From the May/June 2006 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

The Writer’s Page
Digging for Home

bY GEORGE ELLA LYON

suspect there aren’t many songs about writing picture books, and certainly no others that compare it to mining coal. When I sang “In the Picture Book Mine” for a friend, she laughed and said, “I love how your mind works.” But truth to tell, it was how the universe works that generated this song.

It all started with the origins of Mama Is a Miner, the fourth book Peter Catalanotto and I did together. Peter and I had never met until after our first book, Cecil’s Story, came out. It was Richard Jackson, our editor, who saw a potential harmony between the words of a woman from the mountains of Kentucky and the art of an Italian-American guy from Long Island. Peter and I have been having a conversation ever since, and one day Peter asked if I’d ever written anything about mining coal. He knew I’d grown up in the coalfields of Harlan County, so it was a reasonable question. “I’d like to paint the inside of a coal mine,” he said.

I laughed. “It’s dark in there.”

“I know,” Peter said. “But the reflections would be so interesting.”

As a matter of fact, I told him, I had written two picture books about mining, both rejected. Peter asked me to try again, and the (eventual) result was the manuscript for Mama Is a Miner. Peter said that to do the illustrations he had to go into a working coal mine. I told him that was probably impossible because of insurance, but he persisted. So I asked my mother, who isn’t a miner — kids always ask — but works for the Harlan County Chamber of Commerce, and she arranged for us to tour Dulcimer #7, owned by New Horizons Coal in Harlan County. When we came out of the mine, someone snapped the image you see here.

But even before the picture was developed, something astonishing happened. When Peter got home, he called his mother on Long Island. As he told her about the trip, she grew silent. He asked what was wrong. “Peter,” she said. “My mother was born in Harlan County. And her father, your great-grandfather, was a coal miner there.”

Chills flowed over me when Peter called and shared this news. “That’s why you wanted to paint a mine in the first place,” I told him. “You didn’t know your family history, but something in you remembered . . . it’s just incredible.”

Further astonishment ensued when Peter told me his grandmother’s last name, which was the same as that of my childhood friend, Paula. It turns out that Peter and Paula are second cousins, her grandfather being his great-grandfather’s brother. All my life I’d been looking at a picture of Peter’s ancestor at Paula’s house.

A week or so after this conversation, I contemplated the photograph of Peter and me as we came out of Dulcimer #7. Now I knew that his roots as well as mine were in that rugged ground, and that the process of the book went a lot deeper than we had known that day. Peter had said the “reflections” would be interesting, and indeed they were. Mama Is a Miner ends with the words digging for home, and that’s what his artistic imagination had called him to do.

I looked at the photo and imagined us working in the picture book mine. (Dick Jackson had been laboring there, too, when he first put my words and Peter’s vision together.) Thus this song.

Sheet music for “In the Picture Book Mine” (PDF)

Hear George Ella sing the song (MP3 — 2.5MB)

George Ella Lyon’s most recent books are Weaving the Rainbow and Sonny’s House of Spies (both Jackson/Atheneum). No Dessert Forever!, her eighth collaboration with Peter Catalanotto, will be out next fall.