Swimming Against the Current
- Carolina Campos Ruiz
- Jun 22
- 3 min read
Kate Markland on StoryQuest, Survival, and One Hour a Week
A heavy bang on the door started around 9 a.m. as Gabriel ate breakfast. The boy and his mother, who were staying with a friend, hid in the utility room, and two police officers, one armed with a taser, eventually forced their way inside. Still barefoot and in his pajamas, nine-year-old Gabriel stood his ground.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he told the officers, getting louder each time.
Gabriel felt the strong grip from one man and, thanks to his years of practicing martial arts with older teenagers, was able to escape it. The second grip had four hands, making the boy’s struggle more difficult. He was dragged outside, locked in a cage in the back of a van, taken someplace he and Kate did not know. He was later granted “visits” with his mother for one hour a week on FaceTime.
This same boy, now 12 is the co-author of the Adventures of Gabriel series, and today serves as the Chief Dream Officer at StoryQuest, a platform he and his mother Kate Markland are building to empower other children to assimilate and narrate their own stories. Kate told host Amy Boyle during the inaugural episode of Season 6 of the Speaking of Phenomenal podcast. StoryQuest had its first board meeting in early June.
“Nobody can ever take away that he’s got a book,” she told Amy. “You’re gonna feel a sense of pride, a sense of self-worth, the fact we’ve achieved that, and nobody can ever, ever take that away from you.”
Storytelling has been part of Kate’s life since her childhood, when her grandfather, a gifted oral storyteller would recite poems to her. One poem in particular stayed with her: Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” She did not know how much of it she would need in her adult life.
A former chartered physiotherapist who ran her own clinics in England, where she is from, Kate was separated from her son in December of 2023 and started to meet him once a week for an hour. In the beginning, they used their time together to read illustrated books like Michael Morpurgo’s The Puffin Keeper and Treasure Island, but soon realized they should imagine their own story.
“Mum. It’s a book,” Gabriel told Kate after seeing the collection of six short stories they had written together. “Yeah, right,” she told him. “No, Mum,” he said. “It’s a book.”
Kate self-published them and started to lead workshops at schools and to reach out to audiences interested in children’s development. Internationally, India and Nigeria have been among the loudest to recognise her work,a fact Kate finds quietly pointed and UNICEF has recognised her storytelling methodology as well.
“We literally are using storytelling to communicate that children’s voices matter and that they need to be heard,” she told Amy.
Kate and Gabriel continue to meet virtually one hour per week. Most recently, they discussed artwork for their upcoming book. They were allowed to see each other in person for the first time (90 minutes together) when they shared a long embrace.
“To feel Gabriel hug me and hug me and hug me,” she told Amy. “He knew that I’d never given up on him, and I knew he’d never given up on me. But to feel that physically, there was something incredibly reassuring.”
Kate is preparing for events like an upcoming TEDx talk. A former swimmer, she dreams of one day competing in an aquathlon, and hopes visits like that first one will become more frequent. They have a deal: to publish one book and one companion book a year.
“Mum, you do this full time now?” Gabriel asked her recently.
“Yeah, I do.”
“Why, Mum?”
“Because I’m not quitting. You know I’m not quitting. We don’t quit.”
Did this episode make you think about your own story? Call in with a question for Kate or tell us about a moment when constraint became something you did not expect. We listen to every message.
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