How did your career as a public librarian inform your writing? Your insight into the world of publishing?īefore retiring this year, I worked as a specialist in children’s literature for nearly 35 years. This gave me a better grasp of a novel’s form and helped me to “hear” my own writing. I began listening to lots of audio books. What was the best decision you made related to developing craft during your apprenticeship and why? I worked on various versions of what became The Higher Power of Lucky but couldn’t find the story’s heart until 2003. (All these books are out of print, but Simon and Schuster/Atheneum will publish a new edition of Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe in the next year or so.)Īfter that, the mid 1990’s, I hit a wall. My chapter book, Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe (Orchard, 1993) draws from my experiences as a middle sister. The text of Dark Cloud Strong Breeze, illustrated by Peter Catalanotto (Orchard, 1994), a rhythmic, circular tale for very young children, moves back and forth between the fanciful and the mundane, the wish-world and the everyday one. These stories, Burgoo Stew (1991), Five Bad Boys, Billy Que, and the Dustdobbin (1992), and Bobbin Dustdobbin (1993) (all Orchard Books, illustrated by Mike Shenon) are meant to be told or read aloud like stories from the folk tradition.
This picture book became the first in a trilogy about Billy Que, some bad boys who are friends of his, and two Dustdobbins who live in the dust under his bed. Going against popular wisdom that no one wants to see folktale retellings from first-time writers, I sent a contemporary version of the “Stone Soup” tale to several houses before Richard Jackson at Orchard bought it. I’d met editors at publisher booths during ALA conferences.
I loved my work as a librarian, but wanted to be a writer, too.
In 1980, I became LAPL’s Juvenile Materials Collection Development Manager, which means I evaluated everything for branch library collections targeting kids up to the age of ten or eleven.”Ĭould you tell us about your path to publication? Any sprints or stumbles along the way? “Hired in 1972 as a children’s librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, I rediscovered children’s books, learned how to tell stories, and taught preschoolers how to make their fingers into eency-weency spiders. Especially for someone whose initial plan was to be a struggling writer renting a maid’s room in a Paris attic. Married to Rene Patron we live in a neo-Spanish-style house very similar to the one in which I grew up and about four miles away, which I grant you is a little weird. BA in English Lit and a master’s in Library and Information Science. Susan Patron on Susan Patron: “Born in San Gabriel in 1948, grew up in Hollywood.
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