Previous page

Page - 8

Then, my oldest son got married and soon I became a grandmother. Little Rochelle, that dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, was born with spina bifida, an opening in the back and other complications that caused nerve damage and her to be paralyzed from the waist down. We had our season of mourning for her loss, but soon were captured by her personality and all the many things she could do. She began reading at an early age and her mother, Carmen, who supplied her with books, lamented the fact that handicapped children were usually portrayed in the books as poor little crippled children or the story was about a miracle: and now the child can walk! Neither applied to our Rochelle.

Carmen asked me, "Will you write a book for her? One where a handicapped child just happens to be the main character, too. You're an author. You can do it."

Now, if I didn't like my daughters-in-law so much, I could stay out of a lot of things. But I do. I let Carmen pressure me into action and the result was The Balancing Girl. That became such a success, my other grandchildren, later on, started demanding their book. And I was forced into writing Margaret's Moves, which has a lot of Justin in it. And next A Smooth Move, which tells things Chad's way. Then Rehearsal for the Bigtime, which lets the world have a peak at Rebecca.

Not knowing when to back off, I even yielded my heart to a neighbor child. I looked out my window one day to see little Misty Spurlock running around playing with her daddy and dragging with her a toy monkey. Misty is a cutie, a delight, and the victim of Down syndrome. I had to do a book for her to star in. I just had to. So I wrote Where's Chimpy? and editor Kathy Tucker bought it. She worked right along with the photographer, Diane Schmidt, and me in using Misty and her father in the illustrations. Newspapers and television picked up on the story and Misty really did become a star, and loves every moment of it.

The year I was doing my master's thesis at Columbia College, I also finished a novel I'd been working on for some time. Editor Frank Sloan heard of it and asked to see the manuscript of Tall Enough to Own the World. It's about a good boy, a fifth grader, who does a lot of acting-out because he is too different to be happy; he can't read, I feel it is one of the biggest tragedies in this world that any child be denied the joy of reading. Give me a soapbox, please. My stepmother believed that books complicated life, especially for women, and once she pulled a book from my hand and threw it into the heater. After that I hid to read, inside a huge old wardrobe during the winter and in the top of a tree during the summer. In one it was too dark for me to be found, the other involved her looking up to find me, and she never thought to do that. Anyway, my grandson Jeremy said this special book on reading would be his book. It didn't matter that it was not about him. He's a fine reader and approves such a book.

I have four more grandchildren to go, Amber, Christine, Collin, and Joshua. When the pressure gets on me tight enough, you'll see a book for each of them. In the mean time, I've returned to my Missouri stories, doing a trilogy around a fifteen-year-old boy. A tribute to my brothers who were special to me.

I've lived in two very different cultures and very different books come out of them. The material determines my style. Some people find it difficult to imagine the same woman who wrote Naomi also wrote Where's Chimpy? There's no mystery to it, I'm simply a diverse woman. My husband says there's never a dull moment. He's never known what to expect next from me.

Previous page

Page - 8