“Kathleen Thompson is an American feminist, writer and activist.” That ‘s what it says in my Wikipedia entry, and I guess it’s pretty accurate. I’ve been working for a lot of years to address the issues of women and of other people whose voices haven’t been heard. And I’ve decided to take the advice of one of my collaborators, Darlene Clark Hine, who told me years ago, “Document what you’ve done because nobody else is going to.”

I decided to be a writer when I was fifteen. I became a writer when I was twenty-four, the year I began work with Andra Medea on the book Against Rape. My teenage dream involved hard but brilliant writing and lots of cocktail parties drinking martinis and chatting with other witty writers. The reality was very different. I stared into the brutal face of the oppression of women while I was researching and writing with Medea, spent time at my bookstore selling Off Our Backs and Lavender Woman and counseling women who were trying to leave abusive husbands, and at the cocktail hour, drank jug wine sitting on the floor at the collective where I lived in Chicago with a group of eccentric, committed, very funny people. And earned that, in writing and in trying to change some small part of the world, everything is harder and better than you thought it was going to be.

When I went on from there to several years of writing for the theater, I explored the power of laughter to illuminate the human condition, if that’s not being too pretentious for words. And I started bouncing back and forth in my writing between disseminating knowledge and cracking jokes.

And now I’m writing murder mysteries. I have a pretty good backlog of them, and I’m just starting the journey towards getting them published.  Wish me luck.