Kathleen McNamara
The stories in Kathleen McNamara’s Gold in the Furnace explore what it is like to live at the edge of reality, in flood, fire, and snow, in the modern American West. A decorated combat veteran searches for Bigfoot as he tries to forget his ex-wife. A young girl’s coming of age story coincides with her father’s anti-government sentiment, while a bizarre species invades the fragile riparian ecosystem. An aging heiress and cult survivor struggles to process how the mythos of her family shaped the American Century. From rugged stretches of Colorado and Utah, to the urban strip-malls of Los Angeles and Phoenix, McNamara’s characters navigate a dreamscape, slipping into the supernatural as they confront addiction, delusion, and monstrosity.
Kathleen McNamara’s short stories have appeared in the North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. She is the 2024 winner of the Tom Howard/John H. Reid short fiction prize. Her essays on motherhood and the body have been recognized with a Columbia Journal Nonfiction Award and Redivider’s Beacon Street Nonfiction Prize. She teaches in the English Department at Arizona State University, where she earned her MFA in Fiction. Prior to joining ASU, she graduated from Barnard College and worked at the New York Review of Books. Her writing has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. She grew up in Los Angeles County and lives now with her husband and children in Arizona’s Verde Valley.
Photography by Daniele Rose
