I met Elaine several times, first when she gave a dynamite speech about censorship at the University of Chicago when I was a student, and last when she gave another dynamite speech upon receiving the University of Southern Mississippi Medallion in 1998. An acute critic, she was one of the few writers for children  who I thought could do an equally good job on our side of the fence. She had a big Carol Burnett smile and was always the most stylishly dressed person in the room. That goes for her prose, too.

Elissa has collected some of Konigsburg’s Horn Book moments.

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She also wrote many other books — several of which were on the Horn Book’s Fanfare list — and was an illustrator. Above is her groovy cover for the May/June 2002 Horn Book Magazine. Also from our archive, you can read her Newbery acceptance speech for Mixed-Up Files, along with a profile written by her husband, David, for the occasion, and one written by Laurie Konigsburg Todd after her mother won the Newbery for The View from Saturday. We also had some fun with her during the 2012 election season. (Jamie Kincaid for Republican VP!)

Konigsburg never wrote down to her readers. Many of her characters are sophisticated, intelligent, witty, unique, and savvy. She wrote about wannabe-witches (Jennifer), restless suburban kids (Mixed-Up Files), Jewish boys playing baseball (About the B’nai Bagels), historical women (A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, The Second Mrs. Giaconda), possibly-con-artist women (Father’s Arcane Daughter), outcasts, smarty-pantses, heroes — the list goes on.

Roger, whose own thoughts about Konigsburg are here, was quoted in her New York Times obituary. He also remembers leaving his warm bed at 4 am because of one of her stories.

She was truly a star and a Great Lady in the field of children’s literature.

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Friends Gerald McDermott and Doug Cushman. Photo credit: Angela Schellenberg

During one of the last times Gerald was here in Paris, we went off hunting for an oyster restaurant. We finally found one in the Quartier Montorgueil on Rue des Petits Carreaux. The owner shipped oysters from his own farm on the Brittany coast so they were guaranteed to be fresh. We ordered a plate of thirty-six and a bottle of Muscadet and savored each sweet shelled beauty. After staring at the empty platter for a few minutes we looked at each other and ordered another twenty-four. Coffee was taken and I asked for the check. I handed the owner the money and told him to keep the rest as a pourboire (a tip, but literally, “for a drink”). The owner brought over a bottle of Armagnac and poured us both — and himself — a drink. In our bumbling French Gerald and I learned about our host’s oyster beds and hometown. We stumbled out of the restaurant and into the Metro station, said our good-byes, and promised that we’d return soon for another grand plat des huitres.

Sadly, the restaurant has gone forever.

Sadly, so has Gerald.

Gerald McDermott died on December 26, 2012, in Los Angeles. He had been battling a long illness, deciding to convalesce in New Mexico at the edge of a Navajo reservation after his last trip to Paris, settle his affairs in L.A., and return to France in six months time. His body just gave out.

He was determined to live in Paris for good. In May 2012 he arrived here completely convinced he’d be here full time. When I went to see him at his temporary digs after the first couple days he’d arrived, the door was opened by Gerald. In a wheelchair.

I was flabbergasted. He’d been hobbling around on a cane the previous year during our oyster feast but I’d assumed he’d continue his physical therapy so he’d be a bit more mobile.

“Things didn’t turn out quite as I had hoped,” he said. “But I’m here.”

Paris isn’t the most wheelchair-friendly city on earth. For the next month I helped wheel him around Paris, grocery shopping, cashing travelers checks, buying art supplies, going out for meals and art shows. And looking for oyster restaurants.

We established a routine when I’d arrive in the early afternoon to help him run some errands. First we’d have a small glass of wine and plan what he needed to do for the day. Then I’d roll him out into the hallway in front of the elevator (a typical Parisian lift, barely big enough for one person and a baguette). He’d stand up, take two steps inside, take the folded wheelchair and close the door. I’d race three floors down the stairs and meet him just as the doors were opening. Upon returning, we’d reverse the routine and I’d wheel him back into his apartment.

All through the routine and the entire time out, Gerald always talked of what he’d do here in France.

“I’d like to go back to the south for a while,” he said. “I lived there a long time ago, after I got the Caldecott. I always thought I’d be back.”

He never complained about his handicap. He assumed he’d be back on his feet, more or less, and wander the streets of Paris, looking at her buildings, soaking up her museums, eating her cheeses, drinking her wine. He had a Frenchman’s love for wine, cheese, and saucisson.

Paris was going to be his inspiration for getting back to work. He began drawing on the cheap sketch pads I’d leave around the apartment before I left. Wild animals running hither and thither, images from his imagination. One he showed me was some sort of rodent in medieval clothing pulling a wheeled cart with another rodent riding in the back.

“Do you recognize it?” he asked. “That’s you…pulling me around in a wheelchair.”

One evening I took him to a gallery opening. We bundled him into a taxi and drove to a small gallery in Beaubourg, near Les Halles. Greeted as an honored guest, he held court with a small crowd of well-wishers, outshining the artist on exhibition. Gerald was surrounded by his Parisian friends.

We shared a lot of meals then. We’d gossip about all kinds of things: life, art, books, people we knew. He talked of his long mentorship with Joseph Campbell. During that time Gerald would bring his latest ideas and sketches to Campbell and they’d talk about what the focus should be on a particular passage in the myth. Afterwards, as Gerald would explain, “Joe would ask me if I wanted a drink, ‘straight up or ruined,’ he’d say.”

There was a history between us. I’d met him back in 1976 when I was apprenticing with Mercer Mayer. We saw each other during various stages of our lives, tumultuous relationships and careers, moving from Connecticut to California (me to Redding, him to Los Angeles), and our latest writing and illustrating projects. We’d meet at trade shows and conferences and swap stories, sharing a coffee in L.A., a glass of wine in Redding, or a margarita on Cinco de Mayo in San Diego.

He was a fighter, always in the midst of reinventing himself. In the shifting landscape of children’s literature, he shifted as well. Each myth he illustrated encapsulated the essence of each culture, but always with atypical mediums: pen and ink, pastel, colored pencil, watercolor, collage, fabric paint. He began as a filmmaker, then moved to picture books, and, in the last few years, theater.

It was when I moved to Paris that I saw another, deeper creative side to Gerald. He was researching a book, poking around the old rooms of the Musée de Cluny. He discovered, or rediscovered, Odilon Redon on a visit to the Musée d’Orsay. He experimented with some printmaking as well.

But most of all he was a storyteller. He was one of the few artists living that continued the venerable tradition of passing on the old stories from generation to generation. He captured the heart and soul of each myth he illustrated. His writing process was jotting down a few lines of the myth and then walking around the room reciting them over and over again, changing the words slightly here and there and listening to them until they was distilled down to only a few, grasping the heart of the myth in its simplest form. Then he’d create the art, borrowing symbols and images from the myth’s culture. But there would always be some part of Gerald in there, some wink or nod that said, “This is serious stuff, but not too serious. Let’s have some fun.”

My last e-mail from him was in October where he was convalescing with a view of the Sandia Mountains in his beloved New Mexico (“although I still can’t figure out why the Spaniards called them ‘watermelons,’” he wrote). He still looked forward to his “bonne vie Française.” He loved Paris, even with its lopsided sidewalks and inability to tolerate the handicapped. He felt at home there.

I’ll miss him.

And not only during the months with an “r.”

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Margaret Mahy. Photo by Ken Silber.

There was never anyone quite like her. Other amazing children’s writers have won the Hans Christian Andersen Award, but none had her extra‑ordinary range: verse; picture-book texts; books for every conceivable age group; scripts for radio, television, film; serials for newspapers and magazines. “I have been such a tradesman all my professional writing life,” she said once. But for the word tradesman, read wizard.

She even looked like one, in that cape and broad-brimmed hat sometimes, or in the multicolored wig she wore to talk to schoolchildren or to recite her celebrated 1991 poem “Bubble Trouble” (later a picture book). There had been a green wig first, and she was quite relieved when she lost it, but popular demand made another one necessary. She was a private person but a happy entertainer; she gave talks all over the world because she was not good at saying no — just as she answered every child’s letter, probably with a little drawing at the bottom, of a cat or an alligator.

One year she drew penguins. Around 1998 she had a penguin suit, and when she made a trip to Antarctica she was asked to wear it when talking to the personnel at Scott Base. She wrote in a letter, “Though I feel reasonably happy dressing as a penguin and talking to a class in New Zealand, I feel uneasy about dressing as a penguin in the Antarctic. Apart from involvement with other penguins, it somehow seems a little like a violation of the sanctity of the great wilderness.” Then she added (and you could almost hear the chuckle), “Not that I am not good as a penguin…”

She was the best writer New Zealand has ever produced, not excluding Katherine Mansfield. Born in 1936 in Whakatane, North Island, to a bridge-builder and a teacher, she was the protégé of a teacher who soaked her in English literature from Pope to Eliot, via Gilbert and Sullivan; and after a degree and a library diploma she went to work as a children’s librarian in Christchurch, on the South Island where she spent the rest of her life. She wrote stories, but kept getting rejection slips until in the late 1960s the U.S. editor Helen Hoke Watts was shown her story “A Lion in the Meadow” and sent her $1,000 in advance royalties. Margaret never looked back. She bought a car and moved into the house in Governors Bay where she raised her two daughters as a single mother (she never spoke in public about their father). She wrote and wrote. It was 1979 before she took the plunge to become a full-time writer, but by 1984 she had won the Carnegie Medal. Twice.

Her output in that decade of the 1980s, encouraged by her longtime editor and later agent Vanessa Hamilton, was bracketed by two of her best picture books: The Great Piratical Rumbustification (illustrated by Quentin Blake) and the enchanting The Great White Man-Eating Shark (illustrated by Jonathan Allen), whose smug little hero comes to a deeply satisfying end. In between there was an astounding succession of major novels for older readers, blending realism with the supernatural: The Haunting, The Changeover (her two Carnegie winners), The Catalogue of the Universe, The Tricksters, and Memory. Above all, the layered fantasy of The Tricksters is essence of Mahy, full of what she called “that mysterious feeling that everyday life and ego and everything must take a step back to let the story come through.”

Memory dealt with dementia, whose heartbreak and absurdity Margaret knew well from caring for her aunt Francie. It’s a wry, touching book, and I was hired to write a screenplay from it (Margaret wrote, “Our friendship might be strengthened by this, I say, smiling into the blue of the computer screen”), but alas, the subject gave the producers cold feet before it could become a film.

When she first came to stay with me in 1989, we sat up far too late, talking and talking and drinking Scotch. It was like meeting a long-lost sister. We went on talking, sometimes in person, mostly from opposite sides of the world. She was wildly imaginative and generous and funny, and I shall always miss her. Who else would have written this, as a deadpan comment on the availability of pornography on school computers: “When I was a child we had to get our pornography off the walls of public lavatories, and a lot of it was hard to decipher, because you had to look at it in a dim light.” And then comes the chuckle. “It makes you realize how lucky children are these days.”

From the November/December 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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illustration by Micah Player, courtesy of Chronicle Books

Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, died on July 23, 2012, at the age of 61. Best known for her space missions on the shuttle Challenger in 1983 and 1984, Dr. Ride was later a professor of physics at UC San Diego and director of the University of California’s California Space Institute. As founder and CEO of Sally Ride Science, Dr. Ride worked to inspire and support elementary students, especially girls, with science education programs. She authored or co-authored (with her partner Tam O’Shaughnessy) several nonfiction children’s books about space and space travel, including Exploring Our Solar System (Crown, 2003), The Mystery of Mars (Crown, 1999, Horn Book Magazine starred review), and The Third Planet: Exploring the Earth from Space (Crown, 1994).

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Margaret Mahy. Photo by Ken Silber.

We are saddened to learn about the passing of Margaret Mahy, New Zealand’s Grande Dame of children’s literature. Ms. Mahy’s many awards and accolades include the Hans Christian Andersen Medal (2006); Carnegie Medals for The Haunting (1982) and The Changeover (1984); and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Bubble Trouble (2009), illustrated by Polly Dunbar, and Honor Book Awards for Memory (1988) and The Changeover (1985).

La Mahy was a great friend to The Horn Book, and in 2009 I was thrilled to be able to speak with her at her home. Like the great lady herself, the place was warm, welcoming, and full of life, and our conversation felt like chatting with an old friend. Follow the links below to read some of her Horn Book contributions.

Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Acceptance speech for Bubble Trouble printed in the January/February 2010 Magazine and read by Clarion Books publicist Jennifer Groves at the 2009 awards ceremony.

An Interview with Margaret Mahy. From the November/December 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

Five Questions for Margaret Mahy. From the May 2009 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

Accumulated Power from the March/April 1997 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Family Reading.

Cat sketch by Margaret Mahy.

And here’s a little picture MM drew for Roger.

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He is best known for his long-running and beloved boy detective series Encyclopedia Brown. The series was honored with a special Edgar Award in 1976 and inspired both a comic strip (1978-1980) and a television show (1989). Sobol’s twenty-eighth Encyclopedia Brown book will be published by Penguin in October 2012.

Sobol’s more than eighty books include children’s novel Secret Agents Four (1967) in addition to adult fiction and nonfiction.

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Editor Phyllis J. Fogelman shares her thoughts about the Dillons in a 1976 piece in The Horn Book Magazine.

In this entertaining article from a 1977 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, Leo and Diane pay tribute to each other—and son Lee talks about them both.

The Dillons in 1977. Photograph by Kenneth M. Bernstein.

The Dillons at the Eric Carle Museum in 2008. Photo by Deborah Hallen.

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