I get excited about a lot of things, but what I really enjoyishaving authors visit my (small) local library! By (small) I mean to say that we don’t get very many authors to come speak in our neck of the woods, so when one does, guess who is there to get the scoop, A Simple Taste for Reading! Not only did I get the ‘scoop’ on author Kate Clabough, I was also invited to dinner with her and another friend of mine who runs the wonderful site Nebraska Rural Living, Betty Sayers. I feel as though I might have talked their ears off, but books and their author’s get me just a bit excited!
Kate had grown up in this area and is considered a ‘local author’, which is why she was chosen to come speak to us. She is a Holdrege, NE native but lived in the town of Alma, NE for 13 years. During a few of those years, she was a ‘jack of all trades’ working at a floral shop, cleaning a motel and working at the newspaper, just to name a few! Kate is the type of person who is willing to work at anything that is asked of her. Then at last she became a librarian in the town Alma, where she worked for 4 1/2 years (the exact same amount of time I worked at my library!).
Later in life, she had gotten a divorce and moved to Tennessee at the age of 33. When she hit the Tennessee border, she decided she was going to be an author! Kate has been a writer all through out her life, but this change was going to be the one where she was going to be someone different.
Once Kate settled in to her new life, she started writing for the Farragut newspaper. She wrote for a special section called “The West Side Story”. Kate not only likes to write, but she is also passionate about genealogy and is, as you can say, a ‘professional researcher’! “The West Side Story” staged articles about a wide variety of people and places, as well as their history. Writing for this column, Kate told us about some of the interesting people she would meet while researching for her articles. Some adventures Kate was lead on were a little too outrageous to mention! Many of the ‘folks’ she would interview referred to Kate as a ‘foreigner’ and a ‘not from round’ these parts’, which didn’t phase her one bit. Kate’s grandmother Alice, was the soul person who inspired her interest in history.
After her run with the newspaper, Kate and her husband both started working for a regional magazine. Kate was writing about 20 stories or more for them A MONTH and of course her points of interest were the history of things. As this job became a past tense, she started to do a little freelance writing for magazines and focused more on her books and being an author!
Kate mostly writes non-fiction, but her newest writings are works of fiction. Her first published book is titled, “Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Murder”. This is books is part of Kate’s series, the Rhea Tennyson Mysteries. Kate refers to her books as “rainy afternoon mysteries” that you can enjoy in mostly one sitting! In her first book, she takes us to a town called Blaisdell, Nebraska where library director, Rhea Tennyson’s neighbor turns up DEAD. Not knowing if it is the work of a serial killer or someone personal, Rhea becomes part of the investigation when mysterious strangers start showing up in the town. Keep an eye out for the offical review in the next day or two from, A SIMPLE TASTE FOR READING! The next two books that Kate is about ready to release, although I haven’t been told a date yet, are titled “The Fine Art of Murder” and “Cooking with Strychnine”. Kate was actually doing a little research while she was here for the second book!
If you are interested in purchasing Kate’s first book, you can do so by clicking on this link “Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Murder“! I very much enjoyed getting to know Kate and she was so inspirational to me with her words of wisdom on being an author and becoming one as well! I look forward to staying in touch with her and learning from her as she is a great teacher and writer! Kate no resides by the Great Smoky Mountain’s but still finds serenity on the Great Plains of Nebraska, I hope she will be back to visit soon!
A Simple Taste for Reading 