1. Water in the Park is all about observation. What’s your favorite place to people- and animal-watch?

EJ: I live in Brooklyn and am fascinated by the huge variety of people in the city — people from all over the world — and by the texture and rhythms of the street life in my neighborhood. I wrote about it in Lemonade in Winter: A Book About Two Kids Counting Money (Schwartz & Wade/Random, 4–7 years) and the Invisible Inkling series (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, 5–8 years) as well as in Water in the Park. The feeling of the neighborhood is very fundamentally American in that it’s the proverbial melting pot in action. People are mixed, racially and culturally and economically and spiritually, but we all go to the same park and the same corner shop, you know? It’s thrilling.

My own stoop is my favorite place to people- and animal-watch. There’s a woman who shelters all these rescue dogs down the block, and an aged greyhound with a perpetually bandaged hind leg. Also an enormous fluffy dog with a brown head that looks transplanted onto its white body. There’s a veteran who sweeps his walk in a haze of illegal-smelling smoke, a noisy French-speaking family, and an old lady who puts her Agatha Christie novels out on the street for people to take when she’s done with them.

2. How closely do you work with your illustrators? Did anything about Stephanie Graegin’s pictures for Water in the Park surprise you?

EJ: Sometimes I get to see sketches and dummies before a project goes to final art, and sometimes I don’t. As I’ve gotten to know certain illustrators, projects have come from a desire to work together. Small, Medium, Large: A Book About Relative Sizes (Star Bright, 3–5 years) was a book Tomek Bogacki and I put together ourselves. Paul O. Zelinsky and I are doing a Toys Go Out picture book that originated in some conversations we had while on tour.

With Stephanie Graegin, I didn’t see the work until it was completely finished, but I was freaking ecstatic with everything she did, especially the way she threaded characters and little narratives through a story that hardly identifies anyone but the dogs by name. There are so many personalities and little dramas on her pages. And she draws awesome babies.

3. Your book What Happens on Wednesdays, illustrated by Lauren Castillo (Farrar, 4–7 years), also deals with time and the progression of the day. Do you have daily routines or rituals?

EJ: I love community rituals that involve large meals and a million kids running around like lunatics, jacked up on sugar. Hanukkah parties, birthdays, Sunday dinners, I’’m your person. Then I declare myself exhausted and want to see nobody for weeks. As for daily rituals, I think I am more of an observer of how those rituals are important to children, and what they mean in the fabric of a family or neighborhood.

4. The pets in your books, such as Mr. Fluffynut and Little Nonny from Water in the Park and FudgeFudge and Marshmallow from That New Animal (Foster/Farrar, 4–7 years), have fantastic names. What’s the best pet name you haven’t used yet?

EJ: Thank you. The nefarious kitten Pumpkinfacehead in Toys Come Home (Schwartz & Wade/Random, 5–8 years) was just a typo that made me laugh, but the others I chose quite deliberately. Perhaps I should now push my imagination in another direction. I love that the tiger in Life of Pi is called Richard Parker. So: maybe a guinea pig called Louisa May Alcott. That makes me smile.

5. You’ve written picture book reviews for various publications. How does reviewing other people’s work inform your own creative process?

EJ: It forces me to think carefully about what I value in picture books, and about the relation of text and image. It helps me remember to leave room for an artist to fully illustrate my books. I don’t want the text to do all the work. Or even most of it. There needs to be room for pictures.

From the May 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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1. Possible spoiler alert: At what point in the series did you think up this book’s Big Reveal (re: Jeffrey)?

Jeanne Birdsall: And how do I answer that without giving anything away? Here goes. While I was writing the first book I knew this would happen in a future book, but it wasn’t until I was writing the second book that I knew it would happen in this particular book, the third.

2. Is love in the cards for Aunt Claire? Or did I read too much into her friendship with Turron?

JB: No, you didn’t read too much into that friendship. Thanks for noticing. Was it the jigsaw puzzles of romantic places?

By the time Turron leaves Point Mouette he’s determined to see Aunt Claire again, and she’s hoping he’ll follow through. I can’t tell you any more than that. All will be revealed in the next book.

3. Your pastoral settings — in this case coastal Maine — are always so vividly described. How much is real and how much invented?

JB: My settings are a hodgepodge of real, imaginary, and (sometimes) places I’ve read about. (Arundel, the setting for the first book, borrowed a little of E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle.) Point Mouette started out as a real place called Ocean Point, near Boothbay Harbor in Maine. I found it through dumb luck, seized on the little private beach and the long dock, then began to add and subtract. The golf course was an invention, and the pinewood came from ancient memories of my Girl Scout camp in Pennsylvania. I was forced to subtract a flying blue bug that I just couldn’t work into the story and a beautiful stone chapel I was dying to use. But I couldn’t have Dominic skateboarding on hallowed ground.

 4. Is there one Penderwick sister to whom you feel the greatest connection? Has that changed as the books have progressed?

JB: I go back and forth between Skye and Batty, depending on which of them is struggling the most. (I connect with struggle.) Batty had a relatively easy time of it at Point Mouette, but Skye…didn’t. So right now I’m still feeling pretty Skye-ish. As I get deeper into the fourth book I’ll reconnect with Batty, who has lots to work out in that one.

5. Each of the books is a satisfying stand-alone while also being very much part of a whole. Can you share clues about further Penderwick adventures?

JB: The fourth, which I’m working on now, will take place five-and-a-half years after the end of the third book, which means that the three older sisters will be teenagers. However, to keep the book middle grade, everything that happens will be seen through the eyes of Batty and Ben, who will be eleven and eight respectively. Thus, two writing challenges: to portray the life of teenagers without getting inside their minds and to channel an eight-year-old boy, which I certainly never was. Challenges aside, it’s going to be fun to write about Rosalind, Skye, and Jane as teenagers. Jane will finally get her hands on all the books she hasn’t been allowed to read all these years, including Proust, which she’s reading (slowly) in the original French.

From the June 2011 issue of Notes from the Horn Book. For more on Notes — and to sign up — click here.

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Photo: Laurie Gaboard, The Litchfield County Times

Marilyn Singer had already demonstrated considerable versatility of poetic talents when in 2010 she debuted a new verse form in Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse (6–10 years, Dutton). This year she is back with a companion, Follow Follow: A Book of Reverso Poems (6–10 years, Dial; both books illustrated by Josée Masse), in which another cast of folkloric characters get the “reverso” treatment.

1. You invented this verse form and named it. How did you come up with the name?

MS: A reverso is made up of two poems. You read the first down and it says one thing. When you reverse the order of the lines for the second poem, changing only punctuation and capitalization, it says something else. It has to say something different; otherwise it’s what one kid called a “same-o.” When I first started writing these poems, my friend Amy called them “up-and-down poems.” I liked that, but it was a bit of a mouthful. I wanted to use the word reverse, and my husband Steve Aronson, who is one smart cookie, said, “You need something Italianate. How about ‘reverso’?” He gets credit for the name.

2. Do you think folk literature has a particular susceptibility to this poetic form?

MS: At first I didn’t stick exclusively to folk literature. But many of the poems were based on fairy tales, so when I showed that initial batch to an esteemed editor, she suggested I base the entire collection on fairy tales. That struck me as a great idea because fairy tales have strong narratives, and I felt that I could find two sides to one character, or two points in time for that character (such as Cinderella before and at the ball), or two different characters, perhaps with opposing points of view. So far, I’ve written two books of fairy-tale reversos — Mirror Mirror and Follow Follow — and I’m planning to do a third volume based on Greek myths.

However, I don’t think that folk literature is the only possible genre that translates well into reversos. The main thing, really, is to be able to present two sides of someone or something. My forthcoming book, Rutherford B., Who Was He?: Poems About Our Presidents (Disney-Hyperion; illus. by John Hendrix), includes a reverso about a man who viewed himself quite differently from the way the press and public did: Richard Nixon.

3. What was the most difficult poem to write in Follow Follow? And what folktale left you defeated?

MS: Oy, a number of them were difficult. I recall several failed attempts at the title poem, “Follow Follow,” about the Pied Piper. The one about the goose that laid the golden eggs was also tricky. One tale I could not turn into a reverso was “The Fisherman and His Wife.” I couldn’t flip either the husband’s or the wife’s voice into that of the fish.

4. What is the most challenging verse form you’ve attempted to write?

MS: Villanelles are tough, but I was able to write one about flamingos in A Strange Place to Call Home: The World’s Most Dangerous Habitats & the Animals That Call Them Home (Chronicle). Sonnets are also challenging, but I’ve done a few of those as well, including one about mountain goats (in the same book). I have never attempted a sestina — and I may never attempt a sestina. And then there are those darn reversos…

5. Do I sing the book’s title to the tune of “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” or “Try to Remember”?

MS: Well, would you rather sound like a Munchkin or El Gallo? I don’t suggest trying it to Crispian St. Peters’s “The Pied Piper.”

Actually, it took longer to come up with the book’s title than to write the actual poems. The Pied Piper poem originally had a different name, but when we (my editor, the publisher, the marketing department, etc.) all agreed on Follow Follow as the title of the book, it also became the name of the poem. And since it’s a “follow-up” to Mirror Mirror, I think it works, don’t you?

From the April 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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Photo: Jean Hobbs

Since 1988 and the publication of Changes in Latitudes, Will Hobbs has been one of the preeminent adventure novelists writing for young people. Typically, his stories feature a young protagonist confronting some challenge or other posed by the natural world; in his new book Never Say Die, a boy and his adult half-brother face all manner of danger in the remote reaches of the Yukon Territory.

1. You’ve been writing for young people for twenty-five years. How have your books changed over time?

WH: Over the years I find myself writing with more suspense, more dramatic tension. A novel is a big commitment for young people accustomed to clicking from one thing to the next. My goal is to provide kids a slam-dunk experience in the rewards of sustained reading.

2. I’ve never been camping in my life and find the prospect terrifying. When you’re alone in the wilderness in a tent at night, what are YOU most afraid of?

WH: Backpacking in Colorado’s high country I feel snug in my sleeping bag and have no trouble sawing logs. If I’m camping alongside a thunderous rapid on a whitewater river, I don’t sleep well at all, on account of the wildly difficult rowing I do in my dreams. Tenting in grizzly country in Alaska or Canada has me repeating a mantra from Frank Herbert’s Dune: “Fear is the mind-killer.”

3. Where would you most like to get lost?

WH: In a cave in Madagascar riddled with sunken forests and subterranean streams. On second thought, I just remembered about the man-eating crocodiles.

4. What is the most convincing evidence of climate change you’ve seen?

WH: It’s in my home mountains, the San Juans of southwestern Colorado, where I’ve been backpacking since the mid-seventies. Periods of extreme winter cold used to keep over-wintering conifer beetle larvae to a minimum. The warming climate has produced beetle infestations that have killed huge swaths of spruce forest. Warmer summer temperatures above timberline have wreaked havoc on the lushness and diversity of the alpine tundra. If trends continue, climate scientists are predicting the brown-out of the alpine zone in the Rockies. What a sad prospect, the high country without its riot of wildflowers.

5. Your books thus far have all taken place in the western parts of the Americas. Any desire to wander further afield?

WH: On my author travels I’ve been tantalized by many a teacher and librarian offering me story ideas from the Adirondacks down to Lake Okeechobee, but I haven’t followed up. Maybe some day!

From the March 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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1. How did you divide the work on Eve & Adam?

Michael: We keep promising ourselves to pay attention to process when we work together so that we can answer these questions intelligently. But it never works out in an organized way. If you imagine the full list of all possible methods, we could probably tick off everything on the list.

Katherine: It’s actually simple. I did the good parts.

Michael: That’s what I meant to say. She did the good parts.

2. If you could genetically modify one little thing about yourself what would it be? Dare I ask what you might modify in each other?

Katherine: Hmmm. Normally I might say I’d get rid of my OCD gene, but everyone needs a little weirdness, so I might just keep it. Maybe I’d change my nearsightedness because I hate wearing glasses. As for changing Michael, I would genetically manipulate him to have a greater tolerance for small dogs and the cheerful noises they make.

Michael: What would I change about Katherine? Seriously, you expect me to suggest my wife might have a physical flaw? I know you’re newly married, Roger, but take some advice: don’t ever admit to a flaw in the spouse. You’ll never hear the end of it. No, no, no, I’m an experienced husband; I’m not falling for that. As for a change in myself, I might have once said I wish I hadn’t gone bald, but now I kind of like the shaved head look. So I would change my attraction to sweets. Is that genetic?

2.5 Eve finds love in Frankenstein’s lab. What’s YOUR story?

Katherine: The lab was in Austin, Texas, not Transylvania or Tiburon, which we used for Eve & Adam. Other than that, it was pretty much the Frankenstein story.

Michael: Katherine was just finishing college with some made-up major. I was just coming off a hobo phase where I’d been living under a freeway overpass off I35. I got a job waiting tables and rented the apartment next-door to hers on Pearl Street, just a few blocks off campus. One day I saw this girl through the window and decided I had to go meet her. So I knocked on her door and pretended I needed a can opener. We went to the late, lamented Les Amis for a beer and twenty-four hours later we were living together. And we’ve been together for thirty-three years.

Katherine: Love at first sight. It’s a bit cliché. We apologize for that.

From the February 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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Photo: Taeeun Yoo

Jonathan Bean won a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for At Night, a perfect little picture book celebrating night in the city. With Building Our House (5–8 years, Farrar), he moves to the country (and a much larger trim size!) to show us a home and a family growing from the ground up. Based on the author-illustrator’s own childhood, the book combines a practical introduction to house-building with a commemoration of family bonds.

1. Were your parents hippies?

JB: My parents tell me they were not hippies. There were certain facets of that culture they didn’t identify with. For them, getting back to the earth was related to pragmatic issues such as the thriftiness of growing their own vegetables and not wanting to be weighed down by a mortgage. Though, during the seventies, they did subscribe to Mother Earth News, so . . .

2. Would you consider yourself a town mouse or a country mouse?

JB: In either location I need a dose of the other to keep me sane. That wasn’t always the case. Cities were once very frightening to me. I recall returning to the country from my first New York City apartment search and thinking, “I do not belong there!” So, it was thrilling to discover how much I loved the city. Now that I am once again in a quieter locale, I can’t go more than two months without a dose of urban energy.

3. How did you divvy up the storytelling in Building Our House between the words and the pictures?

JB: At some point, looking at one of my textless dummies, I realized that the basic story could be easily followed with images only; they carry much of the process information. However, words were better at providing anecdotal details, like the parents buying land from a farmer, the owls calling, or the bad winter weather arriving early. These things would be prohibitively complicated to express in images.

4. What is the most useful home repair tip you know? 

JB: I know from personal experience that humming a soothing melody helps unclog a drain.

5. On the last spread, the first night in their new house, the family reads a book together. What book do you think it is?

JB: Wow, there were so many books we read together as a family. A few stand out, though, because I recall my mother being so moved by particular passages she had trouble getting through them. One of those was Where the Red Fern Grows, which has a very tragic ending that I remember affected me for days. In this case, since my sister is smiling, I’m going to say it’s Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House. The ending of that story, when the Little House finds itself peacefully resettled in the country, seems very appropriate for this occasion!

From the January 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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Steve Sheinkin, author of the 2011 Boston Globe–Horn Book Nonfiction Award–winning The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism, & Treachery (12–16 years, Flash Point/Roaring Brook), is fast emerging as one of the most compelling writers of narrative nonfiction for young readers today. His books, packed with action and drama, combine meticulous research with page-turning narration. Sheinkin’s latest — Bomb: The Race to Build — and Steal — the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon (12–16 years, Flash Point/Roaring Brook)— delves into Cold War history, science, politics — and spies.

1. We know of your longtime interest in Benedict Arnold — what drew you to the story of the first atomic bomb?

Steve Sheinkin: Unlike with Arnold, I wasn’t obsessed with this story for years before writing the book. What really hooked me was a Smithsonian magazine article about George Koval, a little-known Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project. I dove into Koval’s story, even getting a digital copy of his FBI file. Turns out they suspected him of spying, and investigated him in the 1950s, but he’d already slipped back behind the Iron Curtain. Fascinating stuff, though I couldn’t find out enough to make a book of it. I’d hit a dead end, but a lucky one, because the search had led me to Ted Hall and the other spy stories from Los Alamos, and that became the basis for Bomb.

2. Your approach in Bomb is unusual — you start with the micro and move to the macro. Why did you decide to look at your subject this way?

SS: A teacher in film class once told us to try shooting a scene “from specific to general,” meaning show something eye-catching first and then, gradually, pull back to let viewers know what’s going on. It’s a common technique, but the teacher’s description really helped me visualize it. I turned out not to be very good at making movies, but some of what I learned about structuring scenes and transitioning between them is applicable in my writing life. When I do school visits, kids are not shy about telling me they think history is boring — which is a total lie! That’s why I like to begin some sections with action or interesting scenes that draw them in.

3. You keep a multitude of characters and their stories up in the air, so to speak. How did you accomplish this juggling feat?

SS: That’s a good analogy. Writing this book did feel like juggling, which I can’t actually do. My secret: index cards. I realize that’s very twentieth century, but it works for me. When I know everything I want to happen in a book, I break the story into little pieces and write one piece on each card. Then I can arrange and rearrange the cards, kind of like puzzle pieces, until it all flows.

4. Bomb has been described as a “nonfiction thriller.” How do you create the feel of fiction without crossing the line into making stuff up?

SS: I was well trained in my many years in the textbook world, where I learned to obsessively back up every quote and fact. With books like Bomb, I try to track down several sources for each event, hoping to find tiny details that can help make things more compelling and visual. Sometimes you get lucky — like the scene with the Hungarian physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner searching for Einstein on Long Island. In that case, both Szilard and Wigner wrote their own versions of what happened. More often you end up wishing you knew more — I’d pay big money to listen in on one of the Los Alamos dorm room conversations between Klaus Fuchs and Richard Feynman! Either way, I put quote sources in the back of the book, but not sources for each fact — standard procedure for narrative nonfiction. If anyone wants to know where I got something, they’re more than welcome to email me.

5. How emotionally involved did you become in the story? For instance, I’m still amazed that Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, the two scientists who literally handed the Russians the full design of the atom bomb, got off pretty much scot-free while Robert Oppenheimer was rewarded with the destruction of his reputation.

SS: I think the Ted Hall story — the existence of this eighteen-year-old spy at Los Alamos — was the most stunning to me, and it’s one kids seem particularly intrigued by. And, yes, I did find myself becoming emotionally involved, especially with Oppenheimer. Some biographers describe him as self-destructive, and he did do some foolish things, but I agree that the U.S. government kind of screwed him over. He was such a complex, confusing character.  I think that if Shakespeare could choose to write a historical play about just one American, he’d pick Oppenheimer.

From the November 2012 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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Photo: Vania Stoyanova

Libba Bray sure gets around. The last we saw of her she was playing Survivor with a bunch of Beauty Queens (Scholastic, 14–17 years) on a mysterious island; before that she was Going Bovine (Delacorte, 14–17 years) on a crazy road trip across the country accompanied by a dying teenage boy and a guardian angel (and winning the Printz Award for her troubles). With The Diviners (Little, Brown, 14–17 years), Bray enthusiastically throws herself — and readers — into the demi-monde (and other-monde) of 1920s New York City. I take five with the jazz baby.

1. What’s the most useful bit of 1920s slang you’ve picked up?

Libba Bray: If you’re in a “juice joint,” it’s good to know that you can order some “hooch” or “coffin varnish” (just make sure that’s a euphemism and not actual bad booze) so that you can get “ossified” or “blotto.” And if you’re with a “cuddler,” it’s good to know whether it’s “cash or check” (kiss now or kiss later). In general, I love the compliments: “You’re the elephant’s eyebrows and the cat’s particulars!” But that’s because I’m so virtuous, Roger.

2. If you could have a supernatural power, what would it be? Choose carefully.

LB: The ability to finish writing a book on time.

3. In constructing a story that will be told in a series of books, how do you decide where each volume will leave off?

LB: With the book’s main plot arc settled but with plenty of dangling threads to pull us into the next installment. Or around page 578. You know, I’m just going to shoot for page 578 from now on. That’s my marker.

4. What’s the spookiest place in New York City?

LB: Hmmm, besides the inside of my mind? There are lots of options, but I’m going to have to go with the Dakota. Rosemary’s Baby was filmed there for a reason. It looks like a spooky gothic fortress, and I can just imagine it as the home of Satanists bent on raising the Antichrist. They’d have to be the 1% of Satanists, though, because the Dakota is not cheap. (Then again, you’d hate to think that you sold your soul for a fifth-floor walk-up in Queens.)

5. To quote your heroine Evie, “Have you ever known something that you were afraid to tell?”

LB: Yes. Often. Somehow, I manage to put those scary secrets into books.

From the October 2012 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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Photo by Rachel Zelinsky

Having illustrated more than thirty books, Paul O. Zelinsky is a master of just about every artistic medium. He won the Caldecott Medal in 1998 for Rapunzel, a dark story illustrated with lush, realistic oil paintings. But most recently, he collaborated with Kelly Bingham on the side-splittingly funny Z Is for Moose, in which the exuberant (and impatient) main character barges in on every letter of the alphabet. (2–5 years).

1. Many years ago you wrote a piece for the Horn Book Magazine that told why your favorite medium was oils. Has that changed?

Paul O. Zelinsky: Not really. I wrote about the ways one medium after another tried to trip me up, drying into different colors or textures from those I’d laid down, or lightening overnight from the values that I worked so hard to get; and how oils are not only sensually pleasing to use, but have been a reliable and forgiving medium. I’ve always had an easier time fixing my mistakes in oils than in anything else.

I also wrote that I dabbled in Computer but couldn’t draw on it. This has changed. Now I am a Photoshop fiend, though I still use it not so much for original creation as for manipulation. While Photoshop doesn’t have a lovely smell — you don’t engage in a sort of physical dance with a material in the way you do with actual paint and paper — it takes forgiveness to a whole new level.

2. Z Is for Moose is so silly. Is there a secret to getting in the mood to create funny drawings?

PZ: Kelly Bingham’s manuscript was all I needed; it was hilarious, and almost everything you see in the book was already there. But I don’t think I giggled while I worked. In fact, if you could have watched me the whole time on a studiocam, I doubt you’d have been able to tell that I was making funny pictures. Getting a composition to look right, figuring out what’s wrong and what could be better — these things are engaging but not lighthearted. It’s not actually amusing to spend your time speculating about whether a picture would be funnier if Moose’s head were tilted differently and then find the right tilt; or to draw Zebra’s eyes again and again until the expression looks like what worked in a first rough sketch. Drawing funny actually feels pretty much the same as drawing exquisite or jaunty or soporific or tender or heroic or you-name-it.

3. There’s no shortage of alphabet books, and part of what makes yours stand out is the meta-aspect. Do you think a straightforward ABC book still offers possibilities for illustrators? Or is the fun in the winking?

PZ: I imagine there will always be fresh takes on the form that don’t step back a level and refer to the making of the book itself. Anyway, from the point of view of very young children, nothing is old or hackneyed. Isn’t it important for them to be exposed to the most basic forms of things? Variations should come second. And winking third.

I want to say again that I can’t take credit for the meta-aspect of Z Is for Moose, or indeed for almost any of its aspects. That is all Kelly Bingham. I feel lucky to have been asked to make the pictures.

That said, stepping back and up a level is something I’ve always liked doing — before I gradually ceased my own painting in favor of illustration only, the still lifes I made were all self-referential in their own way, and I’m not sure if that was a good thing. Sometimes I feel there may be too much winking meta-stuff going on in general: after a point, self-reference can become tiresome and lose its cleverness. I think Z Is for Moose gets away with any and all winks because behind the meta–picture book (and behind the alphabet book), there is a story about frustration and friendship that feels warm and true. 

4. E. L. Konigsburg once spoke about how important it is for book creators to spend time “doing nothing.” Do you too find that your time away from the drawing board helps your work?

PZ: I am capable, actually, of doing nothing without getting up from my drawing table. My studio windows look out on a lovely churchyard where preschool children play in the mornings and afternoons. Right now it’s early evening. Dogwoods are in full bloom, and the flowering cherries have just finished; pink petals lie in drifts on the brick paths. The grass is intensely green and rain clouds are looming…

I hope nobody is watching me on a studiocam.

I like to tell myself that the time I spend not working magically contributes to the quality of the work I will eventually get to. But I don’t really believe it.

5. What was it like growing up at the end of the alphabet?

PZ: How good of you to ask. I grew up as both a Z and the shortest kid in my class, and it was a double whammy of coming last. Always being put at the end of the line in every school event did not feel good. At times I have tried to make a campaign of it. All I’d want is to reorder the alphabet. I wouldn’t insist on Z coming first; I’d be happy in the middle, around where N is now. What is an N anyway but a Z turned sideways?

My first illustrated book was by Avi, whose secret last name also comes very late in the alphabet. He threw it over for A and seems to have done quite well. The second book I illustrated was by the early-twentieth-century Russian writer Boris Zhitkov. I will never forget walking into the glamorous Scribner’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue to see if they were carrying that book, How I Hunted the Little Fellows. I looked and looked and finally saw a copy near the floor, way off to the right, in a shadowy corner under a counter shelf.

Even if Z Is for Moose hadn’t been a wonderful manuscript, I would have had to take it, with a title like that. (Moose also happens to be the nickname my wife’s siblings gave her as a child.) What’s more, when I received it, the author’s name on the manuscript was Kelly Wightman. An alphabetical colleague, I thought. But what did Kelly do between submitting her manuscript and getting published? She went and married a Bingham, changed her name, and jumped from number twenty-three to number two. I can’t really blame her, though.

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Photo by Drew Nelson

To tell the complex story of her great-uncle, bookseller Lewis Michaux, 2010 Coretta Scott King Author Award–winner (for Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal) Vaunda Micheaux Nelson employs an amalgamation of historical research, family stories, and her own imagination. No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller is a uniquely collaged novel, and so I asked Vaunda just how she put it all together.

1. No Crystal Stair is an aesthetically daring combination of fiction and nonfiction, word and image. How is it different from what you imagined it would be when you began?

Vaunda Micheaux Nelson: I set out to write a straight biography for teens. In my early drafts I used quotes by Lewis as chapter headings and envisioned photos as part of the final work. But at some point in the process, and after feedback from people I respect, I saw that it wasn’t working. Unavailable and conflicting information left many crucial questions unanswered. More important, I didn’t feel I’d told Lewis’s story in a way that would move readers to care about and understand this amazing man and the significance of what he achieved. After the project evolved into the “documentary fiction” format, I found more pleasure in the storytelling. It allowed me to explore Lewis in a deeper way and to get to know the people around him more intimately. Sometimes you have to do an awful lot of writing to figure out exactly what it is you have to say. The project may have taken fifteen years, but as I think back on the process, I realize it needed those years. I needed those years to become a better writer. And I made exciting discoveries along the way that led me in unexpected and rewarding directions. I’m relieved the book is finished, but I miss being immersed in Lewis’s world.

2. Lewis Michaux was a supporter of such still-controversial men as Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Marcus Garvey — names you don’t see in children’s books nearly as often as Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Rosa Parks. Do you think we have a tendency to play it safe in African American history for young readers?

VMN: I don’t know that I would call Lewis a supporter of Elijah Muhammad. But to address your question, the importance of, and emphasis on, individuals and events in our history are often determined by the media. People like Dr. King and Rosa Parks received greater coverage because they were more palatable to the general public, or have been portrayed as so by the press. There have been a handful of books for youth about Marcus Garvey. I could find none on Elijah Muhammad, though I believe he had a smaller circle of followers than either Malcolm X or Garvey. There is a respectable offering about Malcolm X, but, as you say, nothing like what is available on Dr. King. Garvey and Malcolm were out of the comfort zone, even for some blacks. They were explosive, enigmatic personalities. Most of the grownups in my world saw Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement as extreme and Malcolm X as intimidating. I was eleven years old when Malcolm X was murdered. I’m sure it was covered by the media, but I don’t recall the kind of national mourning that came with the assassinations of President Kennedy and Dr. King. Both of these events saturated the news. I don’t know if publishers are playing it safe so much as looking at the market, a market that is strongly influenced by media, more now than ever. As Lewis said, “If you’re in the book business, you’ve got to sell books.” It’s up to us — the literary community — to help create a demand for topics we find important. I’m not suggesting that publishers don’t take risks. They often do and I’m grateful for that. But they do have to balance the risks with the safe bets in order to stay in business.

3. What bookstore was most formative in your development as a reader?

VMN: There was no bookstore in our small town, nor was there a library. My parents were key in my development as a reader. My mother read to us nightly, and my father introduced us to the work of poets such as Langston Hughes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman. And Dad wrote poetry himself. Mommy took us to the bookmobile when it came every other week, which I loved, but I didn’t really find a bookstore that had a major effect on helping build my reservoir of children’s literature until, as an adult, I was introduced to Pinocchio, a bookstore for children in Pittsburgh. I worked there in the 1980s and read probably a thousand books during that time. The store no longer exists, but I will always be grateful to owner Marilyn Hollinshead for all that I learned while at her literary paradise. I wrote my first book and made the decision to go to library school while there.

4. What would a twenty-first-century National Memorial African Bookstore look like?

VMN: Hypothetical questions are always difficult for me, but I’ll take a shot. I’m pretty old-fashioned and often feel I don’t belong in the technological world. With the decline of independent bookstores, I can’t imagine a National Memorial African Bookstore like Lewis’s existing today unless the owner is doing it for love, not profit. A twenty-first-century National Memorial African Bookstore would still offer books by and about blacks and, of course, there would be tons of discussion through blogs and other online networks. Lewis would surely get a kick out of having such platforms from which to share his two cents. Instead of street speakers, discourse would be broadcast through Skype or YouTube. The Internet would enable Lewis to reach more people and perhaps offer a larger selection. Sadly, the heart, the spirit, the human interaction, the one-on-one, and the excitement that came with a rally at Harlem Square would be lost.

5. What is the most important thing being a children’s librarian has taught you about writing for children?

VMN: To not underestimate what kids can handle. They’re smart and beg to be challenged. I hope my writing stretches them. Sometimes we make the mistake of believing young readers need to have everything spelled out, that they can’t deal with subtlety. That which is left unsaid is often what gets them thinking beyond the text. The reading process becomes an interactive one, a give and take, a private affair that adds to a repository of experience they can draw from as they negotiate life.

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