Love Is a Red Pen

We lost a dear friend last week. Kae Cheatham was a gifted author, photographer, speaker and historian. Notably, her work won praise for its accurate historical depiction of Native Americans and African Americans.

Here’s a photo of one of Kae’s early books, published in 1980 by Harcourt Brace Children’s Books. I read it eagerly as soon as it was released, proud to know a real published author who lived just a few miles from Ted and me in Nashville.

And one of her later works, published in 1997 by Enslow Publishing.

And one of her last works, published in 2010, a novel about the consequences of illegal hunting in a legendary canyon in the Rocky Mountains.

Ted and I met Kae and her family in the late 1970s when she and I and other writers attended a conference at Vanderbilt University. She was an immediate ally, warmly accepting Ted and me in the early days of our relationship when the going was tough family-wise.

More notably, however, Kae was a hard-as-nails critic of the early draft.

Through the 1980s, when she and I took part in weekly Tuesday night meetings of the Nashville Writers’ Alliance (a group still functioning today), Kae was a sharp-eyed and sharp-eared advocate of the cut-the-crap-and-get-to-the-action approach to writing, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, adult, young adult or children’s literature. And for God’s sake, make it realistic. Everyday-life realistic.

Because I had begun my first attempt at writing a novel, her comments were gold coins dropped from a seasoned hand … at no cost, often with wine served afterward!

Here are some of her notes on one of my short stories. I saw plenty of her penciled or red-penned “awk for awkward” judgments through those years.

I valued Kae because she was not only serious about writing; she was serious about my writing, our writing in the writers’ group. We attended those meetings not to be nice to each other when it came to the projects we were working on, but to be honest.

Sure, we delivered the news kindly to each other.

No one was mean about it. But we were straightforward, too.

Kae, whose friends have also described her as elegant, beautiful, quietly acerbic, statuesque, and reserved when she needed to be, set the highest standard for all that.

I loved her for it.

Here are a few other Kae remarks on my work.

From Nashville to the West

After a divorce, Kae moved to Helena, Montana. It didn’t surprise any of us who knew her and her love of the American West to learn that she had settled there, even while her grown children stayed east of the Mississippi.

It might not have been called a full-blown ranch that she owned, but she had land in open, big-sky country, two horses and a dog. It was a fresh-air life to be envied by us traffic-harried city folk.

And based on the photographs and Facebook posts she shared with us in recent years, she had gorgeous, treeless scenery around her. Brutal winters, which I think she delighted in. And friends who shared her creative passions.

It was clear she loved it all. We take comfort in knowing she died in that place, at home, surrounded by her family. And we like to think her spirit abides there.

Friends have also described Kae as indestructible.

We knew her life hadn’t been easy as a person of color born in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1943.

We knew she had survived some tough knocks along the way.

But cancer eventually felled her on January 30, 2024. It didn’t surprise us, really, that we hadn’t known she was sick. She hadn’t told any of us in the original writers’ group that she had been suffering from the illness for two years.

That was typical Kae.

Alas, even the toughest among us are mortal, too.

But then I realize that I hear her voice and see her markings on my pages every time I sit at my laptop.

I recall her best written passages, like this description of her protagonist Eddie CloudRunner in Blood and Bond: “His skin tingled and tightened to the cold, before he pulled a blanket around himself and hurried out of the glen, barely making out the narrow trail leading up the rise from the sweat lodge and back to the house. Low branches scratched his legs, and he remembered his youth when he would run naked along paths, daring the bushes to scratch him.”

And another section that, again, puts you right there. “At the black asphalt highway, he eased the car over the cattle guard and turned south toward the town of Lamp Creek. His was the only vehicle on the highway, surrounded by high-plains prairie and irrigated alfalfa fields. Morning sunlight glared into the drive-side window while blue sky stretched west into a gray blur of clouds.”

Her clear-cut approach to the written word helped shape the book that I eventually got published in 2023.

Her intelligent, matter-of-fact voice will continue to influence me every time I start a new writing project.

Will this sentence pass “the Kae test?” I ask myself. I see her shaking her head. Smiling at the bloated dialogue. The description written before facts are checked. The passages of “tell rather than show.”

I hit the backspace key on my keyboard.

I start over.

And I thank her again for the reviews and red-penning.

Kae Cheatham, I remember you.

Note: Learn more about Kae Cheatham in this lovely obituary. And about her books on this Amazon author page.

Photo of Kae from the Independent Author Network.