Mary Lee Kortes & Carol Hodge

Mary Lee Kortes

“As a writer, you get in a zone. You get possessed by something. If you’re lucky,” says Mary Lee Kortes.

Kortes has found herself possessed by many different forces over the arc of her 25-year career, be it as the lauded front-woman of Mary Lee’s Corvette, a solo artist, author, or social worker. Sometimes the possession comes in the form of Bob Dylan, whose 1975 classic Blood on the Tracks she covered as a live album in 2002, and later revisited in her 2018 non-fiction collection, Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob. Sometimes, as a short story writer and novelist, it’s by the way fiction roots itself in emotional truths. Other times it’s by music’s ability to be used as a tool in an expressive arts therapy program she created. All of the acclaimed songwriter and performer’s endeavors find themselves connected by the same thread: a deeply…