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Julius Lester: Working at His Creative Peak
Not many miles off the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston, a winding road rises and falls just before it reaches the turnoff leading up a hill to Julius Lester's pale green, clapboard home.
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PW Talks with Virginia Euwer Wolff
PW: In 1993, your novel Make Lemonade was published to great acclaim. What prompted you to return to the heroine, LaVaughn, after an eight-year-hiatus? VEW: Young readers, in letters, kept telling me that the ending [of Make Lemonade] was up in the air. It took me eight months to find a name for LaVaughn. Originally, in Make Lemonade, the narrator was nameless and faceless.
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Fall 2000 Flying Starts: Rita Murphy
One could say that prior to the publication of her first YA novel, Night Flying (Delacorte), Rita Murphy was a closeted writer. "I actually wrote the first draft of Night Flying in a closet," Murphy recalls. "I used to write late at night when my husband and son were sleeping. We live in a one-room place, so I pulled a lamp and my computer into a closet where I wouldn't disturb them." Murphy's consideration for her family has come back to her manyfold, as time spent in those somewhat cramped writing quarters seems to have spurred her creativity to new heights.
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Fall 2000 Flying Starts: Christopher Bing
For as long as I can remember, there were three things I wanted to do," says Christopher Bing. "I wanted to draw, I wanted a crack at Everest and K2, and I wanted to fly jets."
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Fall 2000 Flying Starts: Patricia McCormick
Patricia McCormick's first novel, Cut (Front Street), about adolescent girls in a psychiatric hospital, is so convincing and so compassionate that many readers will assume that McCormick is either a therapist or was, like her protagonist, a self-mutilator. In fact, McCormick--who has been a crime reporter for the New Brunswick (N.J.) Home News, a children's movie reviewer for the New York Times and the children's book reviewer for Parents magazine--got her inspiration from a 1997 article in the New York Times Magazine. The piece, by Jennifer Egan, described the growing phenomenon of teen girls who cut themselves, presenting the problem not just as a pathology but also as the girls' desperate attempts to cope with undue stress.
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Fall 2000 Flying Starts: Ian Falconer
The story of Olivia (Atheneum/ Schwartz) begins with a real-life Olivia: Ian Falconer's three-year-old niece. At least, that's how old she was when Falconer started doodling pictures of a pig to give her as a Christmas present. "I thought I'd do a little book for her, a little story," he recalls, "and it just got better and better. I just did drawings first--I drew a whole story--and then I wrote it afterwards."
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PW: Jerry Spinelli: Homer on George Street
In 11th grade, Jerry Spinelli traded his baseball bat for a pencil. The two deciding factors: his dreams of being a shortstop for the major leagues were, in his words, "going down the drain," and his p m about his high school team's impossible victory, "Goal to Go," appeared in his hometown newspaper.
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Spring 2000 Flying Starts: Lori Williams
Lori Williams admits she has more in common with Shayla, the 12-year-old narrator of When Kambia Elaine Flew in from Neptune (S&S), than just being raised in an impoverished Houston neighborhood. "I saw a lot of abused children while I was growing up," says Williams, who was physically abused by her father. "[But] when things happened in your house, you didn't talk about it." She wrote her novel, she says, to bring attention to child-abuse victims: "I wanted to give the children a voice."
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Spring 2000 Flying Starts: Shana Corey and Chelsey McLaren
A devotee of feminist history and a fashion-industry maven might seem a volatile author-illustrator combination, yet Shana Corey and Chesley McLaren make an auspicious match in You Forgot Your Skirt, Amelia Bloomer! (Scholastic), their gleeful skewering of "proper ladies." Amelia details how its title character shocked 1850s Seneca Falls, N.Y., by wearing the billowy pants that came to bear her name ("bloomers"). Yet although Amelia Bloomer campaigned for women's suffrage and the temperance movement, this is no textbook history.
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Spring 2000 Flying Starts: E.R. Frank
As someone who has found a way to marry her two professional passions, writing and social work, E.R. Frank considers herself pretty lucky. And in fact, for her one would not be possible without the other. From a young age, Frank enjoyed writing because it was a way to express herself and make sense of the world; as a social worker helping some of New York City's neediest, she uses writing as both a release and a tool to better understand her patients.
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Spring 2000 Flying Starts: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
No stranger to books--he is, after all, art director at HarperInformation--Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich never planned to publish one himself.
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Spring 2000 Flying Starts: Kate DiCamillo
Her name is Kate DiCamillo, and three winters ago when temperatures in Minneapolis hit 30 degrees below, as pieces of her car door were falling off due to the freezing cold and a strong case of homesickness for her native Florida was setting in, she got an idea for her first novel. This is what happened: she was just about to go to sleep when the book's narrator, India Opal Buloni, spoke to her, saying, "I have a dog named Winn-Dixie." DiCamillo says that after hearing that voice, "the story told itself." The story became Because of Winn-Dixie (Candlewick, Mar.), and its author says that the spirit of it remains, just the way Opal (as the book's heroine calls herself) told it to her.
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Spring 2000 Flying Starts: D.B. Johnson
There's something about the woods of New England. For years they have inspired such renowned writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and Henry David Thoreau. In fact, Thoreau's classic Walden, about his two years of simple living in a woodland cabin, had such a profound effect on a young D.B. (Don) Johnson that it has informed his life, and most certainly his blossoming career as a children's book author-illustrator.
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PW: Suzanne Fisher Staples: Under Eastern Skies
"She has no trouble finding her way around the Cholistan desert, but she can't figure out the streets of Harrisburg, Pa.," Suzanne Fisher Staples murmurs, poking fun at herself.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Karen English: A Testament to Perseverance
The inspiration for Karen English's historical novel, Francie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), came, ironically, from a rejection letter. English had originally written it as a picture book about an African-American girl helping her mother with the laundry in a boarding house in the pre-Civil Rights South. But a thoughtful rejection letter from an editor suggested that the story read more like the beginning of a novel.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Kristen Balouch: Music and Computers Help Tell a Story
There's no denying that computers are increasingly becoming a bigger part of everyday life. It's no surprise then, that a new generation of talented artists has adopted these machines as a medium for creative expression.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Lynne Rae Perkins: Writing from Experience
When Lynne Rae Perkins signs copies of her first novel, All Alone in the Universe (Greenwillow), she inscribes "Eat pie and be kind," and draws a piece of pie. This is inspired by one of the final scenes of her book, in which her main character, Debbie, tries to imagine her perfect life and sees herself eating pie. "It's just a nice thing to do," Perkins says. So is being kind, she says. Perkins wants children who read this inscription--and her book--to realize that "there are a lot of people out there who are willing to care about you, but that you have to be willing to care about people, too."
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Warren Linn: A Book Born of a Friendship
Sarah and I met in kindergarten," answers artist Warren Linn when asked how he hooked up with author Sarah Weeks to create Happy Birthday, Frankie, which HarperCollins published under its Laura Geringer imprint.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Laurie Halse Anderson: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
One night, Laurie Halse Anderson awoke to the sound of a child crying. After checking on her own two children and finding them asleep, she realized that what she had heard was a nightmare in her own head.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Rebecca Bond: A Combination of Talents
I was wrapped up in stories from as far back as I can remember," says Rebecca Bond, author-illustrator of Just Like a Baby (Little, Brown).
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