December 9, 1944 to June 12, 2022
Ki Longfellow, critically acclaimed author of The Secret Magdalene, born on Staten Island, New York, to a French-Irish mother and an Iroquois father, grew up in Hawaii and Marin County, California, but ended up living in New York and England for many years. She is the widow of a British national treasure, the complete artist Vivian Stanshall.
In England, she created and sailed the Thekla, a 180 foot Baltic Trader, to the port of Bristol where it became the Old Profanity Showboat. It remains there today as a Bristol landmark and just celebrated it’s 40th anniversary. On it, she and Vivian wrote and staged a unique musical for the sheer joy of it. Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera garnered a host of delighted, if slightly puzzled, national reviews and a second London production.
Her first book, China Blues, was the subject of a bidding war. China Blues, and her second novel, Chasing Women, introduced Longfellow to Hollywood… a long hard but ultimately fascinating trip.
When Vivian died in 1995, Ki stopped writing, living on Standing Room Only Farm in Vermont. Time may not heal, but it tempers. Eventually Ki began writing again, but her subject became the moment at age 19 that informed her life… a direct experience with the Divine. She chose the figure of Mary Magdalene to tell that tale in her novel The Secret Magdalene. Nancy Savoca, a brilliant independent film maker (winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize with her first film, True Love) traveled all the way to Vermont to option the book as her next film.
Ki’s second book on the Divine Feminine is Flow Down Like Silver, a novel about the numinous and gifted Hypatia of Alexandria, a tragically ignored historical figure of towering intellect who searched through intellect for what the Magdalene knew in her heart.
Ki’s quicksilver mind, diverse interests, and breadth of life experience meant that she explored many genres of fiction as well as a foray into non-fiction. Longfellow found herself writing a tale of supernatural horror called Houdini Heart. This book was selected by the Horror Writers of America as one of a handful of books to be considered for their 2011 Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel. She wrote four books in the noir private eye genre, as well as a moving and highly artistic memoir of her husband Vivian Stanshall, titled The Illustrated Vivian Stanshall, with illustrations by the talented Ben Wickey.