My name is Kiley Owen. I am a lost and wandering soul. Since I was a child, I wanted to lose myself in the forest and become part of it. It seems like when you’re lost, that’s when you’re most likely to discover true meaning. Over a lifetime I have been a malcontent and it leads me to wonder and to wander. The natural world is my remedy. Words come to me and I write them down. Images linger in my mind until I put them on paper.
I have been writing short stories and poetry since I was a child. As I have gotten older, the echoes of the ghosts of my grandparents haunt my footsteps as I walk this earth. They were children of the Great Depression, keepers of the old ways, and overall the mystics of my life. Between canning vegetables that they grew themselves, developing relationships with livestock, reading the signs for the weather, they always had a magic about them. I can still see my grandmother throwing salt over her shoulder to will away bad omens and bad luck. I can see them speaking to cardinals in the yard as if they were departed family members who came back to grace their presence. I can see the broom hanging upside down on the same porch that wore a haint blue ceiling. Their ways were passed down orally from their elders and they passed them on to me. I was impacted early own by a curiosity about the things that can’t always be seen by the naked eye, and soon my stories began to contemplate the folklore. Now I write it all down using my own vernacular but through their inherited eyes. This is my charge.
I create visual and digital art as well, and it often times combines the macabre with the beautiful and blurs the lines between those two concepts showing that the contrast is truly a thing of beauty.
You can usually find me with a pen in my hand and a song in my heart.
I have spent the last 35 years as a man attempting to find a way to create his art, and a lover of the animals that grace my life. I have always felt that they allow me to see things through their eyes, and by doing that I can more clearly see who I really am. I lust for wood smoke, the smell of cedar, wet sandals, dirt under my nails, and chasing the moments that put a gleam in my eye.
I’ll see you in Darkness, and in Shadows.
