Flying Starts

"I'm astounded that other people are interested in my book," says Blue Balliett, author of Chasing Vermeer (Scholastic, May), an art-world mystery that has won acclaim for its sui generis mix of puzzles and codes, philosophies and enigmas. To say that other people are "interested" is understatement: 10 foreign publishers snapped up rights to Chasing Vermeer before publication, and earlier this month Warner Bros. snagged the film rights.

"It's such a personal book," Balliett continues, "so much of my own way of seeing the world. It came out of my own classroom and my own questions." The author concedes that she is to some extent like Ms. Hussey, the unorthodox teacher of the sixth-grade class attended by her novel's two main characters, Petra and Calder. Balliett taught for 10 years at the University of Chicago Lab School, where the book is set (she, however, taught third grade), and her experience has left her with abiding respect for children's imaginations and intellect.

"Kids look at things in their own way, not as tiny adults," says Balliett. "They are people who deserve space of their own, as thinkers." She brought her years of observation of her students and of her own two children (now 17 and 19) to her fictional students, Petra and Calder, whose responses to the theft of a Vermeer painting demonstrate Balliett's belief that kids "have an ability to see connections and to put the world together in so much more of an elastic and fluid way than adults." With this idea, Balliett wanted almost everything in the book to exist also in the real world—from Charles Fort's eccentric book Lo! which influences Petra (Balliett found a copy of the book 25 years ago) to the Hyde Park neighborhood.

Although it was her first work of fiction, and her first book for children, Balliett says she wasn't daunted. "The book was written out of such deep conviction that I wasn't worried about whether I knew how to write fiction or not. I had so much to say that it wrote itself in a way."

However, the process was not straightforward: Balliett spent five years on the book, at first juggling her writing with her teaching (the sale of Chasing Vermeer, in 2001, allowed her to write full-time), and she claims to have a three-foot-high pile of drafts. "The book got more complex as I went along."

She is from a family of writers (her father is the New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett; her mother, Elizabeth Platt, has written a book about day care), and she wrote two collections of oral histories in the 1980s, The Ghosts of Nantucket and Nantucket Hauntings (both from Down East). When she finished Chasing Vermeer, she contacted her agent at the Doe Coover Agency, who turned the manuscript over to Amanda Lewis, the agency's children's specialist.

Balliett was amazed when five houses wanted the manuscript. "I was given a choice," she explains, "either talking to the editors and deciding, or going to straight auction. It was such a piece of passion that I felt that the right editor was much more important."

She chose Tracy Mack, of Scholastic. "She was an art history major, and she shared my vision for the book, which is not terribly conventional," she says. Brett Helquist, of Lemony Snicket renown, was selected to illustrate.

"Brett and Tracy came up with the idea to plant a code in the illustrations, related to the code in the book," Balliett says. She loved the idea, and enthusiastically responded when Helquist asked her to compose the 12-word message in the pictures.

Today Balliett is at work on a second novel featuring Petra and Calder, due out in fall 2005. "I hadn't meant to do that," she says. "But they were still talking in my head. I wasn't done with them or they with me." She says the plot involves a Frank Lloyd Wright house and a reference in another Charles Fort book to a haunted house in Hyde Park. "Ten years in the classroom has given me a backlog. I always had more ideas than space to get them out. Now I'm having a great time." —Elizabeth Devereaux

One Halloween in the mid-1990s, artist Ed Briant needed a quick costume for his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. "The only thing I had was cardboard lying around," Briant says, "so I cut it, stuck a bit of colored paper on it, and turned it into a mask."

At the time, the British-born Briant—a graduate of St. Martin's School of Art in London—was freelancing for publications like GQ, Mademoiselle, Spy and the New Yorker. He specialized in gouache portraits, occasionally with a touch of collage. But the impromptu Halloween mask gave him incentive to try more elaborate paper constructions. "I started making masks to look like celebrities," he says. Pretty soon, "Rolling Stone commissioned me to do a portrait of the writer Tom Wolfe, and the Wall Street Journal assigned me to do Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe, a couple of others."

As Briant experimented with his editorial illustration style, he decided to try some "kid-friendly" paper engineering too. With encouragement from his agent, Holly McGhee, he developed child-oriented animal characters and "started to make whole figures that evolved into full-length models." He experimented in stop-motion animation and took a sculpture class, where he learned to craft internal armatures to support his 3-D creations. With practice, he learned to devise the movable characters that appear in his debut picture book, Paper Parade (Atheneum, May), written by Sarah Weeks and edited by Caitlyn Dlouhy.

Briant cuts, folds and twists tiny bits of paper into the lively characters of Paper Parade. In this onomatopoeic, rhythmic narrative, a girl and her Siamese cat watch drummers and carnival performers passing their apartment building. Because her baby brother is napping, the girl can't persuade her mother to take her outside. Indoors, she sculpts her own set of animal musicians and dreams of leading a parade.

Briant based the main character on the elder of his two daughters: "I copied her hairstyle at the time, her choice of dresses and things like that," he says. He used two lookalike figures, one small and another 10 inches tall, and he created proportionate models for the girl's wide-eyed, antic gray cat. The models' flexible wire armatures let them bend and swivel, and their facial features were applied with removable double-sided tape, so that the girl could smile, yawn, sleep or awaken in surprise. "This is an idea that I got from stop-motion animation," Briant says. Each basic structure stays the same, he explains, but each one has "a library of expressions, and you just peel off one and put on another one."

In Paper Parade, Briant relied on digital art for most backgrounds (except for a street scene whose set "ended up being about six feet wide"). For his next paper-themed book, which he is developing for Steve Geck at Greenwillow, he plans more complicated scenery. "I developed in my techniques as I did Paper Parade, so it'll look a little different," he says of his labor-intensive artwork. "I'm intending to build little sets to photograph the figures in, so it's going to have much more depth to it."

Briant has another picture book forthcoming from Roaring Brook Press that will feature his "flat art." A newcomer to children's books, he is working with several publishers at once: "Times are tough for picture books at the moment," he says, "and I don't think they're in the mood to offer a multiple-book deal to a first-time picture book artist."

Meanwhile, Briant is pursuing a simultaneous career as a public school art teacher, instructing second through ninth graders on Staten Island. He seems surprised and gratified that his students enjoy Paper Parade. "Recently, I've been taking it in [to class], and even the older grades like having it read to them," he says. "My first day with a particular class, I usually read the book to introduce myself. It shows them what I do and gives them a sense of who I am." —Nathalie op de Beeck

Mary Ann Rodman has wanted to be a writer since age three, when she taught herself how to read. However, it never occurred to her to write a story about her own childhood—growing up in the newly integrated South—until she saw the movie Mississippi Burning as an adult. "It surprised me how many people questioned the movie's authenticity. I began to think that maybe I should write about my childhood," remarks Rodman, whose father, like the Gene Hackman character in the film, was an FBI agent sent to Mississippi to investigate hate crimes during the Civil Rights movement.

The opportunity to begin working on Yankee Girl, a moving account of a displaced Northern girl's initiation to prejudice, came in 1998, when Rodman left her job as a librarian in Wisconsin to move to Thailand with her husband, Craig, and daughter Lily, then three-and-a-half. Finding herself submerged in a "completely different culture" once again, the author was reminded of her first years in Mississippi, which inspired her to begin her memoirs.

"I needed to separate myself a couple degrees from painful memories," says Rodman, explaining why she ultimately decided to switch to third person and write her book from the viewpoint of nine-year-old Alice Ann. "Although Alice Ann and I are alike in some ways, she is much braver, smarter and less self-conscious than I was at her age. She is an improved version of me, someone who I wish I could have been."

In the book, Alice Ann, who is torn between wanting to fit in with her peers and wanting to stand up for her beliefs, eventually finds the courage to befriend an African-American classmate: Valerie, the much-ridiculed daughter of a renowned Civil Rights leader.

At the same time Rodman was working on Yankee Girl in Thailand, she enrolled in the online MFA program at Vermont College, which proved to be an invaluable step in her writing career. "It was the making of me as a writer," she states enthusiastically. "I can't stress enough the importance of having a support group." Via e-mail, she began receiving critiques of her manuscript by a series of mentors, including Sharon Darrow, Ron Koertge, Marion Dane Bauer and Randy Powell, all members of the Vermont College faculty. It was Powell (who worked at FSG) who took a particular interest in Yankee Girl and eventually helped the author get the book into the right hands.

Although few plot changes were required of the novel after its acceptance, editor Robbie Mayes was, according to Rodman, "meticulous" about checking out every fact. "He went as far as researching the whereabouts of Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier in 1964 to make sure that it was plausible for them to have been seen at the funeral of Valerie's father," the author recalls.

Although Yankee Girl is aimed at middle schoolers, Rodman (who is now living in Georgia and involved in several new writing projects) has received feedback on her first novel from readers of all ages. "The reactions can be categorized both regionally and demographically," the author notes. "Most Northerners love the book. Children from the South often say, 'Wow, I didn't know that [brutal instances of racism] happened.' Southern white people from my generation start apologizing for their sins. Older Southerners—from my parents' generation—either get a frozen expression on their face when they hear about what I've written, or they ask, 'Why do you want to bring all that up?"

However varied the responses, it is clear that Rodman's book is having an impact. Retired teacher Marion Turner, a friend of Rodman who provided the author with anecdotes and an African-American viewpoint for Valerie's character, said of the finished story, "Yankee Girl is an everybody kind of book." — Lynda Brill Comerford

Sometimes, getting back to basics helps us appreciate what is truly valuable. This type of reality check certainly had an effect on Leslie Connor, inspiring her to write her first picture book, Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel, illustrated by Mary Azarian (Houghton, May). In the story, Miss Bridie leaves her thatch-roofed cottage in 1856 Ireland and sets sail for America. Of all her prized possessions, Miss Bridie chooses to bring a shovel to her new homeland, for reasons that soon become apparent in a most practical way.

Connor formed the character of Miss Bridie as she worked the earth with her own shovel in a much more modern era. "A number of years ago, my husband and I were building a home into a hillside," Connor explains. "We hired a backhoe to do much of the major work, but there was still a lot of digging and earth moving to be done. Even though we were nearly penniless at that point, I bought myself a really good shovel. I started to think back on the Laura Ingalls Wilder books I enjoyed as a girl and wondered, 'What would it be like in those days? What would you want to have on hand?' "

Connor believes she entered children's book publishing via a side door. "I came to the field thinking of myself as an illustrator, but I don't leave much evidence of that yet," she says. In fact, Connor's bachelor's degree from the University of Connecticut is in fine art. Still, she notes, "Writing chose me. I took some local continuing education classes in writing to get a manuscript that I could submit with my artwork. After a while, I began to acknowledge that I was a writer at heart. It was a surprise to me, but it was there all along."

Writing classes helped Connor find a group of like-minded friends who serve as a critique group. "We cheerlead for each other," she says. Participation in an annual writers' retreat in Maine, organized by a friend, has also proved pivotal. And in 2001, when her tale about Miss Bridie seemed in good shape, Connor entered it in a statewide contest in her home state of Connecticut. Before long, she walked away with the Tassy Walden Award for New Voices in Children's Literature—and an agent. "The contest had two levels of judging," Connor says. "One at an editor level and one at an agent level. Jennie Dunham [of Dunham Literary] happened to be at the award reception where I read my text and a few weeks later she offered me representation."

Dunham soon placed the manuscript with Houghton's Ann Rider, who, in turn, paired Miss Bridie with the artwork of Caldecott Medalist Azarian (Snowflake Bentley). "As an illustrator myself, I knew what that meant," Connor recalls. "I felt honored that they would put my text in Mary's good care."

The result has been what Connor characterizes as an experience in warmth. "You don't know much about what happens in publishing until you get a foot—or a knee, maybe—in the door. I was so impressed by the care that was taken after it was out of my hands. It's been amazing to me to read reviews and to feel 'oh, they got it!'—to feel so completely understood."

These days, Connor more than understands the key role that writing has come to occupy in her life. "This is my job now," she says. "I had previously been a kept woman," she jokes, "dedicating a decade to raising three kids [ages 16, 14 and 11]. I always kept a finger in writing and art, but it started to pay off right when it had to—before I had to take a job that I wouldn't love."

Following in Miss Bridie's footsteps is a "kind of spooky" YA novel for Dial that is slated for spring 2005, as well as "two or three picture books I'm honing and one that I badly want to illustrate," says Connor. And as for Connor's shovel, it's still around—just like readers imagine Miss Bridie's would be. —Shannon Maughan

The story of how Fish (Delacorte, June) came to be published is a bit like the miracle at the center of Laura Matthews's debut novel: Tiger saves the Fish, who leaps from a mud puddle in a war-torn, drought-ridden land. The author never identifies the human narrator Tiger by gender, age or physical attributes. Nor does Matthews identify the country in which Tiger's parents act as relief workers. Even the man who, with his donkey, leads Tiger's family across the border to safety as war encroaches on their small village, is known only as the Guide. Although the author keeps the Guide's nationality and the book's setting anonymous, she steeps the novel in such tangible details—the mountainous terrain, a muddy riverbed—that readers always feel as if they know where they are.

If the book possesses a dreamlike quality, perhaps that is because the seed of the novel was a dream. "I was moving house and watching refugees, I think it was in Afghanistan, on the telly, and a lot combined into a very strong dream," Matthews recalls, speaking from her home in Dorset, England. "I usually don't remember anything in the morning, so it was shocking to have this very real dream and to try to make it make sense."

The author worked to keep the entities of Tiger and the Guide and the setting anonymous. "I wanted readers to feel the way I did in the dream. If I put the Guide's name, some people will have a response—a bristling or a liking," she says. "I wanted the widest possible audience to participate."

Along with Keats and Shakespeare, the Bible had a big influence on the author. "I like Jonah for his spirit, the Moses story, the Jesus story, the Good Samaritan—the moral tales. I love evidence in history that there was a great flood," Matthews says, connecting it back to her tale of a fish that changes size to fit in whatever container it must to survive. "A fish can't change size, but it can, can't it?," she poses rhetorically. "If you've ever been around fishermen, you know the deceptive quality of the size of a fish."

Matthews wrote Fish in two weeks. She admits to an unusual process: "I write in a bizarre way. I write in my head first. I work out the plot while I'm having my coffee in the morning, or waiting outside a shop." The mother of 11-year-old Evie (short for Genevieve) and 15-year-old Jay, the author wrote while they were at school and would stop when they got home. However, she did break her routine one day, when Evie got home from school: "After a bit I told her, 'I'm really sorry, I've got to get back. I've left Tiger under the mud.' "

After she finished the book, Matthews was unsure of her next steps. "I did a Google search on children's books, and there was a link to the Fiddler Award. I hit it accidentally, and [discovered] you could enter as a first-time author, and the prize was to be published," she says. She won the contest and Hodder Children's Books in England published the book; Krista Marino bought it for Delacorte in the U.S.

Her second book, The Outcasts, aimed at teens, will be out in September from Hodder. "I didn't think it would be anything like Fish but I suppose there are some similarities," Matthews says. "The children move into a different dimension, and in my own way I try to make it feel plausible. And it's a moral tale." She is now working on a follow-up to The Outcasts.

Just as she is winding up the conversation, Matthews says, "I've left one thing out, haven't I?" At the time she was writing Fish, she and her husband had just split up and had sold their house. She wasn't sure where she was going to move with her two children—and three Koi carp. "I'd become attached to them, and felt I knew them personally," Matthews says of the fish. She finally found a 150-year-old rural cottage that she claims "normally only a builder could handle," and she and her kids created a pond in the backyard for the three fish. The next day, two of the Koi disappeared; one fish survives.

Asked what she'd like young people to take away from reading Fish, she says, "Believing miracles can happen—but you have to put something in. You have to try, to not give up." —Jennifer M. Brown