PW: Flying Starts

JOAN ABELOVE

After spending two years in the Amazon as a graduate student in the early 1970s, Joan Abelove (who has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology) knew she wanted to convey her experience there in a book for children. "I can't even say why; it just felt to me very important," she says. In Go and Come Back (DK Ink/Jackson, Apr.), a teenaged girl eloquently narrates the story of her blossoming friendship with two women anthropologists who come to study her Isabo village, in the Amazonian jungle of Peru.

When Abelove first arrived in the jungle, she was told to "be on the lookout for weird things, like totems. But [the people were] the same. The oddities are inconsequential," she says. "The point of anthropological writing is having a chance to tell about living with these people, the reciprocity [between them]. [For example,] they always share the food from a hunt."

Abelove's challenge was to find a way to best convey that experience to her readers. She didn't settle on a narrator right away, and attempted at first to write from the viewpoint of an outsider like her, a kid who accompanies his anthropologist aunt to the Amazon. Then she tried to write the book in the third person; neither worked. Meanwhile, Abelove enrolled in Margaret Gabel's writing workshop at the New School in New York City. For two years, she wrote nothing and said nothing, she just listened.

All that listening paid off. One day while working out on the treadmill, Abelove heard a voice in her head: "Two old white ladies come to my village," the voice said. The "two old white ladies" were, of course, Abelove and her colleague (both in their 20s at the time). Abelove realized the book could work if she imagined her own experience in the jungle through the eyes of a villager.

Abelove wrote two pages, took them to Gabel's workshop and read them aloud. There she got the encouragement she needed to complete a first draft, and sent it out to publishers. After several discouraging responses, Abelove heard someone at her workshop say she'd just received "a wonderful rejection letter from Dick Jackson." She decided to send him the manuscript, and Jackson called her two weeks later. Although Jackson asked for a few rounds of revisions before offering a contract, Abelove could see that her novel was improving. "He's got this integrity divining rod," she says of Jackson.

Abelove's next novel, due out in fall 1999 (also edited by Jackson), began as a memoir based on her senior year in high school, when her mother died of a brain tumor. "I felt like I was wrapped in cheesecloth throughout [the experience] and even after," she recalls. "Writing about it was therapeutic; it helped me make sense of my life and my feelings." Abelove said that Jackson prompted her to take the book apart and put it back together again. He told her, "An editor's job is to walk you to the edge of a cliff, push you off and then be at the bottom to catch you."Abelove works by day as a technical writer, and writes fiction during the off hours. But she claims she d sn't mind the transitions from right brain to left. As a wife and mother living and working in fast-paced Manhattan, she has to grab those writing moments wherever she can. "When you write, there's always something back there," she says. "There's always this little idea scooper going on."

-Jennifer M. Brown

Back to Top of Page

IAIN LAWRENCE

Iain Lawrence is pleased when his adventure yarn set on the 18th-century Cornish coast is compared to the works of Robert Louis Stevenson. "Treasure Island is still one of my favorite books ever," he readily proclaims. "I wanted to write a story that would have the same sort of feeling as the ones that my father used to read to me at bedtime when I was little."

Although he's never been to Cornwall -- something one would never guess from reading the rousing descriptions in The Wreckers (Delacorte, May) -- Lawrence is an expert seaman, and has written two adult titles on sailing. The soft-spoken Canadian's life story sounds like something out of a novel: a former salmon fisherman, he lives rent-free as caretaker of a radio transmitter house on tiny Bigby Island, off Prince Rupert (population 16,000) in the far north of British Columbia, and every summer he takes off sailing with his partner, writer Kristin Miller, and their dog. PW spoke with him the day before a two-month trip to Alaska (his first).

Lawrence, 43, who works occasionally as a freelance journalist, says, "My favorite books are YA. I like them because they go along faster, and they're shorter and quicker to read." After dashing off The Wreckers in just two to three months, in 1991 he sent the manuscript to Miller's agent, Jane Gordon Browne in Chicago, who submitted it to various publishers, with no luck. "For the record," Lawrence says, "I have a rejection from Delacorte in 1994."

Shortly afterward, he says, "I started completely over and wrote a brand-new story" -- this time in four months. Once he'd made some changes at the behest of Browne's assistant, Delacorte bought it right away. "I'm glad that the first version didn't get sold," he admits, "because this one is so much better."

He is full of praise for his editor, Laurie Hornik. "Everyone said, `You'll never recognize your book when it comes out. The editor will go through it and change everything.' But one of the nicest things I discovered is that it's almost the exact same book as when I wrote it. There isn't one change that I didn't approve. And Laurie was good at seeing at how something could be improved without a whole lot of work -- which I really appreciate," he says with a laugh.

The book's publication hasn't affected Lawrence much -- yet. However, "all of a sudden my agent has had movie offers. Just the last few days there's been a sudden interest that I've never had before, and I'm not sure I really like it." And, as might be expected of someone who has chosen to live on a remote island, he shuns publicity stints, including book signings. "I did one for my first adult book and it was just awful," he confides.

But Lawrence may find it more difficult to hide if his sequel, The Run of 'The Dragon', due to be published next June, gets as much review acclaim as The Wreckers has received. You never know: he just might have to flee in a bigger sailboat.

-Bella Stander

Back to Top of Page

JANE SIMMONS

For author/illustrator Jane Simmons, the inspiration for her first published children's book was essentially a matter of looking out from the deck of her home -- a wooden fishing boat then anchored in the Fens of Cambridgeshire, England. Come Along, Daisy! (Little, Brown, May), the story of an inquisitive duckling who strays from her mother, is a sunnier depiction of a phenomenon Simmons observes all too frequently. Whereas most of the lost ducklings Simmons sees from her boat meet unhappy fates, Daisy is reunited with her mother in the end.

Along with the freshness of Simmons's expressive, somewhat impressionistic, illustrations, the universality of the book's plot (is there a child anywhere who has not succumbed to the temptation to wander, only to immediately feel bereft?) is reflected in the number of foreign editions that have already appeared. Originally published in February in England by Orchard Books U.K., Daisy was brought to the States by Little, Brown, the winner of an auction among several U.S. publishers at the 1997 Bologna Book Fair. Rights have been sold in 10 other countries, ranging from Finland to Korea.

"I'm absolutely stunned," Simmons says with respect to the book's success, which has enabled her to support herself entirely by creating children's books. After completing a B.A. in illustration from Anglia Polytechnic University, in Cambridge, two years ago, Simmons says, "I resisted taking a day job; I really wanted to get this off the ground and running. So I just ate baked beans and toast until I made enough to have sausages as well."

Although Simmons has painted since childhood, she did not always see children's books as a career: "It took me an awfully long time before I realized what I wanted to do," she says. She tried a number of jobs, including landscape gardening and clerking in shops, all the while selling paintings here and there, before deciding to pursue formal training in art. At Anglia Polytech, where she won a prize in a children's book competition, she found her calling.

After graduation Simmons planned to submit her work-in-progress, about a dog and goose living on a boat, but ran into resistance. "I couldn't even get in to any publishers," she laments. A letter of recommendation from a former teacher, illustrator James Mayhew, changed that, and from there it was a short step to a contract: Orchard, only the third house she visited, accepted that book (titled Ebb's New Friends, it will be published in the U.K. this fall, and in the U.S. by McElderry Books in fall '99) and soon thereafter took on Daisy as well.

Her editor at Orchard, Rosemary Davies, and art director Jemima Lumley have been "really helpful," Simmons comments, particularly with regard to Ebb's New Friends. That book, unlike Daisy, includes human characters, whose expressions the artist finds more difficult to capture ("Animals are so easy; they're lovely," says Simmons, who shares her boat, now moored in Cornwall, with two lovebirds, two dogs and a chicken). In contrast, Daisy went smoothly, "without loads of things having to be changed." A second book about Daisy, in which the duckling acquires a baby brother, is due out on both sides of the Atlantic next spring.

In a career that has already brought a number of thrills -- financial rewards, good reviews, the author's "first fan letter ever" -- Simmons says that two things stand out. One is seeing her book in a bookstore -- "I never thought I'd actually get to that bit," she marvels. The other involves a copy of Daisy that she donated to a local cafe. "The nicest thing is to sit in there having a cup of tea and watching a child you don't know look at your book," she concludes. "It's really quite amazing."

-Amy Meeker

Back to Top of Page

ALEXANDRIA LAFAYE

How d s a child whose favorite book was The Guinness Book of World Records grow up to write an emotionally complex novel about an abandoned child? According to Alexandria LaFaye, author of The Year of the Sawdust Man (S&S, June), her interest in one-of-a-kind people and dramatic events is what sparks ideas for her books.

LaFaye explains that the inspiration for The Year of the Sawdust Man came while she was watching a documentary about the Great Depression. "I wondered what would happen if a parent told a child that they had to leave home and could only take one suitcase. And then I wondered how a child might feel if her mother left home with one suitcase," she says.

Set in a small, 1930s Louisiana town, The Year of the Sawdust Man tells what happens when Heirah Bergen, a highly creative but erratic woman, leaves her husband and child, the 11-year-old narrator, to fend for themselves. Heirah's explosive personality, simultaneously attractive and destructive, is a mystery to her daughter. "I am an eccentric person and can be impulsively selfish," LaFaye admits. "That character is a large exaggeration of myself."

A writer since grade school, LaFaye graduated from Mankato [Minn.] State University in 1994 and received her MFA from the University of Memphis in 1995. Although she says she didn't try to write for a particular audience, people remarked that her work seemed to be for young people. Taking their comments seriously, in 1995 LaFaye enrolled in the summer creative writing program at Hollins College in Roanoke, Va., where she studied children's literature for three consecutive summers with such authors as Nancy Willard and Lisa Rowe Fraustino.

LaFaye had a number of finished manuscripts, which had been written as master's thesis projects, but had not tried to get any of them published. She first made contact with editors and agents after she submitted the manuscript for Sawdust Man to a contest sponsored by the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators and was awarded a scholarship to the SCBWI Poconos Retreat. In the midst of the conference, LaFaye contacted agent George Nicholson of Sterling Lord Literistic, who was on the faculty. Nicholson says that he left the retreat with three of her manuscripts and a new client.

Now LaFaye has four books under contract. In the fall, Viking will publish Edith Shay, which takes place in 1860 Chicago. Next spring, S&S will publish Strawberry Hill, set in 1975, which features a girl struggling to understand her freedom-loving parents. A sequel to Sawdust Man and an unwritten novel will follow from S&S, most likely in fall 1999.

LaFaye says a typical writing day for her extends to a full shift. "My writing is method writing. When I sit down to write, it is usually for eight to 10 hours," she says. To support herself, LaFaye taught children's literature part time; in the fall, she starts a full-time teaching job in upstate New York.While writing comes naturally to her, LaFaye says that she didn't know how editors work and had a somewhat old-fashioned view of what it meant to be a writer. "I expected the manuscript to come back with ink all over it. I was surprised to get a detailed letter with post-it notes on the manuscript," she says.And now that she is out in the field doing book signings, LaFaye acknowledges that she didn't know how much effort went into promoting a book. With a memorable debut and four more books on the way, LaFaye will certainly discover that part of the process quickly, but one hopes that she still has time for those long stretches of uninterrupted writing.

-Cindi Di Marzo

Back to Top of Page

DIANE LEE WILSON

I guess it starts with being horse crazy as a kid," Diane Lee Wilson says of her inspiration for I Rode a Horse of Milk White Jade (Orchard, Apr.). Her ambitious first novel is an epic story of an equestrian girl in 13th-century Mongolia who disguises herself as a boy among the Khan's army in order to rescue her horse, and whose adventures ultimately bring her face to face with Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan.

Being both a horse lover and an avid reader as a child, Wilson read all of Marguerite Henry's books (including her 1949 Newbery winner King of the Wind). In fifth grade, Wilson began a correspondence with Henry, but didn't think she'd ever be a writer herself. Although she enjoyed writing and found essays easy to write as an English/fine arts major at the University of Iowa, it wasn't until she was working as a copywriter in an ad agency that she contemplated writing fiction. "One day, the creative director of the agency said, `I think you have a book in you,' " Wilson recalls.

The author was reading about Mongolia when the idea for her novel struck. She saw a photo of two Mongolians mounted on horseback alongside a plane that had crashed there. She wanted to know more about the equestrian country; the more she read about it, the more interested she became. Setting a book there would also satisfy another requirement: she wanted to find an area that Henry hadn't yet covered. "There are hundreds of horse stories, but hers are of literary quality; that's the style I wanted to do," she says.

Wilson had begun writing the novel when an exhibit of artifacts dating back to the reign of Genghis Khan serendipitously arrived in Los Angeles, about 90 miles from Wilson's home outside San Diego. There she could see a ger (a circular tent that many people lived in) as well as weaponry and jewelry. She learned how Mongolians mounted horses from Jan Reynolds's Mongolia (part of Harcourt's Vanishing Cultures series), and even discovered an article in Equus magazine that discussed a licorice root cure for tetanus, the ailment that plagues the Khan's horses in the book.

Wilson continues to compete as an amateur with her five-year-old Arabian mare and trains at least three times a week. But she writes every day. At first, she could only write 15 minutes at a stretch, but after she enrolled in a weekly writing class, which later evolved into a small workshop. There Wilson had to read aloud her work each week.

Once she completed her novel, Wilson found agent Patty Campbell through the head of her writing workshop. Campbell sent the manuscript out, and it was acquired by Melanie Kroupa at Orchard. Wilson said that Kroupa helped to shape the novel by pointing out where characters came off as stereotypical, when their motives weren't clear or places where the manuscript lagged. "I give her a lot of credit for shepherding it through," Wilson says. Her next project, due out in fall 1999 from Orchard, is a picture book edited by Dominic Barth called Asa Coppermane.

The positive attention her first novel has received "sets certain standards for the next one," the author says warily. But from the sound of it, her next novel may well meet them. The seeds for the book -- set in ancient Assyria, now Iraq -- were once again planted by a photograph, this time a bas-relief of horses pulling carts. The last Assyrian emperor had a huge library that contained such tablets, which he brought back from the lands he conquered, according to Wilson.

She finds the prospect of the next novel rather daunting, but, as a woman who has trained horses most of her life, she's up to the challenge. "When I reach a hurdle, it's too easy to say, I'll just start another one -- [but] then you never finish," Wilson says. "Talent is part of it, but writing every single day, discipline and perseverance, that's what gets it done."

-Jennifer M. Brown

Back to Top of Page

SUSAN KATZ

P t Susan Katz has wanted to write a children's novel ever since her son Demian, now 18, was a toddler and "wanted to help Mom write a book by banging on the typewriter keys." Finally, many years after failing to sell her first book (based on one of Demian's made-up tales about a dragon "too small to see"), she has reached her goal.

Her book, Snowdrops for Cousin Ruthie (S&S, June), offers a blend of lyrical prose and tenderly wrought characterizations (with no sign of any dragons). Katz relates how a compassionate, elderly cousin helps a family that is mourning a child. Cousin Ruth, understanding the pain of loss, brings happiness back into the life of the narrator, fourth-grader Johanna, and helps break the wall of silence surrounding Johanna's little sister, Susie.

Katz remarks that in some ways, writing fiction has been a very different experience from writing p try (her p try has appeared under her maiden name, Susan Rea). "Besides requiring more stamina and longer spans of concentration, fiction carries its depth of meaning differently than p try," she states. "P try pushes toward the edge of language, saying the unsayable. A novel creates a whole world. When readers open the pages of a book they enter a new place."

Ideas for p ms and stories, however, come to her in the same way. "I always start with an image," she says. "Snowdrops began with the image of Ruth, who is based on several elderly women I was lucky enough to know as a child." Susie, an elective mute, later evolved from Katz's memory of a silent little girl she met during a school visit (a remedial reading teacher, Katz only recently put that career on hold; she also conducts writing workshops for children at local schools). The author tied the images of the two figures to a real-life event involving the death of a close friend's child. "I was struggling to find a verbal response to the tragedy," the author recalls. "I couldn't use my own voice, so I decided to write a book."

Labeling herself a "strange fiction writer, who works in bits, examining and following one thread at a time," Katz says it took about two years to complete the manuscript for Snowdrops. Her first attempts to get the book published were unsuccessful (although many editors sent long letters of encouragement) until she hooked up with an agent, Ray Lincoln, recommended by a friend, the writer Jerry Spinelli. Once Snowdrops was under contract with S&S, Katz had a "wonderful" working relationship with her editor, Rebecca Davis. "She made substantial suggestions, like throwing out an entire chapter," Katz recalls. "I felt that she absolutely understood the spirit of the book."

Katz, who shares a home in Valley Forge, Pa., with her husband David, is currently juggling two projects: writing a second novel (called Towanda and Me), which tackles the issues of racism and poverty, and composing a volume of p try for children.

Since the appearance of Snowdrops, Katz has enjoyed communicating with her readers through her website. "By meeting Ruth," Katz states, "I want my audience to realize that comfort is available to all children. Throughout the book, I want my readers to hear a little voice in their ears saying, "I'm an all right person."

-Lynda Brill Comerford

Back to Top of Page

KIMBERLY BRUBAKER BRADLEY

Even as a child in Fort Wayne, Ind., Kimberly Brubaker Bradley would catch herself thinking about how to turn an incident into a story. But she was so nervous about other people's reactions that she would rip up whatever she wrote.

So perhaps admirers of her robust middle-grade novel Ruthie's Gift (Delacorte, Mar.), which is based on her grandmother's stories of growing up with six brothers near Fort Wayne in the 1910s, owe a debt of gratitude to Bradley's college roommate. A little more than 10 years ago, when she was a sophomore at Smith College, Bradley fit a children's literature class into her schedule as a chemistry major. She wouldn't have presumed to show her own work to the teacher -- Newbery Medalist Patricia MacLachlan. But her roommate marched her into MacLachlan's office with a manuscript. It came back with a single word, "Lovely," and MacLachlan swung into high gear, arranging Bradley's attendance at a conference to be held the following week and plunking Bradley into the children's writers' group then headed by Jane Yolen in nearby Hatfield, Mass. Even before she finished college, she began sending manuscripts to publishers, and although none was accepted, she was encouraged by editors' detailed and supportive letters.

Bradley married after graduation and, with her husband, enrolled in medical school, testing out a childhood ambition to be a doctor ("But think of all the stories you won't write!" implored her ex-roommate). A few months convinced her that medicine was not for her, and she took a job as a research chemist. "I love chemistry. It strikes me as a lot like writing," she says. "You get a certain number of things you can control and a certain number you can't, and you combine them."

Bradley came to Delacorte in a roundabout way. About five years ago, she submitted a horse story for Delacorte's Marguerite de Angeli Prize for a first middle-grade novel. Her manuscript didn't win, but the editors forwarded it to their colleagues at Bantam, who were producing a riding series. Offered work as a ghostwriter, Bradley started turning out between two and four novels a year (she has written 14 so far). "I don't consider them mine," she says. "They're not my characters and not my setting, and I work on them very differently than I do my own writing. But it taught me discipline: if I had a half hour, I had to get something done." Shortly after, she became a mother (her oldest, Matthew, is now three, and her daughter, Katie, is five months old), and she continued to freelance for horse magazines, as she'd done in college. She and her family also moved last year, from familiar ground in Indiana to 20 acres in Tennessee.

Ruthie's Gift began as a picture book, centering on a single dramatic incident. But when she submitted the manuscript, to BDD and another publisher, both suggested that she turn it into a novel (BDD's offer came first). Today she has two more books under contract: a picture book with S&S, which is loosely scheduled for spring 2000; and a companion to Ruthie, to be called Mallie's Gypsy Summer, due out in fall 1999.

For Bradley, the most startling aspect of being a recognized writer is having other people read her book. "When you write, you can't afford to think about your audience, because you're so far away from being published. When I first saw children with my book with their names written inside, it made me almost want to weep, I was so pleased. I never realized having a book come out would be this much fun."

-Elizabeth Devereaux

Back to Top of Page