Ki Longfellow (born Pamela Longfellow) is an American novelist, playwright, theatrical producer, theater director and entrepreneur. In Britain, as the widow of Vivian Stanshall, she is well known as the guardian of his artistic heritage, but elsewhere she is best known for her own work, especially the novel The Secret Magdalene (Eio Books, 2005; Three Rivers Press, 2007), which deals with gnosis (the direct experience of the divine), told through the Biblical story of Mary Magdalene. The second of her novels to deal with gnosis, although from a very different point of view, is Flow Down Like Silver, Hypatia of Alexandria. Longfellow is also the author of China Blues and Chasing Women.
Ki Longfellow was born on December 9, 1944, most likely in the Mount Loretta Orphanage on Staten Island, New York, to a mother, Andrea Lorraine Kelly, who was was barely sixteen years old. Kelly left her baby in foster care while she worked at any job she could find during the last of the war years. The infant Longfellow contracted pneumonia and was removed from the foster home, only to be taken in by her great aunt. She was removed from this "home" when it was discovered the husband was abusive.
Within two years Kelly, briefly assuming care of her child, left New York to resettle in Marin County, California. It was not until 1972, shortly before Kelly's sudden death at the age of 44 from an embolism, that she told Longfellow that her biological father was a full-blooded Iroquois whom Kelly had met at an unnamed New York City art school. From this long-delayed account, Longfellow believed her Irish/French mother was more ashamed of the Iroquois ancestry than of her daughter's illegitimate birth. Because Kelly never revealed his name, Longfellow never met him nor could she find him. In Marin, Longfellow was cared for by her mother's married older sister, Rosemarie Anderson, until her "Aunt Re" left for Texas with her own child and new husband.
After Kelly met and married a US Navy man, she claimed Pamela again, who at the age of four or so joined her mother and stepfather moving from naval base to naval base, including New York's Brooklyn Navy Yard, Hawaii's Pearl Harbor, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Long Beach Naval Shipyard, both in California, and Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia. Seldom anywhere for long, Longfellow attended a different school for each grade except the years spent on the Island of Oahu. Between duty stations, the family lived at her adopted grandfather's house in Madrone Canyon in Larkspur, California. Throughout these years, Pamela Ki Longfellow turned to her grandfather, Lindsay Ray Longfellow, for "family." The two of them would go to "the races." Lindsay was a keen horse racing fan, taking 7-year-old Ki to Golden Gate Fields where she learned to love the races as much as he did.
Longfellow graduated from Redwood High School in Larkspur. In her junior and senior years, she attended only those classes that interested her and cut those that did not. Determined to become a writer, she spent time with painters, poets, and musicians in Sausalito, and discovered what remained of the Beat Generation in North Beach, San Francisco.
At nineteen, Longfellow suddenly and unexpectedly had a dramatic experience that she now considers an occurrence of self-realization known as gnosis, or in the Hindu mystical tradition: Jnana. Not understanding her experience then and enduring increasingly severe panic attacks, she voluntarily entered the State Mental Institution at Napa, California. There she was diagnosed, without benefit of a doctor, as a "severe psycho-neurotic". In her later novel about Mary Magdalene: The Secret Magdalene, Longfellow made use of her gnosis as well as her experiences at the mental hospital.
On June 21, 1963, at age eighteen, Longfellow gave birth to her first child, Sydney Longfellow. (Sydney Longfellow became a painter as an adult.) In 1964 she acted in her only movie, Once a Thief (starring Alain Delon and directed by Ralph Nelson), but found acting not as involving as she'd hoped. In 1967 she moved with her daughter to New York City where she worked briefly as a fashion model and then as a writer for CARE. For one year she moved to Montana where she lived and worked on a ranch on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation as a member of the Peace Corps (Vista Volunteers, domestic division). For another year, she sailed to Europe, living for a time in Nice and Paris.
Back in New York City, Longfellow worked for the promoter Bill Graham in his Millard Booking Agency. There she met the manager of the English folk band Fairport Convention and moved with him to Hampstead, England, north London. They were married in 1972. This marriage lasted five years, during which Longfellow wrote occasionally for English music magazines.
