Ramsey Hootman
Ramsey Hootman is the author of Courting Greta, Surviving Cyril, and Cyril in the Flesh. Her fiction is often set in the northern California town of Healdsburg, where she was born and raised. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two rambunctious boys.
Twitter: @Ramsey Hootman
Instagram: @RamseyHootmanAuthor
Favorite non-reading activity?
Remodel! My father is a retired master carpenter. I wasn’t super into carpentry as a kid, but I was always around my dad’s work, so it was familiar to me. A few years ago, I was finally able to purchase my own house, and the (re)construction began! When we moved in, we had no working furnace, there was no insulation, the fireplace wasn’t functional, and so on and so forth. My dad helped me tackle the major projects, and now I’m on to what I call “the fun stuff.” Our house has just one bathroom, and currently I’ve got it stripped down to the studs because I’m replacing the bathtub and putting in tile. With a husband and two kids, it gets... interesting. Fortunately, I’ve got the master on speed-dial! Whenever I get stuck, I ask him.
Is there a work of art that you love. Why? Have you ever visited it in person?
When I was in college, I studied in London for a semester. I visited a ton of museums, one of which was the Tate Modern. A lot of the weird performance art stuff went over my head, but there was this one little piece that got me. In a big gallery room filled with paintings, there was this little shelf on the wall, and on the shelf, there was a glass of water. The title of the piece was, “This is a tree.” Essentially it was a statement about the power of the artist – how the artist’s vision can transform one thing into another, the ordinary into the extraordinary. But it’s also a statement about the person viewing the art. Do you choose to join in the artist’s vision? Can you see the tree?
Is there another profession you would like to try?
If I could do life a second time around, I’d go to school for orthotics and prosthetics, which I didn’t even know was a thing when I went to college. Orthotics combines my love of medical tech, my fine-detail skills for making stuff, and my desire to help people in a practical way. I’ve considered going for it, but there are only a few programs in the US, and none of them are nearby!
If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?
Oh, this is a no-brainer. It would start with trepanning and then go to Phineas Gage and on to prefrontal lobotomy – basically the history of how humans learned about the brain and its functions.
