It’s very delightful to me to see kids open up to their writing and using it as a form of expression. And how I even got involved in writing for children. I was working a medical writer for a children’s hospital and it’s where I met my husband. And Chris had been a magician as a child and he and I developed this volunteer project in the hospital where once a week we would visit kids who were chronically ill.
So we got to know these kids well over time because they were so often in the hospital. And we would make it very playful but we would, Chris would involve the kids through magic. And we’d talk to them about their experiences in the hospital and their families and things like that. Help them to write a poem or a story. And for many of those kids, that was their one form of expression.
They were in the hospital constantly, they couldn’t scream, they couldn’t run around, they couldn’t get angry and hit things because they might hurt themselves. So they had at their disposal very limited forms of expressing strong feelings, anger and fear and bewilderment and joy. But writing was one way that they could and it was actually working with those kids and just admiring their courage and liking their playfulness and their sassiness that I decided I might like to try writing for children.
So, that was sort of my involvement in even thinking about myself as a writer for children was through becoming connected with kids in their writing. So in a way I was sort of teaching writing for children before I was a writer for children.