Constance Van Hoven shares the story behind her story …

Right time, right place, sums up the story behind my first book, The Twelve Days of Christmas in Minnesota. Children’s author Candice Ransom, a friend and Vermont College classmate, recommended me to an editor at Sterling Publishing who happened to be looking for a writer from Minnesota for her series of state-themed winter holiday books.

I can’t imagine a project more suited for me. I’ve lived in and loved Minnesota my whole life! My experiences as a teacher at a nature center, tour guide for the Minnesota Historical Society and frequent visitor to Minnesota’s many lakes (in a fishing boat) gave me great starting material. The editor wanted lots of animals and interesting places representing all areas of the state incorporated into the book, plus plenty of humor capturing the essence of what it means to be a Minnesotan, don’t ya know…

My head filled with ideas as I researched what kid readers would enjoy knowing about Minnesota. I visited new museums, parks and historic sites and revisited old favorites. I read stacks of guide books, “best of” books and even some Sven and Ole joke books.

Finally, it was time to fit the pieces of my puzzle together. The publisher’s format required twelve Minnesota-themed gifts to be given to a child visiting the state for the first time. But I just had to make my child, two children—twin sisters visiting the Twin Cities. The girls’ letters home to their parents describes all the fun they have with their unique gifts.

One character in the book ended up stealing the show. The editor wanted the first Christmas gift to be Minnesota’s state bird in Minnesota’s state tree. At first I wasn’t sure how to make a loon in a Norway pine tree work. Loons aren’t in Minnesota in the winter and they don’t hang out in trees. Well, not until Checkers the Loon flew into my head and said he wanted to stick around and see what winter is like. And he wanted to be a Christmas tree topper! The most magical part of the book project was having Checkers come to life in the wonderful illustrations done by fellow Minnesotan, Mike Wohnoutka.

As The Twelve Days of Christmas in Minnesota goes into its 5th printing in four years, the memories I have of writing the book burn like a good fire on a cold winter night. The comments I’ve received from Minnesotans young and old, living close by or far away, continue to warm my heart. Much as we live in a global world, there’s a part of us that stays connected to the place we call home. Home is where shared experiences like weathering blizzards, eating hotdish and hearing loons wail, will always bind us together.

Learn more about Constance Van Hoven

Stephanie Watson shares the story behind her story …

My memories from childhood (say, before I turned 11) have a strange sheen and buzz to them. Maybe because everything that happened then, in the summers out on the street, seemed so important in a way I can blow right by nowadays. They had gravity, these little events, and ultra-strength emotions attached to them. Like when a young neighbor girl rode her bike around the block shirtless (The horror! The courage!), or a kid smashed a glowing firefly on the sidewalk at dusk (so incredibly sad).

Unlike some memories that you can kill by remembering them too much, these only get stronger and more epic the more I revisit them. They were—and are—alive.

When I sat down to write the story that would become Elvis & Olive, my first book, these memories and emotions met me at the table, all sheen and buzz. My middle-grade novel is fictional, but the emotions are real, transplanted from many of those early memories. I included some of the actual moments, too, because they simply would not leave me alone. Like the firefly thing. Man, that still gets me.

The characters in Elvis & Olive are made up and yet they are not. Annie is a Frankenstein of very exciting and dangerous girls I knew as a kid: Val, who once stuffed a little boy’s lunch bag up the tampon machine in the ladies’ after he teased her; and Alison, who would peek at people over the top of the school bathroom stalls and inquire about any weird moles she saw. I gave Natalie all of my feelings about having a crush on someone and not having a clue what to do about it, and how betrayed you feel when a friend tells your secret. So Natalie is me and yet she is not (see above re: fiction).

I’m glad I made my first book (and the second, Elvis & Olive: Super Detectives) a home for some of these early memories and feelings, because otherwise I’m not sure they would let me write about anything else. Every time I would sit at my desk there they’d be, shining in my eyes and buzzing in my ears. The memories are still alive and well, but they are more restful than before. Now I’m free to write about other stuff, like creatures who come out in the wee, small hours of the night to make mischief in your room while you sleep (The Wee Hours, coming in 2013, shameless plug).

Learn more about Stephanie Watson

Catherine Urdahl shares the story behind her story …

I looked my best as I stood in my front yard posing politely for first-day-of school pictures. I wore a new dress with a bright white sailor collar unstained by grape jelly or Spaghettios.  I sported a fresh pixie haircut with perfectly flat bangs. (The night before my mom had plastered them with Dippity Do and stuck on pink hair tape, so my cowlick wouldn’t boing up.)  I even managed a thin smile.

But the truth was—I was quaking inside my unscuffed saddle shoes.  I DID NOT want to go to kindergarten.  I did not want to leave the safety of my fenced yard, with its gingerbread-style playhouse and tiny doll clothes clothesline.  I did not want to venture down the long sidewalk, terrified by the yip-yip and WOOF-WOOF of neighborhood dogs.  I did not want to trade my mom and younger sisters for a kindergarten teacher named Mrs. Harms and a classroom full of staring strangers.

Given my not-so-winning attitude, it’s no surprise that kindergarten was a struggle.  I don’t remember talking to the other children, and my report cards were less than stellar. So perhaps it’s a bit strange that so much of my writing—including my book Polka-dot Fixes Kindergarten—focuses on this time.  Why would I go back and relive it?

A number of people have asked me how I decided to write books about and for children this age.  The truth is—I didn’t really decide; these stories and characters found me.  But why?  My theory is that the events and periods of our life that evoke the strongest emotions tend to take up residence in our brains.  A tiny part of our brain continues to roll these experiences around and around, and once in a while they pop out.  We can push them back into the corner or we can make them useful.

For some reason (don’t ask why) I’d always wanted to write a book about a young girl with the nickname Polka-dot.  I began to imagine her as a kindergartener spunkier than my kindergarten self but also a bit insecure and vulnerable. I started to remember the events of my kindergarten year—including an incident where I stuck the blue paintbrush in the red cup, causing Mrs. Harms to yell at me and call me a failure in front of all the other kids.  (Ok, that’s not true—it’s just how it felt.  The truth was, she said, “Blue brush in the blue cup.  We don’t want to spoil the paint.”—just like the teacher in Polka-dot Fixes Kindergarten.)

I also struggled with a neighborhood girl who was quite mean to me; the character Liz in the book is named after this childhood nemesis. I was unable to stand up to the real-life Liz, but through the spunkier Polka-dot I am able to revise this bit of personal history.  In the book, unlike real life, the problem is resolved and the two girls become friends.

In some ways, this book is me talking to my kindergarten self, saying, “It will be okay.”  I, like Polka-dot, have the chance to fix my kindergarten problems.  When books are honest—when characters are like real people with strengths, flaws, failures and victories—they reach beyond our real-life experiences in a way that allows the author and her child audience to see their struggles in a new light.

Catherine Urdahl is the author of Polka-dot Fixes Kindergarten (ill. by Mai Kemble and published by Charlesbridge in 2011) and Emma’s Question, (ill. by Janine Dawson and published by Charlesbridge in 2009).  In addition to her writing, Catherine conducts school visits and teaches classes at the Loft Literary Center.

Learn more about Catherine Urdahl

Faythe Thureen shares the story behind her story …

I remember a place / Where I’d never been / Across time and space and sea.

The opening lines of this picture book first surfaced by way of the subconscious, insistently intruding into the space meant for syllabus preparation for my Norwegian 301 class at the University of North Dakota.  Teaching Norwegian was the natural outcome of having been raised hearing the language and stories from an island off the west coast of Norway. My mother, one year removed from that island, was the first child of her immigrant parents. Although she never visited Norway, Mother told her 11 children stories from Stord Island as though she had lived there herself.

I grew up loving Norwegian food, songs, stories, and celebrations. The packages my mother sent to sustain relatives in Norway during World War II were part of our extended family history. Not until my teenage years did I venture beyond the farming community of Newfolden, Minnesota, and travel to a city; yet I had developed a keen international awareness, with Norway in the center. And that’s the inspiration for the Troll part of the book.

My appreciation for Native American culture came mainly from getting to know colleagues in Indian Studies as a result of UND’s Indian Head logo controversy. Previously, I had thought of my immigrant grandparents as North Dakota’s first people, never considering the cost of their homestead claim for America’s First People or bothering to look beyond the stereotypes of Indians created to benefit white people. As discussions, research, and pondering came together, Troll Meets Trickster took root.

When I deemed the manuscript ready for that step, I submitted it for critiquing at a writers conference. The editor’s assessment was essentially this: It’s impossible to REMEMBER a place where one has never been. My unspoken response was that immigrant perceptions of homeland define cultures for generations, whether or not one goes back. But what if that didn’t seem clear to anyone but me?

Oh well, I thought, if I switch from coffin to cremation, I can borrow from my life insurance and self-publish. That would also make it possible for the book to come out in time to be the basis for a Norway 2005 centennial celebration onstage at the Chester Fritz auditorium.

I had long wished to collaborate with Chris Wold Dyrud, my professional illustrator sister-in-law. My friend Yvette La Pierre who had worked as a professional editor could be hired to serve as our editor. And Jenna’s Big Jump, published by Atheneum, had made me a published author, so that should give me some credibility! I would name my publishing company Feather Nest Books which would relate to both Norwegian and Native cultures.

A significant advantage of self-publishing was that a Native American colleague and published writer, Denise Lamimodiere, was willing to critique both text and illustrations as we went along. In her opinion, too many books from mainstream publishers involving American Indian cultures had been published with stereotypical or demeaning characterizations. Chris and I did our best to revise as suggested until all involved felt the cultures depicted were portrayed as authentically and respectfully as possible.

I pored over books on self-publishing, learning the process from choosing a printer-publisher to applying for an ISBN number and cataloging with the Library of Congress. Finally the boxes of beautiful books arrived in a semi-truck from Winnipeg, just two days before the scheduled Norwegian centennial performance. Strong arms stacked boxes high against the wallpaper in our dining area, where Troll and Trickster could meet 3,000 times to replay cultural collisions and too-short-lived resolutions.

During the next couple years, rewards came from performing with talented Native and Nordic Americans, each performance closing with children dancing hand in hand and exchanging gifts. After Hjemkomst Festival performances in Moorhead that drew about 500 people and ended with a standing ovation, a 10-year-old hoop dancer approached me.

“Did you write the book?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Awesome!” he said.

I looked into his dark, sparkling eyes and felt tears polish up my blue ones. And that’s how spontaneously a gold-medal-award ceremony can happen!

Learn more about Faythe Thureen

Wendy McCormick shares the story behind her story …

Daniel and His Walking Stick is the very first picture book I wrote, when I was just starting to take writing seriously by entering a graduate program in creative writing at Antioch University’s London, England center when I was 35 years old.  Really, I ran to London to find out if I was a writer, something I’d been asking myself nearly all my life.  I never thought I’d write a picture book for children.  I always thought you had to be clever for that, or you’d need to be a poet.  I felt I was neither.

I spent a week at a children’s writing workshop up in West Yorkshire, in a village called Heptonstall.  The area was full of lovely rolling hills and stone churches, interspersed with twisting yellow gorse. The facility was humble, warm and inviting. The tutors were well-known writers, but they’d never run this kind of workshop before. On the very first night of the week, they showed us how to fold 8 pages of paper in half to make 32 pages, the standard length of a picture book.  “You want to write for children.  Try this to start with,” they said.  Hmm, sounds straightforward, I thought.  I could at least try.

So, I went for a walk.  I had to think.  I picked up a stick on the path to use as a walking stick, sure that I’d need one, as I felt like I was either walking up or down a hill, there, never on a flat road.  That stick was magic though; it was as if I had opened a door to stepping back to home, to the north woods of Minnesota and almost even further back to other places I’d lived as a child.  I remembered past walks in the woods, filled with light and silvery trees and walking sticks I’d found.  This was the start of Daniel and His Walking Stick.

I worked in the stone barn loft that week.  It was quiet and it felt filled with the spirits of other writers who’d worked there.  However, after I had written my list of all the ways you could use a walking stick, I saw that I’d only filled 5 pages of my 32 needed for the picture book to be complete.  Yikes, here’s the part where I have to be clever or poetic, I thought.  But really, that’s when I had to create a story out of pieces of memory, light and shadow, air and emotion.  Something out of what feels like nothing.  What a mystery the process is and remains for me.  I wanted a girl to be walking with her walking stick, but would she be walking alone? Maybe with a grandparent?  But what did I know about that?  My grandparents had all died before I was born or had only been a small part of my life.  And that was where the real story began for me.  Now Jesse opens the book by saying,  “I don’t have a grandfather—not like everyone else I know, not anymore.”

I was very nervous, reading the story out at the end of the week.  One participant sighed and said:  “That reminds me of home.  Of Canada.”  That pleased me a lot.  But it was many years before that story was published as a book.

I wrote Daniel at the workshop in West Yorkshire in 1986.  I sent the story out over 30 times over the next several years, and, while it often got a good response, it never sold.  In 1987, it won an honorable mention for the Loft’s Children’s Fiction award.  In 1991, on the recommendation of another workshop leader, I sent it to LadyBug Magazine and they accepted it and published it in 1993. Finally, I sent the manuscript to an editor at Peachtree Publishers. She felt a strong connection with the story and it was published as a picture book in 2005.

It was a long walk down a long road, but my walking stick was with me every step of the way.

Learn more about Wendy McCormick

Joyce Sidman shares the story behind her story …

There is a reason why authors generally don’t design their own books.  I learned why during the creation of Meow Ruff, my 2006 book with Houghton Mifflin.  Meow Ruff tells the fairly conventional story of an accidental friendship between a freedom-loving dog and an abandoned cat; however, it is composed almost entirely of concrete (or shape) poetry.  So the words meld into the pictures and vice versa.  This is the sort of project that drives book designers crazy.

The idea of Meow Ruff originated in a thought I had one day: What if everything in a picture book had a voice—not just the characters, but the trees, the clouds, the houses, even the grass?  It was an author’s version of heaven: instead of pictures—words, words, words!   As I built the story, even the cat and the dog were made of words at first.  But so were the clouds, the picnic table, and the rain, all of which became part of the plot.  It was so fun to construct all those text boxes with different fonts in them!!  But so difficult for my Writer’s Group to grasp what was going on!  This odd, complicated book took on the working title, “More Weird Stuff from Joyce.”

To her credit, my editor did not immediately deep-six the manuscript when I finally sent it to her. She asked for clarification and simplification (basically, get rid of the people), and she bravely decided to take it on.  So we handed it to Houghton’s design department: this bizarre project that consisted of pages of words—words floating in the sky, marching across the ground, growing upward, raining downward.  And we sent it to a very patient illustrator, Michelle Berg, who draws the cutest dogs and cats in the world.  Without blinking an eye, she began to add color and definition.  At first, it was tough to explain that we wanted the words to actually, physically make up the objects (true concrete poetry), not just fill in an outline.  But she really got it after a while.  The next hurdle was satisfying the book designer, who kept plaintively muttering the phrase “focal point.”

There was much back and forth, and I’m certain many oaths were uttered in the Boston offices of Houghton Mifflin.  The bottom line?  There were just too many darn words.  The reader got lost in all of them.  While I didn’t want to give up a single one, I reluctantly conceded that the dog should be just a dog, the cat just a cat (both of whom merely uttered their words), and that mountains made of words probably weren’t central to the plot.

My editor tells me that this book, when finished, had the thickest file of any she’d ever worked on.  (I don’t think that was a compliment.)  However, Meow Ruff remains close to my heart because it is so different, and because it was so fun to dream up.  And also, of course, because kids are always saying to me, “I like all your books, but Meow Ruff is my favorite!”

Learn more about Joyce Sidman

Laura Vaccaro Seeger shares the story behind her story …

When my boys were little, I often played a game with them—I expressed a variety of emotions and asked them to identify each one, just by looking at me.  For example, I would hold up my hands and open my eyes and mouth wide.  When they correctly guessed, “You’re surprised!”, I then made the same expression again, but without my hands, in my quest to find the fewest number of clues needed to express each emotion.

I became fascinated with the idea that it doesn’t take a lot to illustrate emotions.  I put together a little sample of faces made of letters and called it “Type Faces.”

My editor, Neal Porter, liked the idea, but as he so often does, said it needed something.  So I created another sample, using the letters of each emotion to illustrate the faces.  It was a challenge to make each face look worried, surprised, delighted, etc., using only letterforms to illustrate each emotion.

Neal thought it was an improvement, but it still needed something.  I decided to include a simple narrative as I thought about the possible sources of emotion, and Walter Was Worried finally came together with the addition of a stormy sky, some rain, thunder, lightning, snow, and finally sunshine.

Neal agreed that I’d found what the book needed, though he felt that square-headed Walter should look more like a person.

Though I had originally set out to make a blatantly graphic book and was determined to defend that approach, it was my children who warned that Walter would scare little kids and should, perhaps, look more like a real boy.  So my blatantly graphic book became a painterly graphic book.

For authors, it is so rewarding to learn that children, teachers, librarians, and parents have been inspired to create art and writings based on our books. I will never forget the time I was about to speak to a large audience of kindergarten through sixth graders. The principal introduced me and asked the children to show their surprises. All at once, all five hundred children held up masks they’d made—self-portraits, using the letters of the emotions they were feeling to illustrate their facial features as well as alliterative sentences to go along with their artwork.  Since then, I’ve received a myriad handmade books and photographs of entire school walls covered with self-portraits—wonderful, expressive, emotional self-portraits!

Learn more about Laura Vaccaro Seeger