Kate Burke

Kate Burke now lives in the land of eternal sunshine, central California. The weather forecast seldom changes: hot and dry. The most perilous part of driving is keeping the sun out of your eyes. However, put Kate back on slick, wet, icy roads, and her native Buffalonian driver’s instinct takes over. She’ll get you home without incident.

Setting and characters in THE JAR & HARP derive authenticity from Kate’s continent-spanning experience: her childhood near Buffalo NY, twelve years living in the farm country of central Nebraska, and her recent years in California.

Some might decry her depiction of icy cold Buffalo as a hackneyed cliché, but it was part of Kate’s childhood reality. “I was a freshman in high school during the winter of 1976-77. I remember how crummy that winter was. I personally recall the Blizzard of ’77. During my driving test [for her license], I had to parallel park between a car and a snowbank,” she recalls. (She passed.)

Kaelyn, Jessica, Claire and all the characters inhabiting the fictional Buffalo pub The Jar & Harp just deal with the cold, the snow and the ice, the way all Buffalonians do.

Nebraska’s devilish prairie winds and shrilling bugs aggravate her Irish-born protagonist Mairéad, but Kate loved them.

“You would come around the corner of the house, and the wind would just about knock you off your feet,” she recalls. “You would literally feel your knees start to buckle. But no matter what you were thinking or how you were feeling, when that wind hit you, you knew you were alive, and you knew you were a damn small bit of nothing in the huge scheme of things.”

To young Kate, growing up in long-settled Western New York, America's Great Plains were just the dusty setting for books and movies. Decades later, Kate was teaching high school English when she met Nebraska native Ron Burke online, in a writers’ forum. By then, Ron had recently retired from AT&T and moved back to the Burke family farm. After months of mostly electronic exchanges, they met in person, and fell in love. Kate moved out to the farm to be with him.

Listening to Ron’s amazing anecdotes of growing up on the farm during and after the World War II years, Kate realized these tales deserved a book of their own. Five books, all of her BLUE RIVER BOY series, weren’t enough to relate them all, but, Kate says, “I had to put together many, separate events and instances from Ron’s childhood in a meaningful way. I couldn’t get them all in.”

Kate has described the real-life setting and events of the BLUE RIVER BOY books as the 20th century ending to the pioneering tales of the 19th century.

Kate also offers a fast, thought-provoking read in her novella AN UNCOMMON CONFESSION. Her Roman Catholic upbringing features heavily here, as the protagonist, Diana, makes a confession to Father Matt about having killed three people already, and her desire to kill a fourth.

“I like dynamic characters who grow morally,” Kate says. “I don’t create evil for the sake of evil. Any nastiness that shows up in one of my books is there to provoke a moral response.”

Contact Kate at kateburke.author@gmail.com.