PW: Flying Starts

D.B. Johnson | Kate DiCamillo
Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich | E.R. Frank
Shana Corey and Chesley McLaren | Lori Williams

In his debut work, Henry Hikes to Fitchburg (Houghton, Mar.), Johnson calls upon a passage from Walden in which Thoreau issues a challenge to a friend, boasting that he can walk to the town of Fitchburg (a 30-mile stretch) faster than his friend can earn the fare and make the journey by train. Johnson expands the idea into a striking picture book with bold, cubist-like paintings. In the new scenario, Henry the bear offers of the same challenge to an ursine pal. While his friend toils at strenuous tasks, Henry hikes through a wondrous, bucolic setting, taking ample time to enjoy his surroundings--and arrives in Fitchburg only a bit later than his friend. Johnson claims (and many book reviewers agree) that the tale offers a respectful nod to the past and encapsulates a timeless philosophy.

"We don't know if this actually happened," Johnson says of the Fitchburg challenge. "But I wondered what would happen if it really took place, and I wanted to write it in a way that children could understand. Walden inspired the story, but it's not necessary that readers be familiar with Thoreau to 'get it.' "

Johnson more than "gets it," however; he begins each day with a one-hour walk in the woods near his New Hampshire home in the Connecticut River valley. He then takes up the work on the drawing board in his in-home studio by 8:45 a.m. His projects over the past 15 years have included mostly commercial illustration and regular op-ed pieces for the Los Angeles Times syndicate.

With an established illustration career under his belt, it is perhaps surprising to learn that Johnson is a self-taught artist. "I've had no training," he says. "But my work has always entertained ideas and social issues. I put ideas into pictures; I think this is one of the appeals of my book--it has lots of levels of meaning." Johnson cites Chris Van Allsburg ("You can see his influence in the way I try to simplify shapes"), Grant Wood and Marc Chagall (some of whose cubist work Johnson saw in Russia last year while visiting one of his sons, who was working there) as some of his biggest influences.

As for children's book illustration, Johnson had long been a fan of the genre. "My wife was a children's bookseller, and I knew many illustrators, like Trina Schart Hyman," he says. "I loved the books, but I never thought of doing one myself. I was very busy with commercial work and had kids in college. I was wary of committing to an enormous project that offered little money up front."

But when Johnson hit a slow period in his illustrating, he took out a story from his "stuffed" idea file and one month later had transformed it into Henry Hikes to Fitchburg. In May 1998, he sent off the manuscript and a full set of thumbnail sketches to Houghton Mifflin (incidentally, Thoreau's first publisher). Two weeks later, editor Margaret Raymo offered him a contract. "I was amazed that I got a response so quickly," Johnson says. "I know from experience that phone calls mean good news. It gave me an indication that this book just might be successful."

Johnson's hunch was correct. The book has sold very well so far (there are currently 60,000 copies in print) and it received a significant boost from an on-air rave by Daniel Pinkwater, children's book commentator for National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Saturday, at the end of February. New England booksellers have been especially excited about the title, hosting Johnson nearly every weekend for signings. "The kids' response has been most amazing," Johnson says. "One first-grade class in Leominster, Mass., did a three-day project on how they would hike to Fitchburg. This is the kind of thing I imagined would happen. I get to see the people who see my work now, rather than just getting a tear sheet from an art director." Johnson's new legion of fans will be happy to know that he is equally enthusiastic about his next book for Houghton, Henry Builds a Cabin, scheduled for spring 2002.
--Shannon Maughan

Each morning, DiCamillo rolls out of bed, with the coffeemaker timed to start the day with her, and heads to her desk. When she first started writing, she treated it like her workout routine: five days a week, one hour a day. But that didn't work. So she switched to five days a week, two pages a day. "If you read [those two pages], you'd think it was like The Shining. I don't stop for punctuation, capitalization or anything," she says. Then she puts it away and waits a month before reading it.

However, she says that she d s follow Hemingway's example in order to pave the way for the next day's work: "I leave off in a good place to pick up." When DiCamillo started writing Because of Winn-Dixie, she had a good idea of what she wanted to shoot for lengthwise from studying other middle-grade novels. Fourteen single-spaced pages took her halfway through the first draft. She put that first half through three to four drafts, then went back to finish the manuscript, completing Opal's story in two distinct segments.

"Perseverance is the one word you could use to sum me up," DiCamillo says. How she came to publish Winn-Dixie is certainly a story of tenacity, but also of opportunity. The author had published some adult short stories in periodicals like the Alaska Quarterly, but her day job working on the children's floor at The Bookman, a Minneapolis book distributor, had reawakened her interest in children's books. At The Bookman's annual Christmas open house, she mentioned a picture book she'd been working on to Candlewick sales rep Linda Nelson; Nelson told her she'd get it to an editor and sent the manuscript to Candlewick editor Amy Ehrlich, who ended up rejecting the picture book in the end. When DiCamillo finished Winn-Dixie and sent it to Ehrlich, Ehrlich forwarded it to a fiction editor who worked from home; that editor subsequently left the company and sent boxes of incomplete manuscripts back to Candlewick. Fortunately the box containing Winn-Dixie landed on the desk of Carol LaReau. "She is an incredible editor," DiCamillo says of LaReau. "It's so amazing to have someone take a chance on you. She has been my shield and armor."

DiCamillo says that the outpouring of positive reviews and attention on her first book has changed her experience of writing. "Before, I knew full well I was hitting my head against a brick wall," she says. "Now when I sit down to write, there's a Greek chorus behind me: 'This isn't like Winn-Dixie' or 'She's writing the same story over and over.' I don't want to disappoint people, but I want to write what needs to be written." DiCamillo has a young adult novel, The Tiger Rising, scheduled for publication in March 2001 from Candlewick, "written before the Greek chorus," she adds. It concerns a boy who finds a caged tiger in the woods one morning and a girl who moves to town on the same day. She describes the novel as "considerably darker, but there's light and redemption in it."

DiCamillo's father was not a preacher (as Opal's was) and she is not Southern Baptist, though she did grow up in Florida and confesses, "I'm smitten with dogs." As a child, DiCamillo had a standard poodle named Minette that she used to dress up in an "old glittery green tutu." In college, DiCamillo got a dog from the pound that was traumatized but blossomed under her new owner's tutelage and devotion. However, Winn-Dixie is not based on either of those dogs but on Opal's description of him. "The story passes through you and pieces of you cling to it, but the story existed before me," DiCamillo says. "I just feel grateful that [Opal] chose me."
--Jennifer M. Brown

"My wife's family has a tradition of making handmade gifts for the holidays," he says in a voice brushed with the lilting cadences of his native Brazil. "It was my daughter Genevieve's first Christmas, and I wanted to make something for her." Bembo's Zoo (Holt, Apr.), an abecedary of animals created entirely from of the letters of their names, was the result.

"Every night I give my daughter a bath and put her to bed and read to her," de Vicq says. "My mother language is Portuguese--I read to her in Portuguese and English--and the idea in the beginning was for an alphabet book in both languages."

Although the names of most of the animals he chose were somewhat similar in both languages, he ran into trouble with four letters. W and X are rarely used in Portuguese, he explains, and there weren't any animals for N and O that were consistent. "Owl in Portuguese begins with a C, for instance, and octopus begins with a D," he says.

Eventually, he decided to stick with English alone. As for the inspiration to use letters for the illustrations, "since I am a graphic designer, I thought, well, why don't I create the illustrations from an old typeface, something I do all day in my profession!"

Bembo, a classic Italian Renaissance letterform he calls "a workhorse," had the added advantage of looking attractive both small and large. "When you enlarge some typefaces, they aren't as good, but with Bembo the proportions are still beautiful," he says.

De Vicq credits the computer with helping him achieve the final results in his book. "A lot of people bastardize it as a medium, but I respect it," he says. "You wouldn't have been able to do this kind of book a few years ago, because the computer allowed me to be both the designer and the typographer. Before, I would have spent hours at the Xerox machine looking for the perfect size by increasing the typeface a percent at a time! It's much easier to do this kind of thing with the computer."

Pleased with the finished result, he showed his daughter's present to several friends, including Holt publisher John Sterling, a former colleague at Broadway Books. "It was love at first sight," says de Vicq, and a contract quickly followed.

Praising editor Laura Godwin for her guidance ("She's wonderful--it's one thing to do something at home and quite another to do something for a market I don't know"), he also credits her with urging him to develop a Web site (www.bemboszoo.com).

Genevieve, now two and a half, loves the book, but "I think she prefers the Web site!" he says with a laugh. That may be because the Web site includes a game, based on the book. "She always wants to play Bembo's Zoo at night now."

Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, de Vicq has a B.A. in graphic design from Pontifícia Universidade Católica, "but I wanted to be a painter," he says. Or so he thought. After attending New York's Pratt Institute, where he received his MFA in 1984, "I got it out of my system," he observes wryly. "I decided that I really liked graphic design, so I went back into it."

He worked for several years at such magazines as Vogue, Traveler and House & Garden, then opened his own design studio in the late 1980s, where he designed book jackets. He found he enjoyed book publishing, and has worked at Basic Books, Broadway Books and now HarperCollins. "A lot of times in graphic design, when you work for a big corporation, by the time your work is printed, it's completely different from the original idea that you had," he explains. "Because of the nature of book publishing, it's easier to have a personal vision."

Among those who inspire him the most are graphic designers such as Fabian Baron. "He did beautiful work," he says of the former art director of such magazines as Harper's Bazaar, Interview and Vogue Italia. "And Jonathan H fler is a wonderful typographer; he g s to book fairs and finds old printers' samples, then recreates new typefaces from them."

De Vicq has two new book projects in the works--a companion to Bembo's Zoo coming out next year from Holt ("It's the same thing but totally different, a counting book with insects made of numbers"), and a book for Running Press.

"I'm doing portraits of writers exactly the same way I did my own," he says, referring to the witty self-portrait on the back jacket flap of Bembo's Zoo made from the letters of his own name. "It's going to be fun."
--Heather Vogel Frederick

But as real as her debut YA novel Life Is Funny (DK Ink/Jackson, Apr.) seems, Frank makes it clear that the book is "absolutely a work of fiction." It is probably her command of the language in which it is written, that of the vernacular of contemporary Brooklyn teenagers, that makes her book seem like nonfiction, which the author takes as a compliment. "It's language I've heard now for 10 years, so I didn't need anyone to help me make the book sound real; it's something I'm comfortable with," she says.

Indeed, it might also be something in her blood. Frank was born into a family of voracious readers in Richmond, Va., and spent much of her childhood around her grandfather Gerold Frank, the journalist who wrote The Boston Strangler, An American Death and Judy, among others. "When I was very young, it was because of him that I realized that a writing career was a possibility," she says, adding, "sadly, he died two months before I sold my book."

Frank started writing Life Is Funny in 1996 after taking a writing course with instructor Bunny Gable at the New School in New York City. "I didn't write it with a YA audience in mind; in fact, I didn't have any particular audience in mind when I started," she says. She completed the work two years later, and on the advice of several writer friends decided the first step should be to find an agent. She did, in 1998, when Charlotte Sheedy took her on after reading another of Frank's manuscripts, and immediately submitted Life Is Funny to Dick Jackson. One day, while at home working, Frank answered the phone to hear Jackson on the other end. "He immediately started editing the book with me right then, during our first conversation," she recalls. "It was like a dream come true. I felt honored to be working with him."

So began the editing process, which continued without the two ever meeting face-to-face, since Jackson was located on the West Coast and Frank in Brooklyn. But that fact didn't pose much difficulty anyway, since relatively little was changed from Frank's original manuscript, save for rearranging the order of the characters' stories, and in some cases modifying the ages of certain characters.

Frank's current schedule is designed to devote two days a week to writing and three to social work, an arrangement that works well for her. She has just completed a rough draft of her next novel, which she hasn't even shown to her agent yet. Though it remains under wraps for the most part, she d s reveal that the plot is along the same lines as Life Is Funny, quickly interjecting, "I can't say much about it because I'm a firm believer in jinxes!"

Since the release of Life Is Funny, Frank has continued writing and practicing social work--and has recently begun some book-related activities, like a reading she did for 100 Brooklyn librarians, which she says she enjoyed very much. And she will be doing her first book signing at next month's American Library Association conference in Chicago. Frank's hope is that her book will be helpful in broaching some of the difficult issues it deals with. "For schools and social-work agencies that want to use it, I think the book could be a jumping-off point to help kids start to talk about addiction, violence, family situations, sexuality and diversity."

Asked what her fantasy writing situation would be, Frank again seems fairly lucky, since it so closely resembles reality. She would like to still write two days a week and devote three to social work. However, if she had her way, she would have more freedom to provide services on a sliding-fee scale and do more pro bono work. But still, she couldn't imagine one without the other. And the best thing about this whole experience? "I used to say, 'I'm a social worker and I write, ' " she says. "But now I say very firmly, 'I'm a social worker and a writer.' "
--Jason Britton

Shana Corey, currently an associate editor at Random House Children's Books, conceived of her story (and its catchy title jibe) while an editorial assistant at Random. She drew from her studies at Smith College, where she majored in government and focused on women's history. She also mined her childhood memories of Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy titles and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. "When you take women's history classes, you always hear that women have been left out," she says. "But they are in history, because they're in the kids' books. There are so many strong female characters."

Corey composed a first draft and shared it with her Random House colleague, editor Heidi Kilgras. Amelia didn't fit Random's mass-market line of early readers and chapter books, but Kilgras introduced Corey to Scholastic editor Tracy Mack, who accepted the manuscript. Under Mack's direction, Corey pruned the history-heavy narrative and preserved its weightier facts in an afterword. The final version crisply explains how Amelia edited a women's newspaper and borrowed her distinctive look from Elizabeth Cady Stanton's cousin Libby. Thanks to her liberating garments, Amelia "ran and jumped and twirled ... and did all the things she had always wanted to do."

Corey hadn't envisioned Amelia as a fashion story until Mack showed her some of Chesley McLaren's modish illustrations. A graduate of Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts, McLaren had worked as a Seventh Avenue clothing designer until 1989, when Bloomingdale's hired her as an illustrator. McLaren developed a reputation for Parisian flair, and most recently lent her signature style to Saks Fifth Avenue's children's department. "I was known for drawing snooty-looking women that always had their noses in the air," she says. "Saks asked me to do a series of mannequins that basically look like bratty East Side kids. That was the first full-fledged children's thing I did."

When art director Marijka Kostiw spied McLaren's work in the New York Times, the illustrator came to Scholastic's attention. After meeting with Kostiw and Mack, she read Amelia and began photo research on upstate New York, circa 1851. This led to an aesthetic crisis for the Francophile: "Women were wearing these ugly bonnets. At age 20 they had these mean mugs!" she says, evidently appalled. "I had to Marie Antoinette it up a little bit."

McLaren restrained her impulse to gussy up her characters with flowers and bows, but her breezy Amelia is as likely to float through a garden as to fire off an editorial. "None of my people ever have their feet on the ground," McLaren admits, alluding to her gouaches of swaying, ethereal sophisticates. When she worried that her work was too "wild and frivolous" to suit "a serious woman who did important things," she simply remembered Corey's opening line: "Amelia Bloomer was not a proper lady."

Nevertheless, after her immersion in the American 19th century, McLaren sounds relieved to be back in 2000, working on as-yet-untitled projects. Corey remains inspired by history--her book on the All-American Girls Baseball League, illustrated by Brian Selznick, will be published by Scholastic in 2002--but she looks to the fictional future as well in First Graders from Mars, a projected Scholastic series to be illustrated by Mark Teague and scheduled for fall 2001.

Most of all, Amelia seems to have whetted Corey's fascination with "olden-days clothes" and pioneering girls. "When I was little, I would make up stories about what would happen if I met Laura Ingalls Wilder," she muses. "Sometimes I still think of that when I'm riding the subway: What would she think of what we're wearing?"
--Nathalie op de Beeck

Children have always been prominent in Williams's stories, who started honing her skills in creative-writing courses as a college student at the University of Texas, Austin. "When I write through one of my teenage characters, I get to become that teenager," she says. "I get to live my life through them the way I wanted to live it." Her characters might experience tragedies, but they end up in a better place than where they started.

It was in a fiction workshop in 1996 that Williams, then an English master's student at UT, began her novel about the smart but naive Shayla and her friendship with Kambia, a neglected and sexually abused child who increasingly lives in her own fantasy world. Williams had intended to write a short story about Tia, Shayla's 15-year-old sister, and her longing for understanding from her mother. But as she was writing, she says, "all of the sudden Kambia shows up," and Williams knew it was going to take much more than a short story to write down all she had to say. Tia's story ultimately became the first chapter of the novel.

Williams graduated in 1996, and received a fellowship from the James Michener Center for Writers to finish the novel. "I just wrote it straight through," she says. "Once it was in my head, I knew exactly what the story was going to be about and what the ending was going to be."

She sent her manuscript to two agencies and an editor, including the Sterling Lord Literistic agency's Barbara Ryan. It was Ryan who suggested it might work best as a children's book ("I hadn't intended the book to be for children," Williams admits, "I was just writing."). Everything happened very quickly from that point. When Ryan told her that four major publishers had bid on her book, Williams thought she was kidding.

The book ultimately went to Simon & Schuster, and Williams began working with editor David Gale on the revisions. "I don't think we had a disagreement about anything," she says. While his edits were fairly light, she says "everything he suggested I liked." She is paired with Gale again on her next book, an idea that S&S bought at the same time as Kambia, called Shayla's Double Brown Baby Blues. Told again through Shayla's eyes, this book centers on an alcoholic boy. But, she promises, "You will find out more about Kambia." Williams is currently working on the second draft, and the novel is tentatively scheduled for fall 2001.

Even with the success of her first novel, Williams says, "I still feel very much myself." She still lives in Austin, and gets up at 5:30 every morning for a power walk. She is looking for full-time work, and manages to squeeze in two to three hours of writing each day, preferably on the computer, but sometimes scribbling on the back of grocery receipts or on napkins. Although she admits to liking the attention she has received as an author--being written up in magazines, doing phone interviews--she's been even more thrilled by the warm response of friends and family. "A lot of my church people have bought tons of copies of the book, and I think that's just wonderful," she says. "To them, I'm something very special. They've all known me as just Lori for years, and now I am a writer."
--Kate Pavao