Rhode Island Author Expo Spotlight – Rachael L. McIntosh

This post was originally posted on Martha Reynold’s blog and has been reposted here with author permission, minor revisions have been made.

I graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a B.A. in painting in the mid 1990’s. I lived in a non-live-in painting studio in Boston’s North End when mafia were still huddled at the coffee shops and before the place was gentrified.

That’s when I started Entropy Press to make my artists books and zines seem more legit. Entropy Press grew. My artist’s books appear in the collections of MIT professor Noam Chomsky, jazz musician John Scofield, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s Library. The online version of the zine was getting more hits than the satire site The Onion at that time. Soon a real bricks and mortar gallery, with a digital recording studio, and a black box theater cropped up under the EP brand.

In 1995, my father was in a plane crash and although the Coast Guard searched for days, they never found him. The only thing to confirm his death was a running shoe and his business ledger checkbook. Those things were found floating in the water and collected by a lawyer on his yacht on his way to the Bahamas.

It was around this time that I was suddenly afflicted with a mysterious malaise which turned out to be Multiple Sclerosis. I left Boston and my loft and sought out a “normal” life in Connecticut.

I ended up working as a marketing director in Hartford, Connecticut. I also worked part time as the Urban Artist Initiative Coordinator for Norwich and New London. Ultimately, I secured a full time job, via a temp agency, at a defense contractor agency because I knew how to use email. (I kid you not.)

Then things got sticky. 9/11 happened. My job at the defense contractor became more defense-y. Generals and mercenaries were floating through. I was the youngest person there. My world became almost schizophrenic. Between not feeling my feet and legs and not knowing how to defend my day job to my artist friends, my marriage was falling apart.

Long story short: I was unexpectedly pregnant and became hugely concerned about the future. Maybe it was to avoid thinking about my miserable state of affairs, but I threw myself with all my creative and intellectual might into the Ron Paul campaign. I wanted to end the war and fix all the stuff I had seen at the defense contractor’s. I was elected to be an alternate delegate for the state of Rhode Island and attended the Republican National Convention.

My experiences at the RNC prompted me to write the Security through Absurdity series. I wrote every night for almost two years to produce the equivalent of 4.8 novels. I submitted it to a publisher who told me that they were going to break it down into a trilogy. They also told me to get life insurance. The books, although closer to Contemporary New Journalism, are funny in parts and are listed as fiction so that I don’t get thrown in jail.

The Security Through Absurdity series is #1 on Goodreads Best New Series. The books are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iBooks, as well as in libraries and high schools in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Visit Rachael’s website, her Facebook author page, and follow her on Twitter.