Kathie Giorgio Named Keynote Speaker for the 2013 Southeast Wisconsin Festival of Books
Kathie Giorgio has been chosen at the keynote speaker for the fourth annual 2013 Southeast Wisconsin Festival of Books where she will debut her second novel, Learning to Tell (A Life)Time. The novel is the sequel to her 2011 award-winning The Home for Wayward Clocks.
Organizers for the Festival decided that Giorgio was the perfect keynote speaker for Friday, Sept. 20, 2013 on the UW-Waukesha campus. David Hackbarth, co-chair of the Festival said, “Kathie has been deeply involved and very generous with her time since the first festival. We now have the opportunity to spotlight her as a major Waukesha talent whose impact is being acknowledged well beyond Southeast Wisconsin.”
Giorgio said she never intended to write a sequel to The Home for Wayward Clocks. “It took me three years to write Clocks and it took three years to sell it. I’d been out of that book’s world for a long time and didn’t think I would be able to get back into it. However, six months after the book’s release, I was at a warm stone massage, and in the middle, the opening line floated across my closed eyelids. By the time I left the spa that day, I knew that this book took place sixteen years after the end of Clocks, that Clock’s main character, James, was now dead, and that the book would focus on Cooley, the 16-year old girl that James saved.”
Learning to Tell (A Life)Time has the same nontraditional format as The Home for Wayward Clocks, Giorgio explained. Odd-numbered chapters follow what Cooley goes through after the death of her mother, an abuser she hasn’t seen for 16 years. The even-numbered chapters are short stories that take readers through Cooley’s mother’s life to learn how Mara Rose Mayfield, Cooley’s mother, ca
me to be a monster.
“And that’s one of the major points of the whole book. Monsters are not born. Evil is not present at birth. Monsters are made, and if we were more aware in our world, evil could be prevented,” Giorgio said.
Fellow Wisconsin author Erin Celello, author of Miracle Beach and Learning To Stay, said Giorgio’s upcoming novel is a “masterful, artful look at what it means to be human and the fissures that are ever present between any two people.”
Additional information on Giorgio can be found at: http://www.kathiegiorgio.org/.
The 2013 Southeast Wisconsin Festival of Books, coordinated by the UW-Waukesha Foundation, is scheduled for Friday, Sept. 20-Sunday, Sept. 22 on the UW-Waukesha campus. The event is free and open to the public.