Loring, a Writing Life
11: Some Small Success with the World’s Best Reading Audience
The India book was, as I mentioned at the end of my last post, finished to my satisfaction. It had been a long haul, but it was done. The next step was to find an agent, which I managed through an acquaintance who had been in publishing in New York. I put a package together—sample chapters, a career outline, a statement of who I thought would be my audience, and how I could participate in the marketing. Multiple copies of this went into the mail to a list of agents my contact thought might be interested in my little book.
A couple of weeks later I got a phone call from one of these agents. Great! He wanted to represent me. I gave him the go ahead and prepared to wait. Things were progressing as I imagined they should.
In the meantime, I allowed myself to dream a bit. Maybe more than a bit. I’m only human, after all. Longer daily walks called to me and I answered. I thought about what I should write next. Earlier in my career I’d earned my spurs writing the short story, a genre I’d always adored. I had won a couple of prizes and even a State Arts Board grant for my stories. That grant paid for my going off to India. Since coming back to the States, my energies and imagination had all been about writing the India book, teaching at Metro State, and working with kids in schools.
The wealth of literature available to kids in the third through sixth grades astonished me. Number the Stars, The Devil’s Arithmetic, Hatchet, Walk Two Moons—the list goes on and on, and it’s only gotten better since the time I’m writing about. Wonderful stuff and I’d had no idea it existed. Could producing something similar be my next project?
My eyes were opened to this possibility one week when I visited a small town in Central Minnesota and asked a fifth grade class what I thought was a pretty routine question: What do you read? Every hand shot up. Not one kid in front of me could sit still. They all wanted to be the first to answer. In their impatience, they started calling out the titles of the “chapter books” they loved. Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Great Gilly Hopkins, and Sarah, Plain and Tall, among many others. I stood there a little stunned and looked around the walls of the classroom to see piles of multiple copies of titles. How many piles? I actually lost count. Their teacher, a short middle-aged man in a suit and tie, beamed.
It turned out that he was a master of the read-along. He used reading a chapter of whatever book they were reading at the time as a reward for doing well on math games or to settle them down after some busy group work or after they came back into the classroom red and sweaty from recess or a gym class, and they read up to thirty books in a school year that way. They begged for the stories and wanted to discuss why this character or that did what she or he did, often asking probing questions about the context of the historical fictions they were reading. The class the year of my first visit wanted to read more books than the class before them. The teacher told me this often happened and that he had trouble keeping up. Parents begged for their kids to be in his class because their reading and writing skills, not to mention their enthusiasm for both, soared after a school year with this teacher.
When I left at the end of the week, they gave me a bag full of all the books they had read so far that year and a couple of the books they hoped to read. My next school residency came the very next week in another small town. I stayed as the only guest in a large B and B and spent my free time after school lost in reading through a few of the books in my gift bag. In the following weeks I finished the rest. I found myself fascinated, entertained, provoked, and moved to tears by the stories, remembering the excitement of that fifth grade class.
What writer would not want to write for such an audience?
I knew what my next writing project should be. I would write for kids. Write what, I did not know, but started by retelling a Punjabi folktale collected by some retired British army major, imagining that it would make a great picture book. I called it “Shankar and the Bodhi Tree” and began sending it out to companies that published picture books. The weeks went on with no takers until I sent it to Cricket Magazine in Chicago. They loved it. Bingo.
When that issue of Cricket came out, I found a copy in a book store, opened it up to my story, and read my name. Such a fine feeling. I experienced my first thirty seconds of fame!
Later, Shankar was picked up, re-illustrated, and published by The School Magazine: Blast Off! in Australia. I got an added kick when I saw that they had chosen to my story for their cover illustration. It was the first time I’d had this honor.
I tried pitching a couple more stories to picture book companies, but no go. In the meantime, though, I edited a couple anthologies of writing by kids in the COMPAS program. These were fun, low-pay projects done over a couple of summers. I chose the stories, poems, and songs written during residency weeks, organized them into thematic sections, and wrote an introduction. Toward the middle of the following school year, COMPAS held a celebratory reading for the publication of the book. Family and friends of the now all-dressed-up young reader/authors gathered in the elegant Landmark Center in downtown St. Paul, and I put on a sports jacket and made a little speech introducing the reading. That gave me my final 14 ½ minutes of fame, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Also during this time I published a short-lived magazine for children to publish their stories and poems in, Brainiac’s Treehouse, which—in a wild act of hubris, I illustrated myself. Busy, busy.
But I hadn’t heard from my agent yet. He seemed solid enough. After all, he had that deep, sure New York businessman voice my banker uncle had had. I wondered what might be going on with my book.