Kate Samuels is a true Portlander—meaning her other car is a bike, her spirit animal is a food cart, and she’d like her home address to be a treehouse atop a bookcase in Powell’s. When she’s not copyediting for pocket money or taking long, rambling architecture walks around the Alphabet District, she can generally be found writing in an indie coffeeshop.
Though a proud Portlander, she admits that her home city would be much improved by the presence of castles and clotted cream. She encountered an abundance of both during a sophomore semester abroad at Cardiff University, where she studied Welsh mythology and kept a travel blog titled Wales Watching: Misadventures of a Globetrotting Introvert. (blogs.ubc.ca/waleswatching/)
Two years later, she wrote The Fifth Branch on various trains, buses, metro platforms, and coffee shop patios across Europe over a series of long weekends. She thinks she might also have been taking a full course load in Amsterdam at the time. It's a bit of a blur.
