About
I am Idyllopus Press, J. M. Kearns, or Juli Kearns, born 1957 in Lawrence, Kansas, childhood spent mostly in drizzly Seattle and the desert lands of Richland, Washington (thus the interest in plutonium-producing Hanford, see below). I’m an artist (link to my art, there) and writer. During the late 80s and 90s I was lucky enough to have a number of my plays produced. But mainly I’ve misspent my life authoring unpublished books. For which reason I am Idyllopus Press. Because one day, a long while back, realizing I would never get out of the slush pile, I filled the bathtub with rejection slips and torched them. The bathtub seemed a good idea to me because of the ready availability of water, and I didn’t have to worry about ruining the finish as the landlord’s father had once painted the tub black, and that with the consequential stripping left not much in the way of a finish on it.
My husband, Martin, is a musician, plays keys, now in production and engineering after years doing road work.
H.o.p. is our son, born 1997, and is an artist. His animation shorts and art have frequently appeared on the blog.
My web ventures started circa 1998 with the playpen Bigsofa when I became determined to learn html and web design in order to bring some ideas to the web. Idyllopus Press was later formed with the intent of one day taking advantage of on-demand publishing, Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World (or) In Search of the Great Penguin was eventually published in 2006.
In 2005 came about the blog, which is pretty much as the tag line states, “Sometimes a notion is better than no thread at all”.
Via the blog and the post Growing Up in the Shadow of Mount Fuji, I began the series of essays and digital paintings which became Remixing the Hanford Declassified Project.
One may email Idyllopus at:
meanwhile at idyllopuspress.com
Previous incarnations of Idyllopus (and more besides these, I just didn’t take screenshots of them):
Now an explanation of the graphics I used in the header of this page. Top left is the desert near Richland and Hanford, Washington, where the tumbling tumbleweeds are radioactive monsters. I photoshopped in the book and the trailer. The trailer, because I’m always going to be some way there, in that desert, and the book because I consider my youth there as one of the main influences in my life. The middle image is a rhinoceros toy that belongs to son H.o.p. I adored that rhino. Every time I looked at it I thought of Murukami’s “The Wind up Bird Chronicles”. I was able to keep the little toy rhino on my desk until H.o.p. was about four years of age. He retrieved it and now all I have are photos as memories. The image on the right is from the Bill Cullen show. A distant relation, blues and jazz singer, was a performer on the short-lived show, and was Bill’s comedic foil. (Road musician life is hard. She grew up singing with her brother and sister. Her brother died of food poisoning while they were on the road.) My husband, a musician, used to play accordion in Cajun bands. . I was charmed by the accordion guy seeming to be chased by the rhino. In the picture below, at left, is a drawing my son did of Mechagodzilla, Godzilla being of course a popular entertainment way of Japan to deal with the Nuclear Age, the terrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then on the right that’s me and my eyes.
