The following is a transcript of an e-mail interview by editor Jamie Relth, Central Coast (California) Magazine, with children's book author Barbara Jean Hicks for an article called "Modern Mythmakers: Local Authors Spin Tales for Children," Central Coast Magazine, November 2007, volume 5, number 3. Visit CCM's website at http://www.centralcoastmag.com/.

1.       Where do you live?

Oxnard, a block from the beach.

2.       What do you do for a living?

Write; speak and conduct writing workshops in schools and libraries and at conferences, book fairs and family events.

3.       Who is in your family?

My day-to-day family is my partner Michael, our cat, Patches, and me. My parents and six siblings are also still very important in my life, even though we live far away from one another.

Have any family members been inspiration for characters in your books? Mentors in writing?

Oddly enough, it’s the EX-family members who’ve shown up in my books as characters! When I was working through the sadness and anger of my marriage breaking up, I wrote two romance novels with a kinder, gentler version of my ex-husband in the lead male role. My former cat, a beloved tuxedo named Miguel, inspired two of my four children’s books: I Like Black and White and The Secret Life of Walter Kitty. As for mentors, to hear Miguel tell it (see www.barbarajeanhicks.com/thecatsmeow.htm), I wouldn’t be a writer if not for him! My true writing mentors haven’t been my family members per se, but the books my parents read to me and the books I later read for myself. I learned to write, for the most part, by reading. I did have family role models, however: My dad published articles in trade journals, my older sister ran a textbook publishing company, and my older brother worked as a newspaper reporter/editor/reviewer, so I knew that writing was a professional possibility.

4.       How many books have you written?

Seventeen (thirteen romance novels and novellas and four children’s books).

5.       How long have you been an author?

I’ve been a writer since fourth grade, a published author since 1984, and a published children’s author since 2004.

What was your first published book? And what was that experience like for you?

Adult: An inspirational romance novel called For the Love of Mike, written in collaboration with my friend Patricia Forsythe Knoll. We found out by accident that Silhouette wanted to publish our book, at a writer’s workshop where one of their editors was speaking. We introduced ourselves so she could put faces to the manuscript we were hoping desperately she would read. Thinking we’d already been notified, she nodded and said, “Oh, right, you’re the ones we’re going to publish.” We literally screamed, and drove home from the workshop at breakneck speed because excitement tends to bring out the lead-foot in me.

Children’s: Jitterbug Jam: A Monster Tale. After 22 rejections from U.S. publishers, an editor at the British arm of Random House expressed an interest in the manuscript. (She’d had a hard day and it made her laugh out loud on the Tube on the way home from work.) But, she said, at 2300 words it was much too long for a picture book. “No more than 800 words, 1000 at the outside,” she instructed me. So I cut the story down to 998 words. “Good job,” she wrote back, “but you cut out all my favorite parts. Mind if I have a go at it?” Six months of back-and-forth later, we had the manuscript down to 1300 words and I had a contract. But it’s that first nibble I remember more than the actual sale; I think I knew, because my manuscript had made her laugh, that the sale was a done deal no matter how long the negotiations took. I had connected with her emotionally.

6.       Have any of your illustrators been local artists? (If so, I’d like to involve them, too.)

The illustrator for my most recent book, The Secret Life of Walter Kitty, is Dan Santat, who lives in L.A. (www.dantat.com).

7.       Had you always wanted to be a writer? Or was it an ambition that developed later in life?

I knew I wanted to be a writer from the time my 4^th grade teacher, Mrs. Green, gave a class assignment to write the diary of a nine-year-old traveling in a wagon train on the Oregon Trail. I wrote a good thirty pages and had never had so much fun in my life!

8.       Were you an avid reader as a child?

I was such an avid reader that my parents had to shoo me out of the house so I’d get some exercise.

Did your parents read to you?

Both parents read to us. We didn’t have a television when I was growing up—my dad was suspicious of it even then, when it was a much milder form of entertainment than it is today. My mom was our earliest reader—picture books, rhymes and songs. When we got a little older, my dad read all the classic children’s novels to us, a chapter a night. (Maybe two if we begged.) We also had a bookcase in the dining room, and every night my dad would pull out the dictionary, open it at random, and teach us a new word: the pronunciation, the etymology and the meanings. Then he’d pull out a random encyclopedia volume, open it, and read to us about whatever he happened to turn to. Suppertime in my home was as much about learning as it was about food.

Was reading and writing encouraged by your parents?

Absolutely. First, they both read as their own primary form of education and entertainment. Second, they read aloud to us. Third, they took us to the library every week. Fourth, they had books in the house. (There were nine of us living in a two-bedroom house, but one tiny little room—the “cubbyhole”—was floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves and designated as “the library.”) Fifth, they gave us books and music as gifts. (Music, they believed, was closely associated with reading and an essential pre-reading activity. We had two wonderful Christmas traditions: on Christmas Eve, we got to open any music under the tree—LP’s in those days—and listen to it that night while sipping hot chocolate, eating Christmas cookies, and hearing the Christmas story read aloud. On the day after Christmas, my dad stopped at our local department store, The Bon Marche, on his way home from work because all their books would be marked at half-price. For years I thought December 26th was called Boxing Day because every year my dad brought home a big box of books to distribute to the family!)

How did your family traditions and values influence the direction you took in your education and career as an adult?

Even though my dad made his living as a systems maintenance engineer (he claimed it was a high-falutin’ term for “janitor”), my family was clearly arts oriented rather than science and technology oriented. Beyond an obvious love for books and reading, my mom had been a music education major in college and played the violin, and my dad played the guitar and ukulele. Mom and I often sang duets in church. All seven kids started on a musical instrument, several of us kept it up for a number of years, and one is still actively playing and writing music. Five of us are college graduates, two with advanced degrees, who use or have used our writing and editing skills in our jobs. All of us continue to read a great deal for pleasure.

9.       How important is it that children begin reading at a young age?

It’s more important that kids are read to at a young age than actually doing it themselves. They are related, though: the earlier kids are exposed to reading, the earlier they will catch on to it themselves. A book is a magical thing to a child. Not only do the colorful illustrations of picture books draw them in, but they begin to understand that the funny little black squiggles on the pages are actually secret codes for words and meanings and stories! For children exposed early and often to books, the idea of breaking the code so they can read the story on the page is a powerful motivator. The best readers are those so powerfully motivated that they teach themselves.

10.   What kind of adult is able to write such wonderful children’s stories?

An adult who has retained a sense of wonder at the world, who is able to see the world from a child’s perspective, who remains in touch with her feelings and senses, and who loves to daydream!

How do you stay so in tune with how children think and imagine?

Working and playing with school age children, whether in a professional or personal role. Reading fairy tales and children’s books. Remembering how things felt as a child. Empathy, I think is a writer’s most valuable personal resource.

Are you still a kid at heart?

The question makes me realize how much more I’d like to be a kid at heart. Lately I’ve been preoccupied with far too many adult concerns.

Are your memories of childhood stronger than most people’s?

I don’t think so. I think most people remember the things they feel most strongly. It’s not early memories themselves that I draw on as a writer, but the way I felt about the events and friendships and family situations of my childhood. 

Had you always been a person who was “good with kids”?

Still am. I’m better with kids than with grown-ups! I’ve always been a little shy with my peers, though I’ve learned to fake it pretty well in my professional life. With kids, however, especially pre-school and primary age, I have no inhibitions. I had three younger brothers who looked up to me in early childhood. As a teenager I babysat and volunteered in primary grade classrooms. As an adult I taught elementary and middle school. I’ve never had kids of my own but grew up with nieces and nephews nearby.

Or did writing children’s books stem from experiences with your own children?

Do cats count as kids?! I’ve learned all my lessons about writing from my cats: Be curious, make daring leaps, scratch where it itches, sleep on everything, and stretch!

11.   What do you love about being a children’s book author?

Connecting with kids and connecting with the kid in me. Getting the chance to inspire kids and their grown-ups to think about the world in new ways. Knowing that I’m helping bring families together. Being treated like a rock star when I share my books with kids in schools and libraries!

What is your ultimate hope or goal in writing?

That kids identify their own experience in my books, that there is a heart-to-heart connection. Also that in my books they will find a friend, the way I found friends in books when I was a child.

12.   What do you learn from the process?

Everything! As a writer, I’m a seat-of-the-pants-er, not a planner. Starting a story is an adventure, a leap into the unknown, and writing is a process of discovery. The act of writing teaches me what my story is and how it wants to be told.

What is the toughest part?

Getting started on something new while I’m waiting to hear back from my agent or an editor.

13.   What is it like to compare the experience you had reading books as a child to now writing the books that children like you will read?

The biggest difference in the reading-as-a-child experience and the writing-as-an-adult experience is how much longer it takes to write a book than to read it! I devoured books as a child and never gave a thought to the months or even years it took an author to create the world I immersed myself in. In fact, I rarely gave a thought to the author, period. While I was reading the book, the world in it was real. I suppose my wish is that the children reading my books will have the same experience I did as a child—not thinking about the author, simply lost in the story because it’s that real and that good.

14.   Who is your favorite author? What is your favorite book? Do you still read lots of children’s books? Or do you read “adult” books too?

My favorite authors as a child were C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle and their books The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and A Wrinkle in Time. As an adult, I don’t think I have a favorite. I read widely, both adult and children’s books, and there are so many good things out there that whatever I happen to be reading is my favorite at the time. I do read much more fiction than nonfiction, however, and I prefer fiction, both children’s and adults, that has humor and a bit of magic to it—not full-fledged fantasy, necessarily, but a story with a fantastical element of some kind... Mostly, though, whatever the genre, the emotion has to be true. I have to believe in the experience of the characters and be able to lose myself in the imagined world.

15.   Is there any person or particular audience you have in mind when you write your books?

Ultimately, I write for myself: for the child I was and the adult I want to be.

16.   What do you think of this quote? Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child. ~ Anonymous ~

I agree. I believe good children’s literature speaks to children on levels beyond their conscious awareness. A girl reading The Secret Life of Walter Kitty is taking in, at a sublingual level, the idea that she can be the hero of any story she chooses to make her own. A boy hearing someone read Jitterbug Jam aloud is also subconsciously hearing that facing his fears and letting go of his prejudices can have great rewards. A wise parent asks questions to help children become aware of the themes, underlying messages and assumptions in the stories they love.

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