I’ll tell you about the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators in a very shortened version and I’ll give you the kind of sanitized, cleaned up version. You know, when I – after I graduated college, I came down to Los Angeles to be a writer and so the first job I got was as a comedy writer on a television show and I really didn’t like it.
It just felt like it wasn’t for me. It was a bunch of guys eating Chinese food late into the night and shooting baskets. It wasn’t for me. So I quit and I went to the unemployment office because I didn’t have a job. I was an English major, you know? And so if you believe in destiny at all, you would have to — this would be the final convincing argument. I looked on the bullet board of jobs listed and there was one that said children’s book writer wanted.
And I thought well that doesn’t happen, but it was. It was a federally funded research and development lab that was creating a reading series for kids and they wanted – they had all kinds of educational psychologists who were doing the word text skills and the reading pedagogy but they needed two writers to write the stories. So you had to audition, so I wrote a story and I was selected as one of two.
So when we got in – the other writer was a young man named Stephen Mooser so they put us in an office together and they said now what you’ll be writing is 110 short stories, controlled vocabulary all the way up through novels for fifth graders, a K—5 curriculum. I said okay great. They left the room and I turned to him and said I don’t know how to do this, so we said well no problem, we’ll go to a conference, we’ll take a class, we’ll study children —
At least we had the good sense to know that this was a special skill, children’s book writing. You didn’t just – and there wasn’t anything so I was 21 and I said well let’s throw a conference so I wrote – I went to the library, worked with the children’s librarian and read all the great children’s books that were on the shelves and I picked my 10 favorites and I wrote those authors, Dr. Seuss, Sid Fleischman, Jane Yolen, you know, Judy Blume and said we’re throwing a conference and would you be available to come.
When I look at it now, it’s just a laughable thing, but, you know, out of those 10 letters, I got 10 responses. Ten wrote back. It starts to tell you something about the world of people who create children’s books. This is an unusual world. And eight out of the 10 said yes. The only ones who said no were Dr. Seuss who wrote a rejection letter in rhyme which I still have and E.B. White who wrote Charlotte’s Web who was sick.
He died shortly thereafter and he said I think the old girl being Charlotte and I have to stay in the barn this summer. Anyway, so we threw a conference and here came Sid Fleischman and Jane Yolen and Don Freeman and we had – there were 35 people. We had no idea what we were doing but we fell in love. The whole community fell in love and there was no such organization at the time.
So that’s how it began. It’s now a lifetime later and there are over 25,000 members and basically everybody who writes and illustrates children’s books is a member and of the last 20 years I think we’ve sort of produced the next generation of children’s book authors and illustrators. They’ve all come up through the organization. It’s a non-profit and so it is a community.
We call it the tribe, you know, a really tight knit community of people who write and illustrate and publish for children. It’s a very unique peer group. Everyone is motivated by a longing to do good work, longing for the success of the next person, you know, a kind of altruism in terms of helping kids, helping schools, loving librarians. You know, this is a very unique community.
So the organization has thrived really kind of in spite of us, you know, it grew up, you know, it was kind of a crazy idea that was never intended to be this but because the community is such a heartfelt community and so bound by love that this organization has grown and flourished and I’m sure will continue to way beyond me.
