Our Author Interview
Q. How long have you been an author?
A. My first book was published in 1993 but ten years before then I was writing and sending things out, hoping that they would be published.   

Q.  Have you ever wanted to be something besides an author, when you were young?
A.  Yes. I actually didn't know that I wanted to be an author, because when I was very young I didn't know that people wrote books.  I just thought that books were these wonderful things that appeared. I didn't know that that was an option.  I didn't know that you could write a book.    I never thought I would be good enough.  I did want to be a teacher and I did that, I wanted to be a school librarian and I did that, so those things really led me towards writing.

            Q.  Where do you get your ideas for writing?
A. All of them start with something that gives me a strong feeling and all of them and um, all of them have some experience that happened to me.   Even though it's not obvious in the book it was started by something that actually happened.

            Q.  Do you enjoy writing your books?
A.  I love to write my books.  Now I have bad days. There are times when I think I am a terrible writer, and there are times when I get discouraged but when things are going well, I can't think of anything better.      

            Q.  Does your family ever influence your books?
A.  Yes.  I put little bits and pieces of my family into my books.  For example in Prairie Primer A-Z  which is how things were 100 years ago, I  have for the W whirligigs because my dad was a wood carver and for the letter N I have  bad nanny goat pulling buttons from my coat and that was a story my mother told me.  When she was a little girl going to school, she went over to say hi to a goat and it ate all the buttons off her coat.  So those putting little pieces of your life into your books when people don't know they are there is satisfying.  It’s a wonderful way of remembering people or animals that are no longer there. 

            Q.  How did you decide you wanted to be an author?
A.  I think when I was teaching.  I don't think students realize, teachers spend a lot of time looking for the just right books to read to their classes.  They also edit while they're reading out loud to their classes.  You know, adding something that needs to be explained or shortening something that's too long. While I was doing that I thought, well I love reading so much.  Could I be an author, could I?  So that’s how I became an author.  But leading up to that, now I realize that what was helpful was I did puppet shows to earn pen money at this little collapsible stage in my Volkswagen. And that was good practice because it had to have a main character that had a problem that he or she would solve.  It had to have conflict and action so that helped me with my wandering mind.

            Q.  Do you work for a certain book company?
A.  No, Most of my books have been published by a different company.  So it's been something of a struggle, it's a business that’s changing all the time.  Editors are always leaving their jobs to do something else.  So you think you have your foot in the door when that person is gone, or the publishing company goes out of business.  So I have dealt with many different companies and I still am.  I'm still getting rejection letters. 

Q.  Why do you write children's books instead of adult books?
A.  Ooohh, I think because basically I believe in happy endings.  I do read adult books.  Along with children's books.  A lot of them don't have satisfying happy endings.    And I just I'm the kind of person that likes to have everything tied up happily at the end, it's just my personality.  And I still like children's books, so it's fun.

            Q.  Is there a book that you're writing right now?
A.  I have several books I'm writing right now.  One I'm really struggling with and so I work on that and put it away, and I get it out.  And then I have a couple of chapter books and I took one of my chapter books called Before They Sailed Away to my writer's group.  Well actually, there's 16 people, so I made 16 copies and sent it to all of them.  And then we got together and they had written all over my manuscripts and given me 2 pages of typed feedback and it's all in a pile in my closet, because I can't bear to, you know, re-write.  Rewriting is hard.  So, that's one of the books that I plan to go back to.

            Q. Do ideas always come to you on the first try to find them?
A. I'm pretty good with ideas.  I have more ideas than I can use.

            Q. Do you have any tips to help people with that, if they can't find ideas?
A. Yes, I think it's a good idea to keep a notebook and just write down random things not whole sentences, phrases, something that you saw or smelled or tasted or some experience that happened to you.  Just keep it because when you have an assignment that you have to write, that's a lot of pressure.  And sometimes your brain just freezes.  So if you have this notebook to rely on, almost like a journal, that you just write randomly anything that really has a good feeling or a strong feeling for you, and you can leaf through that.  Or as I do, I have an idea basket where I throw my little scraps in.  I'll write on something and throw it in there.  And you can go back to that notebook or your basket and you can see what still appeals to you.

            “We kind of have that kind of thing in our writing notebook.  There's a back section that we all made in our class.  And it says writing ideas.”

            Cool.  Has that proved helpful for you?

            “Yes.  Sort of, sometimes.  But sometimes you don't really want to write about that and you think, oh that's a bad idea.”

            Sometimes it can just be like a trigger to another idea.  Like a chain reaction.

            Q. So, have you ever found an illustrator you wanted to stick with?  Because I know authors and illustrators sometimes come in pairs.

            A. The illustrator of my first book, By the Light of the Halloween Moon, really well-known, he illustrated Library Lion, and I don't know if you've read that book, but that's one of my favorite books in the whole world, it's for adults as much as it is for children, he did the illustrations on that, and he did great illustrations, and my dream is that I could write a book that he would illustrate.  He was offered the opportunity to illustrate Pirate Pup and he turned it down.  I don't know why.  I don't want to know why.  Did I answer that?

            Yea.