My cat, Max, is in every book.
I used to be the director of an art and science program in South Central Los Angeles. I painted murals, taught afterschool art classes, and started a garden project.
The children and I planted milkweed, the host plant for monarch butterflies, in the narrow swaths of dirt between sidewalk and street. What if we could make the streets a walking garden and create a migration path for monarchs in the heart of the inner-city? I would travel back and forth from work to home with my car full of pupas. It worked for a while.
Now I’m going to share my great idea with you. You can steal it if you like. I wish you would. This is the idea: If every stretch of unused dirt, parkways, medians, etc. were planted with milkweed, monarchs would inhabit our streets.
Be Johnny Milkweed seed. Milkweed needs little water or care and proliferates with the abandon of Mormon rabbits. It is completely drought tolerant. It can grow almost anywhere, and once established, needs no care. Currently Monarch’s migratory patterns are at risk due to habitat loss, climate change, and Monsanto poison. However, if you plant Milkweed they will come. Just imagine a cities heartbeat pulsing in tempo to the rhythm of orange wings!
Then I moved to a Magic town in Mexico for three years. I go back each year for Día de Muertos, to drink in the music and love that hangs in the air so thick, it’s almost tangible. I check my shoes for marigold petals, the flowers of death, just to make sure I’m still alive because in the Magic towns of Mexico (Pueblos Mágicos) anything could happen. Old Gods and new ones waltz arm in arm, and everything seems possible.
From there I moved to Utah, hence the origins of this tale.
What books and/or stories have most resonated with you as an author?
Too many to list. I like reading and listening to both science (mostly biology or quantum physics) and fiction. I hate listing epiphanal works because I always end up forgetting huge influences. Aldous Huxley, Saki, and Ray Bradbury, though, are at the top of most of my lists.
Why? How do these stories and their characters find expression in your work?
I love the poetry of Bradbury, the intelligence of Huxley, and the brevity of Saki. My father was a writer, Dolph Sharp. He told me stories. He also hosted a writer's group with Ray Bradbury in it. When I began to write, my father was dead by then, Ray mentored me. He was extremely generous to young writers.
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