About

Kamila Zeman Miller

What is a Kami and How Do I Find One?

I come from my parents, my sister, my friends, my family, my world.

My parents fled the Czech Republic, then Czechoslovakia, in 1968 when the USSR invaded our country. I was an infant. I was wearing a yellow sweater, and my grandfather, who was dying from cancer, held me in his arms for the last time. That image is burned into my mother's memory to this day. They managed to work their way to the United States over the course of several months, taking shelter with friends and relatives. We immigrated to the United States illegally, but my mother was pregnant with my sister, so we were allowed to stay once she was born. We lived with my great aunt, Maria, who later took me into her home a second time while our house was being built in the Pac NW so that I wouldn't miss the first few months at our new school. My father was an engineer and artist as well as an accomplished musician. My mother is an excellent nurse and she also enjoyed painting in oils, although she seldom has time to paint. We became naturalized citizens in 1981, a short decade before my father's death. We were able to bring my grandmother, Maria's sister to the U.S. where she lives with my mother to this day.

Where I came from and how colors everything I see. I still speak some Czech, although I speak with the equivalent of an English lisp in Czech because there's a letter I can't pronounce. This entertains my cousins to no end. Being raised with art and music as a normal part of family life, I'm disturbed by the tendency of American culture to elevate musical performers in particular to idol status while undervaluing or discouraging amateur endeavors. When I visited my family just before the Velvet Revolution we spent a lot of time singing and telling jokes, playing musical instruments and looking at art that family members produced themselves and displayed in the house. We rarely watched television, and I don't remember listening to any commercially produced music for the entire month we were there. We did go to many museums and looked in on street artists and amateurs as they painted views of Prague at locations that artists have been painting for hundreds of years, maybe even a thousand years or more.

It's different, and I like the difference. I encourage anyone with artistic leanings to go for it, and to be gentle with themselves especially when you're just starting out. Talent is overrated. Passion and practice are what develop true artistry. And even if you never become famous or rich, that's not really the point of art, is it? You don't have to be Andy Warhol, even for fifteen minutes, to express yourself and make your personal world more beautiful.

I believe a person's hobbies say as much about them as their friends. Maybe the two are related. My friends are scalawags and riff raff, and my hobbies are pish toss.

My faves are gardening (I have about an acre or more developed,) belly dance, indoor rock climbing,skiing, paragliding (the last three it's been too long,) chess, Scrabble and Sudoku. I enjoy ripping apart movies, even ones that I love, to see how they tick and how they spronk. I volunteer for OryCon, Portland's Premier SF and F convention, every year. These past few years I've been helping with writer's workshop. I also enjoy wine. If only there was good denatured wine ... but no one would do that to good wine. So I'm stuck with one or two glasses at most a night. Oh, and I read, but there's never enough time. And I blog. And I sew. And other stuff.

Spike bathed in light in the Miller barn

Kami Quick Stats:

About Forty Years Old

Lives in the Pacific Northwest

Favorite Foods: Lobster, Chocolate, Mangos, Prime Rib, Dim Sum, Sushi

Favorite Drinks: Water, Margaritas, Navan

Games: Chess, Chinese Checkers, Scrabble, silly poker games

Authors: James Herriot, Ursula LeGuin, J.K. Rowling, Mark Twain, Mary Rosenblum/Freeman, Richard Bach, Rudyard Kipling and many others

Favorite Charities: SW WA Humane Society, Susan G. Koman,

Doernbecher Children's Hospital

Writes daily

Paints monthly

Gardens obsessively

Builds rock gardens to her peril

Enjoys travel and hiking

Loves big dogs and fluffy cats

Wishes she rode better

If she won an unholy amount of money,

her public works project would be a bridge.

She'd also commission a sculpture

for the city that wasn't rusting iron.

I live in a nice daylight ranch with a view of the Gorge with my husband, two children, five dogs, four cats, a chicken and a healthy population of coyotes, raccoons, wild birds, deer and the occasional cougar. My family also includes a web of wonderful friends that grows a little larger every year as children are born, new friends are introduced and marriages are made.

I've been married since 1991 and it's awesome, in the old sense of the word. My husband is a brilliant, athletic, honest person that no one can really believe exists until they meet him. He'll have a non-fiction book coming out in June 2008 about violence and how it relates to martial arts and artists. My children are teenagers now, high-functioning autistic people who have embraced their diagnosis and made it work for them. Four of our five dogs are working animals. We have an ancient German shepherd who still gets up to bark at strangers despite advanced arthritis. We have an airedale who takes his job of chasing deer, rabbits, raccoons, coyotes, foxes and whatever else disturbs our sleep at night with raids on the garden or eggs very seriously. And then there are the 'puppies,' who are just over a year old but our largest dogs, Great Pyrenees mixes that are being trained to watch the goats. Did I mention we have goats? They're not really family, but they're a part of us. Skunk is a Nubian mix, Scooter is who knows what, and Spike, Llama and Snowy are Saanan-Boer crosses.

The chicken is a chicken, and the cats and indoor dog are expert nappers.

I completed high school and went straight to college to study engineering, where I discovered that being smart in high school means that you're completely unprepared for a college workload. I struggled and landed solidly in Physics for three years, where I started to get my feet under me. Unfortunately my father developed brain cancer, so I left college and moved close to home so that I could spend more time with him. I always intended to return to college, but two children later ...

I returned to college by a different route, taking horticulture courses from Mt. Hood Community College. Another move separated me from school, but the degree I started to build has given me a new appreciation for gardening and an eagerness to experiment. I also learned that given some maturity and basic organizational skills, pulling straight A's is not that hard.

In the meantime I've been picking up watercolor classes and other art courses as I can catch them. Somewhere in there I took several years of belly dance instruction with Ede Schenkel and later I spent a few months in classes taught by members of the awe-inspiring Gypsy Caravan. I studied martial arts for several years at various schools; Judo, Jujutsu, and two styles of 'hard' karate. I also horsed around on violin from grade school up until college, and took an interest in outdoor survival. I hiked from Corvallis to the coast, by our roundabout route a journey of about one hundred miles on foot. I biked a similar route three years later.

The most influential education for my writing and art, however, came from a writer's critique group I joined about a decade ago. Mary Rosenblum, or flagship Mary as we called her at the time, became a wonderful friend. Her encouragement and advice have helped me become a much better writer than I was way back then. We still remain in touch. The infamous Lucky Labs and my ambitious INK critique groups are continuing my education in the writing field, and periodically kicking my butt to market. The environment I've adjusted to within critique groups has helped me approach my art in a more professional manner as well. I spend my time in an endless loop of practice, critique, edit/rework, practice, critique ...

Which brings me to the next goal in my ongoing education: Learn how to get an agent and promote myself. Hence this website.