I adore looking at old photographs, particularly photographs of people.
I found this one on the web. It’s of actress Marjorie Day. There’s not a lot of information about her out there that I was able to find on a cursory search. But for my purposes, that doesn’t really matter.
I feel like I know her from the photo, in a different way than knowing facts, in a kind of abstract way. It’s a casual photograph, not overly posed, or so it seems to me. I feel like I have a glimpse of her personality from it.
I can’t stop looking at her expression, at her stance. She’s somebody. You can see it. She will probably show up in my fiction one day.
This Bassano photo in the National Portrait Gallery seems like it’s of a different person.
About Victoria Janssen
Victoria Janssen [she, her] currently writes cozy space opera for
Kalikoi. The novella series A Place of Refuge begins with
Finding Refuge:
Telepathic warrior Talia Avi, genius engineer Miki Boudreaux, and augmented soldier Faigin Balfour fought the fascist Federated Colonies for ten years, following the charismatic dissenter Jon Churchill. Then Jon disappeared, Talia was thought dead, and Miki and Faigin struggled to take Jon’s place and stay alive. When the FC is unexpectedly upended, Talia is reunited with her friends and they are given sanctuary on the enigmatic planet Refuge. The trio of former guerillas strive to recover from lifetimes of trauma, build new lives on a planet with endless horizons, and forge tender new connections with each other.
