About Kate
Hi. I’m Kate Whouley (hoo’-lee, rhymes with truly), and I live and write on Cape Cod, in the home that inspired Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved. The funny thing is, I never planned to write a book about my house-moving adventures. While we were connecting house and cottage, I was working on a novel—and I even took a research trip to Paris that year, in service of The Maestro and Her Protégé, publishing in October 2025 from Blackwater Press.
I write from character. Discovering that I was compelled by a quirky crew of house-moving, home-building men, I put the novel on pause to write that story. A 2005 Book Sense Book-of-the-Year nominee, Cottage for Sale is now available in a 20th anniversary edition. I love the bright new cover (see Egypt in the cottage window?) and I wrote an all-new bonus chapter for the book to catch readers up on the last twenty years of the cottage, the crew, and of course, the WhouleyCats.
After launching the original edition of Cottage into the world, I returned to the novel. But right around that time, I noticed something wasn’t right with my mother. Our journey over the next several years became my second memoir, Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words. That one won the 2012 New England Book Award in nonfiction, and was one of only nineteen university press titles selected for a 2012 American Library Association Best of the Best citation. (Not too bad for another book I hadn’t set out to write.)
For me, it’s all about the people inside the book—the firemen on my roof, my strong-willed mother, the members of my community band, and the imaginary (some drawn from life and history) cast of characters who occupy the pages of The Maestro and Her Protégé. As a writer, I’m fascinated by human nature—by our limitless spirit and our inescapable mortality, our humor in the face of horror; by the myriad ways that we feel, think, and interact; by how we live, love, and generally operate in the world. I’m also a relentless optimist—that means I work hard at finding the good stuff and the points of light, even as I am keenly aware of the darkness. I believe change, and even redemption, is possible, and again and again, I doggedly choose to embrace hope.
Between Book #2 and Book #3, I designed several independent bookstores, and was delighted to begin writing essays and features for Yankee magazine. I became the accidental president and managing director of the Cape Cod Concert Band, when we declared our musical independence, and in 2014, joined the founding faculty of the MFA at Bay Path University. I now direct the MFA program, and serve as the editor of Multiplicity, the literary magazine we launched in 2020. (You can find links to many of these activities by clicking on the Notes tab.)
But those characters inside the novel? They kept calling me back. And every time I returned to the world of The Maestro and Her Protégé, I found myself desperately wanting to stay. I’m hoping you’ll join me there, in a place where glass ceilings can be shattered, where care and kindness matter, and where, as the wise Emil says in the novel, “love outlasts us all.”
