I was at drama school at the age of 19 to 22. When we went to Australia, I was employed by a teacher’s college to teach drama to teachers and also to teach them how to teach drama.
And even though I was doing the job that I was employed to do, the college said, “You know, we really do need you to have a B.A.”
And when I was doing the B.A., I decided to do children’s literature because our own daughter was an avid reading and I thought, well there must be books that I don’t know which I should find out about so that I can expand her literary horizons. And indeed there were.
And one of the
But one of the things that we had to do in children’s literature was to write a children’s book. Now I was thirty-one at this point and I truly thought that writing a children’s book
because I was an overachieving, mature student, you know, who really tried hard and wanted high distinctions all the time and, you know, was just out there doing her best.
And I thought, write a children’s book? You have to be joking. What kind of Mickey Mouse course is this that you have to write a children’s book? You know, the semester before, I had written a major essay on Milton’s Paradise Lost. I had read all of Milton’s Paradise Lost, all twelve books of it.
And then next semester, I was writing a children’s book. I thought, oh, my Lord. What have I gotten myself into? Well
the reason why our professor had asked us to do this was so that we would immediately at the beginning of the course, find out how difficult it was to write for children and to look up to the children’s writers that we were going to study instead of looking down on them.