Kathi Appelt: A Story Animal
By Steven Scarpa, Associate Editor

In Kathi Appelt's childhood home in Houston, TX, there was a garage with unfinished sheetrock on the walls. Kathi's mom divided the wall into three sections – one for Kathi and each of her sisters – and let the little girls scribble away. As soon as Kathi could pick up a crayon, the wall became a great place for a kid's artistic experimentation. "The garage wall was a perfect place for expression. Once I started actually writing, on paper, I no longer needed the wall. But I still think of it as the place where my earliest writing took place," she said.

A review of Kathi's books, whether it be her successful Bubba and Beau (Harcourt) series - based in part on her Texan relatives, her short story montage Kissing Tennessee (Harcourt, 2000) set around a middle school dance or her memoir My Father's Summers (Henry Holt and Company, 2004), shows that the past is never far away. Her books are, in many cases, interesting character studies, rich in detail and emotion.

"I am really interested in the minutia of life, because I think there are a lot of stories that we overlook because we think, 'If I am going to write a story it has to be about war or people, some big topic.' And I think our best stories are in our shoes and clothes, or whatever," she said.

One of the things Kathi likes to do to keep in touch with her young audience is to go into the schools and speak with students.

"One of the first things you have to do when creating a character is figure out what is driving them." —Kathi Appelt

"I tell the kids that we are story animals. We are the only ones that tell stories. I think they forget that. Their job right now is to figure out how they are going to tell their stories because, of course, there are different ways. You can write. Math, of course, is a way of telling a story. I think of human beings as kind of composed of stories. The trick, the key, is just trying to figure out how to tell them," she said.

Inspiration. From a very young age Kathi had people who believed in her and cultivated her talents. Mrs. Bell, Kathi's first grade teacher, was the first person to point out her literary path. "You know she probably said it to everyone; she was just that kind of teacher. It wasn't that I intended to be a professional writer, I just always knew that I would write, that writing would be part of my life," she said.

Getting permission. And yet, it took the births of her two sons for Kathi to make the full-time leap into writing. She was studying at the University of Iowa when her first son was born. After giving up on reading her assigned text of Aristotle to her newborn, she discovered children's books. A fortuitous lunch with a former professor ultimately cemented her interest. "During the course of the conversation, she asked me what I was reading and I kind of meekly told her the names of the these wonderful children's books, because basically that's all I was reading. I expected her to nod and say 'Oh, that's so sweet,' but instead she said, 'Don't you just love them?' She talked about the picture book as total art. She made me look at them in a different way. And then at the end of our conversation, she actually looked straight at me and said, 'Well, Kathi, have you ever tried writing one?'"

"I look back on that now and what I realize is that somebody I really respected had essentially given me permission to write children's books. It kind of gave it credibility and so she was a huge reason why I started writing for children. And there's kind of a sad part about that in that I was actually in a group of people I bemoan now who don't take children's books seriously as a literary form," she said.

In an effort to continually reinvent herself and keep her writing fresh and vital, Kathi participates in a writing group she calls the Poetry Girls. The group of fast friends work through various writing books to guide their conversations, she said. It was through the group's experimentation with prose poetry that My Father's Summers came to pass, a memoir of her childhood growing up with a loving, charismatic, yet absentee father – a father who nicknamed her Bean.

"I think it is important for authors to be with our audience from time to time, to keep us kind of

Love songs. Citing Lee Bennett Hopkins' seminal prose poem meditation on his own childhood entitled, Been to Yesterdays: Poems of a Life (Boyds Mills Press, 1999) as inspiration, My Father's Summers mines the delicate territory of Kathi's family history. "It's hard really to write someone else's story. I wasn't really writing my mother's story, I was just kind of showing it from my point of view, but it was still to a certain extent her story. It was all of ours – my sisters' and mine and my mother's."

Finally, Kathi gave her mother the galleys and a portrait of her parents slated for the final cover. "I just handed them to her and I said, 'Maybe you should read this before your face goes out all over the country.' She sat down in my living room and read it straight through and she loved it," Kathi said.

Once word of the book spread, Kathi and her sisters were inundated with calls from people who remembered and loved her father, so much so that her editor suggested she keep a journal about it. "In a way, it's sort of bringing Dad back to us, which is what I was going for in the book anyway. A kind of love song to him," she said.

Basking in the "minutia of life" and the stories she gleans from them, Kathi Appelt is as excited as the first day she faced the blank sheetrock wall, crayon poised, a long time ago.