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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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Spring 2003 Flying Starts: Boris Kulikov
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), 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.
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts: Jeanne DuPrau
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), which is set in a postapocalyptic underground world in which the power supply, food and other necessities are dwindling.
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts
Six first-time children's authors and illustrators talk about their road to publication
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Paul Elie: Reading Books With Our Lives
From Paul Elie's office at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a small cubicle with a big window looking south from 19 Union Square West in Manhattan, any New Yorker would notice, beyond the tangle of chimney-potted roofscapes, what was not there—the twin towers, which used to stand about two miles away.
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Fall 2002 Flying Starts: Tanuja Desai Hidier
After writing and publishing several connected short stories about first- and second-generation South Asian Americans, Tanuja Desai Hidier, a Brown graduate who has been involved with filmmaking, music and editing as well as writing fiction, felt that her material was growing “too big” for a short story format. She wanted to create a novel about an “ABCD,” an American-born confused Desai, or, more specifically, a South Asian teen caught between two cultures. She also wanted to capture the “exciting multicultural scene occurring in New York City, where she lived after college.
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Fall 2002 Flying Starts: Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson
For Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, finding the right audience was a matter of trial and error. She has written poetry her whole life, but says she was continuously searching for her true voice. "I tried to write short stories for adults, I tried to write picture books and short stories for kids," she recalls. "And the stuff for the adults was too young, and the stuff for the kids was too old."
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