Children of the Settlement Houses (Carolrhoda, 1998)

Bobcats (Lerner, 1997)

Bobcats will be published by Lerner Publications, the parent company of Carolrhoda Books, a publisher that I have worked with since 1982. With this book Dick Hewett and I continue our long collaboration together but in a new format for younger readers. For many years I have heard from teachers and librarians that there is a need for more books about animals for the primary grades so with Bobcats and several others we will do for the new Lerner EarlyBird Nature series we will try to fill this gap.

Watching Desert Wildlife (Carolrhoda Books, 1994)

Illustrated with color photographs by Arthur Arnold.

I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and it was not until I moved to California as an adult that I had any extended contact with the desert. At first I couldn't imagine that anything could possibly live in such a barren, alien land. But as I began to visit the desert at different times of year--in summer when the heat is so intense it almost takes your breath away, in winter when snow blankets the surrounding mountain peaks, and in spring when the profusion of flowering plants make the desert seem like a garden--I grew to love the desert. My book, WATCHING DESERT WILDLIFE, is about myfascination with the way living things have adapted to the lack of water and extreme temperatures of the desert. My husband, Arthur Arnold, and I traveled to deserts throughout the West to photograph and research the book. I loved getting up early to catch the sunrise--one of the best times for photography and also for watching wildlife. Footprints in the sand showed where nighttime animals had walked and with luck we knew we might see some of these creatures before they settled down for the day. We often saw coyotes on their way back to their daytime lairs and we listened to birds singing their early morning songs. My role on these excursions was to look for wildlife and also to be a photographer's assistant. In one case, as I backed away from one of our subjects I inadvertently stepped on a cactus!

City of the Gods: Mexico's Ancient City of Teotihuacan (Clarion, 1994)

Illustrated with color photographs by Richard Hewett.

I first became interested in ancient cultures of Mexico when I was writing my book The Ancient Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Verde. I learned that even before the Anasazi began to build their villages at Mesa Verde (in what is now the four corners area of the Southwestern United States), people far to the south had built a vast city with pyramids, temples and housing for more than 2000 people. I first saw Teotihuacan (pronounced Tay-oh-tee-wa-kon) as a tourist and, along with thousands of other visitors, mostly Mexicans who had come to experience part of their heritage, I walked along the Avenue of the Dead, peered at still colorful murals of jaguars and ancient priests, and climbed the 248 steps to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun--no small feat when you remember that the elevation of Teotihuacan is 7000 feet above sea level! In writing a book like THE CITY OF THE GODS it is important for me to experience as much as I can about the place--to breathe the air, feel the stones, see the landscape--to understand what it might have been like to live there twenty centuries ago. I hope that my book will enable readers to make a vicarious trip to this first great city in the Americas so that they can be amazed as I was at the vast accomplishments of that rich culture.

On the Brink of Extinction: The California Condor (Harcourt Brace, 1993)

Illustrated with color photographs by Michael Wallace, director of the Los Angeles Zoo condor program.

Since the publication of my book, ON THE BRINK OF EXTINCTION, many more condor chicks have hatched at both the Los Angeles Zoo and the San Diego Wild Animal Park. By the end of the 1995 breeding season the total number of California condors had reached 103, an amazing number considering that the population was once as low as 21 birds. The success of the breeding program has meant that there are more birds available for release to the wild. In August, eight more zoo-bred condors were released in Santa Barbara county in California, bringing the total number of free flying condors in California to 13. The next step in the recovery project for this highly endangered bird calls for releasing condors in a remote area of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The aim of the release programs is to build up condor populations of 15 pairs of birds. And as birds become established at these places, additional sites elsewhere will be chosen to release and reestablish even more California condors in the wild. Many of the Andean condors raised from chicks hatched in North American zoos have been released in South America. Recently, biologists in Columbia reported that a pair of captive bred condors that are now living free have produced a fertile egg.

The Ancient Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Verde(Clarion Books, 1992)

Illustrated with color photographs by Richard Hewett.

My first visit to Mesa Verde National Park was on a family vacation when I was fourteen. We pitched our tent on the edge of the mesa and, like the ancient Anasazi, cooked our meals over an open fire. It was easy to imagine our campsite as a place where the Anasazi might have tilled the ground to plant corn and beans or hunted with bows and arrows for deer or wild turkey. As we looked into the canyon below our campsite we could see Spruce Tree House, a complex of square buildings that had been built into the cliff wall one thousand years ago. Protected from wind and weather by the overhanging rocks, they looked much as they had when they were new. My brothers and I delighted in scrambling up and down the ladders of the cliff dwellings and investigating the open rooms. I also spent hours inside the park museum learning about the people who had once lived at Mesa Verde. As I viewed the fine baskets, intricately decorated pots, carved stone and bone tools and other artifacts, I wondered about the ancient Americans known to us as the Anasazi and about why they had abandoned their homes around 1300 AD. Recently when I returned to Mesa Verde with Richard Hewett to research and photograph our book I discovered that even more ancient sites had been excavated and opened to the public. I was intrigued by the archeological process--how people discover evidence of ancient cultures and how they figure out what it means. The buildings and household objects that the Anasazi left behind are like pieces of a puzzle, which reveal what life was like on that high tableland over a thousand years ago.

Trapped in Tar: Fossils From the Ice Age (Clarion, 1987)

Illustrated with black and white photographs by Richard Hewett.

When I was growing up in Minneapolis I spent a lot of time in the out of doors and my parents interest in the natural world encouraged me and my three younger brothers to become involved in bird watching, learning to identify wild flowers, and collecting rocks. I still remember climbing cliffs along the Mississippi river to collect chunks of limestone and the thrill of cracking it open to discover the perfectly preserved skeleton of a creature that had lived millions of years earlier. When I moved to Los Angeles as an adult and saw the fossilized skeletons of Ice Age animals at the La Brea Tar Pits, I felt this same sense of awe.

Koala (Morrow Junior Books, 1987)

Illustrated with color photographs by Richard Hewett.

When I was working on my book, Koala, I was very lucky to be able to do my research in Australia. I had first learned about koalas on a family vacation to Australia. Later I returned with the photographer and we spent two weeks behind the scenes at Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Queensland. I wanted to know what koalas look like (like living teddy bears), how they behave (they mostly sleep and eat), how they feel (their fur is soft but their claws are needle sharp),how they smell (like their food, eucalyptus leaves), and everything else that I could observe about how they live. At the same time I was helping the photographer get the photos we needed to illustrate the book. Our goal was to make our readers feel as if they were in Australia while turning the pages of the book.

Cheetah (Morrow Junior Books, 1989)

Illustrated with full color photographs by Richard Hewett.

The idea for our book, Cheetah, came by chance. Dick Hewett, the photographer with whom I collaborate, and I were trying to find a place to photograph giraffes for another book. When we contacted a wild animal park in Oregon, we discovered that although they didn't have any giraffes, they had lots of cheetahs. Perhaps, they suggested, we'd like to do a book on cheetahs.

I liked the idea of doing a cheetah book for our animal series at Morrow Junior Books. We had not yet done a cat book, and cheetahs fit into our theme of animals threatened with extinction. Also, as the fastest land animal in the world, the cheetah had tremendous child appeal. For Dick, the idea was attractive because the setting of the wildlife park offered the possibility of natural and dramatic photos of this elegant cat.

I wrote a short proposal, and our editor agreed that it would be a good addition to our series. Then I went to the library to read as much as I could about cheetahs. Based on this material and on information from the wildlife park, Dick and I made a list of the photos we wanted for the book. We knew we needed photos that showed the behavior and physical features of cheetahs. We also wanted photos that showed what was special about the cheetahs at the park. We discussed our project with the keepers and decided that spring would be the best time to visit. We decided that 10 days would probably be enough time to get to know the cheetahs, and it allowed for rainy days (which were likely in Oregon) and other unpredictable events that might interfere with taking photographs.

Our first week at the park was spent inside the cheetah enclosure--several acres of wooded hillsides where eight cheetahs lived. We sat inside the safety of our car (a park rule) and watched the animals, I taking notes and Dick waiting for photo opportunities. (His telephoto lens made the animals in the photos seem closer than they really were) We learned that most activity occurred around feeding time--otherwise, like most cats, the cheetahs spent much of their day asleep. The hours we spent observing the cheetahs helped us to know them really well. At the same time, Dick and I had plenty of time to discuss how to organize the book. One cheetah, named Damara, lived by herself near the park visitor center. She had been handraised and liked to be near people. Because she was tame, she was happy to sit still to have her ears examined or to be petted by children in a visiting school group. This gave us the chance for close-up pictures.

By the end of our visit, Dick had taken about 40 rolls of film. Back home in Los Angeles, we went through the photos together. I wanted photos that illustrated the points in my text and Dick was looking for pictures that were artistically interesting. Ideally, our final selection would be of photographs that fit both of these criteria. We hadn't been able to get two of the photos on our list--cheetah cubs and a running cheetah--so we arranged to borrow those from the slide collection at the animal park.

In the meanwhile, I began to write my final text, shaping it to fit the photos that I knew we had. When the text was finished, we were ready to make a dummy of the book. Paragraph by paragraph we decided what text and photos would go on each page spread. Then Dick used his enlarger to project the photos and trace outlines of the main objects onto paper that had been cut to be the same size as the pages in the book. I made a copy of the manuscript and cut it up to go with the pictures. This helped us to see if the pictures and text were working together. It also showed our editor our suggestions for the sizes and cropping of photos. When everything was complete, we sent the manuscript, slides, and dummy to our editor. We knew that some fine tuning still lay ahead, but for us, the hard work of creating our book about cheetahs was nearly finished.

Easter Island: Giant Stone Statues Tell of a Rich and Tragic Past (Clarion Books, 2000)

Illustrated with full color photographs by Caroline Arnold.

Perhaps the most exotic site I’ve ever visited is Easter Island in the South Pacific, where I went to photograph and research my book, Easter Island: Giant Stone Statues Tell of a Rich and Tragic Past. Although I had read about the giant statues and the people who made them a thousand years ago, nothing prepared me for standing in the ancient quarry amid dozens of half carved statues that never made it to their seaside platforms or climbing to the top of the cliff where the birdman rituals were once performed. My personal experience on Easter Island was important for bringing a sense of immediacy to my book, but the cost of time and travel meant that I could only spend a short time there. After I got home I needed to do extensive museum and library research as well. It took me a year to collect everything I needed and when I was ready to write I had a box bursting with notes, brochures, books, tapes, and other research materials. My book was for children ages ten and up so I knew I was limited to a manuscript of about 5000 words. Several months later, after distilling the mass of material I had collected to its essential points, the manuscript was ready to turn in to my editor.

The agony of being a nonfiction writer is that the space allotted for text in the book is never enough for all that wonderful information that was discovered in the research. This is particularly true when writing for children since the text and page length of the book are relatively short. Even if I were able to include every detail, I don’t want to overwhelm the reader by providing more than he or she wants to know. But there are several ways I supplement the information included in the main text and enrich the overall impact of the book: through captions, sidebars, charts, maps, time lines, projects, list of further resources, author notes and acknowledgments.

Since most books for children are widely illustrated, there are ample opportunities to add information through captions. Minimally the caption needs to identify the illustration and show how it ties into the text, but often there is room to elaborate. For instance, in my book Easter Island, a scenic photo showing several cultivated fields has the following caption: View from the crater Puna Pau. Now, as in ancient times, much of Easter Island’s land is tilled for agriculture. (Captions are almost always written in the present tense) Throughout the book I used captions not only to add information but to tie the photos and text together to create a more unified presentation.

Dinosaurs with Feathers: The Ancestors of Modern Birds (Clarion Books, 2001)

Illustrated with full color paintings by Laurie Caple.

Sidebars are a technique I use when I want to elaborate on points that are related to the theme but would slow the pace if they were included in the main body of the text. In my book, Dinosaurs With Feathers: The Ancestors of Modern Birds, the focus of the book is on the origin of birds and their relationship to dinosaurs. Sidebars on fossil feathers, birds with and without teeth, and stomach stones (stones swallowed by dinosaurs to aid in digestion), allow me to provide the reader with information that reinforces the main idea but is too detailed. I was pleased that the illustrator drew slabs of fossil rocks as background for these sidebars, a clever way to visually integrate them into the book.

El Nino: Stormy Weather for People and Wildlife (Clarion Books, 1998)

Illustrated with full color photographs.

In December 1997, the front page of the Los Angeles Times featured a picture of an emaciated sea lion over a headline that read, “El Nino Starves Sea Lions, Seals: As warm water drives away prey, 6,000 pups die on one island alone.” It was a heartbreaking photo and made one want to read the story that followed.

El Nino is the term used to describe a wide range of cyclic weather events caused by the warming of the central Pacific Ocean. In the western Pacific, El Nino typically creates drought and terrible fires, while in California, where I live, it usually brings an abnormally wet winter with floods and mudslides. Natural disasters are always good topics for nonfiction books, especially when they impact people and the environment. As it happened, I was already at work on my book, El Nino: Stormy Weather for People and Wildlife. I clipped out the article and added it to my file.

The idea of writing a book about El Nino and its effects on people and wildlife came to me in 1992, when I was researching another book, Sea Lion, a photo essay about two stranded sea lion pups being cared for at a local marine mammal rescue center. I often write about wildlife, an interest that grew out of my childhood summers spent at a camp in northern Wisconsin and I am especially interested in animals that are endangered. When I asked why the animals at the rescue center needed help, I got a long list of reasons ranging from injuries by motorboats and tangled fishing lines to starvation caused by El Nino. (1992 was another El Nino year) I realized that if sea lions were so devastated by the effects of El Nino, a lot of other animals probably were, too. Over the next year or so, I accumulated more information about El Nino and its influence on wildlife. When it was clear that I had more than enough material to fill a book I wrote a proposal and sent it to my editor. She agreed that the subject would make an interesting book, and so I got started.

Stories in Stone: Rock Art Pictures by Early Americans(Clarion Books, 1996)

Illustrated with full color photographs.

I frequently discover ideas for new books while I am working on other projects. What is mentioned as a passing fact in one book later turns out to be the main theme of another project. For instance, in my book The Ancient Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Verde, I wrote a short section about petroglyphs, or rock art. I was fascinated by the stone images carved into the rock and by the fact that they have endured for hundreds of years. A few years later, as I was leafing through a local museum publication, I learned of a rock art site in the California desert where thousands of petroglyphs lined the canyon walls. I arranged a visit and discovered the subject for a new book, Stories in Stone: Rock Art Pictures by Ancient Americans. In it I explored not only the stone images themselves but the people who made them, how they did it, and what the symbols may represent. Learning about people who lived in the past is another of my long time interests. When I visit an ancient site such as the petroglyph canyons or Mesa Verde, I find it easy to imagine myself living hundreds or thousands of years ago. I am amazed by how much archeologists can learn about the daily lives of people who lived long ago by examining the things they left behind. My goal in writing about these subjects for children is to convey some of that same sense of wonder.

Uluru, Australia's Aboriginal Heart (Clarion Books, 2003)

Illustrated with full color photographs by Arthur arnold.

The following is my diary report written after my first visit to Uluru and Australia's red center in 1999.

We have just returned from our Easter vacation trip with a week’s worth of clothes covered in fine red dust acquired in Australia’s “Red Center” where we visited Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock), in Uluru and Kata Tjuta National Park, and Alice Springs, the largest town in the heart of Australia’s enormous desert interior and the center of life in the outback. In the desert, daytime temperatures can easily rise to 110 degrees or more and in winter it goes below freezing at night, but we were lucky to have beautiful weather in the seventies. In the morning, though, it was so cold that I had to put on my thermal underwear! As in most deserts, one would think that nothing could live in such a harsh environment, but we saw a surprising variety of plant and animal life, especially near sources of water. Actually, the land around Uluru was green and flowering due to rains several weeks ago. This trip was also our first real exposure to Aboriginal life and we learned how people have lived and survived in this region for 70,000 years. About half of the land in the Northern Territory belongs to the Aboriginal Land Trust, the equivalent of America’s Indian Reservations, and most of Australia’s Aborigines live in this region.

We flew to Uluru on Thursday, arriving about noon at our hotel in the resort village of Yulara. Until the 1970's the only way to visit Uluru (then called Ayers Rock) was to drive there and camp or stay at a small motel, both located right at the base of the rock. (You may have seen a movie called Cry in the Dark starring Meryl Streep. It was based on the true story of a couple camping at the rock whose baby was supposedly stolen by a dingo) As Uluru became an increasingly popular tourist destination (currently 400,000 people visit each year) it was decided to move all the accommodation facilities outside the park boundary and Yulara was built. About the same time the government was under increasing pressure from the Aborigines, who regard Uluru as a sacred site, to return the national park to them. The Hand Back, as it is called, finally happened in 1985 with the agreement that tourists would continue to be allowed to visit.

We had a great time at Uluru but we didn't climb it. The Aborigines don't really like having people climb it although they don't stop them. Many people do but the more eco-minded tour companies are discouraging it. Not only is it disrespectful for the Aborigines who consider the rock sacred but it is wearing down the rock. In any case, Art doesn't like high places so he was easily convinced that we didn't want to climb. We decided that we'd much more enjoy our walk around the base of the rock. The Aborigines call the people who climb the rock Mingi, which means "ants" and that's exactly what they look like when you see them from a distance.

I had previously seen many photos of Uluru but I was unprepared for the impact it has in real life. It is located about seven miles from the resort and looms nearly 1000 feet above the flat desert floor. I always thought the photos of the brilliant red rock were color enhanced, but the sandstone really is a natural deep red and practically glows at sunrise and sunset, the two high points of every day. On our first evening we went to the official sunset viewing spot and along with hundreds of other tourists, took our photos. The next morning we got up at 5:30 to meet our tour guide for a sunrise breakfast walk around the base of the rock, a distance of about ten kilometers.. This was a small group eco-tour and this time we were nearly alone to enjoy the lighting of the rock at dawn. At the same time we had the double pleasure of seeing the moon set behind the rock. In the course of the walk we were introduced to desert plants, saw lots of birds (including our first sighting of zebra finches in the wild) and heard some of the aboriginal stories associated with the Rock. We had chances to try “bush tucker” (native edible foods) including a tiny red fruit called the bush plum and the so-called bush banana, which is banana shaped but more like eating the inside of a milkweed pod. Our outing the next day was a hike and sunset barbecue at the Kata Tjuta, an equally impressive but less well known rocky outcrop nearby. The Aboriginal name, Kata Tjuta, means stone heads and they do look like giant heads piled on the horizon.

On Sunday morning we flew from Ayers Rock to Alice Springs, a distance of about 300 miles. Although it was Easter, there wasn’t much celebration. We noticed that some people are trying to promote the bilby, a marsupial with long, rabbit-like ears, as an Easter Bunny alternative--eg, the Easter Bilby--but it doesn't seem to be catching on. At the Desert Park in Alice Springs (where we actually saw a bilby in the night exhibit) they had a special exhibit of eggs to celebrate the rebirth of life. They showed all kinds of eggs--birds, reptiles, insects and even mammals (the echidna) We got nabbed by a ranger on our way in who needed an audience to talk about the eggs but who managed to get sidetracked into telling us about his Aboriginal heritage and how he is part of the emu clan.

In Alice Springs we visited the shops and art galleries in the center of town and were tempted to buy some of the carvings and paintings but the ones we really liked were both too big and too expensive. We then drove north of town about fifteen miles to the Tropic of Capricorn marker (to take a companion photo for our Equator shot from 1971 and the more recent Greenwich Meridian) en route to the Bond Springs Station, a working cattle ranch that was also our bed and breakfast. We had our own small cottage and arranged to have dinner there which we ate on our own verandah as we watched the stars come out. In the morning we went out for a bird walk along a dry creek bed and saw parrots, cockatoos, budgies, zebra finches as well as some kangaroos who seemed as surprised to see us as we were to see them. Later in the day we had a tour of the station and got some insight into the challenges of grazing cattle over millions of acres in the outback. I always had a romantic image of cowboys on horseback rounding up the cattle, but on modern stations like this one the cattle are mustered with airplanes, helicopters and motorbikes because it is quicker and more cost effective. That evening we went to a barbecue and were served beef steaks from the station’s own cattle. At both Ayers Rock and Alice Springs we had terrific views of the night sky. For the first time we saw the Magellanic clouds--which Magellan apparently used to figure out where south was.

Our outings in Alice Springs included a tour of the old telegraph station (now a museum) which is at the site of the original Alice Springs. The “spring” is actually a pool in a river bed and was named after the wife of the Superintendent of Telegraphs. The telegraph station, constructed in the 1870's, was the beginning of the town of Alice Springs and the line, which went between Adelaide in the south and Darwin in the north, provided for the first time a direct connection (via an undersea cable between Darwin and Java) between Australia and the rest of the world. We got to talking with the managers of the Telegraph Station Museum and they showed us the three joeys (baby kangaroos) that they were taking care of after their mothers had been killed by cars. One was so small that they kept it tucked into a purse sized cloth pouch. Our other tourist destinations in Alice Springs were to the Desert Park (an exhibit of desert wildlife), the Royal Flying Doctor Service, the School of the Air, and finally a date grove where we had afternoon coffee and date cake before returning to Melbourne.

The Flying Doctor Service was started by a Presbyterian missionary in 1928 as a way of providing health care to people in remote areas. Communication to the center in Alice Springs was by radio and when a call came in a pilot and a doctor would head out hoping that when they got there they would find a suitable place to land. The radio service is also used to give medical advice for immediate treatment while the patient is waiting for the doctor to arrive. When we toured the center in the early afternoon, the log on the wall showed five emergencies had already been dealt with that day. In the 1950's someone had the idea of using the same radio service to provide schooling to children who live on remote cattle stations and that became the School of the Air.

The School of the Air now has its own facility and teaches about 200 children, some of them living as far as 1000 kilometers from Alice Springs. We listened in as a teacher gave a lesson to a six year old student. Kids get group lessons by grade level each morning for an hour and then once a week each child gets an individual lesson. The kids get lesson packets every two weeks in the mail and the work is supervised either by a parent or a governess. We saw samples of work on display at the school headquarters and it was well done. In many ways these kids have all the advantages of individual attention in their home schooling and at the same time they are able to grow up on their cattle stations and be part of that life too. School of the Air goes to grade 7 and after that the kids go to boarding school. Our tour guide on the cattle ranch where we stayed had grown up there and went to School of the Air with his brother and two sisters. (We saw the room that they had used for their lessons) Although we had driven into the ranch on a dirt road that was in bumpy but reasonable condition, until recently there was no road at all. Getting into town was an ordeal, especially if it rained and the creeks filled with water, so School of the Air was the best option.

It is hard for us to realize how self-sufficient people have to be in the outback. At Bond Springs they have maintained the original homestead buildings as part of the National Trust so you can see how people really lived when they first came to the outback. The first house was one tiny room with dirt floors and a canvas bed. Later a slightly larger house was built. (I had always thought that quilts were a uniquely American craft but when we visited the homestead we saw on the bed a wedding quilt that had been made for the couple by the bride and groom's mothers) The current family home was built in the 1930's and has at its heart a high ceilinged kitchen with a giant table where we ate breakfast.. Even at Bond Springs, which now seems quite modern, it has only been recently that the station has had telephone service and they still have to produce all their own electricity. Despite the obvious hardships, the people who live in the outback love it and can't imagine why anyone would want to live anywhere else. When we told one of the people working at Bond Springs that our home was in Los Angeles, she seemed sorry that we had to live in a city.

I am reading a book called We of the Never-Never that is a memoir of a woman at a cattle station in the early part of the century. During the rainy season they would be cut off for weeks when rain swollen rivers became impassable and then it would take weeks after it dried for wagons to travel from Darwin. Her solution to the perpetual fly problem was to construct a net that enclosed the entire dining room--table, chairs and all! The book was made into a movie that we saw the last time we were in Australia. (The outback is the Never-Never because once you live there, you never-never want to return to city life) Art is reading another classic, A Fortunate Life, about a man whose life would seem to be anything but fortunate.

I always take several books to read on vacations and never read any of them partly because I always buy books on the trip (like We of the Never-Never) and start reading them and partly because when I'm on the airplane I find it much more interesting to look out the window than to read. Our flight to Ayers Rock (from Melbourne via Sydney) took us over miles and miles of desolate desert where you could see the patterns of salt deposited across the bottom of enormous dry lake beds. It is hard to imagine that there are times when these lakes actually have water in them.

Our trip was so full of interesting things that I hardly knew where to begin and as it is I have just touched the highlights. At moments the Australian desert reminded us of experiences we’ve had in American deserts such as at Joshua Tree National Monument, in the Mojave or in Borrego Springs, but the scale and distances in Australia are so much grander. There is also the sense with the Aborigines that they are part of a really distant past--in a time long before there was any human life in the Americas. The Red Center is definitely the most foreign place we've visited in Australia and it’s a long way from anywhere. Its like flying from LA to Denver and realizing that there is nothing in between.

PETS WITHOUT HOMES (Clarion, 1983)

In 1984, my book Pets Without Homes was named a Golden Kite honor book by the SCBW. (It later became the SCBWI.) The following are my remarks upon receiving the award.

I feel particularly honored to receive this award tonight because, in so many ways, the SCBW has been critical to my success as an author. When I attended my first conference here in August 1977, I was an aspiring but yet unpublished writer. I was thrilled to meet already established writers, illustrators, editors and agents, and I hoped that someday I might be a bit like them. However, I certainly never dreamed that one day I would be standing up here receiving an award.

At the conference it had been emphasized that people usually write best about topics that they know and care about and with which they have had personal experience. The idea for my book Pets Without Homes began when my daughter Jennifer, who was about to turn nine, told us that she wanted a kitten for her birthday. So a few days before her birthday, which was in early February, I went to our local animal shelter intending to pick out a kitten. I looked in all the cages and saw lots of cats, but no kittens. I went to another shelter, but again, lots of cats and no kittens. Although I had grown up in the midwest where puppies and kittens are usually born in the warm spring and summer months, I was assuming that here in California where it is warm all year round, that kittens would be available at any time. However, I found out that I was wrong. Even in California, it seems, most cats have their kittens in spring and summer. Over the next two months I visited nearly every shelter in Los Angeles County, hoping to find an early kitten. I learned a lot about animal shelters and eventually, at the beginning of April, I finally found a kitten for Jennifer's birthday.

I could not have written Pets Without Homes without the help and cooperation of many other people. I particularly want to thank my editor at Clarion, Ann Troy, and all the other people at Clarion who worked together to produce this book. I am glad that Jim Giblin, as a representative of Clarion, can be here tonight to share the honor for this book, and I wish Ann could have been with us too. I also want to thank the staff of the Santa Monica Animal shelter who cooperated with us so cheerfully in this project.

Most of all I want to thank Dick Hewett, who illustrated Pets Without Homes with his wonderful photographs. Although Dick had previously done several fine books with his wife Joan, this was the first time I had ever worked with a photographer for one of my books. It turned out to be a truly cooperative project in which my text suggested photos for him to take, and in which his photos often suggested changes or additions to the text.

Dick and I had decided that the star of our book would be a lost puppy, and luckily, at just about the time we were ready to go to work on the book, the perfect puppy arrived at the shelter. It had big eyes, floppy ears, an a most winsome expression. Although it is hard to imagine how anyone could have abandoned this puppy, its owner never came for it. We claimed the puppy for our star and named him Buffy.

This afternoon the panel members were asked, "What was the biggest problem you had with your book?" My answer to that question would have been "time". Buffy, like all puppies, was growing rapidly and we knew we had to finish our story fast. Luckily everything went smoothly and in several weeks I had my story and Dick had all the pictures he needed. However, if you look carefully, you will see that Buffy is definitely bigger at the end of the story than he is at the beginning.

Pets Without Homes is a special book to me for many reasons, but particularly because I will always have a special fondness for Buffy, who did in fact find a new home by the end of the book.

Reflections on my Long Collaboration with Richard Hewett (adapted from a talk at SCBWI/LA Writer's Day, April 22, 2006

In 1981, I came up with an idea to do a book about a city animal shelter. When I proposed it to my editor, her response was that she liked the idea but thought it would be best to illustrate it with photographs. The problem was that she didn't know any photographers in Los Angeles. As it happened, I did. The photographer was Richard Hewett, the husband of my friend Joan Hewett, another children's book writer. He agreed to take the photographs for my book, which became Pets Without Homes. This book, which won a Golden Kite honorable mention, was the beginning of a collaboration that lasted nearly twenty years and produced almost fifty books. Looking back, I believe that meeting Dick was the most significant event in my writing career. Together we produced a new kind of photo book, in which the words and pictures told the story together to become an integrated whole. It was a true collaborative process in which my words influenced his pictures and his pictures inspired my words.

Sadly, Richard passed away on April 7, 2006, after a long illness. He will be greatly missed by his friends and family, and by the countless people who knew him through his books. Dick also worked with his wife, Joan, and with several other children's book writers. I learned a great deal about writing books from working with Dick and I would like to dedicate this talk to him.

Dick also came to the world of children's books as a second career. For most of his life he had been a magazine photographer, doing stories for Life, Look, TV Guide and various other magazines. His specialty was animal photography, so with my interest in animals and the natural world, we were a good match.

In all of our books we worked together as an author/photographer team. While Dick took photographs, I took notes and did on site research. One of the first things I learned from Dick was that each book sets its own rules. There is no one right way to get the information or pictures that you need. Dick was like all good photographers--he did whatever was necessary to get the picture he wanted and often drove people crazy in the process. In the picture you see here, we were working on a penguin book at the San Francisco Zoo, and Dick persuaded the zoo keepers to loan him a pair of hip boots so he could go into the water and get close to the birds. This is one of my rare pictures of Dick, because most of the time he was the one holding the camera. For some reason, I also had a camera that day.

For every book that we did, the first step was to come up with an idea or a topic. Typically we did life cycle books about animals and the challenge was to find a zoo or animal park where the animals were breeding and were displayed in naturalistic enclosures. Then my job was to do enough preliminary research to write an outline of the story. At this point we were usually ready to go "on scene" and start taking pictures. From the beginning, Dick was always looking for his lead shot, which would open the book and introduce the reader to the main subject, and for the end shot, which would be the final image of the story. Besides the cover, these were the most important pictures in the book--they were like the two pieces of bread that hold a sandwich together. The inside of the book could be a bit flexible, but the two ends had to make the book look and feel complete. The same had to go for my writing. I often spend as much time on the opening and closing paragraphs of my book as what goes in between.

My role during the picture taking process was as the photographer's assistant--I drove the car, carried cameras, held the sun shade, and provided an extra pair of eyes for spotting a possible photo subject. The advantage of being "on scene" was that I understood the circumstances surrounding each photo and I also could be aware of the nonvisual aspects of the scene. Later, when I was writing the final version of the manuscript at home, I always tried to include as many of the sounds and smells and other sensual information as I could, to make the reader feel on scene as well.

Another goal of Dick's photography was to capture some kind of action or emotion in the photo. One thing we learned in all our visits to zoos, is that the vast majority of time, animals just eat and sleep. The brief moments of interaction are rare and the only way to catch them is just to be patient and wait for something to happen. As I wrote my text, I too tried to create empathy or identity with the animals, without anthropomorphizing them and this is what connects the reader to the story.

Another type of book that Dick and I did together was a visit to a place, such as Mesa Verde National Park, where you can see cliff dwellings and other remains of the ancient Anasazi who lived in the southwest more than 1000 years ago. When we did a book like this, or about fossils, or rock art, Dick would moan and groan that it was just a pile of rocks--how was he going to get any human warmth into the photos? The solution was to find ways to include people in the photos, and if at all possible, pictures of children.

Sometimes, if no one else was available, I had to be a model, although always reluctantly. On the cover of our book, The Ancient Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Verde, you can see me climbing a ladder. We needed to have a person in the picture to provide scale. I agreed to do it as long as I remained very small! For close-ups I often volunteered my hands which helped show the actual size of objects.

Sometimes Dick and I did books based on museum exhibits. This photo is the title page of our book Watch Out for Sharks, an exhibit that was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. A life size model of the mouth of an extinct relative of the great white shark becomes even more impressive when you see three people dwarfed inside it! Like all sharks, this shark regularly lost its teeth, some of which became fossils. I bought a real giant shark fossil that I use in my school presentations to show children that these teeth really were as big as a hand.

After the pictures were taken and my manuscript was complete it was time to assemble the book. In all our projects, Dick and I laid out the book page spread by page spread. In this way we could see the flow of the story and how well the pictures and text were coordinated. This process made me very conscious of page turns and the need to think of my text in blocks that would fit on a page.

Many nonfiction books are illustrated with photos. The advantage of a photo is that it shows what the subject really looks like. In today's world where children are exposed to amazing nature films on video and television, they want to see pictures of real animals in books. In all the books I did with Dick Hewett, his photos brought the animals to life and made them memorable in ways that he was uniquely capable of doing. He taught me how to see the world through the eye of his camera.

Music Lessons for Alex (Clarion, 1985)

Illustrated with black and white photographs by Richard Hewett.

On August 3, 1985, the first copies of my new book, Music Lessons for Alex, arrived in California--just in time for the Suzuki Institute (a summer music camp for children) at UCLA. Although I had written over 30 books for children, the publication of this book was particularly special for me. Music Lessons for Alex traces the story of an eight-year-old girl, Alex, from the time she first begins violin lessons to her first recital nine months later. Like Alex, my own children struggled through beginning lessons, also experiencing the joy of progress, occasional frustration and disappointment, and ultimately the triumph of success.

Many children who begin music lessons become discouraged because they do not understand the process involved, and imagine that they will become virtuosos overnight. I wanted to write a book that might help children and parents realize that learning to play music is just like learning to read, play a sport, or any other skill--that it is a slow, gradual, step-by-step process that can be fun and have rewards along the way.

In the spring of 1983, when I suggested my idea to my editor at Clarion Books in New York, she was interested. She remembered her own experience of playing the cello in her school orchestra and felt that if she had had a book such as mine, it might have helped her enjoy it more. We discussed how I would write my book and decided that it would be best to present the material in story form. The book would be illustrated by Dick Hewett, a Los Angeles photographer with whom I had worked before.

Dick and I were lucky to have the cooperation of so many people, particularly Alex and her family, her teacher, and the students and teachers of the San Fernando Valley Suzuki workshop program. We attended several of Alex's lessons, during which Dick took unposed photos--trying to be as unobtrusive as possible so that the lesson would not be interrupted. He also took photos when Alex went to group lessons at the workshops.

When we assembled all the photos for the book we realized that there were some points that I had made in the story, such as tuning, correct placement of the feet, practicing at home, that did not yet have illustrations, so we arranged to spend a day with Alex and Susan to take those photos. We also took photos of an elementary school orchestra to illustrate the point that as Alex progressed, playing in an orchestra was something to which she could aspire. We also wanted to show instruments other than the violin, for, although we had focused on the violin in our book, we felt that the basic process of learning to play music was similar for all instruments.

When the photos and text of the book were finished and assembled--a process that took several months--we sent them to our editor. Then we worked with her to refine and clarify details. One of the hardest things for me to remember was that because of my involvement in my own children's lessons, I understood a lot of musical terms that a child or parent new to music lessons, might not. As I wrote, I had to keep asking myself, "What would I want to know about music lessons if this were my first introduction to the subject?"" Finally, more than a year after we had submitted our completed project to our editor, the book was published.

As people attending the Suzuki Institute read Music Lessons for Alex, the people depicted in the photographs in the book discovered that they had become celebrities of a sort. Alex was even asked for her autograph by several people. I was pleased to have such a positive response to the book and hope that many children and parents will have the opportunity to read it.