Perhaps no children’s book has been more subject to the corrosive influence of commerce than Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Its tangled publishing history features professional bullies more ruthless than Mr. McGregor (whose wife put Peter’s father in a pie) pursuing this hapless rabbit across time, committing acts of piracy, “copyfraud,” and criminally bad taste. Potter’s longtime publisher, Frederick Warne & Co., has joined their ranks, baking Peter into an unseemly sequel, The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit (about which more later).

The bunnysploitation seems especially glaring in light of Potter’s unique gifts as writer and illustrator. Born in London in 1866, Potter was an assiduous student of animal anatomy and behavior from childhood on. She and her younger brother Bertram furnished their nursery with exotic pets, wild and domestic, bringing home mice, lizards, bats, frogs, birds, and, of course, rabbits. The children became determined amateur naturalists, documenting their finds in sketchbooks, never squeamish about studying dead specimens. (Indeed, when their captives succumbed, sometimes to rather outré diets, the young Potters would boil the skeletons and draw them as well.)

Beatrix carried her affections into adulthood: Potter scholar Judy Taylor once compiled a list of the author’s named pets throughout her life, tallying eighty-nine. Among them was the rabbit Benjamin Bouncer, who perished after breaking a tooth on hard candy. But he and his successor, the beloved Peter, lived long lives, providing ample opportunities to study their attitudes and habits.

With this intimate familiarity, Beatrix Potter became one of the finest observers of rabbits since Dürer. And not just rabbits: clothed or not, the mice, pigs, red squirrels, rabbits, hedgehogs, cats, foxes, and owls of her books are all true to life, animated by a keen eye for muscular and skeletal structure as well as by the common postures and characteristic movements she captured. Animals in her tales do fantastical things — mice embroider buttonholes; newt Sir Isaac Newton, clad in a species-specific “black and gold waistcoat,” dines on “grasshopper with lady-bird sauce” — but they do them plausibly. They are charming and convincing in large part because they are rendered naturalistically. This can be seen in all of her tales but also in a pen-and-ink drawing, the meditative masterwork “The Rabbit’s Dream” (c. 1899). A sleeping rabbit conjures itself under a counterpane in bed, surrounded by portraits of itself in over a dozen different positions — stretched on its side, prone with legs kicked back, with feet tucked under the body, with ears erect, ears folded back, ears parted over the shoulders, etc. A virtuosic performance, it remains among the most moving of Potter’s works, a testament to imagination enriched by experience.

Potter first told the story of Peter Rabbit in 1893 in a picture-letter sent to the bedridden son of her former governess. Its simple line drawings introduce the principals — Peter and his siblings; his mother; and his nemesis, Mr. McGregor — while its tiny tale of temptation and trial in an English garden unfolds in simple perfection. Several years later, she borrowed the letter back, expanded it, and, after failing to interest publishers in producing a small, affordable book with a single color frontispiece and black-and-white illustrations (she felt color throughout was too expensive), printed it herself; it was snapped up by friends and relations. She quickly secured a contract with publisher Frederick Warne, agreeing to redo the illustrations in color.

The book proved an immediate success on publication in October 1902, rapidly selling out a first printing of eight thousand copies. “The public must be fond of rabbits!” Potter wrote to the youngest Warne brother, Norman (to whom she would be briefly engaged, before his untimely death in 1905); “what an appalling quantity of Peter.” To her dismay, the firm failed to register copyright in the United States, leading to piracies and loss of revenue. Although she helped save the company in 1917, after embezzlement by another Warne brother nearly bankrupted it, she scolded them on quality, condemning a copy of Peter Rabbit’s Almanac for 1929 as “wretched.” She wrote sharply, “It is impossible to explain balance & style to people, if they don’t see it themselves.” While she enthusiastically crafted her own unique merchandise prototypes — including an extraordinarily soulful Peter Rabbit doll — she could have had no idea of the extent of commodification to come.

After Potter died in 1943 at the age of seventy-seven, Warne cast itself as the guardian of her legacy. But eventually the guardian began behaving badly, seeking to wring profits from its most famous long-eared property. In 1983, Warne was acquired by Penguin, itself owned by the international conglomerate Pearson, the largest book publisher in the world. Then, as scholar Margaret Mackey chronicles in The Case of Peter Rabbit: Changing Conditions of Literature for Children, Warne embarked on the expensive process of remaking printing plates for Potter’s books. While the new reproductions were a welcome improvement, Warne festooned them with what Mackey terms “aggressive” assertions of copyright, although Peter was already in the public domain. (In the UK, copyright protection lapsed but was then extended until 2013 when the European Union “harmonized” copyright law.) Warne seized on its “re-originated” illustrations to declare itself “owner of all rights, copyrights and trademarks in the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations,” going so far as to attach a “tm” to the scampering Peter on the cover. Back in 1979, the publisher had sued a competitor, claiming trademark rights to eight images from Potter’s books that, it argued, were identified in the public mind with Warne alone. The case was settled out of court, but Viva R. Moffat, a legal scholar who teaches at the University of Denver, has called Warne’s claims (in a paper on “Mutant Copyrights”) a “stretch.”

Warne has applied for trademarks here and in the EU for every imaginable Peter Rabbit–related item that might feasibly be sold, from “books and texts in all media” to “toilet seat covers” and “meat extracts.” Moffat assails the practice of forcing trademarks to pinch-hit for lapsed copyright, while another legal expert, Jason Mazzone (who teaches intellectual property law at Brooklyn Law School), defines the placement of misleading warnings on public domain works as “copyfraud” in his book by the same name.

Warne’s zealous pursuit of its rights has not deterred it from crass acts of its own. In 1987, the same year it published its painstakingly remade edition, the firm allowed Ladybird Books, a purveyor of cheap paperbacks owned by the parent company, Pearson, to market The Tale of Peter Rabbit with bowdlerized text, eliminating Potter’s dry wit, dispensing with the pie made of Peter’s father (Mrs. Rabbit instead explains that Mr. McGregor just “doesn’t like rabbits”), and replacing Potter’s illustrations with photos of stuffed animals. Warne was excoriated in The Times of London, which condemned the new edition as “Hamlet without the ghost, Othello without the handkerchief.” Undaunted, a few years later Warne took out an advertisement in The Bookseller — “Peter Rabbit™ Packs a Powerful Punch” — threatening those who wandered into its garden with “expensive legal action” (see below).

The text of Warne’s advertisement asserting its legal rights to Peter Rabbit.

Now the firm has set its hobnailed boot upon Peter again, muddying the same waters it sought to protect:  publishing The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit, a large-format sequel written by actress-celebrity Emma Thompson and illustrated by Eleanor Taylor, whose previous books include Go-Go Gorillas. The idea did not originate with Thompson. According to her, Warne solicited the sequel, sending her two half-eaten radishes and a note purportedly written by the Rabbit Himself. The story finds Peter once again in Mr. McGregor’s lettuce patch (ground already covered in Potter’s own sequel, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny), climbing into a picnic basket, and being carried off to Scotland, where frenetic adventures involving a giant black rabbit named Finlay McBurney ensue. Smarmy in tone, the text relies heavily on italics and typographical tricks to engender interest. Its author clearly knows little about rabbits, suggesting that Finlay’s mother goes about with her ears “tied in a neat knot.” (One hopes an impressionable toddler will not do the same to a pet.) Saddled with a thankless task, artist Taylor produces soft-focus brushwork that seems timid and amateurish, lacking Potter’s precision and authority, her unerring color sense, and her humor. Taylor’s Mrs. McGregor is copied from Potter’s privately printed original and is more appropriation than homage, while poor Finlay’s chest juts above his kilt like a pouter pigeon’s. Missing are Potter’s beautifully detailed portraits of flora and fauna, from the water beetle in The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher to the Red Admiral butterfly in The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse. No one, it seems, has done more to dilute Potter’s work than her own publisher.

Other ersatz sequels have proliferated recently, as publishing houses cash in on classics, from The Wind in the Willows to Winnie-the-Pooh to A Little Princess to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Indeed, there will be sequels to The Further Tale: Thompson has signed up for two more. Ultimately, such derivative stuff can’t harm the originals, just as a bad production of Shakespeare can’t touch the play itself. But sequels, it seems to me, are particularly confusing to the youngest readers, who are just developing notions of authorship. As the editor of the Library of America’s edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, I’ve been asked by children where the recent sequels, written by an heir who never met Wilder, came from. From someplace hotter than the Dakotas, I think.

What sets The Further Tale apart is that it presents inferior work to an audience of very young children who have not yet developed the intellectual capacity to distinguish between original and unoriginal text and art. In her discussion of the multiplicity of Peters, scholar Mackey quotes Margaret Meek’s essay on the profound influence of early encounters: “Children’s literature is undeniably the first literary experience, where the reader’s experiences of what literature is are laid down. Books in childhood initiate children into literature; they inaugurate certain kinds of literary competencies.” The competency that The Further Tale inaugurates is that of copying. It tells children, It’s acceptable to be unoriginal. It’s acceptable to exploit the work of others. And it’s acceptable — even desirable — to make money from that exploitation. This is being done in an era when publishing has been beset with scandals involving plagiarism and other unethical practices, the perpetrators of which are often young. With the model set by today’s publishers, this is hardly surprising. Perhaps Warne could learn a lesson from the original Peter: gluttony always leads to tears.

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Water in the Park: A Book About Water & 
the Times of the Day

For more on Water in the Park, read “Five questions for Emily Jenkins.”

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It was noticed — my imagination — and praised until I was nine or so, when my mother started rebuking me for having too much of it. Perhaps I’d provoked her, paradoxically, by wandering in my chatter too close to truths that needed to stay secret. Whatever her reason, this was a blow to me — an attack on my best protection, and my joy.

I could have given up right then and withered away, and might have if it hadn’t been for books. Whatever else my family’s faults, they read. My mother took me each week to the library, where I was encouraged to wander freely through the children’s room, choosing whatever pleased me. On one wall were picture books for little kids; on the other walls, the books with chapters — “real” books, to my mind, or what we now call middle grade books. I flew through those middle grade books, six or more a week, finding solace and hope.

Consider one of my favorite series, Mary Norton’s Borrower books, about people so tiny they could live under the floor, surviving on the gleanings of humans. Stacked matchboxes became a chest of drawers, a hatpin a weapon against threatening bugs, a potato enough food for weeks. What vast imaginations the Borrowers needed, to see a cutlery box as a possible boat, or a boot as a home. And even better — I understood this early on — what a vast imagination Mary Norton had needed to create the Borrowers. Or E. Nesbit the Psammead, Noel Streatfeild the Fossil sisters, C. S. Lewis the wardrobe, Norton Juster the tollbooth — the list was long and laden with riches.

My decision was made. Since splendid imaginings were too much for the real world, I threw in my lot with the authors and their creations, and stayed there until I grew up and no longer needed the shelter. By then, however, living without books had become impossible — the act of reading was as natural and essential to me as eating or sleeping. And so I read and read, and eventually I wrote a middle grade book of my own, but that is another story.

Not all children are treated as badly as I was, and for that we can be grateful. But all children have to work out the role of creativity, fantasy, and learning in their lives, often at the same age I was when books saved me — nine to twelve, the years for reading middle grade books. This is when children are moving toward an identity apart from their families but haven’t yet submerged themselves in peer groups. For these brief and wondrous years, they are individuals open to and ripe for the very best we can give them, including those books written just for them, books that invite them into the world outside their families, their schoolrooms, their own lives.

The list of middle grade books available these days is immeasurably longer and richer than when I was a child fifty years ago. Frank Cottrell Boyce, Christopher Paul Curtis, Kate DiCamillo, Polly Horvath, Grace Lin, Hilary McKay, Louis Sachar, Laura Amy Schlitz, Jerry Spinelli, Rebecca Stead, N. D. Wilson, Lisa Yee — these are only some of the authors writing superb books for middle graders. Into the midst of such treasure, however, creeps a troubling trend. The immense success of young adult books, written for teens and known to everyone as YA, has been overshadowing the quieter middle grade category and, in some cases, threatening to subsume it.

For example, a list of “The Greatest Girl Characters of Young Adult Literature,” published online by The Atlantic Wire in 2012, was made up almost entirely of middle grade stalwarts like Meg Murry, Harriet M. Welsch, Claudia Kincaid, and, even worse, those marvelous young girls our seven- and eight-year-olds read about: Ramona Quimby and Pippi Longstocking. I’m happy to say that a great outcry ensued, leading to a mea culpa from The Atlantic Wire, plus an excellent discussion of what exactly YA is (among other things, books written about and for teens, not children). Another example: a 2012 NPR online poll, “Best-Ever Teen Novels? Vote for Your Favorites,” got into a mess when it — correctly — rejected all the votes for middle grade books. Much complaining followed, which led to further explanations, which led to…more complaining. And still the mix-ups come, though not all are so public. Just ask any middle grade writer when was the last time he or she had to run the so-you-write-YA gauntlet. Then hold onto your hat.

Some of this confusion is understandable. Long before YA was dreamt of (most say sometime in the sixties), children’s books were written in which the characters grew from childhood into adolescence and even adulthood. To name a few: Little Women, the Anne of Green Gables series, the Betsy-Tacy series, and the Little House series. So should we now re-categorize them as YA? No. The children’s book world, if not the general public, is certain of that. Those books were written for children, are safe and appropriate for children, and would probably bore the socks off any teenager reading them for reasons other than a nostalgic return to her own childhood. Then there’s the more recent Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling’s behemoth, which brought on further category confusion by starting out in middle grade, then aging into YA as Harry himself aged into adolescence. On top of all that, not only is there the sad fact that middle grade is not as snappy and memorable a term as YA, it is also too often seen as a synonym for middle school, which is another thing altogether.

So is all this confusion really a problem? Does it matter? Not in terms of teens or adults reading children’s books, or even of children reading YA books (the less sexual and violent ones, that is). But in terms of maintaining the boundaries of the middle grade category — so that children know where to go for books that address their particular lives — it matters a great deal. Not just to the children who are, like I was, unprotected and floundering, desperately in need of an imagination-filled haven. No, it matters to all children. As Monica Edinger wrote in response to the NPR brouhaha (“Stop Calling Books for Kids ‘Young Adult,’” November 2012 on the Huffington Post), “Those adults who enjoy reading young adult books today like to reminisce about their favorite teen reads. But when they include children’s books among them and call them YA, they are marginalizing the true readership of these books. My fourth grade students are children. They are not young adults.” Exactly. And, besides, claiming Ramona for YA is like your older sister borrowing your favorite sweater to go out with her boyfriend while you have to stay home with the babysitter. It’s just not right.

Those of us who write middle grade books are a proud bunch, certain that our work is important, that we’re building lifelong readers, maybe even saving lives. And we’re absolutely certain that we’re not a part of YA. Please help us keep the boundaries high and childhood safe for children. They need it, and we owe it to them.

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Table of Contents

 

		Features
Caroline Fraser	10	Peter Rabbit and the Tale of a Fierce Bad Publisher The bunnysploitation of a children’s literature icon.
Jeanne Birdsall	27	Middle Grade Saved My Life In praise of middle grade novels—and why not to confuse them with YA.
Jonathan Hunt	31	The Amorphous Genre Needed: a gateway drug for nonfiction.
		Columns
Roger Sutton	7	Editorial Everybody Wants to Be a Teenager Has contemporary YA literature outgrown our caretaking?.
Karen Jameyson	16	Foreign Correspondence Jeannie Baker: Mirror, Mirror… The hows and whys of a remarkable cross-cultural picture book
Kathleen T. Horning	35	Caldecott at 75 Madeline’s Rescue and the Question of Audience Third in a series on the Caldecott Medal at seventy-five—one winner per decade, here the 1950s.
Marc Tyler Nobleman	43	The Writer’s Page Danger! Dialogue Ahead Should nonfiction authors let their subjects speak for themselves?
Katrina Hedeen and Rachel L. Smith	48	What Makes a Good…? What Makes a Good YA Love Story?
	111	From The Guide Graphic Novels for Children A selection of reviews from The Horn Book Guide.
Raina Telgemeier	120	Cadenza Retitled In a word, touchstone novels get title updates.
		Reviews
	55	Book Reviews
		Departments
	4 5 113 118 119	Letters to the editor May/June Starred Books Impromptu Index to Advertisers Index to Books Reviewed
		Cover from Mirror. © 2010 by Jeannie Baker. Reproduced by permission of the publishers, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA on behalf of Walker Books, London.

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Ask the Passengers

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The Dark

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Several years ago, I asked an author about the snappy dialogue in his nonfiction picture book about a poet. He said the words were a combination of excerpts from the poet’s autobiography and some things the author “rather assumed.” The book, he continued, got “whacked in a couple of reviews.”

It wasn’t because the book was badly written. It was because it contained fabricated dialogue but was presented as nonfiction. This was a classification malfunction.

Early drafts of my nonfiction picture book Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman did not contain dialogue. An editor I’d queried suggested I add some, but the word whacked had spooked me into feeling that any dialogue could nullify the nonfiction status. So I resisted.

Soon, however, I grew curious. I went back through the text and found instances where I could replace exposition with a punchy quotation from one of the published interviews from my source material. As luck would have it, these happened to occur fairly evenly throughout the manuscript.

That editor did not end up acquiring the book. And the one who did, Janet Schulman, felt that picture book biographies do not need dialogue. I told her I used to feel the same way, but now that I’d tried it, I liked the outcome. So Janet obliged me, and the dialogue stayed.

Avoiding the trap of making up quotations is not the only nonfiction dialogue danger. While doing market research for Boys of Steel, I came across reviews dinging eight nonfiction picture books for lack of attribution in the back matter. (This was in terms of both quotations and facts in general.)

Still seeing whacked warning signs, I asked Janet if the acknowledgments in the book could include the following: “All dialogue is excerpted from interviews with Jerry and Joe” (referring to writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman). At first, she didn’t think it was necessary. To try to validate my request, I referenced the eight tsk-tsk reviews I’d found and the poet-profiler’s unpleasant experience in the dialogue trenches. Janet kindly obliged me again.

Though I’d lobbied to insert that disclaimer, even I was surprised when it was singled out in the very first review (Booklist): “A bibliography and assurances that ‘all dialogue [was] excerpted from interviews’ puts factual muscle on the narrative.” Janet graciously joked that I should now blog about how something my editor initially dismissed became a focal point of the first review. (So I did.)

Avoiding made-up dialogue and citing sources are straightforward obligations. A trickier prospect is addressing the authenticity of dialogue not in and of itself but rather with respect to context.

Technically, no nonfiction book is pure nonfiction. Even if every word of every quotation can be corroborated, the bugaboo is the placement of those quotations.

In other words, while a quotation may be “real,” it may not necessarily have been spoken at the chronological moment it appears in the book’s narrative. That makes many lines of dialogue at once true and false. Let’s call them nonfictionesque.

I ran into some nonfictionesque problems in Boys of Steel. Consider this passage about Jerry:

“He had crushes on girls who didn’t know — or didn’t care — that he existed. ‘Some of them look like they hope I don’t exist,’ Jerry thought.”

This is how the statements appeared in the source, a published interview with Jerry:

“I had crushes on several attractive girls who either didn’t know I existed or didn’t care I existed. As a matter of fact, some of them looked like they hoped I didn’t exist.”

(Side note: How could a writer read that and not put it in his book?)

I had to change the tense of the original lines, and I tightened them, too. However, that did not change the meaning; while it took a few nonessential words out of Jerry’s mouth, it did not put words in.

Writers of nonfiction must often make such judgment calls. History is heavy with what people did but comparatively scant on precisely what people said. Therefore, when writers do find a lively statement in a primary source, to my mind readers benefit by allowing the writer a pinch of leeway in how he incorporates it. So long as it’s cited, far better to tweak a tense than dispose of a gem altogether for fear of the fury of the fact checker. This further informs a definition of nonfictionesque.

But what of the context? Yes, Jerry did say the quotation above, but it was in an interview decades after the fact, not in the 1930s, which is when I positioned it in my narrative. That is one reason why I used the word thought instead of said. It was my inexact way of accounting for the time discrepancy. What’s more, to quote Jerry in such a case, I must trust Jerry’s recollection — but our memories are notoriously unreliable. What we say can melt from memory faster than an ice cube left in the midday sun.

So, strictly speaking, my lines count as nonfiction only if you accept my functional and stylistic tweaks…and if you tolerate the shift in the timeline…and if you trust that Jerry’s recollection is consistent with how he truly felt all those years earlier.

We weren’t there when Babe Ruth kept hitting or Rosa Parks kept sitting or Betsy Ross allegedly got to sewing. And sometimes the star of a particular true story did not record his or her take for posterity. In cases like that, we must turn to those who were closest to the action, if possible. History is written not only by the winners but also by the witnesses — people who were not famous and who probably never dreamed they’d be quoted in the future. (If only more of them had kept journals — and more of the journals that were kept had survived.)

While any given action can be described in any number of equally passable ways, there’s only one way to accurately transcribe someone’s spoken words. Best-case scenario: it’s done immediately after the words were spoken. And even then it may be a word or two off, even if the speaker himself is the one transcribing — and even if it’s recorded electronically. Did Neil Armstrong say “one small step for man” or “one small step for a man”? Millions were listening, yet the debate has raged for nearly five decades.

When writing nonfiction, my goal is to let my subjects speak for themselves to whatever extent possible and to source every statement — practically every sigh — mercilessly. Pure nonfiction may be unattainable, but writers owe it to readers to come as close as possible.

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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As an author of nonfiction, I confess I sometimes feel like the mama rabbit, stuck in a tight, dark spot, constrained by my craft. We nonfiction writers are considered…well…educational. Boring. Outside our tight quarters, the baying and shouting and enthusiasm goes to the fiction writers.

But look at what has happened in the past few years. In 2009 three of the five finalists for National Book Awards for Young People’s Literature went to nonfiction…

…and one, Charles and Emma, went on to receive a 2010 Michael L. Printz Honor Award and was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize;

…and the winner of the 2009 National Book Award, Claudette Colvin, went on in 2010 to earn a silver Newbery Honor sticker;

…and three out of five finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize were nonfiction, and the winner, my book, Marching for Freedom, was the dark-horse champion of School Library Journal’s Battle of the Kids’ Books;

…and the Coretta Scott King Author Award went to a picture book biography, Bad News for Outlaws;

…and you may think I am done, but I am not, because in 2010 Jim Murphy became the first-ever nonfiction author to win the Margaret A. Edwards Award for a “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature.”

In this amazing, starry, silver-and gold-stickered time, I’d say we were well on our way to outnumbering ’em. I’d like to talk about how we do it, because actually there is a method to our madness.

It’s called narrative nonfiction, sometimes called creative nonfiction, or literary nonfiction. I think the term creative nonfiction is misleading — we don’t create anything that isn’t there already, and literary sounds pretentious to me. So I prefer narrative nonfiction. It boils down to this: making sure we are telling a story. The author of narrative nonfiction uses all of the best techniques of fiction writing: plot, character development, voice, and theme.

Nonfiction often gets accused of just being about plot. But here’s that famous quote by Nabokov (himself paraphrasing E. M. Forster) that shows what we are striving for: “The term ‘narrative’ is often confused with the term ‘plot,’ but they’re not the same thing. If I tell you that the king died, and then the queen died, that’s not narrative; that’s plot. But, if I tell you that the king died, and then the queen died of a broken heart, that’s narrative.” So narrative nonfiction takes people, places, and events, builds bridges between them, gives them meaning and emotional content. Without making anything up.

We begin with an idea that smacks us in the head.

Here’s how Deborah Heiligman got smacked for Charles and Emma. Her husband, Jon Weiner, who writes about science, said to her: “You know, Charles Darwin’s wife was religious. She loved him very much, and she was afraid that he would go to hell and they wouldn’t be together for eternity.”

“Literally,” Deb said, “had fireworks gone off at that moment, I would have not been surprised.” She knew she had a book to write and headed for the library, where she checked out a two-volume book of letters collected by the Darwins’ daughter, Henrietta. After reading the two volumes straight through, she tackled the autobiography Charles Darwin wrote for his children and grandchildren.

Then she wove the strands together:

One of the great things about doing primary source research for Charles and Emma was that I got to put together pieces of a puzzle. For example, I could read a letter that Charles wrote on a particular day, and then I could go online and see what Emma wrote in her diary for that day or week. I could figure out what Charles was concerned about scientifically and what was happening in his very busy family life at the same time.

Two lives, imbued with meaning and emotion, delivered to the obsessed researcher.

In 2000, Phillip Hoose was researching his book We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History when he came across a mention of Claudette Colvin. He did some snooping around and found that, indeed, Claudette Colvin had refused to give up her seat on a bus nine months before Rosa Parks, and a year later she and three other women sued the city of Montgomery and the state of Alabama, challenging the laws that required segregated seating on the buses.

“Is Claudette Colvin still alive?” he asked himself.

He found her. It took more than four years before she agreed to talk with him.

In an interview on PBS’s Newshour after winning the National Book Award for Claudette Colvin, Hoose said about the book: “In addition to what happened, it was as much about how she felt and why she did things…how her friends took it, how her parents took it,” he said. “So it was this story not only of historical events, but of a girl’s journey through those.”

Being a primary source junkie myself, I e-mailed Phillip Hoose and asked why he wanted to write about Colvin. “In book after book she was portrayed as this mouthy, undisciplined, kind of loose teen from the wrong side of the tracks. Claudette was always compared unflatteringly and, I thought, unfairly, with Rosa Parks. As I read those books I yearned for her side of the story.”

He went on to say:

When I know I’ve found a story to tell I let the flood tide run in me for a day or so and just let myself be soaked with love for the idea. In those dawning hours I’m blindly in love with the idea…Then I sleep on it. I try to put it away for a little bit…I am so excitable that I know I need a day. If my idea can survive those stages, I explore it with all I have.

As for me, I stumbled backward into writing Marching for Freedom. I read that Pete Seeger had been on the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, and I casually went online to see if I could find any images. That’s when I found Matt Herron’s photos of the march, including one he’d taken of Seeger.

Unlike Heiligman’s fireworks, I always get a feeling of utter silence, that the earth has stopped turning, just for a nanosecond.

Within days I was ensconced in Herron’s studio, looking through his archives (I had discovered that he lived about thirty miles away). I also started sniffing around through secondary sources, getting a feel for time and place, for the politics of the era. I cruised bibliographies, acknowledgments, footnotes. I call this “reading around” because it sounds like “sleeping around” and I like the slightly pejorative ring, and because I’ll read anything at this point, good, bad, or ugly. I’m getting my feet under me.

I also began looking for more photos and reading photo credits. I wanted to go deeper than the mainstream, well-publicized photos.

Searching out primary source materials, I found a 1965 New York Times article interviewing some of the kids who were there, protesting, marching, singing, going to jail, getting beat up, and getting up the next day and doing it all over again. I picked up the phone and started calling people with the same names in Selma, Alabama. In the end, I interviewed about six of these people, now in their late fifties to mid sixties.

So what do authors of narrative nonfiction do with all the information we’ve collected? Let’s take as our starting point some famous lines from an unlikely source, The Cat in the Hat:

“Look at me!

Look at me now!” said the cat.

“With a cup and a cake

On the top of my hat!

I can hold up TWO books!

I can hold up the fish!

And a little toy ship!

And some milk on a dish!”

That’s exactly what my brain looks like when it is stuffed full of research. I’m precariously holding a whole lot of things, very, very carefully and enthusiastically, and I’m scared to death it will all come crashing down around my feet.

What nonfiction writers have to do is find a structure for our material.

Charles and Emma opens with Darwin writing his list: to marry or not marry. With each item on his list, Heiligman fills us in on his life, the state of science, pressing social issues of the time. We can sense the quiet of Darwin’s rented room on Great Marlborough Street as well as the grit and smoke of the London streets outside.

The opening launches us, expectations aroused, into the book with the chapter-ending sentences: “But he had one other fear, a fear that he could not bring himself to write down. The issue was too big. He would have to talk to his father.”

Brilliantly, brilliantly woven.

All this careful crafting is glued together by passion: for our subject, for our craft, for our readers. As we writers of narrative nonfiction work with draft after draft to make a clear, clean manuscript, we not only strive to do justice to our topic, we choose every word as carefully as any poet or fiction writer. We weight the resonance for each word, searching for those rich with meaning and emotion. These just-right words, strung together one after another, give us the queen’s broken heart, and win over our readers’ hearts in turn.

With a little luck, we’ll outnumber ’em yet.

From the March/April 2011 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Elizabeth Bird – “Seven Little Ones Instead”
Luann Toth – “Word Girl”
Deborah Stevenson – “Horrible and Beautiful”
Kristin Cashore – “Embracing the Strange”
Susan Marston – “New and Strange, Once”
Elizabeth Law – “How Can a Fire Be Naughty?”
Christine Taylor-Butler – “Something Wicked”
Mitali Perkins – “Border Crossing”
Vaunda Micheaux Nelson – “Wiggiling”

What’s the strangest children’s book you’ve ever enjoyed? Let us know in the comments!

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When I was in nursery school, my favorite bedtime books were two my mother stole from the Unitarian Sunday School library, Martin and Judy, volumes II and III, by Verna Hills Bayley. I loved these books, about two friends who lived next door to each other, because each chapter contained a mildly dramatic story on a subject I could relate to, and each one ended with a lesson. (That’s right, a lesson—the same thing that makes me leery when I see one in a picture book manuscript today. But that’s because I don’t like instruction that tries to pass itself off as something else.) Judy and her brother get distracted while popping corn in the fireplace and forget to replace the screen, causing a fire. A tiny fire that burns a hole in the rug, but it seems scary at first. Judy and her mother sensibly discuss, “How can a fire be naughty? It has to burn the things that are in its way.” Another time, Judy gets her tonsils out in a story that ends with Judy remembering her father’s wise words, “Hospitals may not be much fun, but they are good when you need them.” So satisfying!

When I came across these books again in my twenties, I rolled my eyes at their all-white cast, their overstated prose style, and their obvious didacticism. But now I recognize what they did well. There’s real plot in each story, yet they are short and come to rewarding conclusions. They build a world and characters. Finally, each tale, from the rained-out picnic to the nickel that gets lost under the porch, is one a preschooler can relate to. And don’t many of our very best picture books today explore or celebrate the tiny things that loom so large in a child’s universe?

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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