Actually, that may be selling it short. If you know children’s books, my mother is THE storyteller.
I am an author. Have been for 30 years and almost 50 books. In my family that makes me a slowpoke.
My mother is Jane Yolen, author of 450 books. But, the book I want to talk to you about today isn’t one she wrote.
My mom has been telling me the story of her “first big success as an author” for as long as I can remember. The story began: I always knew I wanted to be an author, my first big success was in the first grade when I wrote our school musical…” If you tell my mom about an incident like that, the first thing she will tell you is, “that’s a picture book! Go write it!” And because of this, I always assumed she would write the story herself someday. She never did. So, in late 2019, I sat down and started writing. I realized I didn’t have a ton of facts about this play, so I filled in the parts of my mom’s young life that I did know and fleshed out the story. At this same time, my mom had surgery after a nasty fall. While she was recovering, I continued working on the manuscript. When it was done, I read it to her.
She was thrilled.
I asked her a bunch of questions and worked those details in. I switched things I had gotten wrong. We had a fun time talking about her neighborhood and class.
She and I were scheduled to teach a picture book intensive at SCBWI in NYC, but since she was still not so steady on her feet, she decided to back out. I asked one of my favorite editors, Yolanda Scott, to present with me and she said yes. When I visit NYC, I always meet with my agent Elizabeth. I brought her the manuscript and a crazy idea. “I want to hand the manuscript to Yolanda because she is my dream editor for this project…” Elizabeth agreed, even though we both knew it was bad form to hand your editor an unsolicited manuscript at a conference. (Please don’t do this!) To my great relief and joy, Yo was happy to hear about the concept and promised to read it. This was February, 2020. We had no idea what was on the horizon.
Fast forward into what happened next—the pandemic. Everything was topsy turvy and books seemed less relevant and more relevant all at the same time. I spent my time making masks for teachers and librarians, posting free content for kids at home, and I wrote a lot. When it became clear that we were in it for the long haul, publishers began to settle into this new normal and Yo bought the book! This was still early 2020, April, I think. So a pretty quick purchase.
You know what the BEST part was? I got to tell my mom that I had sold the book about her. I asked her how she felt about it. She told me this: “I feel proud at the wonderful job you have done and thrilled that I didn't have to write it!” When the first copy arrived at her house, (for some reason, Charlesbridge sends all our books to her house—but to be fair, we live next door to each other, share a PO box, and are fine with these mailing glitches) she didn’t read the name on the envelope. So, of course, she ripped open the package and she was the one who got to see the actual book. I may have been a little disappointed that I didn’t get to be the first one to open it… but, also, it seemed right for her to be the first. It is, after all, her story.
At the last minute, when the illustrations were done, all the revisions were in, and the book was set to go to print, my mom and I were in the car and we were talking about the book. She started singing one of the songs from the play. I pulled over and typed the lyrics into my phone and sent them off to Yo. She managed to get them into the illustrations!
When I asked my mom to tell me what her hopes for this book are. She said she hope kids will think they can be the next Janie. As a follow up, I asked her, “do you hope people will buy this book?” Ever the pragmatist, she responded “Oh Heidi, everybody who writes a book hopes that.” Thankfully she redeemed herself by adding, “but, for me, this book is special for two reasons—one it’s my story, and two, it’s your telling.”
Thanks Mom!
Love you xoxoHeidi
My new children’s novel, Werewolf Hamlet, is coming out into the world. It’s my most personal novel aside from Offsides, which came out, almost thirty years ago in 1996 and was a New York Public Library Pick for the Teen Age in 1997. My older kids were six and eight when Offsides was published, and I remember Doug Dutton of Dutton’s books in Brentwood kneeling down to help my son with his necktie. Flannery wanted to wear a tie to my signing at Dutton’s, and my husband was driving from his teaching job in South Central to meet us, so he couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it on our rush to drive to the Westside in LA traffic from Silver Lake.
It was going to be a lark of a novel, a romp, and a way of capturing my children’s childhoods. I wrote it first as a diary, and then an editor warned me that Diary of a Wimpy Kid would kill it, so to write it as a traditional novel, because she loved the premise and the first draft. Then she left the publishing house, and it was inherited by a new editor, who didn’t love it. I rewrote it some more, and it was rejected by one and all in 2014, so that was that.
