Katharine Lowrie isn’t the picture of an erotica writer.
Elegant, gentle, and articulate, she has teenaged grandchildren and for a time wrote a column called The Granny Blossom Chronicles.
But the Redondo Beach woman, who won’t offer her age but confirms she’s on Medicare, has recently dipped her toes into writing humorous, satirical erotica. She was published under the penname K. B. Plum, but now she wants to claim her novel, a story, she says, that’s about much more than just sex. No longer does she feel anxious about it. She figures if she can write it as herself, others can read it as themselves.
“My one sister never said anything about it,” she said. “I gave it to her but she just wanted to avoid ‘it’,” Lowrie said. “The reason I wanted to use my own name was because I felt people were misunderstanding me and my book. If I could do it again, I’d use my real name.”
Those who actually read her novel, Lowrie said, respond positively; others bristle at the innuendos, stop reading, and regard her with silence.
But by putting her name to her novel, she’s giving it a very public vote of confidence, laying claim to it as Katharine B. Lowrie, a published author, award-winning journalist, and longtime humor columnist.
Originally a transplant from the East Coast, Lowrie lived in the L.A. area until her first marriage landed her in Palos Verdes. Shortly thereafter, the Daily Breeze hired her as a stringer to write humor columns, and eventually offered her a job as a reporter covering police and municipal beats.
She found this work left her with crippling writer’s block.
“I’m used to writing things out of my imagination,” she said. “I remember my first council meeting – they were discussing signage and all I focused on was what they were wearing and not what they said.
“I went back to the office, and the editor found me there the next morning with my hands on the keyboard. I hadn’t written a thing.”
The same scenario played out when she was later hired to write for the L.A. Times’ Calendar section. But Lowrie found her groove, and wrote her way through jobs at the Riverside Press Enterprise, L.A. Times, and L.A. Magazine, eventually launching her own obituary-writing business in Orange County.
About five years ago, she moved to Redondo Beach to live with her daughter and found work writing columns for Redondo Beach Patch and Palos Verdes Patch. She also ventured into novel writing, publishing a book called Hasherazade (My Green Publisher) about two battered women – a 13th century harem girl and a wife in modern-day Tehran (she calls it Parthia) – and how they rise up against their oppressors to reclaim their freedom.
That novel was the precursor to Lowrie’s foray into satirical erotica – the publication of Penelope Pan (Flamingo Publications), the novel her sister refused to read.
Penelope Pan is set in a fantasy world, a kind of Neverland inhabited by a gay fairy and hordes of abused and downtrodden people (a la The Lost Boys) who end up banding together to rise against Simon Hook, the male villain.
While Lowrie was new to the erotica genre, she was an old hand at humor – a defense mechanism she says she’s used all her life to hide any traces of vulnerability – so she made use of it.
“I wanted a strong female protagonist, but I wanted her to be funny. I think sex is so stupid in some ways. It becomes ludicrous and I think we have to just make fun of it and laugh at it,” she said.
She wanted that female protagonist to be victorious – “As a woman who’s fought a lot during my life I understand that very well,” she said – and she also just wanted to have some fun with it.
“This book is about writers and the places our minds go when they’re not edited or told to stop,” Lowrie said, laughing. “I’ve always been a creature of my imagination, which has always been very fertile.”
Creating something that fuses social commentary, humor, and the increasingly popular erotica genre was a means for her to rediscover her creative spark.
“And I never get writer’s block anymore,” Lowrie said.
