About

There’s a particular kind of thinking that happens in the margins.

Thoughts too urgent to leave unrecorded, too personal for the main page. Questions we’re afraid to ask out loud. Our reflections and ruminations. Our musings and ideas. Our rants.

Marginalia — from the Latin marginalis, “of the margin” — is a private conversation, a response to the main text. The back-talk. The wait, but what about… scrawled beside someone else’s certainty.

This is where I think out loud — in the margins, with you.

Marginalia & Other Notes is for writers and creative women who are becoming more of their true selves. Paying attention. Learning and unlearning. Refusing to choose just one thing.

Personal essays, notes on the art of writing, musings on creativity, and reflections on faith explore what happens when creative life and everyday life converge and refuse to separate — and the quiet cost of becoming yourself.

If any of this resonates with you, you’re in the right place.

I’m Kimberly Garrett Brown, a novelist, publisher, photographer, woman of faith, and devoted student of the creative life. My novel Cora’s Kitchen won the 2022 Sarton Women’s Book Award for Historical Fiction and a Bronze Foreword INDIES Award. I’m the founder and Executive Editor of Minerva Rising Press, where I’ve spent more than a decade publishing women’s literary voices. I’m also a licensed realtor.

Whether I’m writing, taking pictures, or showing a home, I’m doing some version of the same work: paying attention, learning, and unlearning. Marginalia & Other Notes is where I think out loud about the creative life, the ordinary life, and the quiet cost of becoming yourself.

Marginalia & Other Notes publishes once a week on Thursday. Essays fill the page. Sometimes photographs, drawings, and excerpts from unfinished stories are tucked in the margins.

Marginalia & Other Notes is free to read and always will be at its core. If this work has meant something to you, a paid subscription is the best way to keep it going.

Free subscribers receive every essay. Paid subscribers receive access to a monthly creative challenge group and a copy of my e-book, The Writing Book.

The margins are where the real conversation happens. Grab your favorite beverage.

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