I needed that kind of honesty to tell my stories, and I needed to know such honesty could be received before I could put my first words down on paper. I fell in love with what a children’s book can be, with the deep honesty those books demonstrated. Not with the award-I still didn’t know what the Newbery Medal meant-but with the books those award committees had chosen. But I figured somebody liked these books, so I took some home. The elementary school I attended didn’t even have a library of its own, and, of course, the English professors at the colleges where I studied never spoke of children’s literature. The Newbery Award had been around for a long time, of course, but I had never heard of it. The novels of my own youth had come from my mother’s childhood home, most of them written in the nineteenth century.Īt the library I encountered a shelf labeled Newbery. My children were young, so I was already filled to the brim with the picture books of the time, but I knew nothing of contemporary novels for young people. I went back and forth and back and forth bringing home armloads of books.
For that matter, I knew no other adult who had the smallest interest in children’s books.įirst, I found the Hannibal Public Library. I’ll say only that during the years I lived there I was aware of a Mark Twain roofing company and had tried Mark Twain fried chicken, but I knew no one else who was attempting to do the writing thing Mark Twain had made the town famous for. In our society in that period-the 60s and 70s, a time of stay-at-home moms almost completely without support systems-motherhood was profoundly isolating.īeing a clergy wife then, when clergy wives were seen as their more important husband’s unpaid assistants, deepened the isolation and gave it a fish-bowl quality.Īnd living in Hannibal. When I made the decision to take this writing habit seriously, to attempt actually to produce something publishable, I was a young mother and clergy wife living in Hannibal, Missouri. I’ll talk about just one, though, the one I’ve found most important to overcome in order to “defy the odds.” That bump is isolation.
how can I talk about bumps? I have been so darned lucky! In 1976, the first novel I ever attempted to write was published, and in the more than forty years that have followed I’ve seen 100 more books into the light.Īnd yet, of course, there have been bumps. Reflecting on your personal journey (creatively, career-wise, and your writer’s heart), what bumps did you encounter and how have you managed to defy the odds to achieve continued success? In children’s-YA writing, maintaining an active publishing career is arguably an even bigger challenge than breaking into the field.
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