ST. GEORGE, UT, February 9, 2021
M. Kasey
M. Kasey’s genre-bending novel, recently acquired by E. L. Marker, uses a narrative frame combining religious and scientific theory to examine how a person’s choices impact the spiritual and spacetime fabric of a universe. At the center of the novel is Marty, a woman with a dark secret she has held onto for nearly half a century. When the book opens, Marty is in her 70s and agonizing over whether and when to confide her secret to her husband. Her story, her secret, and its aftermath are told in flashback.
Raised in Idaho in the 1950s, Marty is brusquely honest and outspoken at a time when women were expected to be anything but. She is also openly dismissive of religion in a place where belief in God was a foregone conclusion. To Marty, there is no higher power than free will and scientific theory. Her mother, a scientist, and a believer, is an intellectual powerhouse who engages her family at dinner time in complex theoretical discussions on the intersections of the physical and spiritual world. Readers follow Marty through college, marriage, and raising a family of her own with the ever-present tension between the known and the unknown, faith and fact.
Kasey’s initial inspiration came from reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. She was struck by how modern scientific theory seemed to align with descriptions of space and time recorded in the writings of Moses and Abraham, and she wrote Marty as the embodiment of this intersection between science and religion. Just as feminist Carol Hanisch flatly stated that the personal is the political, Kasey’s novel takes aim at an artificial dichotomy between the spiritual and the physical. Or in the words of Marty’s husband, Ty, “True religion and true science must agree or neither will survive.”
###
M. Kasey was raised on a potato farm in Idaho, which she credits with instilling in her a strong work ethic. She earned a degree in business, which she applied in managing a successful family-owned business begun by her husband and their children. It was the family-owned element that first attracted her to WiDo Publishing.
Kasey grew up reading mystery books such as Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Now, her love of mysteries extends to the mysteries of science and the cosmos, and her favorite authors are Brian Greene and Stephen Hawking. Always a storyteller, Kasey remembers evenings around the campfire in Yellowstone Park where her cousins always begged her to tell them just one more story, the more mysterious, the better.