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

TL;DR

Tish Rabe accidentally became a children's book author after training as an opera singer and landing a job at Sesame Street season two.

Key Points

• 1.Tish studied opera at Ithaca College (class of '72) with a jazz minor, intending to be a professional singer before pivoting entirely by accident.
• 2.Her Sesame Street entry came through her high school music teacher, who became assistant music director on Season 2 and asked if she could type — she sang on the show, albums, and specials including a duet with Oscar the Grouch.
• 3.Key Sesame Street creative lesson: writers wrote endings first, working backward from the punchline — a technique Tish still uses, always writing her last page first.
• 4.Jim Henson was described as a "gentle giant with a mind of steel" who would do a Sesame Street day, fly to London for the Muppet Show, then fly back — constantly working.
• 5.Sesame Street pioneered double-level humor and educational focus groups, originally worried a six-foot yellow bird, a cookie monster, and a multi-racial cast wouldn't work in 1969.
• 6.Her first book, "Bert and the Broken Teapot," came from pitching a personal childhood story at Sesame Street Books; the editor simply asked her to reframe it around Bert.
• 7.She submitted a rhyming dinosaur book ("Morris Aurorus Brachiosaurus") to Random House, was rejected because they are "the rhyming home of Dr. Seuss" — then offered the chance to write a new Dr. Seuss science series.
• 8.Dr. Seuss had started a science-in-rhyme series for ages 4–7 and died before finishing the first book; Tish was given four months to deliver two completed manuscripts.
• 9.Dr. Seuss's two non-negotiable rules: perfect, unvarying rhythm and pure (not slant) end rhymes — when stuck, he invented words, a trick Tish adopted (e.g., "Gerlatz" in "Oh, the Pets You Can Get").
• 10.Audrey Geisel (Dr. Seuss's widow) personally called Tish to write "Oh Baby, the Places You'll Go," asking her to weave references to all 41 Seuss books into a single volume for babies read to in utero.
• 11.At 71, Tish founded her own publishing company during COVID to create books with dialogic reading (questions embedded in text) and launched "Sweet Dreams" to teach bedtime routines, partnered with the Pajama Program (now Beyond Bedtime) for kids facing adversity.