Interview with Katherine Ashe

Enjoy this fine interview by our new friend, Tony Angelo. It brings to mind as well that we at APHR are dedicated to the proposition that
the pub is the parliament of the common man.

Story by Tony Angelo

Tell me a little bit about your life?
I was born in Hollywood where my father was a screenwriter for Cecil B. deMille. Research fascinated me, My father would tell me fascinating things of the historical background of the films he was working on -- deMille supplied excellent advisers to his writers, but they looked upon the advisers as chiefly hampering their stories. (Chief Rain-in-the-Face, adviser for "Unconquered," was called by the writers "Chief Stick-in-the-Mud.") I think my love of history comes from what didn't get into my father's films.

When did you start to write?
I began life as a painter. When I was five my parents summoned me to serious conference in the living room -- I remember this vividly, my little legs and feet were sticking straight out from the couch. They told me that my ability to draw seemed exceptional and they wanted to get a proper artists set for me: should it be oils or water colors? I asked what oils were and they said they were colors done up like toothpaste tubs. I said i would probably get them in my hair. They got me the oils anyway.

Who Inspires you?
By the age of 18 I was showing in two New York galleries simultaneously: the Braverman Gallery and the Dorsky gallery, being too naive to know one was supposed to be exclusively with just one gallery at a time. But not to worry, both galleries went out of business before my one-person shows were scheduled to open.

Curious about why people would pay so much for a work of art, I stopped painting and turned to writing books on Chinese art to be able to look at the collecting impulse objectively.

That led me to an interest in China, and in the early 1970s, in the throes of an impulse for "peace through trade." I researched where China was falling behind in its 5-year programs. An so it was that I came to found a company to work with Agway to sell quick-frozen bull sperm to the Inner Mongolian Grasslands Institute. Unfortunately, the Chinese embraced the idea, but contacted the Texas Cattle Breeders Association, which was rather better known in the business than I was.

After a fine art print publishing business of mine was perfectly timed to the collapse of the fine art print market, I turned back to writing books. Licking my wounds over the demise of my fine art company, I was writing a book about fairies when, in the course of my research about Salisbury Cathedral, which was consecrated in 1258, I discovered Simon de Montfort. That began a project of writing that has lasted from 1977 to the present.

During those 34 years I also wrote plays, screenplays, and then radio plays for my own radio theater company, Jefferson Radio Theater, which was funded with state grant money, with production through public radio stations WJFF and WVIA.

What are you working on now?
My current aim is to get The Fairy Garden into print at last. But I've also begun research for a sequel to Montfort, on Edward I and, possibly, Simon's son, Guy de Montfort.

Amazing life, thanks for sharing it with me and all of our readers.

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