When we first talked, I had started writing Fish House Secrets, and the first of my juvenile novels, so already I was writing things that weren't like what I'd started with. Asked if she had ever imagined such an output occurring, Kathy says, 'You never know what the next idea is going to be, but I think even then that I knew I was going to be trying lots of different things.

Though The Bare Naked Book and 101 Ways to Dance are intended for audiences at the opposite ends of the child-adolescent spectrum, they illustrate an important characteristic of Kathy's writing - her unwillingness to compromise in giving her audience the whole 'story.'Īt the time of our initial interview, Kathy had published five books, but now her bibliography boasts some two dozen books as well as a number of short stories in edited collections. Kathy's most recent book, 101 Ways to Dance, a collection of short stories for older teens, may also garner the notice of the media as the volume's 14 stories each deal with some aspect of adolescent sexuality. Aimed at assisting preschoolers in identifying body parts, this picture book, which is celebrating its twentieth year of being in-print, had a pair of pages, the so-called 'penis' and 'vagina' pages, which attracted some media attention. Just prior to our initial interview session in the 1980s, Kathy's The Bare Naked Book had appeared. Since 2007 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Red Is Best, a picture book that has become a modern Canadian classic, I thought it an appropriate time to revisit Kathy. It's been more than 20 years since I interviewed Kathy Stinson for my 'Portraits' column in Emergency Librarian while Kathy was on her first 'Book Week' tour with the Canadian Children's Book Centre.

Becoming Ruby by Kathy Stinson