The Wall Street Journal-20080119-WEEKEND JOURNAL- A Late-Blooming Talent In Full Flower
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080119
WEEKEND JOURNAL; A Late-Blooming Talent In Full Flower
Lord Randolph Churchill once summarized the career of Benjamin Disraeli in one line: "Failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure, ultimate and complete victory." The parallel is not exact and might sound a little cruel, but it nicely encapsulates the career, so far, of the fabulously talented children's book author Laura Amy Schlitz, who this past week won the 2008 Newbery Medal for most distinguished contribution to children's literature.
Haven't heard of her? A year and a half ago, almost no one had -- apart from the parents and children of the Park School in Baltimore. It was while working there as a librarian that Ms. Schlitz, something of a frustrated thespian, wrote the series of monologues set in a 13th-century English village that would eventually become "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!" -- the remarkable and poignant book that has just won her the Newbery.
"I'm still in a daze of incredulity," Ms. Schlitz says. "I haven't begun to think through what the Newbery might change in my life."
What the prize changes, of course, is the cover of the book of anyone who wins. Booksellers immediately stamp gold foil medallions on every copy, and that imprimatur not only secures the book's place for decades on innumerable library and school shelves, but also nudges it toward the canon of children's greats.
As with any prestigious award, the Newbery also brings new readers to the author's other works, which in this case is a particularly welcome effect. Ms. Schlitz has a rich and humane style of writing, with stories that manage to be both sparkling and substantial. Better still, her storytelling is a return to the moral traditions of the greatest and most enduring tales, yet with not the slightest taste of cod liver oil nor any of the tiresome left-leaning didacticism that has characterized so much writing for children since the late 1960s.
"She is a gift that has fallen into my lap," says Mary Lee Donovan, Ms. Schlitz's editor at the publishing house Candlewick.
How Ms. Schlitz fell into that lap was the happy accident dreamed of by millions of aspiring writers. Urged by parents at the Park School to find a publisher for the kind of medieval Spoon River Anthology she'd written for fifth-graders to perform, Ms. Schlitz sent unsolicited copies to 11 publishers. It was rejected 10 times but spotted in the slush pile of the 11th by a quick-witted employee and immediately seized upon as something wonderful.
In this instance, the quick wits belonged to Danielle Sadler, Ms. Donovan's assistant at Candlewick. And the manuscript would become this year's Newbery winner.
"It was so obviously the work of someone brilliant," recalls Ms. Donovan. "Here was this blinding talent new to children's books. I kept thinking, 'Why hasn't she done this sooner?'"
That was all seven years ago, however. Troubles with first one and then another illustrator kept forcing back publication of the manuscript that had caught Candlewick's eye.
In the meantime, Ms. Schlitz kept writing. In the summer of 2006, Candlewick published "The Hero Schliemann," an illustrated biography for middle-grade children about the willful, grandiose explorer who discovered the site of ancient Troy. Shortly thereafter came "A Drowned Maiden's Hair," a charming and mordant melodrama for older readers about an orphan adopted by three old ladies to act in their phony seances.
Last August, "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!" arrived in bookstores, having finally found its ideal illustrator in Robert Byrd, whose delicate and amusing village scenes were inspired by the Munich- Nuremberg manuscript, an illuminated poem from medieval Germany.
In the introduction, Ms. Schlitz explains to children how historical novels had inspired her to see the past not as a dull pageant of dreary dead people, but as a thrilling story. (The introduction also, incidentally, conveys her vigorous prose style.) "People in historical novels loved, fought, and struggled to survive," she writes. "They died violently; they were beset with invaders and famine and plague. They wore splendid clothes or picturesque rags. They performed miracles of courage and strength just to get something to eat. It was from novels that I learned that history was the story of survival: even something that sounded boring, like crop rotation or inheritance law, might be a matter of life and death to a hungry peasant."
Then, two months after "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!" was released, Candlewick published Ms. Schlitz's picture-book collaboration with illustrator Max Grafe of "The Bearskinner," an obscure Brothers Grimm story about a desolate soldier who takes a wager from the Devil.
This last book, with its explicit engagement of large ideas about appetite, temptation, degradation, redemption and pity, in some ways most sharply demonstrates the intelligence and heft of Ms. Schlitz's work. There's nothing dumbed-down or patronizing here; indeed, all her work so far reveals an understanding that children respond to situations of risk, daring, cussedness and cleverness, and that even grade-schoolers have inner lives.
Ms. Schlitz says her choices as a writer are informed by the experience of telling folktales to children at the Park School for the past 17 years.
"Folklore has a moral center to it. Folklore is always, always, always on the side of the underdog," she says, "and children have a natural instinct towards justice. They feel indignation at needless cruelty and wistfulness about acts of mercy and kindness."
At age 52, with a long, gray ponytail and a penchant for swishy, gypsy-like skirts, Laura Amy Schlitz does look every bit the joyful late-bloomer.
Following the Disraeli pattern she had experienced years of discouragement. Rejected as a government-funded traveling troubadour for a Carter-era program after college (she hadn't been unemployed for the requisite 15 months), she went to work in a library and wrote on the side.
Partial success in the form of a pseudonymous comic romance for adult readers was followed by failure to sell a massive historical novel that took her four years to write. "I could not find a home for it. It was breaking my heart," Ms. Schlitz says.
"I tried for years to get an agent, because I was told you needed an agent. The agent-hunting process was grim indeed. I didn't stop writing, but I did give up on the idea of being published," she says.
That, as they say, was then. This is now: Still employed at the school library in Baltimore, Ms. Schlitz is at work on a middle-grade novel for 2009 that her editor at Candlewick promises will be "really something special."
Personally, I can't wait.
---
Mrs. Gurdon is the children's book critic for The Wall Street Journal.
