A rainbow of factors come into play to help form and encourage the best writers and artists of books for children and young adults - people like Theodore Taylor, Emily Arnold McCully, Russell Freedman and Patricia Polacco. The four - all of whom plan to visit Utah in the next few weeks - cite influences including their families and growing-up years and qualities like curiosity, imagination and perseverence as ingredients in their success.
Young readers have discovered that talent and vision are also part of the recipe. All four know how to make reading both enjoyable and rewarding in works of fiction and nonfiction."Fiction and nonfiction," suggests Freedman, "are just two different roads leading to the same destination, to an enlarged understanding of the world around you and feeling part of the human family - that's what reading's all about."
Theodore Taylor
"Never in my childhood did I want to become a writer. . . ."
What a remarkable thing for Theodore Taylor to say, this man who has been a successful newspaperman (a sports writer who types with two fingers) and novelist. One of his 20 books of fiction for young readers, "The Cay" (Doubleday, 1969), has sold more than 2.5 million paper copies and 500,000 in hardback. "The Cay" has also been made into a TV special and noted on award-lists such as American Library Association's Notable Books and best books of the year by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, the School Library Journal and the Horn Book Honor List. It received the Lewis Carroll Award and Jane Addams Peace and Freedom Foundation Award.
Taylor will be in Utah on Friday, Feb. 4, to receive the 1993 Utah Young Adult Fiction Award for "Sniper" (Harcourt Brace, 1989), a mystery-thriller about a teenager left in charge of the family's wild animal preserve full of big lions. Besides the Utah award, "Sniper" won an ALA Best Book for Young Adults Award, the 1992 California Young Readers Medal and the Society of School Librarians International Best of 1990 Award.
Something happened to Taylor (the boy who never wanted to write) when he was 13. He wrote sports copy about high school athletics for the Portsmouth Star. "I began writing for money. Fifty cents a week was my reward for a page and a half of double-spaced sports copy." At the age of 19 he wrote network sports for NBC before serving in both the Merchant Marines and the Navy during World War II. After the Korean War, Taylor was an associate producer and worked on 17 major films, including "Tora! Tora! Tora!"
Considering all of Taylor's works, "The Cay" (a word taken from Spanish lucayo and Arawakan cair, for island, and sometimes pronounced and spelled "key") is the best known and certainly most controversial. This story is of a blinded young boy and a black man cast on a barren island in the Caribbean.
Criticized by the NAACP for its racial overtones, the TV special starring James Earl Jones was picketed in New York City by the Children's Interracial Book Council. While some school librarians still refuse to have the book on the shelves, "The Cay" is the center of many debates and remains politically and emotionally charged.
Now, 24 years later and after 200,000 letters from readers asking, "When will you write a sequel?" Theodore Taylor has written more about this island adventure in "Timothy of the Cay."
"By the spring of 1991, I'd grown tired of repeating `no' and `never.' Even my own children were saying, `When, Dad?' "
Taylor's works are varied in genre and tone, using different settings and nationalities, but all express the background and experiences from his personal life; the ocean, scenarios akin to screenplays and winsome characters that tug at the heart.
"I look back on a lifetime at the typewriter, many typewriters in many places, and think how lucky I've been. Those keys have two-fingered sports and crime and love and death. They've pecked out books for both adults and young readers as well as scripts for radio, TV and feature films. I've been so very, very lucky."
When we again look at the range of writing of Theodore Taylor - "The Teetoncy" trilogy; "The Weirdo"; "Maria, A Christmas Story"; "Air Raid, Pearl Harbor!" and "The Maldonado Miracle" as examples - we realize what he means when he talks of his three C's: character, conflict and construction. He has them all in impeccable order.
Emily Arnold McCully
"Generous, astute people and luck had steered me into the only medium that unites the two halves of myself, the one who writes and the other who draws. . . ."
Emily Arnold McCully's remarks when accepting the Calde-cott Award for the best picture book of the year, "Mirette on the High Wire," reflect a tribute to the help of others and include the persistence in drawing and writing that she has practiced diligently from the time she was a child.
Her basic life-rules were learned at an early age. From a Chinese book of wisdom, McCully internalized "perseverance furthers" and a mother's critical evaluation, "That's not good enough yet."
"There was never a period of stick figures and happy suns for me, but instead the discipline of daily practice, the elusive goal, the pain of failure and the end product. . . . I did it because I was fascinated and fulfilled."
Her mother's "inspiring force" was the first step in helping McCully become independent "so that it [art] might support me someday."
During her school years, McCully was a doodler. Later in school she designed posters, backdrops and programs for plays. Even though she was successful in this expression, she chose not to go to art school and instead attended college, participating in other aesthetic areas, including theater. She performed as an actress and singer.
But art was never far from her daily life. She worked part time in commercial art, designing advertisements. One job, researching title pages in baroque books, took McCully to Europe, which later became the subject of her master's thesis in art history at Columbia University.
In 1966 some of her posters were seen by an editor at Harpers, and McCully was commissioned to do the illustrations for "Sea Beach Express" by George Panette. Three years later she illustrated Meindert DeJong's "Journey from Peppermint Street," the first children's book to be given a National Book Award.
While she was still accepting picture-book contracts, McCully's adult short story, "How's Your Vacuum Cleaner Working" (1976) was chosen for the "O. Henry Collection: Best Stories of the Year," and "A Craving" (1982), again adult fiction, was an American Book Award nominee.
McCully's work on the stage, as co-author of a musical, and the influence of her father, who was a writer of radio drama, came together in "Picnic" (Harper, 1984), the first of four wordless picture books about a family of mice. In these wonderful "tell-your-own-stories," each picture is enclosed like a stage set or a frame from a movie, each telling a little bit more than the previous one.
In 1991 McCully returned to an off-Broadway production of "Night-ingale." The theater, her scripts and picture books have been a recursive part of her life. They each present a view of what it is to feel like someone else. "But in picture books, I get to play all the parts and be the director, too!"
"Mirette on the High Wire" (Putnam, 1992) is understandably a metaphor for McCully's life. In her Caldecott acceptance speech she said, "The story and the artistic challenges had forced me to step out on a wire, throw off my cloaks of irony, humor and sketchiness and embrace Mirette's desire without reservation. . . . I needed to soar above perseverance, somehow to recapture the free spirit, passion for life, defiance and inexhaustible enthusiasm of a 9-year-old daredevil. . . ."
Both "Mirette on the High Wire" and McCully's newest picture book, "The Amazing Felix" (Putnam, 1993), are illustrated with impressionistic paintings reminiscent of turn-of-the-century Paris, a stretch from the line drawings of her "Picnic" series. Both also have a strong theme of practice makes perfect. Practice was what Mirette did on her tightrope, and "practice" is what Felix's father, a renowned pianist, tells his children.
Russell Freedman
In the past, many a young reader's reaction to nonfiction was enigmatic. Although born wanting to know more about themselves, animals and their world, they found the informational books (another term for nonfiction) as distasteful as spinach and fried liver! Nonfiction often lacked emotion and the bristling of adventure represented in fantasy and realistic fiction. In recent years, however, more satisfying links have formed between young readers and nonfiction writers to help answer this curiosity, imagination and reasoning.
Russell Freedman, renowned nonfiction writer, is a prime example of someone who incorporates all three - curiosity, imagination and reasoning - into his books. He came by his choice of genre naturally, it appears. As a young boy he read and re-read "Treasure Island" and Seton's "Wild Animals I Have Known" and claims that the latter was as appealing as the fictional novel. He often recalls the Seton book as his starting point in reading nonfiction and later his entry into becoming a professional writer.
While employed by Associated Press, Freedman read a piece about a blind 16-year-old who developed a typewriter to accommodate Braille. This was the same age when Louis Braille himself invented the Braille alphabet. Freedman pondered what other remark-able accomplishments might have been made by teenagers and collected material for his first book, "Teenagers Who Made History" (1961). Two years later he wrote "Two Thousand Years of Space Travel," which naturally led to a biography, "Jules Verne: Portrait of a Prophet." All three were published by Holiday House.
Since the '60s Freedman has written or collaborated on more than 20 books about the animal kingdom, such as "Growing Up Wild," "How Young Animals Survive" (Holiday House, 1975), "Tooth and Claw: A Look at Animal Weapons" (Holiday House), "Can Bears Predict Earthquakes? Unsolved Mysteries of Animals' Behavior" (Prentice Hall, 1982) and "Buffalo Hunt" (Holiday House, 1988). Rave reviews are testimony to the worth of these well-written, detailed books in the educational settings.
After creating informational books with sketches, Freedman began including photography to expand the text in books like "Hang-ing On: How Animals Carry Their Young" (Holiday House, 1977). In a Horn Book interview he said, "Ideally, the photographs should reveal something that words alone can't express."
In 1980 Freedman visited an exhibition of 19th- and 20th-century photographs and was impressed with the children who "seemed to defy the passage of time." The result was "Immigrant Kids" (Dutton, 1980).
In a chronology of Freedman's works, this was the turning point. While he continued to produce books about animals, his work on the "human animal" was emerging. "Cowboys of the Wild West" (Clarion, 1985) and "Indian Chiefs" (Holiday House, 1987) were followed by "Lincoln: A Photobiography" (Clarion, 1987) in which he sought to separate fact from fiction about the 16th president of the United States. "Lincoln" won the prestigious Newbery Award for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children, the first nonfiction work in more than 30 years to win this medal.
Freedman spends months researching a biography before he begins drafting it. For the photo-essay "Lincoln: A Photobiography" he traveled to historical sites and was allowed to examine Lincoln's documents and the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. The immersion into the person's life ("I have to soak myself in the subject") means reading memoirs, other biographies and interviewing those who have also done research. This provides a feeling about the central focus of the work, but he admits that it must be "something that I'm personally interested in."
Freedman's most recent biography is "Eleanor Roosevelt: Life of Discovery" (Clarion, 1993), which follows "Franklin Delano Roosevelt" (Clarion, 1990). He decided to write about Eleanor Roosevelt separately because she was "such a good role model for boys and girls. She is somebody who took control of her own life."
Since Freedman's audience falls into the 10-to-17 range, he often includes matters of controversy and discusses frankly the rumors of the Roosevelts. In a recent Publisher's Weekly interview he said, "You have to be honest. Kids don't have to be protected in the same way they did a generation or two ago." Freedman believes that besides honesty, it is healthy for biographies directed toward young readers to include controversial and substantiated topics "to give people something to think about."
Because photography has become such an important tool in his recent writing, Freedman's next book will be on Lewis Hines, who is famous for his photography of Ellis Island immigrants, child laborers and poverty during the early 1990s, which had impact on social change in America.
Patricia Polacco
"I basically came from story-telling families," said author/artist Patricia Polacco. "My maternal grandparents lived with us. They were Russian Jews. Babushka (Gramma) and her people came from the Ukraine, just outside of Kiev. My Diadushka (Grampa) came from Soviet Georgia."
In a telephone interview from her Oakland, Calif., home, Polacco talked about her family lineage, the Russian Jews and the other side, "shanty" Irish, which expressed rich biographical tales. "It is through their stories that I now trace the history of my father's family."
Polacco was surrounded by multicultural experiences in her early years in Michigan. Later in Oakland the ethnic mixture of neighbors was an influence. "I learned not to make judgments on outside appearances. My neighbors came in as many colors, ideas and belief systems as there are people on this planet."
After completing a master's degree in fine arts and a doctorate in art history, Polacco worked in various areas, one restoring Russian and Greek icons for museums. She didn't begin writing until she was 41, focusing on her lineage of Russian folklore. "Having my grandparents around me as a child had been a remarkable relationship! Their stories became my first books."
These influences are apparent in Polacco's books, which mix the old with the young and the ethnic stories that spiced her life. Each story has a broad canvas of hope and determination, themes that also directly relate to her early years.
As a child Polacco had a form of dyslexia, and "until I was 14, I didn't learn. Whenever I would be asked to read in front of the class I would say things that weren't even on the page, then the children would laugh at me. I remember the pain to this day!"
A special teacher took time - and paid for tutoring - to help her overcome the problem, making her realize that there were thousands of people who suffered from the disability. "If there's one thing I want young readers to know it's that it is not all right to tease others if they are different."
Polacco has a passion for young people taking time to dream and visit their "imaginary places." When invited to schools - as many as 70 a year - she brings along a piece of a meteorite found in her back yard and encourages the children to touch it and make wishes. "It seems that so many children are in despair today. I think magic has been taken away from them. They never seem to flex the muscles of imagination, and there always seems to be busyness to fill the silence in their lives."
Polacco is very clear with advice to would-be writers. First, she suggests that it is never too late to begin. She encourages everyone to find a time and place and "do it!" Second, she advises those who want to write for children to join the Society of Children's Book Writers/Illustrators.
"They were my energy exchange. This group of authors and artists encouraged and supported me - but never with negative critiques! - until I had material ready to submit to publishers."
Eight-and-a-half years ago she took her portfolio to New York City and sold everything she had. She claims that the SCBWI helped her prepare for that triumph.
The next bit of advice for writers is to "feel! Experience! Have the writing become a part of you! Or, as the old saying goes, `write what you know.' "
Most emphatically, Polacco suggests that writing remain personal. "It is the small stories that have interest. They have the heart."
Polacco takes her own advice and writes about what she knows best. "I'm a Michigan farm girl, still running through fields of corn chasing meadowlarks." This is reflected in "Meteor," "Boat Ride with Lillian Two Blossom," "Picnic at Mudsock Meadow" (all from Phil-omel) and "Some Birthday" (Simon & Schuster).
She writes about her Jewish heritage in "The Keeping Quilt" (Simon & Schuster), "Mrs. Katz and Tush" (Bantam) and "Chicken Sunday" (Philomel) and pays homage to the Ukrainian, Russian and Christian part of her family with "Thunder Cake," "Rechenk's Eggs," "Uncle Vova's Tree" (all Philomel) and "Babushka's Doll" (Simon & Schuster).
Polacco's two new picture books (both by Philomel) reflect the same treasures of her life. "Babushka Baba Yaga" is a Russian tale and "The Bee Tree" is a story from her own family experience. Here is how she relates it:
"In my family we have a tradition that is done with the youngest child as he or she is approaching the age when they too will read. I remember when they put me in the center of a circle of all my relatives, Grampa handed me a book, then he spooned honey onto it and asked me to taste it. When I did, he and the others said, `The taste of honey is sweet, child, but so also is knowledge. But knowledge is like the bee who made this honey. You have to chase it through the pages of a book.' Then they all said `mazel tov!' sang songs and celebrated."
Anyone interested in the Utah Chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers/Illustrators should contact Cathy Miller at 942-7981.