writer journalist etc.
I’ve started blogging on the food industry for BNET. I’ve been doing it for about a month now, and I’m having a lot of fun with it. Some of my recent posts:
Groups Clash Over Organic Standards for Fish, Milk
More Eating In Means Higher Sales for Heinz, Smucker’s and Campbell Soup
Financial dilemma: For many Muslims, conventional loans can be a sin
By Katherine Glover
Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008
MinnPost.com
Seven years ago, staff at the Neighborhood Development Center made a realization. Plenty of Somalis and other Muslim immigrants had attended the St. Paul-based center’s trainings for small-business entrepreneurs — but in more than a decade, not one Muslim had ever taken advantage of the center’s small-business loans.
The reason? Islam forbids “reba,” or usury. To some, the term refers merely to excessive interest, but to others, it includes the payment of any kind of interest — making conventional bank loans a sin for them.
Trans (I) Am
Chrissy Nakonsky looks to become the first transgender Republican state legislator from Brainerd (or anywhere)
By Katherine Glover
Minnesota Law & Politics
August/September 2008
A sidebar to “Not the Man She Married.”
scanned article as PDF (scroll down to page 2)
Not the Man I Married
by Katherine Glover
Minnesota Law & Politics
August/September 2008
When a trans person marries a member of his or her new gender before transitioning, is there any reason the union shouldn’t be considered legal?
“Generally speaking, the validity of a marriage is measured at the time that the marriage is contracted,” says Phil Duran, a staff attorney with GLBT rights group OutFront Minnesota. “So if at the time of the marriage one person was legally male and one person was legally female, then short of an annulment, the only way you can terminate that is through death or divorce.”
Which adds an extra twist to the legal issues around same-sex marriage.
“If we were ever to get a divorce,” April says, “I could go to Texas and marry another woman, or I could stay here and marry a man.”
Cookin’ With Sun
Sierra Magazine
November/December 2008
Mike and Martha Port sell solar cookers to outdoor enthusiasts in the United States–and use the profits to subsidize sales of the ovens in developing countries.
Also check out the online-only audio interview with Solar Oven Society volunteer and recipe-maker Bill Potts.
Blind activists protest depiction in new film ‘Blindness’
by Katherine Glover
MinnPost
“This is the kind of movie that’s going to make my life harder,” says Jennifer Dunnam, president of the National Federation of the Blind of Minnesota. “The people in this movie just seem to lose all capacity for creativity and for taking care of themselves, and it’s a problem when real people already think that about blind people.”
Transgender Rights Meeting: Mara Kiesling Mixes Humor with Savvy Insight
by Katherine Glover
Lavender Magazine
April 11, 2008
At a town hall meeting on transgender rights, the executive director of the Washington D.C.-based National Center for Transgender Equality talks about the battle for a trans-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
If you click on “other works,” instead of an “under construction” message, you will now see links to my short stories, performance pieces and other creative works.
Highlights include my 2001 prize-winning short story “The Diary Thief,” audio recordings of my performances, and of course, Pony Wars.
I also added a paypal link, in case anyone wants to give me money to support my less well-paying endeavors.
Once again a story of mine is on Minnesota Public Radio’s In the Loop.
I performed at Saturday’s story slam, recorded at the Minnesota State Fair. The theme was “Taking Sides” and the episode is available for download at In the Loop’s website.
My story deals with a day that politics sneakily invaded the level two ESL class I was teaching… I’ll post an mp3 and transcript of my piece later, but for now, check out the entire show, which includes many other fabulous performers as well. Look for the episode called “Taking Sides.”
The Minnesota Fringe Festival is over and I’m in San Francisco getting ready to do it all over again, West Coast style.
As I mentioned earlier, I was originally near the end of the waitlist for Minnesota Fringe, but I got a slot literally a week before the festival opened because another company had to drop out.
It was a crazy week of constant writing and rehearsing, little sleep, and slightly excessive amounts of both coffee and alcohol (followed of course by the Fringe itself, which was the same only with a less writing and more alcohol).
I averaged a little under 30 people at each performance, and the response was incredibly positive.
All in all, I’d say No Stranger Than Home had a successful run in Minnesota – especially since I had so little time for publicity. Though let’s see if we can’t bring out bigger crowds for San Francisco…
In addition to my one-woman show “No Stranger Than Home,” I was also part of Shakespeare’s Land of the Dead: “a true and accurate account of the Elizabethan zombie plague,” which takes place backstage at the Globe Playhouse in 1599.
The cast, the direction, and the script (written by company member John Heimbuch) were all phenomenal. I am proud to report that we were the top-selling show at the Fringe and got great reviews from pretty much every local media outlet. More than 1200 people saw the show, and Walking Shadow has received numerous requests from companies who want to produce the show themselves.
I was just a grunting zombie who got her neck snapped, but it was quite an honor to be a part of this production.
The Food Detectives
by Katherine Glover
Minnesota Law & Politics
August/September 2008
After something like E. coli strikes, these lawyers turn into Columbo.
The first review of my show is up on the Fringe website:
This show amazed me with what can be done through simple storytelling! With minimal props, the artist brought us with her around the world– we looked over her shoulder as she flirted with a girl in East Africa, or had her foot brutally readjusted (with success!) by Nicaraguan witch doctors. I appreciated her humor, poetry, and honesty in presenting these tales… each building upon the next, until by the end, I truly felt like I’d gone someplace and back with her.
The review comes from Malia Burkhart, who is also doing a one-woman show, The Survival Pages. I haven’t seen it and I’m not familiar with her work, but anyone with such good taste is probably worth seeing. 
Midwesterners can now see No Stranger Than Home without traveling all the way to San Francisco.
Two companies dropped out of the Minnesota Fringe Festival at the last minute, and I stepped in and took one of the slots.
It’ll be great for me to have a first run in my home city, where I have a lot more contacts and can get feedback and make last minute adjustments before I head out west, where I’m a complete unknown.
But it’s going to be a stressful week – I haven’t actually finished writing the show yet, and it opens one week from today.
I say: bring it on…
I’ve finally gotten up all of my photos from Ethiopia, along with a short summary of my trip and some audio samples from the church wedding ceremony.
It took awhile because I was developing a template to post photo essays on the site, and I was learning how to use all the photo editing tools on my new Mac…
I’ve got even more material to post from Kenya, but that will have to wait until after the San Francisco Fringe Festival in September.
About the Ethiopia photos: some of you may wonder, “Who is that white guy? What’s he doing in an Ethiopian wedding?”
That’s Matthew, a good friend of the groom. He’s from Chicago but lives in Minneapolis – and he’s fluent in Amharic.
I was expecting to rely on him as a translator, but it turned out that in Ethiopia, the bride’s family and friends traditionally keep away from from the groom’s family and friends until after the main wedding day. So I was left to fend for myself…
I performed a five-minute excerpt from my show last night at the Minneapolis “Anything Goes” poetry slam. It seemed to go over well; I won the slam and came home with this trophy, which is just under four inches tall and made of plastic.
Because it was the “Anything Goes” slam (a fundraiser to send the local team to nationals), none of the regular slam rules applied – you could use props, you could go over three minutes, and the regular judging system didn’t apply. Instead of individual judges ranking the poems on a scale of one to ten, the emcee asked the audience to clap or boo after each piece to show how much they liked it, and then she picked a random number that she felt reflected the audience’s judgment. My score was 8,000-something.
But all wackiness and unscientific judging aside, I got some incredibly positive feedback from the audience, along with promises that they would tell all of their friends in the Bay Area to see the show. All in all, it was a good debut.
Buenos Aires is a top competitor for the title of most gay-friendly city in Latin America; the city hosted the Gay Soccer World Cup last September and a five-star gay hotel opened there the following month. But though civil unions are legal and tourists can safely ask locals for directions to gay clubs, I always felt that queer folks were more tolerated than accepted.
“We’re not like you foreigners,” one security guard told me. “We don’t do that here; we have different standards.”
Irma Fischer, the founder of the Argentine chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbian and Gays, told me that even now she’s the only parent in the group who allows her photograph or real name to appear in the media.
It’s not necessarily out of shame, she said – a lot of the parents fear their children might lose their jobs if it got out at work that they were gay.
“My son’s in Germany, so it’s easier for me,” Fischer said.
Her son didn’t come out to her until he was 24, about fifteen years ago. She was visiting him abroad. According to her, she reacted “terribly.” But she read all of the literature her son gave her, listened to what he said, and, in the course of one very emotional night, she changed her perspective and decided to learn to accept him as he was.
When she went back to Argentina, she wanted to meet other parents in the same situation. Her son had given her a pamphlet from a PFLAG group in Germany, and through them she managed to find a mother in Argentina with a lesbian daughter. They started meeting.
They tried to recruit other people – for example, by leaving flyers at gay and lesbian hangouts. But since most people weren’t out to their parents, the flyers never went anywhere. It was just the two women meeting, for about a year.
Then the other woman left the country. “She left me all alone!” Fischer said.
Fischer tried to expand the group, but everyone she talked to told her the same thing – she would have to go public. She would have to use her real name and photograph to lend legitimacy to what she was doing and attract other people. They’d said the same thing a year earlier and she had refused, but now she was ready.
She appeared in an article and started getting responses, though the group was small for several years, with just four or five people.
Now there are 30-40 at any given meeting – not always the same people. A lot of their work is helping other parents learn to adjust when their children come out.
“People accept gays,” Fischer said, “but they don’t want it to be their own child.”
Minnesota Public Radio has been producing a series of “Story Slams” – audience members get up and perform short stories on a specific topic, usually announced one or two weeks beforehand. MPR records the entire show and then cuts it down to an hour-long broadcast for its “In the Loop” series.
The theme for the February show was “payback.” I did a story about a sixth-grade revenge plot involving cookies.
This story was kind of a landmark for me in that I created and performed it entirely in the oral tradition – no paper, no written text. All in my head. I’ve never done that before.
The story is available for download on the In the Loop website – look for the one entitled “Payback.”
UPDATE (8/25/08):
The show is now archived here or hear just my piece here.
Last night was the lottery for the Minnesota Fringe Festival line-up, and I was not selected.
I’ve been a spoken word performer in this theater festival every year but one since 2003, but this was the first time I applied to do my own one-woman show. Alas, the ping-pong ball with my number was not drawn until late into the night – so late, in fact, that I am 115 on the waiting list. A lot of people would have to drop out for me to get a spot.
Fortunately I also applied for the Boulder and San Francisco Fringe Festivals as a back-up. The Boulder lottery isn’t until February 21, but I did get a slot in the San Francisco Fringe, so I will be producing a show. It’s a collection of stories from my travels abroad and within the U.S., possibly including new material from my upcoming trip to East Africa.
And in case a company has to drop out of the Minnesota Fringe at the last possible minute, I’ll be ready to step in…
I’m still setting up the overall structure of the site and will start posting new content regularly within the next week or two. If you have stumbled here somehow, welcome! You can browse through some of my old stories, or watch a video about an odd war involving My Little Ponies. More coming soon.