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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Chuck Richards
Jungle Gym Jitters (Walker) reveals something new each time readers revisit its extraordinarily crafted drawings. Even its author and illustrator, Chuck Richards, admits forgetting about and then discovering anew some quirky detail he's created among the book's countless contraptions and spine-tingling perspectives. His high-flying artwork chronicles a boy's fear of his father's fantastic, sky-scraping jungle gym.
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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Anna Dale
For British author Anna Dale, a childhood fascination with witches proved a key ingredient for the imaginative potion that became her first novel, Whispering to Witches (Bloomsbury).
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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Meg Rosoff
Meg Rosoff wasn't able to celebrate the glowing reviews her first novel received when they started coming in—she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. "I was in the hospital for my first operation when the book was released and all these flowers started arriving. Half of the cards said, 'Congratulations,' the other half said, 'We're so sorry.' "
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Laura MatthewsLaura
The story of how Fish (Delacorte) 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.
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Leslie Connor
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). 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.
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Mary Ann Rodman
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.
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Ed Briant
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."
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Blue Balliett
"I'm astounded that other people are interested in my book," says Blue Balliett, author of Chasing Vermeer (Scholastic), 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.
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts
Five authors and artists who made noteworthy debuts this spring.
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts: Libba Bray
Libba Bray's love of ghost stories, her view of feminism and her fascination with Victorian society's veiled obsession—sex (or more precisely, budding sexuality)—fuel her first novel, A Great and Terrible Beauty (Delacorte). In this tale of 19th-century British teen Gemma Doyle, powerful visions link her to an ancient purgatory-like realm called the Order. At the beginning of the novel, Gemma's mother dies, and the heroine envisions just how it happened—a murder by an otherworldly being.
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts: Stacey Dressen-McQueen
Stacey Dressen-McQueen admits that she wasn't very brave when it first came to mailing out her artwork for people to see. "Just getting the nerve up to send stuff to people is hard," she says. She started sending some of her illustrations to children's publications and publishing houses in the late 1990s.
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts: Clare B. Dunkle
In September 2001, Clare Dunkle, an American living in Germany, had just finished writing her first novel. She thought she'd need an agent to get it published, but she did a little sleuthing on the Internet first. The first site she checked was Henry Holt's, because back in the 1960s the house had published Dunkle's favorite books ever, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series. Sure enough, Holt accepted unsolicited manuscripts, and although Dunkle—a former librarian—had low expectations, she sent off her manuscript. Six weeks later, editor Reka Simonsen e-mailed her to say she'd like to publish the book; this October, The Hollow Kingdom appeared—with a glowing blurb by none other than Alexander on its jacket.
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts: John Holyfield
After graduating from high school, John Holyfield decided on a graphic design major at Howard University, because it had been drummed into his head for so long that being a graphic artist was the only way he could make money as an artist. While in college, working at an art supply store, he brought in some sketches he had done to show to the other employees at the shop. They were so impressed with his work, they suggested he send it out. As luck would have it, one of the recipients wanted to publish his images as lithographic prints. Holyfield has been painting ever since.
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts: Lisa Yee
"It all came from a two-word joke," Lisa Yee says of her first middle-grade novel, Millicent Min, Girl Genius (Scholastic/Levine). And ever since the book's release, young readers (and reviewers, too) have been enjoying Yee's sense of humor. "I was thinking about the term 'child psychologist' and how funny it was," Yee explains. "Initially I thought I would write a book about a child who was actually a psychologist—and I did that, but it has since evolved into Millicent Min."
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts: Christopher Paolini
Publishers always hope for a new author to create a buzz, but few could imagine the level and intensity of attention that 20-year-old Christopher Paolini has generated. He began work on his debut novel Eragon (Knopf), the first in a planned trilogy, when he was only 15 years old; when it was finished, his family had the book printed by on-demand printer Lightning Source.
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts
Six first-time authors and artists talk about their fall '03 debuts.
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts: Ali Bahrampour
In Ali Bahrampour's picture book Otto: The Story of a Mirror (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 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."
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts: Kathleen O'Dell
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). "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.
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts: Derek Anderson
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."
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts: Michael Simmons
Michael Simmons knows that Brett, the narrator of his novel Pool Boy (Roaring Brook), 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."
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