Beverly Cleary

An indelible figure in the children's book world since she burst onto the scene in 1955 in Beezus and Ramona, Ramona Quimby--the spirited brainchild of beloved author Beverly Cleary--recently made her first new appearance in print in 15 years.

"I thought I was through with Ramona, but she just wouldn't go away," says Cleary, speaking from her home in Carmel, Calif. "She just kept popping into my mind."

Finally, Cleary gave in to the proddings of her muse, and the result is Ramona's World (Morrow, Aug.), which finds the perennially popular character still living on Klickitat Street in Portland, Ore. Now in fourth grade, Ramona has a new baby sister, a new best friend and a whole new set of predicaments with which to delight readers.

What was it like revisiting familiar territory after so many years? "I think it was probably a good idea to wait a long time before writing another Ramona book, as change is refreshing to me," Cleary replies. Although Ramona is the character most closely associated with Cleary, her range as a writer includes the realistic Henry series, the fantasy series that begins with The Mouse and the Motorcycle, picture books (most recently The Hullabaloo ABC, illustrated by Ted Rand) and memoirs (A Girl from Yamhill; My Own Two Feet). Her many books have earned her just about every major award in children's literature, including the 1984 Newbery Medal for Dear Mr. Henshaw.

Slipping back into the voice of Ramona wasn't difficult--"Ramona I just know," Cleary says simply--and despite a few gently updated details (Ramona's mother is in a book group, and her friend Daisy's older brother says things like "whatever"), the story retains the timeless quality that the author clearly associates with childhood.

"I don't think children and schools for the most part have changed that much," she states. "I think we need to remember that there are children with loving parents in schools in neighborhoods that go along in a civilized way and that, while there are problems, they're not always dramatic and dangerous. I think caring parents need a little attention, too."

Cleary didn't tell her publisher that she was working on a new Ramona story--"I just write my books and send them in," she explains--and so the manuscript came as a complete surprise to Barbara Lalicki, now senior v-p and editorial director at HarperCollins Children's Books, to whom Cleary handed a plain manila envelope during a visit at Cleary's home.

"I had no idea what it was, and the curiosity was killing me," Lalicki recalls. "I was driving back to my hotel and got caught in a traffic jam, so I opened it up and read the first few lines and thought, 'Wow!' Ramona was back with all the immediacy--it was just as if 15 years hadn't gone by."

As always, Cleary's stories are sparked by "little things in my daily life." Fan mail for one, which she answered single-handedly for more than 30 years but finally relinquished to her publisher ("They still give me what I call 'from the heart' letters"). "Quite a few children have asked how Ramona would get along with a baby sister," Cleary says, "which started me thinking, 'Well, how would she get along?' And then my son happened to mention the time he fell through my friend's ceiling"--a reminiscence that quickly became a key dramatic event in the book.

Cleary has no plans at this point to write more Ramona books--"I really don't want to run Ramona into the ground"--and in fact considers herself semi-retired. However, she quips, "If a brand-new idea comes my way, I'm not retired. I never say never!"

--Heather Vogel Frederick

Kevin Henkes

A visual artist first and foremost, Kevin Henkes creates a world that appeals to the five senses even when he is using words as his paintbrush. For fans of his work, specific images from his novels spring to mind: the matching M-shaped imprints on the hands of a boy and his grandmother in Sun & Spoon, the opening crescent-shaped gravesite in Words of Stone. This fall's The Birthday Room (Greenwillow, Sept.) is no exception.

The novel centers on Ben, a budding artist whose parents give him an attic room for his 12th birthday to use as a studio, and whose uncle gives him an airline ticket to visit him in Oregon. That readers can almost taste Ben's birthday breakfast of blueberry pancakes and smell the apple orchard near Ben's uncle's house, as well as empathize with the feeling of sanctity Ben senses when he steps into his uncle's woodworking shop, is no accident. Henkes researched the times that the sun rose and set in Oregon in August; he has friends with an apple orchard and other friends who do woodworking; he was even undergoing construction on his own attic while writing the book. He grounds each novel in the particulars of his firsthand experience.

The main impetus for The Birthday Room was the birth of Henkes's son. "He was so little and fragile, and as a first child, he seemed more so to us. We were so careful with him," Henkes recalls. "And then I got to thinking: What would happen if an accident happened that wounded a child in some way? What would that be like from a child's perspective?"

Much of the tension in the novel stems from the blame Ben's mother places on her brother for an injury Ben had incurred at age 2 1/2 in his uncle's workshop, which resulted in the loss of the little finger on Ben's left hand. Ben has no fear of his uncle, yet his mother still d sn't trust him with Ben. "I didn't want the child to be scared, but someone else might be," Henkes says.

Like Ben and his uncle, many of the characters in Henkes's fiction are artists: the father in Words of Stone is a painter; the mother in Sun & Spoon is an elementary school art teacher. "I often have artists as characters in books because I love writing about painting," Henkes says. "I think of scenes as paintings. I need to have that frame, then the characters can move around in that space." He mentions the importance of light and shadow in Sun & Spoon and the significance of various rooms--even the thresholds--in The Birthday Room.

If Henkes gets stuck while writing a novel, he often takes a break to pen a picture book. Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse and Circle Dogs, for instance, were texts he wrote on hiatus from 1995's Protecting Marie. He explains why he is so drawn to writing novels: "I love to go into depth, to describe the psyche in a way that you can't and shouldn't in picture books. With novels, I can explore a character in a different way. Novels take longer to do, and you live with a character for two years. It's a different way of working."

--Jennifer M. Brown

David Wiesner

The relationship between an artistic boy and a cloud is the centerpiece of David Wiesner's Sector 7 (Clarion, Sept.), the latest wordless picture book by the Caldecott Medalist. Sector 7 has had much critical success (including a boxed review in PW), which has confirmed Wiesner's reputation as a master in this genre.

"I've had an interest in wordless books for a long time," Wiesner says. "In each book, I took a different perspective. Free Fall is nonnarrative; Tuesday is funny and influenced by comic books; and [Sector 7] has a much more traditional storytelling element to it."

The action begins when a boy on a class trip to the Empire State Building discovers that the fog-enshrouded landmark is his entrance to a magical adventure in the sky. He embarks on an aerial journey with a snowmanlike cloud that carries him to "Sector 7," a Grand Central in the sky that functions as a cloud factory. While the boy is imaginative and soon takes his pencil out to draw new shapes for the clouds, the Sector 7 work crew is rigidly set in their ways, scorning his attempts at novelty and evicting him from the station. Having experienced the taste of freedom, however, the clouds have no intention of returning to their boring existence. As a result, in the final spreads, the view over Manhattan is much more entertaining.

Although Wiesner took a narrative approach to Sector 7, the book clearly contains themes that he has explored in depth in other books--for instance, flying. "Flying is a very visual thing," Wiesner explains. "I just love to draw things flying in the air," adding that the first occurrence came in the fifth grade when he drew a picture of flying refrigerators.

The fanciful fish shapes that the clouds acquire also harken back to one of the artist's favorite themes. Originally, Wiesner reports, he was going to have the boy in the book draw dinosaurs. Then, having decided that dinosaurs were a bit predictable, he hit upon the fish, which he had been wanting to use in a book. The multihued fish give readers a glimpse of another of his personal motifs; as with flying, fish are a "mysterious" element that appeals to him because of the visual possibilities. "I don't like to try to explain it," he says.

Since he states that "almost all my books start out with a visual image, usually from my sketchbook," we queried why some of his books end up with a text and some are wordless. Wiesner explains that it depends on how much information he can get into the pictures. If the pictures can tell the story and cause readers to find visual elements that they might not if a text was available to provide the answers--if he decides that a text would not add anything--then it ends up as a wordless book.

Wiesner found that he was able to move the more complicated plot in Sector 7 along visually, once he solved a few technical problems, such as how to convey the boy from the ground into the sky. "The idea was to have a child who draws and who uses art to transform a situation. But I had to get him up into the clouds. Since I've always been fascinated with New York and enchanted by steel, stone and the hustle and bustle, I thought, 'Well, the child could ride a cloud up to the top of the Empire State Building.' When the cloud took on a personality and a relationship grew between it and the boy, [the story] came together."

In Sector 7, fantasy and the everyday truly come together, something that happens all the time in children's lives, according to Wiesner. "I like the fantasy element in ordinary life. [It is] the juxtaposition of the unusual in the middle of the ordinary that interests me."

--Cindi di Marzo

Susan Cooper

Newbery Medalist Susan Cooper has been writing for children for more than 30 years, so it is especially impressive when she says that her latest novel, King of Shadows (S&S/ McElderry, Oct.), is her "biggest labor of love ever." The novel, about an American child actor who travels back through time to perform in A Midsummer Night's Dream alongside Shakespeare, combines Cooper's gifts for fantasy (amply showcased, for example, in her Dark Is Rising sequence) and what she calls a "lifetime obsession" with theater.

In her sterling accent--Cooper is British, but she has lived in the U.S. since 1963--Cooper explains that her fascination with the theater began when she was very young. "I was the kind of kid who went to the local repertory theater every Saturday afternoon and sat in the very cheap seats at the top of the house, gobbling it up," she said.

Her professional life has long been intertwined with the stage. For about 25 years, she has been writing for John Langstaff's The Christmas Revels, contributing plays, stories, lyrics and verse to these annual productions. Also 25 years ago, she met the actors Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, who became her close friends. (In 1996, two years after Tandy's death, Cooper and Cronyn married.) Cooper and Cronyn wrote together--among their collaborations is the play Foxfire, which was produced on Broadway in 1982 and also toured on the West Coast. "If there's ever a way to get soaked in the theater, and never cured of it, it's to go all the way through a major production like that," she says cheerfully.

The author adds that King of Shadows is in part "the result of always having known about Sam Wanamaker and his passionate efforts to get the Globe rebuilt." Wanamaker, she explains, is the late American actor who spearheaded the reconstruction of Shakespeare's theater, a project completed in 1997. "About 10 years ago," Cooper continues, "I had a flicker of an idea that I would like to write about a boy who is acting at the new Globe and finds himself going back in time to act at Shakespeare's Globe. But I thought, 'Oh, God, all that research!' I had just finished The Boggart, and the [main character] hadn't quite left my head, so instead of doing my Elizabethan boy, I wrote a sequel. But the Elizabethan boy didn't leave my head either. So then I did bite the bullet."

The research took several years. Cooper dug out her books from college ("Shakespeare and Elizabethan England loomed fairly large on the syllabus when I was at Oxford University doing a degree in English"), sought works on Shakespeare and the Globe and "read every single piece of social history about that period that I could lay my hands on."

The author's voice quickens when she describes creating the character of William Shakespeare: "I loved writing Shakespeare! He's my greatest possible hero." In her story, he is highly charismatic, and he speaks colorfully but not vastly unlike the other characters in the book--in other words, he d sn't speak like a Shakespearean character. Was she intimidated by the prospect of putting words in his mouth? "At the very beginning, I thought, 'This is a bit cheeky,' but I was so looking forward to it. We know so little about him--we don't even know if the pictures are anything like what he really looked like. A writer is free to imagine. I'd always been so soaked in the plays, and I think you develop your own image of the quiet person behind them.

"I was terribly sad when I had to leave Shakespeare," Cooper says, as if speaking of a friend. What comes through her voice, however, is not so much sorrow but enthusiasm. "I had more pleasure from writing King of Shadows [than any other work]," she acknowledges. "It kept giving me things back."

--Elizabeth Devereaux