Meet Christine Gallagher Kearney

Christine is a writer based in Chicago, but calls her native Minnesota home. She is a 2020 Midwest Review “Great Midwest Writing Contest” finalist and has published in places like Wild Roof Journal, Driftless Magazine, Fortune, ForbesWoman and Cara Magazine. She is the former Irish American News food columnist where she wrote about her gastronomic experiences in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is at work on a historical novel about a polio survivor. 

The Organization for Research on Women and Communication (ORWAC) awarded Christine a grant that enabled her to complete master’s thesis research in rural Catalonia, where she recorded women’s narratives of the Franco dictatorship to understand how oppressed regions keep their languages alive in the face of minority language extinction.

After working as an internal communications manager and diversity and inclusion specialist in higher education, electric utilities and insurance, Christine joined Russell Reynolds Associates, a premier provider of senior-level executive search and assessment that serves clients around the world.

Christine earned her master’s in Organizational and Multicultural Communication from the College of Communication at DePaul University and her bachelor’s in Spanish and International Relations from Mount Holyoke College. 

Q+A

Favorite Quote?

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” -Rainer Maria Rilke

Who helped get you here?

When I published my first op-ed on women’s leadership in January 2013 as part of the initial OpEd Project Public Voices cohort at DePaul University, I understood the power of sending my voice into the world. In that moment, I had the attention of Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill and her staff as I commented on the unintended consequences of her tweets about an incoming group of congresswomen. The power of my first byline was among the most transformative experiences of my personal and professional life. 

Tell us about your creative process.

Books scatter my office, pile up on my bookshelf and tuck into my backpack. I read to inspire and inform my creative process. I read to learn and grow. I read to understand how other writers think about the world. 

My first drafts are written by hand with the Ohto Rays pen in a lined, spiral-bound notebook with thick paper and a forest green cover. Hand written drafts are typed, additional edits are made, pages printed and more revisions scribbled on the train to and from work. Once I have a draft to share, I kindly ask a circle of readers and fellow writers for feedback. Their edits and suggestions are incorporated and I’m hopefully ready to submit for publication, most often to literary journals and magazines.   

When do you feel most at peace?

I feel most at peace surrounded by my family at our cabin in northern Minnesota. 

What do you hope will be different by this time next year?

By 2021, I hope to have the final manuscript of my novel in my hands, a publication avenue and have written a few chapters of my next book that is about a stranded gray whale carcass and the waterfront property owner who decides to become its decomposition host.

Want more? You can find Christine on Instagram @cgallagherkearney and Twitter @CGKwrites.