Inevitably her students end up making common sense as well as academic sense out of their experience, and learn to write too. Kate teaches poetry and short story writing to contract and summer students as well. Kate believes that writing is hard enough without making it more difficult by not having fun. The first thing I always do is to make it very relaxed, get rid of all the anxiety, fear and junk that we carry with us. Her classroom strategy is to keep it loose, keep it rolling, avoid stifling.
Students just rise to that, they love it.
Kate has had the experience that gives her the authority to help people write about their own. At age four she was responsible both for washing the dishes and supervising her young siblings learning to dry the dishes. At eight her lighter reading had included Time, Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Look, Life, Reader's Digest, including the condensed novels therein, as well as American Girl and Hemingway. She graduated from High School when she was seventeen. Her Aunt and Uncle from Olympia visited.