The Mom-Stuff Blog Tour is really excited to visit Katherine this week. We believe all of our moms will enjoy this week with her. I want to share a video with you . This was my first introduction to Katherine’s work. I love this video! It is an example of how I feel about motherhood. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Defining A Movement is a video essay about motherhood by Katherine Center for the Mom 2.0 Summit in Houston this February http://www.mom2summit.com/ Click the link to see this amazing video.
Meet Katherine
Around that time, Katherine also started keeping journals, logging with great sincerity every detail of middle school life as she knew it. Lists of friends! Lists of boys! Lists of must-have shoes! Lists of personal flaws and areas for improvement! The journals (though not the lists) continued through college, and now Katherine has storage boxes of them taking up far too much room in her attic.
Katherine always intended to be a writer. At St. John’s School, in Houston, where she clocked her K-12 years, she generated stacks of poems, school newspaper columns, and short stories. At Vassar College, she majored in English, wrote short stories, lettered her poems onto metal signs that she put up around campus, and wrote a novella (which won the Vassar College Fiction Prize).
Not too far out of college, she met the guy she would get to marry a few years later. On that first night, he held the car door open for her, made her laugh so hard her face hurt, and–he says–knew by the end of the evening that she was the one. On their second date, Katherine almost choked to death on a pancake.
Around that same time, Katherine won a fellowship to the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she taught Freshman English and earned an MA in Fiction. She also co-edited fiction for the literary magazine Gulf Coast.
After graduate school, Katherine held a number of crazy jobs and a few sensible ones. Her favorite job was teaching creative writing to little kids through a program called Writers In The Schools. She also liked working in her uncle’s “Used, Rare & Out-of-Print” bookstore, an old house with many reading nooks and a secret door, which has now been sold and turned into an Italian restaurant.
Katherine grew up in Houston, the middle of three very close sisters. Her older sister, who has beautiful red hair, worked as a journalist for many years and now teaches French. Her younger sister, who has beautiful green eyes, is a lawyer with a serious knack for decorating. When they were younger, their house was a cacophony of stereos blaring from each room, blow-dryers, and phones ringing. Back then, they sometimes got so mad at each other they threw shoes. Now, they are all great friends.
Katherine’s parents are both Texans with charming accents. Her dad is a lawyer and her mom—among many other things—crossbreeds Brahman cattle with Herfords at her ranch.
Katherine’s husband Gordon is a sixth grade teacher at the school she herself went to, and he likes to joke that they met in his class. They have two feisty and impossibly sweet young children—a girl and a boy—who love to give hugs, turn on the hose, raise and lower the driver’s seat in the car, run the bath faucet, squirt hand sanitizer, eat lollipops, sweep rain puddles, dump out raisin boxes, stand on the dining table, unfold folded things, listen to stories, and give people presents (like sticks, pieces of cardboard and grocery receipts from their mama’s purse).
If you ask Katherine’s 4-year-old daughter what Katherine does for a living, she will tell you that her mama “is an author. Just like Richard Scarry.”
Katherine’s official BIO:
Katherine Center’s second novel, Everyone Is Beautiful, is featured in the March issue of Redbook. Kirkus Reviews likens it to the 1950s motherhood classic Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and says, “Center’s breezy style invites the reader to commiserate, laughing all the way.” Booklist calls it “a superbly written novel filled with unique and resonant characters.” Katherine’s first novel, The Bright Side of Disaster, was featured in People Magazine, USA Today, Vanity Fair, the Houston Chronicle, and the Dallas Morning News, among others. BookPage named Katherine one of seven new writers to watch, and the paperback of Bright Side was a Breakout Title at Target. Katherine recently published an essay in Real Simple Family and has another forthcoming in Because I Love Her: 34 Women Writers on the Mother-Daughter Bond this April. She has just turned in her third novel, Get Lucky, and is starting on a fourth. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and two young children.
I have just sarted to read one of Katherine’s books. I will up date you on my experience as we visit Katherine this week.
Thanks to everyone following our Mom-Stuff Blog Tour. Visit Katherines Blog. Buy and read one of her books. Make comments, make tweets, invite friends, tell your friends about how much fun we are having. If you have a blog you want us to visit, let me know at dianne@mom-stuff.com Mom-Stuff is giving gifts to the moms who make the most comments so join in the fun.
Mom-Stuff has added a new page titled Rockin Boddie Pins.It is easy instructions for girls hair accessories. You can get some fun girl hair styles to use the Rockin Bobbie Pins in, at The Wright Hair blog.
Visit us tomorrow for some more great infromation from the mom-stuff team. We believe in moms helping moms. Life is a circle around here. Come and join us.
Dianne-from Mom-Stuff
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