A New Cover for Trouble’s Daughter (12/1/2020) - What happens when a book goes out of print? In the olden days, that was that. But nowadays you can reissue the book yourself via print-on-demand (POD) publishing. One of the pleasures of this route is to choose your own cover for the book. For years I’d thought of reissuing my young adult novel Trouble’s Daughter: The […]
Reflections on My Stepping Stones Lighthouse (9/19/2016) - I have always felt that City Island in the Bronx, within greater New York City, where I lived in my twenties and early thirties, possesses a certain magic. There’s a feeling, when listening to the symphony of halyards chiming against the masts of sailboats or the eerie sound of wind blowing through the rigging, […]Announcing Editorial Services (9/13/2016) - Manuscript Evaluation and Consultations Virtually all novelists ask for feedback on their manuscripts before they show their work to their agents and editors. I have had the great pleasure of helping many unpublished writers launch their careers. I believe the next best thing to belonging to a writers’ support group is to receive a professional […]
Interview with Katherine Kirkpatrick by Susan Hill Long (9/19/2014) - Susan: What made you realize you wanted to be a writer? Do you have any advice for aspiring writers? Katherine: In the sixth grade, I wrote a story about vampire bats attacking a scientist. That year I won my first English prize, the first of many, and writing became “my thing.” I followed a family […]
Celebrating Fifteen Years of Redcoats and Petticoats (6/6/2014) - Recently an envelope arrived in the mail from the literary agency that represented my earliest published work. Only one of those titles, my 1999 picture book Redcoats and Petticoats, remains in print. When royalties start to dwindle, an out-of-print notice usually follows. It seemed to me I had a […]
Boreal Ties: Part II (5/14/2014) - Katherine Kirkpatrick’s Interview with Kim Fairley and Silas Hibbard Ayer III In July 1901 two New York businessmen paid the hefty sum of $500 each ($10,000 by today’s standards) to travel to a remote area of the northwest Greenland Arctic on the SS Erik. Their names were Clarence Wyckoff, 25, and Louis Bement, 35. The […]
Boreal Ties: Part I (4/7/2014) - While I was writing Between Two Worlds, I returned again and again to the stunning photographs in a gorgeous book called Boreal Ties: Photographs and Two Diaries of the 1901 Peary Relief Expedition, edited by Kim Fairley Gillis and Silas Hibbard Ayer III. Its panoramic shots of the towering cliffs and massive ice floes of […]
As Good as It Gets (3/8/2014) - The price of one of my young adult novels, throw in a few bucks for tax, is about what you’d pay for a bottle of wine to take to your host for dinner. People used to stop by the autographing party at the local museum’s bookshop to purchase Katherine Kirkpatrick’s latest young adult historical tearjerker, […]
The Commander and I (2/4/2014) - A photo of a spunky four-year-old Marie Peary, posed near a gigantic meteorite on a ship, inspired me to write a book called The Snow Baby. A photo biography, it tells of Marie’s childhood, from her 1893 birth in the Arctic to the age of sixteen, when her father, Admiral Robert E. Peary, reached the […]