NYT Bestselling Author on Writing 200+ Children's Books — Tish Rabe

Tish Rabe traces her path from training as an opera singer to landing a music production job on Sesame Street's second season, where she sang with the Muppets and learned the craft of writing for children. She recounts how a rejected rhyming dinosaur manuscript led Random House to hire her to write a science-in-rhyme series for Dr. Seuss after his death, requiring her to master his exact rhythm and pure end rhymes. The conversation digs into her creative process: writing the last page first, mapping songs to public-domain melodies, using rhyme as a mnemonic device, and adapting when reality intervenes (like Pluto's demotion forcing a solar-system rewrite). She shares the origins of passion projects including a book for military families (Sometimes a Part Always in My Heart) and her work getting free books to underserved kids. She closes on the 1982 Big Bird in China shoot and her belief that children are our most precious gift.

• Random House rejected Rabe's rhyming dinosaur book Morris the Brachiosaurus because they were 'the rhyming home of Dr. Seuss,' then immediately offered her to write a new series for Dr. Seuss instead.
  00:00:00
• Dr. Seuss had wanted to write a series of science-in-rhyme books for early readers but died before finishing the first one; Random House handed the stacks of research to Rabe because her dinosaur manuscript matched Seuss's rhythm and rhyme scheme.
  00:31:58
• The Sesame Street writers taught Rabe to write the endings first, a technique she has used on every children's book since.
  00:08:52
• In 2008 Audrey Geisel (Dr. Seuss's widow) personally called Rabe and asked her to read all 41 Dr. Seuss books and write 'Oh, the Places You'll Go!' designed to be read in utero.
  00:33:36
• After Rabe published a solar-system mnemonic ending in '999 pizzas' for Pluto, Random House called to say Pluto had been demoted; she rewrote it to '999 nickels' so the illustrator only had to change pizza boxes to nickels.
  00:45:26
• Rabe started her own company around age 70 during COVID and built the bedtime book Sweet Dreams with the Pajama Program (now Beyond Bedtime), embedding sleep tips in rhyme so parents read them aloud.
  00:53:13
• For her military-family book, Rabe got clearance onto the Groton naval base, read every military-children's book in the library, then was pointed to United Through Reading, which records deployed service members reading to their kids.
  00:59:57
• Michelle Obama funded 16 additional pages of exercises for Rabe's health book featuring made-up Seuss-style characters like 'Zing Zing Zing Zans who loves washing her hands.'
  01:16:41

• Rabe has a four-year college degree in opera with a minor in jazz and originally intended to be a Broadway star, not an author.
  00:01:33
• She got onto Sesame Street because her high school music teacher became assistant music director on season two and asked if she could type.
  00:02:35
• Her first on-air singing break was performing 'I Love Trash' with Oscar the Grouch.
  00:03:36
• Joe Raposo wrote 'Bein' Green' (Kermit's song) deliberately with no end rhymes at all, which stunned the Sesame Street staff; the only other non-rhyming song they could find was 'Moonlight in Vermont.'
  00:24:03
• To research books, Rabe pulls every children's-library book on a topic because the content is already simplified, then hunts for words with rhyming potential (e.g., birds 'migrate' rhyming with 'vacation').
  00:39:44
• Dr. Seuss insisted on two rules: perfectly consistent rhythm and pure (not slant) end rhymes; when stuck, he invented words, a trick Rabe also uses (e.g., 'Grouplets').
  00:40:14
• Every book Rabe creates herself contains a song set to a public-domain melody (e.g., a lullaby to 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star') so families already know the tune.
  00:50:37
• After joining the Mystic, Connecticut Chamber of Commerce for business advice, Rabe was instead asked to write a children's book about the town and wrote 'Mystic by the Sea' in about two days after 'hallucinating' four seagulls in a coffee shop.
  01:06:43
• Big Bird in China (1982) was the first film crew allowed into China with the 6-foot Big Bird costume; Rabe scheduled 13 rain days and it poured the entire first 13 days, with hand-dyed feathers that couldn't get wet.
  01:16:41
• The Big Bird in China special won an Emmy for best special for NBC despite running 90 minutes with a complicated plot about finding the Phoenix.
  01:17:12