Kathleen Rowan 🌱

@rowanauthor.bsky.social

3167 Followers 3225 Following

🔸️writing fantasy & sci-fantasy🔸️living real life adventures🔸️marveling at the mundane & the majestic🔸️breathing courage into your embers 🔸️GentlyRowan on AO3 & Tumblr (HZD) 🔸️photography by me & my husband 🔸️🥔 📷 close up of my hands, green valley beyond

Two nuns in The Sound of Music look at each other before presenting car parts they have stolen from the Not Sees to prevent them from chasing the Von Trapp family
Treebeard witnesses the destruction of the forest and roars in grief and rage. From The Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers
Kathleen Rowan crouches on the bank of a swamp, surrounded by bald cypresses and their reflections in the brown, green and blue sunlit water, one hand upturned and lifting as if drawing the short cypresses fingers up out of the ground in a circle around her.
Kathleen Rowan, in a deep blue medieval dress, stands on a mountaintop under a cloudy gray sky, looking across a green valley to a pale blue break in the clouds
Tufts of grass mark the line between the sunlit dune where Kathleen Rowan sits and a very blue sky. Her head bends slightly in a melancholy attitude, and her hair dances in windswept tendrils before her face. The bright day casts stark contrasts between light and shadow on her dark blue dress, its skirt splaying dramatically on the sand where she sits on a dune. Photo by Mr. Rowan
Photo, in theatrically wide dimensions: A small figure (Kathleen Rowan, dressed as a Nora from Horizon Zero Dawn) on a snowy mesa's edge looks down into a canyon that meanders toward hazy mountains in the distance. The earth is warm tan, dotted with scrubby green plants. Blue stretches beyond it: bright blue skies, vast and clear, and deeper blue mesa-shadows stretching into the canyon behind the eager, adventurous figure. In the distance rise the La Sal Mountains. · The Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands National Park · Photo by Mr. Rowan
Snow clings to hardy bushes and trees in the foreground, while lances of light flow from the sun peeking out from behind a looming stone formation above and behind them. The snow looks magical in its contrasts of white light and blue shadow.
Kathleen Rowan stands in the blue shadow of a low cliff dripping with icicles, some of them reaching all the way to the ground, gazing across the road on the other side of her at the thin golden glow of a winter sunset slipping over rolling hills into the distance under a clear sky. She wears an ombré dark blue dress spangled with tiny white stars. Near the southern part of the Appalachian Trail in north Georgia. Photo by Mr. Rowan.
Kathleen Rowan stands akimbo in the snow amongst the hoodoos on a bright, sunny day at Bryce Canyon
A white cat sleeping on a white blanket with one front paw outstretched, the pink inside of his ear the only break in the snowy monochrome
A natural monolith, almost silhouetted in the falling dusk, juts into the smoky summer sky between trees in the foreground and tree-capped cliffs beyond. Yosemite National Park, fire season, 2020. Photo by Kathleen Rowan.
The low sun shines golden through a colonnade of lakeside trees in autumnal hues, casting a pattern of alternating light and shadow over the ground. Kathleen Rowan, in a long dress with hanging sleeves, stands this side of the trees, looking out across the shining blue water. Photo by my husband. Georgia, USA.
A tuxedo cat lies on her back on the floor, front paws lifted, staring back at the viewer with piercing green eyes. Sunlight washes over her through a grated glass door, limning her fur. Beyond, out of focus, are the autumnal auburn tones of a pile of leaves.
A tuxedo cat, rolled over mostly onto her back, her left paws stretched out and touching, and her right paws each curled in. Light shines a rim of highlight on the black part of her fur.
A white cat curled up in a gray felt box by a window, his fur dense as a blanket of snow
Photo: an adventuress pauses to survey the wide, orange and blue vista of natural desert monoliths under open sky. She is dressed as a Nora from Horizon Zero Dawn, in brown with accents of blue and a curved white "machine plate" clasping a short cape to one shoulder. Puddles of water pooled in shallow hollows in the plateau on which she stands reflect back the azure of the sky. Arches National Park, Utah, USA. Photo by my husband.
Kathleen Rowan, in a dark blue dress with red sleeves peeking from it, stands on a beach gazing out at the Gulf of Mexico. Photo by her husband. Mississippi, United States of America
The anime meme of a man in glasses lifting a hand toward a butterfly. He asks, "Is this... Neurotypical?"
A tuxedo cat on her back, curled almost into a circle, with her right paws raised, and her back, left foot extended
Gray t-shirt from netflix's shop featuring the funny drawing a young fan in the movie made of Rumi on the back of a winged Jinu, labeled Rujinu
Frodo saying, "I'm going to Mordor alone!" but "Mordor" is crossed out in purple and replaced with "The KPop Demon Hunters Sing Along."
Looking up at a backlit weeping willow, photo by me
Kathleen Rowan at Zion National Park, Utah, USA. Sunlight glows off the warm, brown highlights of her long hair as she stands on a smooth, sloped, Navajo sandstone overlook gazing across the vast, shadowed canyon at the line of peaks known as the Court of the Patriarchs. Photo by her husband.
Kathleen Rowan, in a post-apocalyptic costume complete with (toy) archery bow inspired by Horizon Zero Dawn, stands boldly in the snow atop Angel's Landing at Zion National Park in Utah, USA. The canyon is so far below that the river looks like a road and the road is barely visible.
Kathleen Rowan, in a wind-billowed, deep blue dress under a bright blue sky, looks across a sunny vista of snow-capped mountains with clouds in the valley below. Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park, Washington, USA
An upcycled toy archery bow held aloft to align with a similarly shaped natural, angled cut in a cliff face at Zion National Park in Utah, USA. I redesigned the bow in the style of Horizon Zero Dawn. It features blue "machine wire" and elements that look like "machine plate" off the robots from the game, along with earthier elements like feathers, beads, and braided cord.
A white cat dips down below the hem of a curtain he's partially under to look back at me. A mostly black cat sits just behind him like his shadow, more fully covered by the curtain as she looks out the window beyond. One of her dark ears presses, silhouetted, into the curtain.
Three tiny, black and white kittens frolic at the base of a tree. One is blurry, sticking her nose right up to the camera.
Two small, red peppers and a small potato, a smaller potato, and teeny tiny potato on a saucer with a leaf pattern
A tiny kitten - barely more than a newborn, eyes only half-opened so far - wriggles as I hold it securely in one hand.
Kathleen Rowan sits in profile on a sand dune at a bright white beach under an azure sky with sparkling blue water in between, her face obscured by wind-blown tendrils of her hair. The sunward front of her long dress is deep, vibrant blue, and the back is nearly black in shadow. A red underdress peeks out around her forward-slumped shoulders and at her wrists where her hands lay folded in her lap. Photo by my husband.
A black and white kitten, asleep with one of his back paws up by his face
A white kitten "hides" behind some stringy grass
Gray waves lap on a gray beach under a gray sky. Kathleen Rowan walks away from the camera in a long blue ombre dress, dark at the top, sky blue and star-studded at the end of the skirt swishing around her ankles.
Photo: an adventuress pauses to survey the wide, orange and blue vista of natural desert monoliths under open sky. She is dressed as a Nora from Horizon Zero Dawn, in brown with accents of blue and a curved white "machine plate" clasping a short cape to one shoulder. Puddles of water pooled in shallow hollows in the plateau on which she stands reflect back the azure of the sky.
I stand, tiny and full of awe, on an outcropping on the right of the photo, amidst the grandeur of Zion Canyon, with its high peaks at intervals on either side and the sparkling Virgin River running through it. Photo by my husband
Close up on the forest floor: a snail and a tiny white mushroom stand side-by-side on a bed of crisp, curled brown leaves. Photo by Kathleen Rowan
Two kitties by a window
A white cat turns his head back to look at a white woman's hand laying lightly on his fluffy belly.
An upward view – as if you've craned your neck way back to take in the enormous height – of towering sequoias rising in stark, straight lines against a blue sky! On the left, the sun peeks ever so slightly from behind the foremost tree, washing the sky white around it with its brightness. Photo by Kathleen Rowan. Sequoia National Park, CA, USA.
A cluster of purple flowers with five rounded petals per flower - wild phlox - grows in the shade on the forest floor.
Kathleen Rowan stands at the brink of the Grand Canyon, looking across it with her back to the viewer. A wind ripples in her short, dark hair and long, blue gown. She wears a red scarf around her neck that drapes down her back. The Colorado River wends through the rippling canyons, cut into the variously colored striations of rock and stretching out, vast and deep, to the pale horizon. Photo by my husband. Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, USA.
I reach up, up, exuberantly, echoing the sharp angles of the Grand Teton Mountains standing hazy and blue across the lake at my feet and the half-fallen pine tree angled in front of a copse of its fellow evergreens. I wear a blue ombre dress spangled in tiny white stars. Photo by my husband. Grand Tetons National Park, Wyoming, USA.
View from an airplane over Kansas City and its surrounding countryside: shafts of sunlight stream between clouds, from the upper right to the mid left, setting swathes of distant fields below aglow in contrast to the shadowed foreground.
The vibrant light of sunrise or sunset hits the mountains of Silver Gate, Montana, just north of Yellowstone's Lamar Valley, painting near ridges red and casting those beyond in purple shadow. A coniferous forest blankets their feet, and the branches of a pine reach into the foreground on the right.
Dusks falls in soft hues over a country road through flat, golden fields. A car's headlight in the lower right corner lights the pavement ahead. Uneven fenceposts dot the roadside as it narrows into the distance, leading the eye toward the hazy mountains on the horizon. Power lines cross overhead at a different angle, toward high electrical towers that stand faintly sketched against the brightest corner of the sky in the upper left. Photo by Kathleen Rowan. Northern California, USA.
Kathleen Rowan, in a wind-billowed, deep blue medieval dress under a bright blue sky, looks across a sunny vista of snow-capped mountains with clouds in the valley below. Photo by my husband. Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park, WA, USA
A white kitten in a striped blanket in a soft box, holding onto hanging faux ivy with his front paws,
Vibrant green moss adorns the thick bark ridges of a fallen tree like seafoam on rippling waves Photo by Kathleen Rowan Castle Crags, California, USA
A lone, seated figure -- tiny in the wide landscape, but stark against the bright blue sky -- watches the last white gleam of the setting sun glow in the crook between a cliff on the right and the broad, curved rock formation she sits on in the center. The silhouette of a tree, perhaps a pinyon pine, reaches up into the azure sky from the foreground on the left.
I stand atop a bulbous cliff, arms outstretched against a blue, blue sky. A dark, distant bird flies above me and to my left. A sunlit tree grows in the foreground, in front of the cliff.
Sunlight slants over a cardboard box, open and laying on its side on the floor, while a white cat lounges inside. His eyes are narrowed sleepily, looking at you from the side.
A white cat and a tuxedo cat face off, paws raised, ready to bat at each other, despite the fact they're both lounging on the carpet.
Undulating rock rises to pine-covered hills on either side – one sunny, one in full shade – with a blue, wooded mountaintop centered in the distance. The sky is clear and blue. Photo by Kathleen Rowan Mount Saint Helen's National Volcanic Monument, Washington, USA
Kathleen Rowan sets off down a dirt path through a glade of ferns almost as tall as she is under towering evergreens. She leans forward, bowed by awe or just eager for adventure. (Her hair is short, and she wears a purple top under a strappy, black, tea length dress with combat boots.) Sol Duc, Olympic National Park, WA photo by my husband
A tiny, blue-eyed kitten (tuxedo pattern) leans against soft, light folds of fabric the same color as her eyes, looking up at the camera
A young while cat walks out of the shot. A little bit of sunlight dapples moss-mottled pavement and the scalloped leaves of low ground cover plants. The setting is a very green back yard, the perspective very close to the ground. In the upper left, we see the bottom of a bit of wooden fencing.
From JoJo Rabbit: JoJo, facing himself in a mirror, says, "Today, just do what you can."
Defined rays of sunlight peek through scattered clouds in a blue sky, limning the rolling green hills of California's Briones Regional Park and crisply highlighting each blade of grass on the hill the photographer stands on.
Leaf shaped fan blades stacked on a cabinet