Episode 101 · April 25, 2023
Betty Casey: Award Winning Author and Illustrator
with Betty Casey, Editor, Tulsa Kids Magazine; award-winning children's author and illustrator
29 min
Betty Casey: Award Winning Author and Illustrator
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In this episode
In this episode I sit down with Betty Casey, who many of you know as the amazing editor of Tulsa Kids Magazine — and who happens to be my editor there, too. Betty has led that award-winning publication for over thirty years, and in our conversation she opens up about the winding path that brought her there: teaching literature and writing from middle school through college, helping students find their career paths at the community college, and always, always creating on the side.
What I love about Betty's story is how naturally her creativity threads through everything. She's an author and illustrator with three published children's books — May Finds Her Way, The Prince on the Prairie, and That Is a Hat — the last of which was recently chosen as the Read Across Oklahoma selection. She tells the delightful story of reading it to 1,500 kids at the Oklahoma City Zoo, elephants and all.
Because April is National Stress Awareness Month, we also get into how Betty manages a full life — running for forty years and hot yoga she never expected to love. And she shares something I keep coming back to: there is no magic formula for making time to create. You have to find your own rhythm. If you want to do it, you should just do it. Keep going.
Key takeaways
- Your creative career rarely arrives in a single leap — Betty's path from teacher to editor to author was a series of natural next steps that all built on the same love of people, ideas, and creativity.
- Deadlines can be a gift for procrastinators. Signing a publishing contract gave Betty the external accountability she needed to actually finish her books.
- There is no magic productivity method. Some people create an hour at a time; Betty needs long weekend blocks to get 'lost' in the work. Find the rhythm that fits you.
- Timing matters. Betty wrote her books later in life, when her kids were grown and she finally had the stretches of time creative work requires — proof it's never too late to pursue a dream.
- Know your publisher before you pitch. Betty matched her Alaska sled-dog story to a small Oklahoma press known for Western books, which made it a natural fit.
- Good children's writing can teach without feeling like a lesson — Betty built critical thinking, repetition, and 'dramatic irony for children' into a book meant simply to be fun.
- Movement is Betty's stress medicine: forty years of running for thinking time, and hot yoga as a 'moving meditation' that calms the body when sitting still to meditate feels impossible.
- Living purposefully, for Betty, means letting your outside match your inside — releasing what you only did for others' approval and living in line with what you truly value.
Chapters
- 00:00Find your own rhythm: there's no magic way
- 00:30Welcome and introducing Betty Casey
- 02:00Betty's path: teaching, career counseling, and editing
- 04:30What being an editor really involves
- 07:00The hard parts of small-business publishing
- 09:00Read Across Oklahoma and reading to 1,500 kids at the zoo
- 13:00Writing later in life: how the books came about
- 16:00May Finds Her Way and finding the right publisher
- 19:00Making time to create with a full-time job
- 23:00Managing stress: running and hot yoga
- 28:00Living purposefully in 2023
- 31:00The gift of a local publication and lifelong learning
About Betty
Editor, Tulsa Kids Magazine; award-winning children's author and illustrator
Betty Casey has been the editor of the award-winning Tulsa Kids Magazine for over thirty years. A former teacher of literature and writing and a career counselor, she is also an author and illustrator whose children's books include May Finds Her Way, The Prince on the Prairie, and That Is a Hat — which was selected as a Read Across Oklahoma title. Her artwork is featured at Sky Gallery on Route 66 in Tulsa.
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