Transcription of Kate Egan for the show Kid Literature, #102
Dr. Lisa: Kate Egan is a transplant to our great state of Maine and I believe a grateful transplant. She spent many years working in New York and has been in Brunswick for … how long now, Kate?
Kate: It will be 10 years in May.
Dr. Lisa: Ten years in May. Kate has been in children’s publishing for almost 20 years both as an editor and an author. She’s edited fiction and non-fiction paperback and hardcover for kids from pre-school through high school. Some of the authors she has worked for include Tamora Pierce, Suzanne Collins and Maine’s own Cynthia Lord. Kate’s first original picture book, Kate and Nate Are Running Late was published by Macmillan last fall. Thanks for coming in and being with us today, Kate.
Kate: Thank for having me, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: I’m really interested in the Kate and Nate Are Running Late book because I understand it’s a book about your own personal experience.
Kate: It’s a book about every parent’s personal experience. It’s a book about the difficulty of getting a family out the door for school in the morning and it begins with Nate, the five year old son going into his mother’s room and just taking her away and saying, “You got to get up. We’re running late.” From there, the story just tumbles forward. It includes everything that I think every family understands. “Get your breakfast. Get dressed. Brush your teeth. Find your backpack. Find your homework.”
Of course, things take a turn for the worse when things get us behind and there’s one point where Kate, the mother, says, “There’s been a change in plans. We need to drive instead of walk.” They get into the car and they squealed on the streets. They barely make it to school and when they get there, a surprise awaits them.
Dr. Lisa: Well, we’ll let people pick up your book at a local bookstore and find out what that surprise is.
Kate: I’ll just leave it a mystery.
Dr. Lisa: Good. Kate, you came to Maine for family reasons. Your husband now works in Augusta but there must have been something about Maine that brought you here that sort of drew you to the state as an author and an editor. You’re somebody who pays attention to things. What was it about Maine?
Kate: Well, when my husband graduated from law school, we made a quick weekend trip to Maine. We were only here … I wanted to stay for three nights. We were supposed to stay longer. He had some schoolwork he had to finish and I crashed a rental car so we were not able to stay in Maine as long as we liked.
When we went back to New York, I found myself thinking about Maine a lot. I’m thinking, “We can’t forget. We need to go back there. That was a really special place.” We never quite managed it. We stayed in New York. We took other vacations. We never went back to Maine but I know it was always in the back of my mind. When my husband kind of randomly interviewed for a job up here, I know that we were both hoping that it would be of interest to him and a possibility for us. We were just extremely fortunate that it worked out.
I’m not sure what truly makes Maine then on that first visit. Was it just being so peaceful compared to our frantic life in New York? Of course when we moved here, we had a normal life. We were frantic about getting kids to school and that kind of thing but I do think that we’ve been able to slow down here and find focus in a way that we couldn’t in New York.
I know myself. I’m easily distracted. I found it hard in New York to really focus in on things that I really wanted to do, that were important to me and in Maine, somehow, I’ve been able to do that with fewer distractions around.
Dr. Lisa: How old are your children now, Kate?
Kate: I have … my daughter is 10, almost 11 and my son is six, almost seven. They’re both about to have their birthday.
Dr. Lisa: Neither one of them have ever lived anywhere but Maine?
Kate: No. They love to travel and we have no family connection in Maine. We have no relatives here so we actually travel all the time visiting our families elsewhere and they really are eager to see the world and they love to go to other places. I think that what they don’t realize that they have that’s special is a really firm connection to a place that’s home. I feel we’ve been able to give them that in Maine. I don’t think they will appreciate that till later but I think that part of what makes travelling so appealing to them is that they know they have a solid place to come back to.
Dr. Lisa: Not only do you live in Maine but you lived in Brunswick which seems to be quite a hot spot for people who love to write and love to read. There are many authors including Jaed Coffin who we’ve interviewed on the show here before and Charlotte Agell who has been profiled in Maine Magazine, Elizabeth Strout. There’s so many authors that have a Brunswick connection. Why do you think that is?
Kate: I’m not 100% sure. I will say that I feel Brunswick has everything a creative person needs. It has beautiful natural surroundings as well as its driving center. It’s the kind of place where you can walk to where you want to go. I feel that that kind of community is conducive to thinking and letting your imagination roam. It also … we have a wonderful bookstore and we have a wonderful coffee shop. Just to me, as a writer, everything I could possibly want is in Brunswick. We have a college so there are ways to feed yourself intellectually.
There’s just a great mix of people in Brunswick, too. I really … we stumbled into Brunswick. We have never been to Brunswick before we moved there and it’s just everything that we could dream of. We love it there.
Dr. Lisa: It is interesting because one of the first times that I heard your name was through Susan Grisanti who is the editor here at Maine Magazine, Maine Home and Design and she had found you on a 48 hours in Brunswick trip at a coffee shop and she said, “You won’t believe this. Here is this rock star, Kate Egan who is the editor of The Hunger Games sitting in a coffee shop in Brunswick, Maine and she is so personable and she is so charming and so low-key. You wouldn’t even believe it.” It’s the kind of thing I think that we in Maine don’t even realize how fortunate we are to have because we’ve never had it any other way.
Kate: I think that’s true and when … of course, I’m constantly meeting amazing people in Maine and I feel that very accomplished people I meet here, and there are so many of them, are not necessarily trying to impress you with their accomplishments. They’re just quietly accomplishing great things and I don’t know really why that is. I’m not sure if it’s a New England culture or Maine itself. I’m not a native New Englander so I don’t know entirely but what I do know is I like living among people who are not trying to impress others. I just like that people are able to do what they do and do it well and we don’t have a … I don’t think we have a culture here of bragging and so I like that about Maine.
Dr. Lisa: You have been an editor for many very well-known children’s authors and you’ve edited The Hunger Games which of course became very popular. This is something that not every person who loves reading and loves writing thinks about as a job. Was there something about your childhood or your formative years that caused you to go in this direction? Because you’re still writing but you’re writing with another person, you’re helping their voice kind of shine through.
Kate: Well, I didn’t know it was a job either when I was growing up but I do come from a family of huge readers and I would say, probably in my family, I read the least. My father in particular, when we were kids and we would go on vacation, will go to the … I grew up in New Jersey. We would go to the Jersey shore for a couple of weeks in the summer and my father hated the beach. He never even went to the ocean. He would go on his so-called vacation with a stack of books that’s two feet tall. I’m not exaggerating. That’s what he would do for the entire two weeks, is he would just read his books.
My sister also works in publishing. She also loves to read and our grandmother … I remember when I was very young, I would go over to my grandmother and she would say, “What were you reading?” Sometimes I would say things that she did not approve of but she would always say to me … she was also very curious about my friends and she would say, “It’s important when you grow up to have friends who like to read. It’s important to be able to talk about books with your friends.”
Those sweetest messages I filed away and it took me a while to find my way into publishing. I went to graduate school and then I taught English at a high school for a couple of years but I knew that publishing was out there eventually. I had a friend who did an internship at a publishing company one summer. She didn’t stick with it but I thought, “Oh, that’s something I could do.”
Anyway, it was a series of adventures. I made my way into publishing. As soon as I discovered it, I knew that it was sort of the perfect match for me. I love … I write my own books now but at the time, I … when I started working in publishing, I did not write. I really liked the kind of behind-the-scenes nature of publishing. I wasn’t really seeking the spotlight and I like helping somebody else find their way narratively and then sometimes, those authors would find their way into the spotlight. I like watching from the wings.
Dr. Lisa: The idea of writing and writing a book always seems like a very solitary pursuit but what you’re describing is very much collaborative.
Kate: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: Especially when you’re talking about the traditional publishing industry. Does that ever create challenges for people who think of themselves as, “I am the author of this book. This is my baby,” almost.
Kate: I have to tell you I’ve never had a bad experience. I definitely have had authors saying, “I don’t see it that way. I don’t want to answer your question. Thank you. I like your suggestions for my book but I don’t want to go there.”
Ultimately, it is the author’s book. I work for a publisher or I work for many publishers because I’m freelance and so it’s within their right to say, “Well, we don’t … we don’t want to publish this book if you can’t make it satisfactory to us,” but that has never happened in my experience.
I mean publishers … if an author has come to the point where his or her book is signed up by the publisher, that means the publisher already has great respect and interest in the book and obviously, they want the book to meet their needs but authors have a fair amount of freedom to do what they like. They do not have to do every single thing that an editor suggests.
I think that part of being an editor is being diplomatic and helping … know when to push and know when to hold back. It’s definitely something I’ve learned very early in my career. I worked with an author I had loved as a child. Her name was Paula Danziger. She sadly died young about 10 years ago but I worked on a book with her and I agonized over notes for her and she got them and she didn’t do anything. It was humbling for me but ultimately, I think I really learned from her. She knew what she wanted to do in the book and it was not what I had imagined. Her book had integrity of its own and she published it as it was.
Dr. Lisa: What about the notion of self-publishing and the quality of the book that can emerge from that? I’ve read some books that I really wanted to like and I know they were self-published and it wasn’t because they were self-published. Often, I would read the book and then afterwards would notice it was self-published. Do you think that’s something, sometimes, as lost when there isn’t this collaborative process when you’re creating a book?
Kate: I think that every writer can benefit from an editor and I think that … I mean I’ve worked with people who are first time authors and I’ve worked with people who are very well-known and I’ve worked with my own kids on their writing. I feel everybody can benefit from another reader. I feel that a professional editor, as a more experienced, will give … I don’t want to say more experienced reader but certainly will give a certain kind of feedback that I think can be helpful to any writer but not everybody can be … not every aspiring writer is able to be connected with a publisher or a professional editor and so if those writers are exploring self-publishing as an option and can find someone else to read their work, I think that accomplishes many of the same goals.
I’ve read self-published books that are really great and I thought, I don’t understand why this book isn’t published by a capital P publisher and then I’ve read other self-published books that just feel like they’re very meaningful to the author but don’t always bridge the gap to a reader.
The truth is I don’t know a whole lot about self-publishing because I work for publishers but I do know that publishers are very interested in what’s happening in the world of publishing just because that world has exploded and there are so many options out there for writers than just publishing through a traditional channel.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been describing this need to not only read an author’s words but also read the author, him or herself and know how to respond in a way that you can really achieve the outcome of a whole book that someone will someday want to read. Do you think that this attitude and this sort of compassionate embracing of somebody who’s trying to do something very personal, this creation of a book, do you think this is something that your children are seeing from you, you’re passing down to your own kids?
Kate: I hope so. I’m not sure. What I do know I can pass on to my kids … my son is too young for this yet but I have a daughter who is in fifth grade and you probably know what it’s like to walk a fifth grader through an assignment. They do it one time and then they think they’re done and I do think that I can model uniquely a real understanding of how a piece of writing is not done the first time that you write it. My daughter might not want to make edit and then I mentioned lots of famous authors and I say, “Well, those people had to edit their book. It’s so strange that you would not want to go back and look at this again.”
I do think I know that when I was a kid and I thought about people who were writers, I thought of it as a very mysterious, almost magical thing that … and I truly imagined that a writer would just sit down and sort of … at a rickety old typewriter and produce this novel and be done. I see the messy side of writing now and I mean that’s just a myth. No writer writes like that.
I think it’s instructive for me as a writer and also as a mother to … just to show what a complicated process writing can be and there’s no shame in going back and going back and revising and changing and that’s what the best writers do. I do try to … taught my own kids about that.
I think that probably they have a different understanding of the writing process than other kids have and they certainly have an idea … I’ll get manuscripts to … my house is just … everywhere they go, every flat surface, they’ll see someone’s book sitting there and some stage for the process and for them, writing is not mysterious at all. It’s a very tangible thing. Our cats walk all over the manuscripts. They just have a different understanding.
Dr. Lisa: I think that people who write often as being highly intelligent and … not always but often highly intelligent people think a lot about things and have a very specific idea about how they want things to sound or look, in fact oftentimes, can be somewhat perfectionistic in their approaches. What you’re describing is kind of the opposite of that, is this willingness to be imperfect, this willingness to embrace the messiness and just sort of work through it.
Kate: I think that writing is a really brave act. When I sit down to write something, I’ve written a lot but every time I sit down to write something, I think, “Well, all those other things that … I was able to do it then but I will definitely not be able to do it this time.” There’s that. There’s getting past the blank screen and then there’s also the fear once we have written something of sharing it with somebody else. Everything I’ve written is pretty short. Every time I get a four or 500 page manuscript from an author, I think how incredibly brave to do that.
I don’t really know about writers, who are perfectionistic, I have to say. I think that you have to … it’s a leap of faith to start writing words on paper. After you get past the first sentence, you realize, “Well, I should have to put it out there and then I’ll go back and fix it.” In the end, or course, everyone wants their writing to be perfect but I think that any writer knows that if you’re perfectionistic from the beginning, you will never get past that first sentence. I think that perfect is the enemy of the good when it comes to writing.
Dr. Lisa: Kate, how can people find out about your first book?
Kate: Well, that’s a good question. I am working on developing a website but I don’t have one now. I know that it’s in a lot of libraries. It’s in local bookstores here in Maine and elsewhere. It can be ordered online through Amazon of course but also independent booksellers that sell online. This is where making the transition from editor to writer is a little bit strange because when you’re an editor, you’re very behind-the-scenes so I’m still working on creating more public presence but I have other books coming out so I know that I will be forced to develop that public presence in a better way.
Dr. Lisa: Well, I think you’re doing a great job.
Kate: Thank you.
Dr. Lisa: You’re very authentic and I know that people will rush out to the local bookstore and buy Kate and Nate Are Running Late will enjoy that and I know that many, many people have already enjoyed the work you’ve done editing The Hunger Games so I’m appreciative of the fact that you’d spent time here talking with me today about the writing and editing process and living here in Maine.
Kate: Thanks for having me, Lisa.