Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Silence Awareness Existence program / MARCH 2020
Joelle Anthony
Canada
www.joelleanthony.com
About
J. M. Kelly is the occasional pen name for the writer, actress,
and playwright, Joëlle Anthony. Born in Portland, Oregon,
she makes her home in British Columbia, Canada. However,
she has spent the last year, traveling around the US, Canada,
and Europe cat-sitting for people while they go on holiday,
and intends to continue doing that indefinitely.
She spent her childhood with her nose in a book, often in
the backseat of whatever antique car her dad had at the
time. She’s worked as an actress, a Minor League Baseball
souvenir hawker, the Easter Bunny, and various other notso-odd
jobs. Now she mostly writes novels, but she still
dabbles in sketch comedy, nonfiction, and teaching writing
to both kids and adults (www.thewritepotential.com). With
a developing interest in stand-up comedy and a love of
theatre, a return to acting seems to be inevitable, and while
she intends to work on fiction at Arteles, she suspects there
will be some comedy written as well. She hopes so!
Her first four books are for children and teens. Speed of
Life, Joëlle’s third novel, was a White Pine nominee, hailed
by Publisher’s Weekly as: a believable portrait of blue-collar
teens struggling to make it work against tough odds. She’s
also the author of the 2017 Middle Grade novel, A Month of
Mondays, which was an OLA Forest Kid Committee Summer
Reading List pick, a VOYA Top Shelf Award winner, and a 2019
Chocolate Lily Nominee. She is currently finishing her first
novel for adults, an historical novel set in 1962 Vancouver, BC
called Between Over and Next.
Xenia
While I was here at Areteles, I read Stephen Fry’s latest book,
MYTHOS, a retelling of Greek mythology. It was my formal
introduction to “xenia”, the Greek gods’ idea of hospitality,
which Zeus prized above all else. For my entire adult life, even
without a name for it, xenia had naturally been “”my thing””
and I’d done it well. When I saw the kitchen at Arteles, I knew
why I was here. I’d come to write, but I happily laid down my
pen in exchange for a knife and cutting board.
While here, instead of working on my novel, I made food for the
other artists, first as they settled in, and then to comfort and
nourish them as Coronavirus ravaged the world, and sent us
all spinning. The kitchen became a place for hasty midnight
goodbyes, breakfast sandwiches tucked into a carry-on bags
for long flights, and drinking Salmiakki together in hopes of
Finland leaving a good taste in our mouths to remember it by.
On one of our last nights, which was right in the middle of our
residency, the kitchen was a place to make pizza together,
while we pretended for one night, everything was okay...
I didn’t do much writing, and the fact is, fifteen days after the
residency officially ended, I’m still here, still cooking for (and
with) the others who are also stranded here. Now I’m writing,
too, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens with that.
This residency was partially funded by a generous grant from
Canada Council for the Arts.