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MEET KATHE GOGOLEWSKI
by Bonnie O'Brian

Would you please tell us what influenced your choice of your writing genre? How did you come up with the storyline for TATO?

Kathe Gogolewski

TATO is a fantasy adventure for children ages 8 to 13. I was teaching grade school when I started writing it, so the genre was a natural choice. The story is about a boy who acquires magical powers and brings a potato to life. It evolved through a number of chats with my schoolchildren. We pretended that we all came from potatoes, and each child chose a different type of potato such as red, russet or white. Then they chose a style for preparing a potato, such as mashed, fried, baked, hash browns. They explained their personalities in relation to their choices, and had a lot of fun with it. They asked me questions about how a potato could come to life, and I invented a story about it. That’s how TATO got started.

Has TATO won any awards?

Yes, several. It won the May, 2006, Golden Wings Award, presented twice each year to the one book that the Senior Editor of the department at Wings Press feels best exemplifies wonderful story telling ability, great characterization and exceptional writing skills. It also placed third in the Preditors and Editors Readers’ Poll for books in 2005 for the Novel Mainstream category. TATO was also the #1 bestseller with my publisher in the month of February, 2006.

Did you base your characters on real life people?

I think authors tend to incorporate themselves and people they know in their writing in the same way that portrait artists tend to paint themselves into their work. Even when we write about someone else, it is still his or her personality as we understand it, so it is filtered through our own! There is no escape! Having said that, I don’t think my personality shows up in a significant way in TATO. The boy, Michael, is a mix of different children I’ve known, as is his sister.

Do you do other types of writing - for example, educational, nonfiction, magazine work?

Using my experience as a schoolteacher, I wrote an educational supplement, a Teachers’ Guide, to go with TATO. It is an integrated unit aligned with California State Content Standards for Language Arts and Science for 4 th and 5 th grade. The science experiments explain certain magical illusions in the story. I recently returned from the San Francisco Bay Area where I worked with seven fourth and fifth grade teachers from the Palo Alto Unified School District and West Contra Costa County School District. I demonstrated lessons from the guide with their students for one period a day for a week. We all had a lot of fun! Teachers or administrators interested in an author visit may find out more from my website: http://tri-studio.com/kathegogolewskiTEACHERS.html. I am also an editor for Ranch and Coast, San Diego Lifestyle Magazine, and The Muse Marquee, a magazine for writers.

What special qualities do you try to instill in your children's books?

I don’t want to preach to the kids (they can smell that stuff at 100 paces!), but I do want them to feel certain things vicariously through the eyes of the characters. I want the story to tap their sense of compassion for others and to gather a feeling of hope and strength about how to deal with problems such as grief or sibling rivalry.

For example, the main character in TATO, a boy named Michael, loses his grandfather, Gankum, who was also his best friend. In the end, Michael is able to transcend his grandfather’s death through the idea that love lasts forever. Through the power of love, his grandfather’s spirit is able to convince Michael to move on. This message sinks in during Michael’s many adventures with his sister and their little mascot, TATO. He must battle giant spiders and shrinking doorways to overcome obstacles. In the process, young readers can apply Michael’s growing awareness to events in their own lives. I want children to walk away from TATO with a sense of their own goodness and immortality.

You are a recently retired schoolteacher, and now you teach as a volunteer at a local elementary school. What do you enjoy more? Teaching or writing?

  I love both. Teaching grade school children has been a singular pleasure in my life!  Being around their energy every day for years has kept me feeling young. Writing children’s stories is, for me, is a way to pay tribute to the children and those wonderful years I had in the classroom with them.

I understand you also work as a professional artist. What kind of work do you do?

I do book covers and illustrations for Red Engine Press, and I also paint murals. Recently, I painted two wall murals at Children’s Hospital in San Diego. If anyone would like to see samples of my work, I have some of it posted here: http://www.tri-studio.com/KATHE.html

Please tell readers about the series of audio classes on writing that you co-teach with a group of other writers. How did the idea for this series come about?

After my books were released, I got involved with other authors to cross promote and share resources and networking. I have been involved with numerous group projects since then, including selling books with other authors at book fairs and conventions, such as the LA Festival of Books. The audio class was an extension of one of these projects. Several of the authors were already doing a call-in program where they would discuss writing and book promotion. From this, one author had the idea that we create audio classes, and we approached Deron Douglas, owner of Double Dragon Publishing, with the idea. He offered us a contract. All five authors involved, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Marilyn Peake, Joyce Faulkner, Allyn and myself have different areas of expertise. Joyce, as a retired engineer, was our techie guru; Allyn, as a long-time participant in Toastmaster, was our moderator; Carolyn, author of The Frugal Book Promoter, led the charge on book promotion; and Marilyn and I were the resident experts for writing. Though our expertise overlaps, we gravitated toward topics where we were most knowledgeable. Based on this, we created three threads for our audio class series: Writing, Promotion and Technology for Writers. We contracted for 30 classes, which will be complete at the end of 2006. I have to say that we are having a blast! Anyone interested in learning more about the classes can visit this page: http://tri-studio.com/kathegogolewskiAUDIOCLASSES.html