Katherine McNamara

Katherine McNamara is a writer, editor, and digital publisher in Charlottesville, Virginia. She grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania. While pursuing a Ph.D. in History at Cornell, she went to Paris on a French-government research fellowship, researching the thought of the French ethnologue Marcel Mauss. From Paris she moved to Alaska, where she lived and wrote for many years; She moved to New York in the late 1980s, and in 1989 began writing her 2001 book, Narrow Road to the Deep North: A Journey into the Interior of Alaska. By its eighth year, the quarterly magazine reached 10,000-13,000 unique readers per month. translation, and recorded sound. Endnotes, and in such series as "Living with Guns," McNamara wrote about war and violence, often from Washington, and spoke out about how Bush-Cheyney manufactured a premise for taking the nation into a war of choice. She wrote editorials against the Bush-Cheyney war when opposition was only beginning to form in DC. She began the series "Living with Guns" and published excerpts of James L. Hicks's reports of the lynching of Emmett Till. Contributing editors included writers such as John Casey, Benjamin Cheever, Edith Grossman, Some of the international range of contributors to Archipelago include Etel Adnan, Hubert Butler, Joel Agee, Sarah Arvio, Attlio Bertolucci, Jared Carter, Theo Dorgan, George Garrett, John Haines, Norman Lock, Frank McGuinness, Samuel Menashe, Greil Marcus, and Abdón Ubidia.

McNamara was prompted to experiment with the web as a publishing venue in part because of what she witnessed happening in print publishing in the early 1990s: her husband, Leo Goerner, was an editor at Knopf and editor and publisher at Atheneum, and McNamara saw through his work how limited the range of published writers was. Archipelago not only published in response to this condition, but included interviews with publishing insiders about the business of books. Archipelago’s presentation of The Great Book of Gaelic / An Leabhar Mòr, now the only remaining web presence of that multi-media unbound book, showed her how a multi-media, multi-language book might be presented digitally.

Artist's Proof has published the following works: Bin Danh and Robert Schultz, Ancestral Altars. (Apple Books) Ben Jasnow and George Woodman, Georgic Fantasy. (Apple Books) Peter Kalifornsky and Katherine McNamara, From the First Beginning. When the Animals Were Talking / Ninya Hndadulghest: The Dena'ina Animal Stories of Peter Kalifornsky and Conversations with the Author. 2015. (Apple Books) Peter Kalifornsky and Katherine McNamara, Kel Ench'q Ghe'uyi Lachq'u Niltu / From the Believing Time, When they Tested for the Truth: The Dana'ina Belief Stories of Peter Kalifornsky. 2019. (Apple Books) Lyndia Terre, I went into the Large Space. (Apple Books) Katherine Vaz and Isabel Pavão, The Heart is a Drowning Object. 2019. (Apple Books) Mary-Sherman Willis and Colin Willis, Caveboy: A Poem. 2012. (Apple Books ) Inna Kabysh and Katherine E. Young (translator). Two Poems. (Apple Books)

Writing and scholarship McNamara's book, a work of nonfiction, Narrow Road to the Deep North: A Journey into the Interior of Alaska (Mercury House, 2001), is about her years living and working as a teacher in a native Athabaskan community in a remote area of Alaska. The review in Publishers Weekly termed it “A finely wrought, layered story ... rich with affectionate, precise profiles of native people and white outsiders.... Whether writing about intimate relationships, poetry, or the intricacies of village life, her approach is full of grace and equanimity.” McNamara's conversations with linguist Peter Kalifornsky had a profound impact on her and led to her ongoing Kalifornsky Project, with Artist's Proof Editions.