Creator Corner: Author Sophie Kohn
Welcome to Creator Corner, a blog series where we interview the creators of our recent books. For this post, we interviewed Katrina Hyena, Stand-up Comedian author Sophie Kohn, whose book published October 15, 2024!
Owlkids Books: Sophie, how did you begin writing and illustrating children’s books?
Sophie Kohn: I was on maternity leave with my son in 2020, locked down and very isolated in the early days of a global pandemic, and feeling a bit disconnected from the creative and professional side of my brain. After reading approximately six billion children’s books to my baby, I became fascinated with the magical alchemy that makes a kid’s book shine. Sometimes you happen upon a gem where the art and the words are perfectly entangled in a glorious dance. That’s what inspired me to sit down and start writing my first kid’s book. That, and the fact that with a new baby, my free time was now chopped up into small and unpredictable chunks, and writing a kid’s book felt less daunting and more accessible and fun than writing, say, a whole serious adult novel.
OKB: What inspired you to write this book?
SK: I’ve always been someone who laughs at inappropriate times and uses humor to cope with really serious or difficult moments. It’s frequently got me in trouble, stretching all the way back to elementary school. But at times it’s also felt like a superpower: people who move through this world and are able to find humor under every rock and behind every flower are operating on a really interesting frequency. So I wanted to write this book for other kids who might be feeling unsure if their brain is a little different or weird, because I used to be that kid. I still am, in many ways! I wanted to reassure those kids that they’re actually magical and powerful humans. From there, a hyena felt like the perfect main character, given that they’re already world-famous for their relationship with laughter.
OKB: What was the most enjoyable part of bringing this story to life? What was the most challenging part of the process?
SK: Because I typically write stories for adult audiences, art had never been part of my creative process. I’d never thought about any of my stories visually. I’d never thought about what a scene literally looks like on the page. So when the illustrator Aparna Varma started showing me her preliminary sketches of Katrina and all the characters in Katrina’s universe, it was like a whole other dimension opened up. The book transformed from 2D to 3D. Her particular art was so infused with humor and play, and it just added a new layer of warmth to the story. It was so gratifying to watch her process unfold alongside mine, and observe the way the art and words began to feed off each other, empower each other, and make each other stronger. But I’d say that was also the biggest challenge for me – writing to pictures was a new skill I had to learn to cultivate. It totally changed the way I had to approach the writing.
OKB: What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
SK: I hope readers will feel reminded that being a little weird and a little different from everyone around you is beautiful and important, and that the particular unique way you see the world is valuable, even if other people struggle to understand it. I hope people feel invited to lean into the ways they are unusual, rather than trying to silence or deny those parts of themselves.
OKB: What’s a fun fact people may not know about you?
SK: One summer I paddled the Yukon River with some friends and hitchhiked back to Whitehorse with a truly unhinged birthday clown.
