I’ve been in the book industry for 40 years, a third of that time was as a publisher and I was publisher of children’s books at Houghton. And a third of that time as a reviewer and I was editor-in-chief of the “Horn Book Magazine” and now a third of that time has been spent as an author. And I think this is the best part, but that’s I guess because I’m doing it on a daily basis.
And I always said that I did not have the talent to write for young readers. I mean that children’s book writing takes enormous talent and it takes, by the way, much more talent then writing for adults. I write for adults all the time, but writing for children really takes a kind of sophistication that I didn’t think that I had.
And Dinah Stevenson who has been in the industry also for many years, and once worked for me in fact, the minute I left to be a writer she started to bug me. I mean she would just… consistently bugging me and we’d have coffee together. And she would say three things: she would say, you love history, you love telling stories, and you love children. And she said, you have everything it takes to be a narrative, non-fiction writer. And why don’t you write a work of narrative nonfiction for me?
And I would say to her, Dinah you don’t understand, I don’t have the talent to write for children, I can only write for adults. And I would see her again and she would say, have you given more thought to what subject matter you would like to write about for children? And I would say, Dinah, you don’t get it.
And the day she won both the Newbery and the Caldecott which she did one year, I sent her a thank-you note and what she sent back to me was, have you given any more thought to what book you want? And I was about to send back a really snarky reply to say, don’t you get it, I can’t write for children? And then I thought, wait a minute, she just won the Newbery and Caldecott, maybe she sees something in me that I don’t see. What if maybe I did have the talent to write for children? What would I want to write about?
I’ve always been fascinated by Civil War history, I’m a bit of an armchair Civil War buff. I go tromp around battlefields in Virginia when I come to Washington, DC if I have an opportunity to do that. And I have traced ancestors over various battlefields. And suddenly I picked up about 10 years ago, I picked up a book, one of the first academic studies of the close to 1000 women who fought in the Civil War, in disguise. And I thought, I’ve never read this story and I never encountered this story as a young woman and I would love to have known about this. I really, you know, would love to have known that as many as 1000 women just disguised themselves as men and went off to the battlefield. So I said to Dinah, okay, if I were going to write a book, that’s what I would write about.
And she said, here’s a contract basically. I mean she just handed me the contract and I spent the next five years kind of chasing down women and going to small historical societies and going down South to, you know, see battlefields and down to Gettysburg to see what I could find there. It was really like a puzzle of putting together the clues of really how these women’s lives played out overtime.
We know maybe a sentence or two sentences about each of them. They might just have appeared in a newspaper article and then they vanish. So I tried to put together a composite experience; what was it like, why did they do it, how did they have to, what did they have to do to pull off this disguise? You know, how did they train, what was fighting like, what was life like after they went back and had had all this freedom and suddenly they’re thrown back into being you know, in a very constrained society?
So I really tried to tell sort of that whole cycle of their lives. And I, it was published in a book called, “I’ll Pass for Your Comrade: Women Soldiers in the Civil War”. And I hope it gives young readers, boys and girls, a little different vision of who made up the troops when we look at the Civil War.