Kathy Haaga, Not in the Mainstream

My path to becoming a writer has been both circuitous and serendipitous.

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Born in Arkansas, I grew up across the Mississippi River in Memphis. My dad was a salesman who thrived on people’s stories. As a child I rode along when he traveled to small towns in Arkansas, regaling me with stories about people from every farm and town that we passed along the way. He had a knack for making the stories of seemingly ordinary people interesting and colorful. A raconteur par excellence, he wove his stories together seamlessly. They were sprinkled with words and phrases such as “boulevardier,” “the vicissitudes of life” and “sartorial splendor.”

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A voracious reader, Dad hoped to go to college after he retired, but died before reaching that goal. Thanks to his belief in the importance of college, all three of his kids earned advanced degrees. Mine were a BS in Art (Painting) and an MFA in Theatre (Set Design) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My interest in visual arts and theatrical doings were my mom’s influence.  But my love of words and stories and wry sense of humor came from my dad.

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A thirteen-year sojourn to college in blessedly cool Wisconsin took me to theatre jobs in Pennsylvania and Nebraska before I returned home to the wretched heat of Memphis. It was 1985, and my dad was terminally ill. I’ve lived and worked here since, mostly doing theater and exhibit design, except for several all-too-brief stints dog-sitting in the promised land of Juneau, Alaska.

Whether working as a visual artist, stage designer or dog-sitter, writing has been my constant companion. I’ve always expressed myself better with the written word than with the spoken whether it’s in journals, letters, or emails. When I turned to design work at museums and zoos to augment my non-profitable work in non-profit theatres, I found I enjoyed researching and writing the educational text panels that went along with the exhibits—they were a form of storytelling.

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Writing text for a children’s exhibit at one museum led to teaching art to kindergarteners through a literacy/art program under the auspices of that museum. Realizing that more topic-specific picture books were needed for the curriculum, I wrote and illustrated a group of six picture books for my classes. 

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I’ve wanted to do more writing, but time has always been the enemy. Then along came 2020. While taking away nearly everything else, the pandemic gave me time. The pandemic, with its horrible worldwide loss of life, has been pretty deadly for theatres and museums as well. Thus, my design work has also evaporated, even my jewelry design work. Who needs jewelry with no place to wear it? So, I decided to go ahead and write the book I’ve been wanting to write.

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In the meantime, I hope readers will enjoy this blog: a “side gig” for me to tell stories about some of my adventures along the way.