Flying Starts

Jeanne DuPrau grew up in the 1950s and 1960s with a fear of the world coming to an end. "People were building bomb shelters, and I was afraid of the idea that we could wipe out the human race," she says, citing one inspiration for The City of Ember (Random House, May), which is set in a postapocalyptic underground world in which the power supply, food and other necessities are dwindling.

But she also credits the fact that, as a child, she loved "all books that had to do with magical things." Her favorites included Mary Poppins, The Secret Garden, The Borrowers—and especially C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. "I loved reading books in which the child discovers a whole new world," she says. And in the subterranean city of Ember, it's up to two 12-year-olds, Lina Mayfleet and Doon Harrow, to find out why supplies are running out and to save their fellow citizens—by discovering a whole new world.

If readers feel as though they've stepped into a three-dimensional underground setting in DuPrau's novel, it's no wonder. "I had a mental picture [of Ember when I began the book], and it became clearer as I wrote. I had to draw a map of it so I would know how people went from one place to another," DuPrau says. The seeds for the story also had a chance to take root: "I had the idea for the book in my mind quite a long time ago. I think 20 years ago."

The author has written nonfiction books for instructional use and had worked as an editor in educational publishing, but never thought of herself as a fiction writer. "I didn't say to myself, 'I want to write a children's book,' I just thought, 'I want to write this story.' Because of its nature, I knew it would be a children's book," she says.

When she finished the manuscript, DuPrau sent it to Houghton Mifflin (she had read in the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators newsletter that an editor there was looking for such a book). "The editor wrote back a very nice letter saying she thought it was too much like [Lois Lowry's] The Giver, and it wasn't for them, but said she was sure I'd have success elsewhere," DuPrau recalls. At that point, she decided to get an agent and sent the book to someone who had just started her own agency, Nancy Gallt. Gallt sent the book to various publishers, and it went to auction; it wound up with Jim Thomas at Random House.

From there, the story is almost like a fairy tale. DuPrau says, "The suggestions that Jim made on Ember were things that I agreed would be for the better about 85% of the time. There were some things that he saw about the book that were a complete surprise to me. [For instance,] in the original version of Ember, the city was overcrowded and people were sleeping in the streets. But Jim said the city didn't feel crowded to him; it seemed empty and desolate. He thought that either I should make Ember feel more crowded or not have people sleeping in the streets."

Random House took an unusual approach to promoting this first novel: they sent her on a five-city pre-publication tour to meet booksellers, librarians and other influential members of the children's books community—perhaps an indication of the publisher's confidence of the book's success.

For those curious to know what Lina and Doon discover beyond the realm of Ember, they won't have too long to wait—DuPrau has already finished the next book and sent it off to her editor. "I hadn't thought of writing a sequel when I wrote the first book," she says. "With Ember, I had the whole story in my mind. I had to get from the beginning to the end, which was hard, but I knew where I was going. With the second book, it wasn't nearly as clear, so it took a long time. I realized how much I didn't know about how [this future] world works. How does the economy work? How many people does it take to make a viable community?"

As she awaits Thomas's comments on the sequel, the author may be found playing the piano at her home near Palo Alto, Calif., walking her cairn terrier, Ethan, or working in her garden, where she grows vegetables and flowers. Although she is not currently at work on a new book, DuPrau thinks her next one will likely be another work of fiction. Her passion for writing comes through when she describes one of the important reasons behind writing Ember: "I wanted to write a book that would make people love the world, that would make people see it for the wonderful place it is. The world is threatened in so many ways right now that it seemed important to me to say that—not in a messagey way, but to have that come through."

Once you know illustrator Boris Kulikov's background, all the vintage clothing makes perfect sense. In Lore Segal's Morris the Artist (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Foster, May), Kulikov's unconventional debut, he dresses his young characters in puffy knickers, sailor suits, huge rust-colored fedoras and long, flowing scarves. It's a pretty daring juxtaposition to Segal's modern "everykid" tale of a boy who yearns to keep the paint set he takes to a birthday party, but it blends seamlessly.

That over-the-top costuming, not too surprisingly, has its roots in the theater. Russian-born and -bred, Kulikov worked as a set and costume designer after graduating from the Institute of Theater, Music and Cinema in St. Petersburg. He good-naturedly explains that, "having a mother, father and wife in the arts, I had no choice but to be an artist." Still, external factors led to his specialization in theater. "In Russia, my parents were set and costume designers too. During the Soviet time, our government didn't pay close attention to theater artists. It was the one artistic profession that was mostly free of ideology. People just saw them as crazy people."

By the time Kulikov graduated in 1992, the chokehold on the arts had dropped away with the Soviet system. "By this time, we had huge freedom—even more than we needed. Of course there was another problem, a huge economic problem." Free to follow his heart, Kulikov began painting, collaborating on two books for teenagers. He then landed a plum assignment—illustrating a new edition of Mary Poppins, a childhood favorite of his. But the publisher folded before publication.

The 50 illustrations he did for that book came in handy, though, after he moved to New York City in 1997. After a stint restoring murals, painting apartments and passing as an electrician ("even though I do not understand anything about electricity"), he shopped his Poppins-filled portfolio around to magazines and newspapers. His big break came when a fellow illustrator sent him to the art director of the New York Times Book Review, Steven Heller. "He was the first art director who gave me a job in America," he recalls gratefully. "He was, I would say, my godfather here."

Then began a steady stream of editorial assignments—which continue to roll in—for such publications as the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. Still smitten with the idea of children's books, though, Kulikov fruitlessly cold-called the major publishers until Heller referred him to FSG editor Frances Foster ("another great person in my life"). Already a fan of his editorial work, Foster proposed a book on the spot.

Compared to the breakneck pace of editorial illustration, Kulikov finds book publishing "smoother, less pressured," and much more fun. "It is rare when an editor or art director trusts an artist completely. I was very happy," he says of his relationship with Foster, Segal, art director Robbin Gourley and designer Barbara Grzeslo. Changes were generally minor. Their sharp eyes helped him, for example, to keep the same number of buttons on a shirt from page to page. He also concurred with Segal's suggestion to make the gift surreally grow in size, reflecting Morris's increasing possessiveness of it.

Besides giving the characters a lavish wardrobe, Kulikov—who admires illustrators Peter Sís, Sergio Ruzzier and Ray Bartkus—places them in a unique, rustic and Victorian-flavored setting. "I like old times," he explains. "I do not like mass production—contemporary architecture, chairs, tables, etc. That is why often I use things from the past. I especially love the 1930s and '40s, and the Victorian and Renaissance styles." The book's verdant, cypress-spiked landscapes, rendered in pen-and-ink and acrylic wash, feel almost Tuscan—echoing the Italian-like geography of his birthplace on the Crimean peninsula.

Like the book's main character, whose wild paintings delight his fellow partygoers, Kulikov's original style is winning devotees, too. He already has three more books in the pipeline, the first of which is Carnival of the Animals by John Lithgow (Simon & Schuster, spring 2004). Then in 2005 comes The Perfect Friend, written by his wife, Yelena Romanova; and Max's Words by Kate Banks (both FSG/Foster).

That's quite a line-up, considering that Kulikov arrived in America a mere six years ago. "I think I am lucky with the good persons that I have met," he says. "You know, we all meet some good people in our lives." He adds thoughtfully, "And there were some in mine."

Michael Simmons knows that Brett, the narrator of his novel Pool Boy (Roaring Brook, May), is something of a brat. "All he does is complain," he says. "He's completely self-absorbed, he doesn't really care about anyone else."

But Brett's been through a lot: the former rich kid lost his money—and his stockbroker father—when his dad got busted and imprisoned for insider trading. And he's not without redeemable qualities. To Simmons, he's a little bit like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. While Calvin causes lots of trouble, he's also funny. And, he says, "Calvin also has a very sweet, soft side to him. I hope that comes out with Brett, at least by the end."

While this is Simmons's first novel, he is not new to writing. After earning a master's in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he decided while working toward his Ph.D. that he'd rather be a writer. He then went to Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned an MFA in creative writing.

Now, living in Brooklyn, he freelances for Scholastic's reading programs and other educational packagers. He has also published short stories in literary journals under his real name (the name Simmons is actually a pen name—his mother's maiden name—that he is using for his young adult novels so readers won't confuse his two voices). "They're generally about cranky old men who are almost as dislikable as Brett is," he says of those short stories.

The idea for Pool Boy came to him while he was doing some research for Scholastic. "I had read a bunch of articles about mothers in prisons and what it was like to be estranged from their kids," he says. "It's really heartbreaking stuff." After he nailed Brett's voice, the story flowed quickly; he finished a draft of the book after "a month of incredibly disciplined work."

Simmons equates the process of writing a book with acting. "Once you start to assume this role, you can go spontaneously or extemporaneously, and write from that voice," he says. In fact, several of the essential plot points "came to me on the fly," he says, including Brett's summer job cleaning swimming pools.

After finishing the book, he found an agent, George Nicholson at Sterling Lord Literistic, who placed his book with Roaring Brook. There, Simmons worked with editor Neal Porter, whom he felt really trusted him. Together, they worked on bringing Brett's soft side into the novel's foreground. "Some editors can be bullies, and with Neal, all his suggestions were phrased in the interrogative," he says.

Simmons is also working with Porter and Roaring Brook on his next book, Vandal, due out in about a year. It's about a talented teen—the lead guitarist in a Kiss cover band—whose brother gets into serious trouble. "It's basically about the love that the guitar-playing brother, the good brother, learns to feel for the bad brother.

These days, Simmons says, he is dividing his time between his own work and educational writing. He says he gets up early in the morning and writes until midday—leaving his afternoons free to watch shows like Ricki Lake and Married with Children. He says it's a thrill to walk into a bookstore and see his book, and hear from people who have read it. "I think sales are being driven by my mother," he says. "I think everybody in my family, from seventh cousins to immediate family, has several copies of my book that my mother sent to them."

And what does he hope readers walk away with after finishing Pool Boy? "I wasn't much of a reader when I was a teenager," he says. "I kind of hope that some 15-year-old kid who hates reading is maybe forced into reading this book, reads it, and at the end of it, decides it wasn't that bad."

Derek Anderson's career in children's books began one fortuitous afternoon. "Just as I was graduating from college," he recalls, "My mother, a third-grade teacher, returned from a book conference where she'd met all kinds of authors and illustrators. She took armfuls of children's books back with her, which immediately caught my eye." They were books the likes of which he'd never seen before, like The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs. "I was blown away by them," he says. "The pictures were works of art."

On the cusp of graduating from Iowa State University, where he majored in drawing and painting, he was looking for an outlet, and once he saw his mother's treasure trove of children's books, he knew he wanted this to be his future.

Anderson's path eventually led him to Simon & Schuster, and the debut of his first picture book, Little Quack (Feb.), written by Lauren Thompson, which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list this spring. Of course the road to being published wasn't as straight and narrow as he would have liked. "I had been sending my work out to New York for years," he says, "and S&S had been at the top of my list." He had sent a story to Kevin Lewis, executive editor at S&S Books for Young Readers, and associate editor Alyssa Eisner, about four years ago and they showed a lot of interest in it. It went through a round of rewrites but was eventually rejected.

After that, Anderson scheduled appointments with 15 publishing houses, and in May of 2001 made a trip out to New York City from his home in Minneapolis. "It was intimidating to go to the East Coast and sit in front of people who are used to working with the best," says Anderson. At S&S, he saw Lewis and Eisner and showed them all the drawings in his portfolio. "When they saw my true self, all my different styles, they said to me, 'You've been holding out on us!' "

Thompson's manuscript for Little Quack had already been acquired, and S&S was looking for an illustrator for it. Once the duo saw Anderson's full range of work, they knew he was right for the job.

Eisner (who edited the book) gave Anderson a fair amount of freedom, according to the artist. "She reined me in when I needed it, but allowed me to break free with brush strokes," he recalls. "I wanted to give the book an impressionistic feeling and she let me do those things."

Working out a way to give five little ducklings distinct personalities proved to be a bit of a challenge. Anderson painted Mama Duck and Little Quack first, and Eisner loved them, but she reminded him that there were five ducklings and they couldn't all be the same. Anderson says, "We toyed around with a few different ideas like adding clothes or glasses or hats, but thought that wouldn't work because the book was grounded in reality." Then he did a second painting where he played around with their height and weight and different feather styles (i.e., hairstyles)—that worked for everyone.

While books have always been Anderson's first choice, his past experience includes a variety of stints in various creative fields. Shortly after graduating from college, he moved to Minneapolis and worked as a sculptor, with contracts with Disney and Warner Brothers to make figurines. Then he moved into product design, and after that he illustrated greeting cards and designed storyboards for animation. "It was during this time, on evenings and weekends, that I would write and paint and send my stuff off to New York," says Anderson.

He is currently working on three more books with S&S—two more Little Quack books, as well as one that he is writing and illustrating himself—and no longer has time for freelancing. With all the attention his first book has been getting, it's no wonder.

And to Think That I Saw It on Klickitat Street. No, it's not a new Dr. Seuss title. But it could perhaps serve as a thumbnail summary of where Kathleen O'Dell found inspiration for her novel Agnes Parker... Girl in Progress (Dial, Apr.). "Several years ago I was working on a historical novel and had done months of research," recalls O'Dell. "I had just read the first volume of Beverly Cleary's memoirs [A Girl from Yamhill]. One afternoon I took a break and fell asleep. When I woke up from that nap, it came to me; I shouldn't be writing something historical, I should be writing something more like the Cleary books I loved as a child. I grew up in Portland, Ore. [as Cleary did], and all our street names were in Beverly Cleary's books. I knew those places and felt like I knew those characters. I guess you could say the idea came to me during a nap. That, and I think my subconscious decided it didn't want to do any more research," O'Dell jokes.

The result of O'Dell's liberating trip to dreamland is a breezily paced tale about an unassuming girl who is navigating her way through some of the landmines of sixth grade: a bully, a first crush, evolving friendships and a tough teacher. Reviews have complimented O'Dell's realistic scenarios and dialogue, something the author says she admires about the works of her writing idols. "All I want to do is penetrate to the heart of a character," O'Dell says. "Beverly Cleary uses a plain-spoken style where you can recognize her characters as people in life. Canadian author Alice Munro has that same gift."

Agnes Parker was not O'Dell's first attempt at authordom, however. "I had been writing for a long time," she says. "But when my children went off to grade school I got absorbed in volunteering at the large library at their school. I was immersed in what children like, then about 10 years ago I started thinking about writing children's books. I sat around in my sweatpants and did a lot of typing then," she says with a laugh.

Along the way, O'Dell, an English major in college, had gained experience writing in the public relations field and had studied with writers in the Los Angeles area (near her Glendale home) through UCLA's extension program. That path led her to eventually submit a poetry collection to Dial Books for Young Readers.

Following a "bunch of circumstances" including the personnel changes common in publishing, O'Dell's work landed with editor Cecile Goyette. The poetry title did not come to fruition, but Goyette "snapped up" O'Dell's idea for the middle-grade novel back in 2000. "I was under the impression that when I finished my first draft the book was finished," O'Dell says. "But no! It was just the starting point. Working with Cecile was much more of a collaboration than I thought it would be; she has really helped me as a writer."

And these days O'Dell does indeed feel like a writer. She writes full-time now, and her husband and two teenage sons applaud her efforts. "My 13-year-old is a big fan, as long as he doesn't have to read the part about the bras," she says. He even purchased one of her books "out of support" at a recent signing O'Dell did during the L.A. Times Book Festival.

She has not done much promotion yet, but plans to do more in the fall, when an excerpt of Agnes Parker will run in American Girl magazine (the Sept./Oct. issue). She is hard at work on a sequel ("Agnes goes to summer camp," she notes) and has finished another novel, due out in summer 2004, about a girl who is "obsessed with Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz."

"It's all been exciting," O'Dell says. "I've been thrilled at seeing the cover, seeing the book listed on Amazon—all the little things that make it real." And she has received her first fan letters as well. "Sometimes you have to take yourself by the shoulders and say 'Hello, you're an author now.' "

In Ali Bahrampour's picture book Otto: The Story of a Mirror (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May), the shiny, oval title character runs out on his dull job at a hat shop after dealing with an especially vain customer named Curly Joe. Otto becomes a wayfarer on the high seas, "not knowing where the waves would take him, but happy nonetheless."

Otto's rootlessness might describe Bahrampour himself, although he is loath to admit it. "My girlfriend says it's totally autobiographical, that it's based on every crummy job I've had, and wanting to get away," he says, though he remains unconvinced. He allows only that he leads a "jaunt-to-jaunt" existence in and around New York City. "Most recently I was working in a library, but now I'm drawing and writing for the summer," he says. "I live cheaply. It's a philosophy based on necessity."

This happen-what-may approach may be anathema to careerists, but it apparently stokes Bahrampour's imagination. He describes Otto as a daydream brought to fruition. "I was doodling in a language class—it might have been Russian," he says. "I drew a picture of a mirror and a sort of proto-Curly Joe character chasing the mirror. And then I tried to reason what the story might be from there."

Bahrampour developed book dummies for Otto and another as-yet-unpublished manuscript. He does not have an agent—although he is thinking of finding one—so he planned to shop his portfolio to various publishing houses. But before he did the legwork, his sister, New York Times journalist Tara Bahrampour, intervened. She had published her memoir with Farrar, Straus and Giroux ("It's about her childhood in Iran— and mine I guess. I'm sort of a peripheral character," Ali says). Tara contacted her editor, Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard (now at Ballantine), who put Ali in touch with FSG children's editor Robbie Mayes.

Bahrampour remembers being on the defensive at first. "I had never worked with an editor, so I was prepared to defy any advice," he says. He intended to preserve the book's comical crowd scenes, which he models after Brueghel's teeming peasant villages, Bosch's alchemical fantasias and, more prosaically perhaps, Richard Scarry's bustling cities. He also worried that a children's editor would introduce some "namby-pamby" elements that were contrary to Otto's dry wit.

"As a child, my hackles would raise when there was any patronizing tone or winking at the parents," Bahrampour says. "Sometimes authors pander to parents at the expense of enchanting the child. I liked authors that were a little darker, with a bit of absurdism. I loved Struwwelpeter, and my favorite book was The Beast of Monsieur Racine."

Bahrampour's fears were unfounded, for he and Mayes shared a dislike for the sugary. "I trust his taste and his sensibility," Bahrampour says. He also feels fortunate that Mayes sent Otto to Maurice Sendak, who provided a blurb. "[Sendak] is one of those people, like Tomi Ungerer or Richard Scarry, whose books are so elemental it's hard to believe that someone even wrote them," he says, again thinking of his own childhood reading.

Bahrampour is now working on another picture book for Mayes, a story of an insect-collector called Luna Likes Bugs. He senses that his cartoon style is becoming freer with experience. "The more you practice, the looser you get," he says. "The next book will be a little more inky, with more variation in lines. The pen I used for Otto was just one thickness." He adds that his artistic experiments have led him into a world of fountain pen admirers: "There are lots of nib maniacs, it turns out, on the Internet," he says.

Besides chatting online with members of "nib fan clubs," Bahrampour has met some of his public face to face. "I have a friend who's an elementary school teacher in California; in one of the crowd scenes, she's at a table being drawn," he says. "I read Otto to her class and her students picked her out." He hopes to do readings in New York too. "I used to work at a settlement house, running a literacy program in Brooklyn," he says. "Because I was doing this first dummy, I promised them I would come back when it was published." Like Otto, Bahrampour has every reason to seize the day.