the most kate speech to ever

romance prose and being out there for a book release

Dear readers,

Well sakes, it’s been awhile since I’ve been in your inbox—I was busy disappearing into the whirlwind of book promotion (see what I did there) for the last month or so, which has been truly wonderful, and I have loved meeting so many of you and interacting with even more of you online in this release season for The Other Side of Disappearing. As some of you know, this is a tough time of year for me to travel, so the in-person events I have been able to do have been all the more precious to me. Thank you so, so much if you were able to come to any of these, or if you popped in virtually where possible—you can’t know how completely grateful I am.

When I first began writing romance, I never imagined a world in which I would make public appearances related to my work. Many of you who have followed me for some years now know that for years, I did not share any photographs of myself online (let alone make videos, GOD!!!), and on those rare occasions where I did attend book events, I was reluctant even about having others share their photos. I’m not unlike Jess from The Other Side of Disappearing in that way, I suppose—generally a private person, wary of the lives we lead online, wary of what it has done to us to do so, and beyond that, I am perpetually worried about the impression I might make on other people when meeting them. Too boring, too nervous, or (these days especially) too worried about covid? Or worse…not outgoing or nice enough, not good enough in photos, not as funny or interesting as when I’m tossing off a random romance observation online?

Don’t I sound like I’d be fun to meet? Well, look—I hope I’ve gotten more fun to meet, and if I have, that’s thanks to all of you.

It’s the romance community that has made it worth it for me to break out of my shell a bit more in recent years: connecting with you all over my books and the books of our favorite authors always reminds me how beautiful it is to bond with people over a shared love of something. Last month, when I went to Brooklyn for Fated Mates Live, I felt this so acutely as I looked out into an audience of people who laughed loudly and unreservedly, clutching their seat neighbors in joy and hilarity, calling out their random responses and getting enthusiastic encouragement from everyone there. I don’t exaggerate when I say it was life-affirming, love-affirming, being-out-there-in-public-and-having-your-picture-taken-affirming. Sarah and Jen, the brilliant hosts of Fated Mates, were wise enough to hire an excellent photographer to capture some of this, and they’re sharing snapshots here — I highly recommend experiencing some of this yourself, so you can carry a little spot of happiness in your day with you.

And more recently—just this past weekend, in fact—I got to feel this same feeling again as one of the keynote speakers for Chicago-North Romance Writer’s conference, Chicago Spring Fling. Beyond being so shocked and honored that they asked in the first place, I was absolutely bowled over by the opportunity to share the title of keynote speaker with one of my favorite authors, Ms. Beverly Jenkins, whose career in this genre is legendary and, equally important, ongoing. I loved every second I got to spend in her presence, and also loved the opportunity to give a speech that would honor the craft she and so many other romance writers have put into their books.

After the speech was over, the absolutely fantastic Alicia Thompson (are you subscribed to her substack yet; it is brilliant, and also so are her books) suggested I share the text of that speech here, and while I’m a little worried that some of you will find it <insert all the drowsy/sleeping emojis face here>, see above: it’s this community I want to honor by being out there a bit more, and this speech is very me…it reflects how I read and think about romance, how I try to write it myself. If you’re interested in reading about sensory perception in romance, and how it is an act of resistance against some of the most powerful forces in our society, have a look at the speech below (which I’ve edited to make sense for this format).

If not, know you have my thanks for all the ways you have supported me in being a more public figure in relation to my writing. And know too that I hope to have some news about that writing soon. 😉

xoxo

kate 🖤

Keynote Speech for Chicago Spring Fling: April 20th, 2024 (abridged for clarity)

When I was initially approached about this conference, what excited me most was, first, that it is a conference that clearly concerns itself with the craft of writing romance, and second, that this year’s theme is “Our Strength is Love.” This is speaking my language, because both craft and love are what drew me to this genre, and they are both what have made me a devoted reader of and writer in the genre. Of course, I love love: I love the promise of the happily ever after, I love the delicious alchemy of main characters catching feelings for each other, I love the familiar tropes and the first kisses and the third act break ups and the grovels and slice-of-life epilogues that prove to me how it all worked out in the end. But equally so, I love the work it requires to do this well; I love the craft of genre romance. I love reading a book and thinking, my god, how did this author achieve this; how did they make me feel this flutter in my stomach; how did they make it impossible for me to go on with my day until I finished the story; how did they make me love this character that seemed irredeemable at first; how did they make fake dating feel realistic or only one bed feel brand new? So much romance, I believe, operates in a space of profound creativity, and operates with a profound—if largely unsung by the literary establishment—sense of writerly craft. 

And so, I thought, I’d sing about something very specific that I love about romance craft with all of you today, and that is the genre’s attentiveness to the senses of its characters—their sight, their hearing, their sense of smell and taste and touch. I’m going to tell you up front that it’s going to be just a little technical—a little linguistic—in here for awhile, but I don’t think I’d be me if I didn’t get a little technical, if I didn’t come here to talk to you about the literary craft of romance prose, and why it matters.

So let me begin with what are, to me, a few memorable sensory descriptions from romances I’ve loved—descriptions that I barely had to look up, because I remember them so well:

In Megan Bannen’s The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy, when Hart Ralston first sees Mercy Birdsall, her yellow dress is a “jolt of sunlight bursting through the glowering clouds on a gloomy day.”

When Adriana Herrera’s Carribbean Heiress in Paris Luz Alana hears James Evanston Sinclair laugh, it’s a “sound that reverberated through her like rolling thunder.”

When Finn Roberts and Harlow Vega are reunited in Christina Lauren’s Dirty Rowdy Thing, he bends to kiss her collarbone and is relieved to inhale “the soft smell I couldn’t forget in a million years: honeysuckle and warm stone, Harlow and mine.”

In Sherry Thomas’s Ravishing the Heiress, when a drunken, nearly insensate Earl Fitzhugh kisses his unwanted bride Millie for the first time, believing she’s someone else entirely, he thinks she tastes “so sweet, like spring water at the source.”

And, when West Ravenel touches Phoebe’s face in Lisa Kleypas’s Devil’s Daughter, his fingers are “dry and warm, textured like sandpaper and silk.”

Honestly, I could’ve picked countless more—phrases that live inside the romance palace of my mind. I can think of dozens of pairs of lust-darkened eyes, the rasp of a hundred hands rubbing across coarse-stubbled jaws, so many kisses that taste like black coffee or whisky or peppermint. Necks and chests that smell like leather or the ocean, callouses rubbing against satin-soft arms. I can think of so many sensations. 

Now, what would critics of romance—so many critics!—say about these descriptions? That using sunlight as a description for yellow is too cliché? That Finn Roberts has no good reason to be able to identify what honeysuckle smells like, or that something can’t feel simultaneously like sandpaper and silk? That eyes don’t really change color when someone feels horny, that the black-coffee kiss probably only tastes good if it happens within a half hour of the first sip of said drink? They would say, I’m sure, that the prose is predictable, and that it is…that dreaded term, too purple. Too descriptive, too ornate, taking up too much space and time. 

But as usual, I think these full-throated criticisms—well, let’s be honest, often mockeries—of the genre entirely miss the point of these descriptions. The predictability charge—which I don’t have time to fully explore today—of course misses a central part of the romance reading experience, which is the shared language that develops within it over time. Romance readers do, in fact, know that eye color doesn’t meaningfully change because someone is horny—but seeing that description is probably no less delightful for them, an echoing call to a spot of joy experienced in other beloved books, too. 

That other charge—that the descriptions are too ornate, or that we spend too much time on them—is what I want to counter most fervently here. Sensory descriptions are, of course, a part of almost all literature, and while romance maybe takes the most heat about them, we are certainly not alone in using them frequently. But it is how we use them that is our strength; it is about what we use the senses in the service of. When a romance writer makes use of the senses in their writing—one sense, or a combination of multiple senses (we must remember, we do not all have access to the same sensory experiences)—something powerful is happening. These descriptions are a deeply important part of how we represent the love we are capable of having for others, and the love we are capable of having for ourselves. And finally—maybe most importantly—this specific, sensory aspect of our craft is, like a lot of things in romance, powerfully subversive of the status quo. 

The first way sensory description in romance makes a powerful impact is by showing a way we are capable of loving others: by noticing them, by being attentive to them, and by appreciating the specificity of them. In one of my favorite romances, Ms. Bev’s Indigo, the heroine Hester always smells like vanilla, which may not seem, on its face, like a particularly unique scent for a woman in a romance novel to wear. But Hester wearing vanilla—and the hero, Galen, noticing that she wears vanilla—is important to how he loves her, how he learns about her, and how he eventually honors her. Hester wears vanilla because it is a scent she can obtain easily and inexpensively, a kitchen scent, basically, which is crucial given how many of her resources she devotes to her work as an active abolitionist. When Galen gifts Hester with a more luxurious version of her vanilla scent, he does so with an explanation to her of how it was sourced—knowing that it would be of paramount importance to her that this gift not be connected to the slave trade in any way. Galen’s gift to Hester is a lesson to us about his love for her: we know Galen is right and safe and good for Hester because he noticed that scent and knew how to pay tribute to it in a way that would validate who Hester is as a person. As human beings, this is one of our best and most precious capabilities—the ability to invest our own sensory perceptions into the acknowledgment of and care for other human beings. Romance reminds us of that again and again. 

The second way the senses can make an impact in romance is by reminding us of how important it is to love ourselves through the recognition of our own sensory pleasures. In romance, characters taking the time to notice and honor what they like, what makes them feel good, can transform their experience. In another of my favorite romances, Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm, our heroine Maddy—a very prim, very sheltered Quaker woman who spends most of her days caring for her blind father—has the occasion to share a meal with the infamous, ingenious rake, the Duke of Jervaulx. When the Duke takes it upon himself to offer a detailed description of Maddy to her father, who hasn’t been able to see her since she was a child, something starts to shift in Maddy, who has lived her life believing that even looking in a mirror at herself is overindulgent. Hearing someone else describe her features opens Maddy to observations about her own person that end up chasing her throughout the narrative, as she transforms into a more independent, assertive, and—yes!—pleasure-seeking person. When Maddy begins noticing things like the feel of her own hair as it trails along her skin, you know that she is doing more than just having a sensory perception: she is having an awakening about her own will and her own desires. She is becoming a person who exists outside the narrow confines of her strict community; she is becoming herself. 

So—loving others, loving ourselves: a strength of the genre indeed, and probably also two principles that, if deployed widely and consistently across the human race, could probably change the world. But in the absence of that happening—instead, in the presence of the world we find ourselves in now—I want to say what I think is the final and most powerful thing about these sensory descriptions. I want to say that these descriptions—the ones I’ve named here, but also, the literally thousands upon thousands of others that are thoughtfully crafted—are so very subversive of a capitalistic, patriarchal status quo. 

In the first instance—the capitalistic one: I want to remind you of how fully you live in the world at a time when you are being actively discouraged from dwelling, from sinking in and spending time with your senses. Unless you reside in the most privileged classes of our society, you are told in a thousand different ways, every single day, that you have to keep moving, keep grinding, keep texting, keep checking, keep cleaning, keep spending, keep balancing all your many plates in the air. You are told that your senses are simply something you cannot afford in this world, at least not outside of them being manipulated so that you’ll buy something. But in fact your senses are yours: yours to cherish and to nourish, and yours to use as a bulwark against the relentless and exhausting deprivation chamber of 21st century life. If you want one example of the kind of art that can remind you of this power you have within yourself, then I am happy to tell you that you have it in these books you love—these romance books you read and write. 

And in the second: I want to remind you that if you are marginalized in some way—whether by your gender identity, your race, your sexuality, your ethnic or religious background, your class, your ability, your body type—there is a not-insignificant part of this world that is teaching you, from the time you are a child, to distrust your own senses. Indeed, those who hold the most destructive power in our society often say to us: Are you sure that’s what you saw? Are you sure that’s what he said to you; are you sure that’s how he meant to touch you; are you sure that’s what you really felt or how you really feel; are you sure you can trust your experience of this thing that happened, or even this thing that is happening to you or to someone you love right now? In the pages of romance novels, what is so affirming—and so subversive in this world—is that the characters get to be sure about such things in the transformative moments of the narrative: the moment, perhaps, when they first see the character they are destined to have a happily ever after with, or maybe the moment they first sit close to them, or sleep beside them, or do…you know, a lot more with them. It can be transformative to read this; it is powerful to read this. 

And it is powerful to write it, which also means we must make room for meaningful critique of and meaningful change to how we do description in the genre. Indeed, as writers, we should keep our own senses attuned to the readers and fellow writers in our community who bravely and thoughtfully draw attention to sensory descriptions that can be harmful, discriminatory, painful to read and also participatory in dangerous societal norms. If you are a writer who makes sensory description a part of your craft—and my guess is, you probably do—I hope you will be alert to these criticisms, and I hope you’ll commit to adapting in response to them. Love is but one of our strengths as a genre—one of the others, to be sure, is the capability we have shown for change, and when it comes to certain types of description, change is warranted and worthy. See the posts readers and your fellow writers make on socials; hear them when they say, in spaces like these, that certain descriptions can be gender-normative, or racist, or body-shaming. Pay attention, because you love this genre, and you love the community that has been built from it. 

So, to go back to where I began, and to where this conference begins: love is, indeed, our strength as a genre. As romance writers, we build that strength through our craft, through the sentences we construct and the words we choose. We fortify, we fireproof, we reinforce and renovate. For me, sensory description has always been a foundational part of romance’s strength as a genre: witness not just the memorable lines I described, but witness your own memorable lines, embedded in the romance palace of your own imagination. What I hope I’ve stressed to you today is the impact these descriptions can have not just how we love, but how we live. And what I hope I’ve reminded you of is the impact you stand to have on the readers who love your work so much. 

🖤🖤🖤