Flying Starts

-- Publishers Weekly, 6/28/1999

DAVID ALMOND

When David Almond's novel Skellig (Delacorte, May) appeared last year in the author's native England, his publisher, Hodder Children's Books, had to go back to press after only four days. And when Skellig won the Whitbread Award, it looked like an overnight sensation-but Almond's success as a novelist was almost 20 years in the making.

Like many authors, Almond wanted to write from a very young age. In college and in his early 20s, he says, he wrote "bits of things-bits of stories, bits of p ms, bits of plays. I never finished anything." Then, in 1982, when he was 28 years old, Almond quit his job and sold his house. With the proceeds, he moved to a commune and began to produce short stories. They appeared in literary journals and were collected in two volumes, Sleepless Nights (Iron Press, 1985) and A Kind of Heaven (Iron Press, 1997).

For years Almond enjoyed what he calls a "respectable" career. He won various competitions and had work broadcast on the BBC, and for six years he edited and published a literary magazine called Panurge. He took various jobs-an author's note in Skellig lists stints as a mailman and brush salesman, but most involved teaching. For the past eight years he has taught English part-time to special-needs students ages 11 to 16.

Skellig emerged, wholly unexpected, from Almond's stories for adults. Almond had been writing a collection about his childhood, "about me and my brothers and sisters and uncles, and the small town we grew up in, which is on the banks of the Tyne. It was a mixture of very truthful happenings merging with the semi-imaginary. When I wrote the last of these stories, I stuck them into an envelope, and as soon as I'd posted away the book to my agent, the story of Skellig just flew into my head, as if it had just been waiting there."

Like the stories that preceded it, Skellig is a mixture of very realistic and fantastic events. The main character, Michael, grapples with his newborn sister's critical illness at the same time that his family has moved to a rundown house. There, in the garage, Michael discovers Skellig, who first appears to be a man in need of help and then, once aided, reveals himself as a creature with wings, capable of transforming himself and those around him.

"As soon as I started writing, I thought, `Oh, yes, this is a children's book,' " says Almond, who concedes that he is "not steeped in children's literature." He identifies Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino and Raymond Carver as influences on Skellig, Márquez and Calvino for their magical realism, Carver for his "apparent simplicity."

It was "great" to write for children, Almond continues, "for an audience with a fluid imagination, able to accept all kinds of possibilities. Several times I'd start to write something and say, `Oh, you can't write that,' but then I'd think, `Of course you can, because you're writing for children.' Everything for them is new and fresh, whereas maybe adults have become a bit tired, and their expectations are rather different."

Almond's own expectations-of the publishing process-were to be turned upside-down. Previously published by small presses, he was thrilled to have his manuscript accepted straight away by Hodder. "As soon as they got it, they said, `Oh, it's a prize-winning book,' " he recalls. "They've been marvelous all the way through. They had great confidence in it, and they've done a wonderful job promoting it. Now it's being translated into 15 languages."

Almond has been able to take a long-term leave of absence from his teaching job, and has seen Hodder publish his second book, Kit's Wilderness, to glowing reviews (Delacorte will publish it here in spring 2000). It, like Skellig, concerns a boy growing up in the north of England, and it, too, has a mystical component. At the moment Almond is completing revisions on a third children's novel, Heaven Eyes, for which Delacorte is in negotiations.

Will he go back to writing for adults? "I'm enjoying writing for children so much," he says, "and I'm learning so much, I'm concentrating on it. I do have a half-finished adult novel, which I'll be going back to. But I seem to have so many ideas [for children's books], it feels like time to strike."

-Elizabeth Devereaux

KAREN ROMANO YOUNG

Like the illustrious vehicle in Karen Romano Young's fresh and funny novel, the framework for The Beetle and Me (Greenwillow, May) had been around for awhile and just needed some tuning up. While in high school, Young had written and illustrated a picture book called The Blue Volkswagen, starring a boy named Daniel and his father, who traveled to another planet littered with broken down cars that needed fixing. The father-son pair will sound familiar to those who've read The Beetle and Me. The titular VW's color may have changed from blue to purple, the setting may be on this planet, and Daniel and his father may have moved from leading to supporting roles, but the author's love of the vintage Beetle remains constant.

Young had often thought about writing fiction, she says, but "no ideas came." She has kept a journal from the age of nine and has been supporting herself writing nonfiction for 20 years. Her first job after she was graduated from Syracuse University in 1981 was working at one of Scholastic's classroom magazines. Then one day while driving through Vermont, she noticed "an old Beetle hanging out of a barn." As she recalls it, "The car was as decrepit as the barn and seemed to be waiting for a kid to come along and fix it up."

Enter Daisy Pandolfi, the resourceful, independent, mechanically inclined heroine who rescues her purple costar in The Beetle and Me. If the supporting cast seems so real that readers feel they know these people, it may be because the characters of Daisy's car-crazy family are based on Young's own father, mother, aunt and uncle. And what of Billy Hatcher, the auto shop teacher's pet, who "roars past [Daisy] in his black Thunderbird" on page two and becomes Daisy's steadfast friend? Young says that her husband was the inspiration for Billy's character.

The author began writing The Beetle and Me in 1989, but with three children at home and no child care, the manuscript took four years to complete. When Young finally started sending the manuscript out in 1993, it was rejected by half a dozen publishers, some of whom kept it for two years. One house asked for three revisions, and by the time she'd completed the third draft, the editor had left the company.

Finally, in August 1997, Greenwillow Books acquired the manuscript. Young says that editors Virginia Duncan and Susan Hirschman had a way of asking questions or stating problems so that she could figure out the solutions on her own: "They have a very nice way of letting the book always be mine."

Young describes writing fiction as a deep and joyful experience, very different from nonfiction writing. "With nonfiction, you have to be in the moment, collecting facts, organizing information, picking up pieces of paper," she says. "Fiction d sn't come from the desktop. Something comes from nowhere when I'm doing something else."

Young may have taken a while to start writing fiction, but she's certainly had a lot of experience reading it. From the time she first started to read, she said, she made the public library in Fairfield, Conn., into a "second home." By age 14, she was volunteering at the library shelving the new additions to the collection. This was in the early 1970s, so she was reading new works by S.E. Hinton, E.L. Konigsberg and Paul Zindel. She is also a fan of Louise Fitzhugh, Cynthia Voigt, Nancy Willard, Daniel Pinkwater and Madeleine L'Engle.

The positive attention she has received for The Beetle and Me has "astonished" her, says Young. "I used to cry in the shower, thinking, `Is this ever going to be good enough to be published?' And now, to have the book starred [by PW], it's wonderful."

Young describes her next book, Video, due out from Greenwillow this October, as being "very different, darker." The novel is told through the points of view of Eric and Janine, two kids who hate each other on sight. Their lives intertwine because of a science project, and when Janine witnesses a crime, Eric is the one who notices the changes in her. A third novel is in the works, tentatively titled Outside In.

And now for the burning question: What kind of car d s the author drive? No, Young says she d s not own a Volkswagen at the moment, but she recently noticed a vintage Beetle on sale in robin's-egg blue....

-Jennifer M. Brown

JONATHAN FROST

Jonathan Frost was in junior high when he made up his mind to be an artist. It wasn't until over two decades later, however, that he turned his hand to children's books, with the publication of Gowanus Dogs (FSG/Foster, Apr.).

Born in Ohio, Frost had some early training at the College of Art and Design in Columbus, but when it came time to choose a college he picked liberal arts over fine arts, earning a degree in philosophy at Dartmouth.

"I didn't fit in really well with the art department there," he recalls. "I liked to work figuratively and with the old masters, and everything there was design."

He found a mentor in Gary Milek, who taught drawing at evening community classes, and after graduation moved to nearby Cornish, N.H., where he tried to be a full-time artist-with less than spectacular results. "I had no idea what it took in terms of discipline," he says ruefully.

Art eventually took a back seat to carpentry when Frost (who is now divorced) got married and needed to support a wife and stepchild; it wasn't until he turned 40 that Frost decided it was now or never for his childhood dream. Frost began looking for a graduate program, and decided on New York City's School of Visual Arts, and it was there that a classmate introduced him to Frances Foster at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "Frances had seen some large etchings I'd done of these wild dogs on the banks of the Gowanus Canal"-a rather blighted waterway in Brooklyn-"and she invited me to come talk with her."

He pitched an idea for a book set in Chinatown; she countered with a request for a narrative about the dogs, which surprised Frost, as he'd never thought of his Gowanus work-black-and-white images of the canal's stark industrial setting-as appropriate material for children. "It's very bleak," he says. Nonetheless, he was happy to give it a try. "The first storyboard I submitted was 72 pages long," he recalls with a chuckle. "Frances sent me a letter saying she hadn't asked for a novel!"

With Foster's "guidance and forbearance," Frost spent nine months working up an acceptable draft. "The story ended up much friendlier and happier than the dogs I actually did know on the Gowanus Canal, only one of which survived," he says.

Frost credits Foster and associate editor Elizabeth Mikesell for their patience in helping to shape Gowanus Dogs, and to art director Filomena Tuosto as well, whose design input "made it a much stronger book."

Now living in Camden, Maine, Frost continues to work as an artist, and to help make ends meet he also manages a small commercial art gallery and teaches oil painting and etching. He's finishing the large series of Gowanus etchings he interrupted to work on Gowanus Dogs, and is also at work on another picture book, this one about beavers in the North Woods. "It's in color and I'm using egg tempera this time," he says, noting that he enjoys variety.

Happy with the warm reception accorded Gowanus Dogs, Frost says he's particularly delighted with the feedback he's received from children, including an entire class of first-graders in Brooklyn. "I got a packet of 25 letters from them," he says. "They really liked the book!"

-Heather Vogel Frederick

JENNIFER HOLM

The idea for Jennifer Holm's novel Our Only May Amelia (HarperCollins, June) emerged from a Christmas present. Six years ago, while unpacking an old suitcase in her grandmother's house, Holm's Aunt Elizabeth found a diary kept by Holm's grand-aunt Alice Amelia Holm when she was a teenager in the early 1900s, living in what is now the state of Washington. Elizabeth typed and circulated the diary as a present to family members a few months later at Christmastime. To Holm's surprise, the diary "wasn't any different from what I would have written when I was that age. It got me thinking what it would be like to grow up as I did with brothers but out in the middle of nowhere in a wilderness at a very exciting time."

Holm, 31, already knew well the setting for what ended up as her debut in children's books, the story of a 12-year-old tomboy with six brothers set in the same time and place captured in the young diarist's record. In the 1870s her Finnish great-grandfather carved one of the first farms into the densely wooded area known as Little Finland, where My Only May Amelia takes place. Although her father, a pediatrician, moved her family from Washington to Audubon, Pa., he loved to tell tales of his childhood adventures, and Holm and her four brothers spent every summer visiting relatives and exploring the creeks and rivers along the Nasel River.

A graduate of Dickinson College, now employed as a commercial producer for the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather in New York City, Holm worked as hard on researching how to structure a narrative as she did researching the history of Washington. She took advantage of her then boyfriend's (they are now married) long hours as a computer programmer to establish a disciplined research and writing schedule. She came home each day for a jog around her Brooklyn neighborhood and then worked on her novel. She gathered information from local historical societies, interviewed family members, and combed her families' oral histories for details of Finnish food, Chinook Indians, logging camps, seafarers and the distinctive characters who formed her cast. When she re-read one of her father's favorite stories in one of the oral histories about Lucy May, her grandfather's notoriously talkative cousin, Holm immediately recognized her spunky heroine.

While some complain about the increasingly competitive and impersonal nature of publishing, Holm raves about the attention she received. Inspired by the young narrator in Kaye Gibbons's Charms for the Easy Life, Holm initially targeted an adult audience for her novel. However, an encouraging rejection from a literary agency suggested she consider children's books. Holm's friend Jill Siegel, a book publicist, passed the manuscript to Dell editors Jackie Cantor and Mitch Solomon, who ech d this recommendation and wrote a detailed letter on finding an agent. Siegel put Holm in touch with Jill Grinberg of Scovil Chichak Galen, who agreed to represent the book and submitted the manuscript to children's publishers. Thrilled at her first nibble from a publishing house, Holm urged Grinberg to accept it, but Grinberg commenced a mini-bidding war that drove Harper's price up 12 times the original offer. "It was wild, like a Hollywood story," Holm remembers.

Holm's editor Ginee Seo "was fabulous," Holm notes, saying that Seo nurtured the manuscript with lengthy letters of suggestions and comments. "May didn't change at all," she says. "But I had originally written the book in diary format and we made it more active. The biggest change was strengthening all the brothers to give each one a well-defined character. I knew in my head that Matti is this way and Isahiah is like this, but it needed to be clearer to the reader."

Speaking at her former elementary school in Audubon proved even more rewarding than seeing bound copies in stores, according to Holm. "They brought my old teachers out of retirement and placed a copy of my book in the library." And the comments from eager readers surprised Holm. "I read the chapter `How to be a Proper Young Lady,' and one girl laughed and cried out, `May's not a proper young lady!' "

Holm's second novel, Boston Jane, which is scheduled for publication by HarperCollins next spring, features a 15-year-old girl who travels to Washington in the 1850s to marry her betrothed, but must fend for herself on the frontier when she discovers he has disappeared. Holm enjoyed writing the adventure, but says, "I think you may only have one May in you. For this book I had to plot each chapter. With May, I just sat down and I wrote it-it was like a movie unfolding. And there was so much of me in May."

-Ingrid Roper

AMY WALROD

To hear Amy Walrod tell it, her "flying start" as a children's illustrator has been a long time coming. "I had a difficult couple of years there," says the 1995 Rhode Island School of Design graduate, whose quirky paint-and-paper collages animate James Howe's Horace and Morris but Mostly Dolores (Atheneum, Mar.).

Nevertheless, Walrod didn't have to wait too long by starving-artist standards. While still an illustration student at RISD, she attracted the attention of mentor-cum-agent Judy Sue Goodwin-Sturges. "I had done some posters for the RISD admissions office," she explains. "Judy Sue saw my work and gave me a call."

Goodwin-Sturges enclosed some of Walrod's pieces in a multi-artist portfolio, then made the rounds at publishing houses. Months passed, with Walrod making ends meet by working at a toy store ("too corporate"), at a sh store ("I like sh s"), and as a sometime dog-sitter in her home city of Cambridge, Mass.

Meanwhile, author James Howe and his editor Jonathan Lanman, editorial director of Atheneum Books for Young Readers, were in search of an artist for Horace and Morris but Mostly Dolores, Howe's story of a tomboyish mouse. Goodwin-Sturges showed them Walrod's work, which Howe considered an excellent complement to his manuscript. The match was made, and soon Walrod was planning a series of spreads for Horace and Morris, incorporating cut paper, paint and such allusions to packaging as cutout letters and masking tape.

During the illustration process, Walrod received editorial input from art director Ann Bobco and designer Angela Carlino. Since Horace & Morris opposes an all-boy "Mega-Mice" club and an all-girl "Cheese Puffs" organization, the rival groups' clubhouses had to support conventional wisdom about sex roles. Walrod ultimately gave the Mega-Mice a forbidding, boarded-up-and-nailed-together clubhouse and the Cheese Puffs a cloyingly pink-and-lavender cottage.

In addition, Walrod mentions that the visual depiction of the heroine (and her male friends) was of major concern for Howe, who regularly checked in with Atheneum's art department. "We discussed that we wanted to keep Dolores as not necessarily a boy or a girl character," Walrod recalls. She dressed the nontraditional "girl mouse" in purple sneakers, brick-red overalls and a striped T-shirt. Dolores's only nod to femininity is a daisy, discreetly tucked in the crook of her right ear.

In part, the character of Dolores grew out of Walrod's imagination, but she also came from Walrod's summer experiences as an art instructor for 8-to-15-year-olds. "I've taught bookmaking and illustration at the same camp since I graduated from high school back in 1991," Walrod says. "Sometimes I have kids who don't really have gender-I mean, they do, but they're sort of androgynous." She can sympathize with the outsider's feeling that "your hair isn't cut the right way" or "you don't wear the right clothes," and she draws on this awareness in her illustrations for children.

Walrod tries to keep her images playful rather than preachy, and she expresses a dislike for children's illustrations that are "too sappy or sugary sweet." Her favorite author-illustrators display a similarly unsentimental, rigorous aesthetic; Walrod professes admiration for the fluid and folksy style of Alice and Martin Provensen, and for the bold and witty work of Lane Smith.

Like those picture-book professionals, Walrod soon will have several titles to her credit. In September, Dutton will publish The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza, a collaboration between Walrod and Philemon Sturges (Judy Sue Goodwin-Sturges's husband). For this contemporization of the "Little Red Hen" tale, Walrod opted for cut-paper illustration ("there's no paint involved"). For her third book, a mathematics tale that's still in sketch form, she'll return to Atheneum.

For all this success, Walrod modestly recognizes that "I'm pretty much starting out." She notes that her style is still changing and that she recently has begun learning Web-site design, with an eye toward creating computer-illustrated texts in the vein of J.otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh's Mr. Lunch series. In any case, for Walrod, the rewards of picture-book illustration require the sacrifices of a freelance lifestyle. "If you're in it for money, don't bother." she states pragmatically." "But if you're passionate about your work, go ahead."

-Nathalie op de Beeck