Photo by Jamie Narod ©2004
Born in 1960 in Syracuse, New York, Mary Kay grew up in Oklahoma City. She has a degree in English and mathematics from Rice University and in creative writing from
Johns Hopkins University. She studied writing with Max Apple and John Barth. She and her husband, Gary Zizka, have two children, Theo and Eliza, born in 1992 and 2000. And she has recently taken up the
ukulele.
Mary Kay has taught writing to undergraduates and graduate students at the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, Goucher College, and George Mason University. She has been invited to read and speak at venues across the country, including the Key West Literary Seminar, the American Association of Museum Directors, Washington Independent Writers Conference, and many university writing programs. Her job history includes teaching writing and mathematics; establishing sample sizes for the quality control of computer parts; writing articles on museum exhibitions; and working as an industrial engineer at a water-pump plant. For nine years, she was the senior editor of publications at the
Freer and Arthur M. Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
For years, I spent my days at the Smithsonian editing museum text and my evenings and week-ends spinning fiction. Some of the exhibitions at the Freer and Sackler Galleries overflowed with jewel-encrusted statuary; others displayed the rice-powder patterns Indian women spread over their thresholds before breakfast. I was hired as an advocate for the general audience; good thing, because I knew nothing about Asia or Asian art (I struggled to find Laos or Bangladesh on a map). What most impressed me was the reverence the staff felt for the museum’s contents: they cared about a page of calligraphy the way I cared about fiction. I also realized, after my first child was born, how few of my colleagues had children, as if Asian art were their calling.
Crafting labels for the humblest objects—or the most ornate or the most ephemeral—brought up notions of worth. My novel grew from this fascination. What do you deem valuable? Would you sacrifice personal wealth, integrity, or the care and feeding of your family in its cause? And what if, having made excruciating choices, that which you put on a pedestal fell to pieces despite your best efforts? What then?
Life among the masterpieces had its down side as well. People assume that within the marble walls decisions are made in a civilized manner, but it might as well be mud wrestling. (This led the designer to put an image of fighting babies on the cover.) I left the Smithsonian once my first novel was published, only to spend the next nine years writing a love letter to museums, warts and all.
I thought I'd freely imagined a plot and cast, but I'm beginning to believe that imagination is one step shy of intuition. Years into writing about Promise, a woman who is pregnant and doesn’t know it, I was pregnant and didn’t know it; initially, I was just as reluctant and sick as the script I'd crafted. (And, at three, that child was diagnosed with flea bites after I’d fashioned such a scene for the novel.) My fictional museum director resigns and embarks on an archeological dig along the Silk Route. Meanwhile, back at the Sackler and Freer, the director resigned and began working with Yo Yo Ma on his Silk Route Project! Just last week, I was told that in the 1980s, an architect had suggested the Smithsonian turn the Arts & Industries Building into a food court. Had I harbored that for decades or invented something the Institution was capable of? I don’t know anymore. My husband always said I could make a living as a psychic, if only I could write faster than what I imagined came true.
