Klise, Kate
Kate Klise shares more than just a love of creating highly readable and always entertaining books with her collaborator Sarah. She also shares DNA.
Kate and Sarah Klise created their first book together when they were ten and eleven years old. Their mother was an elementary school teacher and their father created educational films. Mom would read to them at bedtime. Kate, the future writer, lay in bed with her eyes closed, letting the theatre of the mind play out the action. Sarah, the future illustrator, jumped out of the bed to closely examine the illustrations. “Our mother insisted we make the gifts we give one another,” explains Kate, so the decidedly non-crafty Kate asked her sister to illustrate a story she had written as a gift. They have been working together ever since.
That same mother also made a bargain with her talented children: “She would send us to any college we could get into as long as we wrote a letter home every week.” Perhaps this is why so many of Kate’s books are epistolary in nature but the habit of writing letters–some would say a lost art form in and of itself–was engrained in all the Klise kids.
The 43 Old Cemetery Road series balances funny and scary in a way that engages readers. “I know these characters so well,” says Kate, who is at work on her seventh “Cemetery Road” book. “It’s fun to spend so much time with characters that you can almost sit back and let them tell the story.” She feels this way both as a writer and as a reader. “If I’m interested in the characters, I stick around for the ride–I like them because they are flawed and quirky.” Readers of the entire series will get to see a special payoff in the seventh book. That’s all we’re going to say but it’s going to be good!
When Kate finishes a manuscript, the copy-edited story is then sent to Sarah who creates the illustrations. The sisters then begin a back-and-forth process, each building on the work of the other. That shared family experience sometimes reveals itself in surprising ways.”We noticed all the villains resemble certain unsavory characters in high school,” Kate chuckles.
Perhaps that ability to access all the elements of school life contributes to the appeal of the Klise books. Kate finds herself conflicted when she receives letters from kids who admit that they never liked reading until they read one of her books. “On one level that is great, but on another it breaks my heart because it shouldn’t take all those years to find a book they love,” she explains. “I want to create books that make kids want to read more books.”
That compulsion to pull kids to reading at a younger age is the impetus to the new Three-Ring Rascals series. Sarah provides her whimsical line drawings just as in many of their other collaborations but The Show Must Go On is crafted for younger readers who are ready for a chapter book. More illustrations, generous white space, lots of dialog and talking animals all play a part in the success of this circus. “I pitched it as Downton Abbey meets Doctor Doolittle,” recalls Kate. She wanted to capture the upstairs/downstairs dynamic and decided a circus would be the perfect setting. The icing on the cake or, in this case, the top hat on the ringmaster? She includes a song in every book. “I wanted to create a series that is fun and warm-hearted and never mean-spirited.”
The characters don’t always come from Kate’s active imagination. A surprisingly engaging newsletter from the local electric co-op provided the inspiration for Stand Straight, Ella Kate. Something in Ella Ewing’s story spoke to the author and “I immediately ripped it out and sent it to Sarah with a note that read, ‘Do you love her or what?!'” Her sister loved Ella’s story so much that she wrote back (those Klise girls are still letter writers) that yes, she did love her and a demand to “Write about her!” Kate climbed into the story of the misunderstood but gentle giantess and is proud that she and her sister captured something of her “quiet dignity and Mona Lisa smile” when all around her was chaos. Stand Straight, Ella Kate went on to receive several starred reviews and state awards.
Kids today have books by Kate Klise and other wonderful authors to read but when Kate was a fourth grader, kids read prescripted passages by SRA. Kate loved reading so she blazed through the entire fourth grade set and left her teacher with a problem. What to do with the eager reader? “She let me dust the shelves of the library,” Kate recalls. No one else was there. Just Kate, a rag, some Olde English furniture polish, and thousands of books. “I would dust for twelve seconds and then pull a book out and start to read.” It should be noted, however, that this did not instill a similar love of dusting.
– Interviewed by Ellen Myrick, July 2013
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