From: angelica
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 09:26:17 -0800

Greetings from Fresno, where I am working on a biography for young adults, about a British man. My first three biographies featured an English (later American) woman, Frances Hodgson Burnett; an American, L. Frank Baum; and a Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson. As a woman, I feel adquately qualified to write about men, but I must admit that I use my husband sometimes as a role model for qualities he shares with my male subjects. A greater worry is researching places, cultures, and times that I can never experience on my own. I once figured out that I make ten cents an hour writing children's books. Though I have visited Britain, there is no way that I could afford the money or time to travel to all the places where my subjects lived, or to live there long enough to feel thoroughly grounded in the culture. Does this mean that I should not write about Samoa, for RLS, or New York, where L. Frank Baum was born? I still have a day job as a librarian. Another problem: time travel is not yet possible. So I rely on libraries, museums, historical societies, tourist agencies, descendents of my subjects, and other kind and helpful people and organizations to provide me with the resources I need to write my books. The more I write, the more experts I meet and now I am lucky to have several knowledgeable people who will read my new book before it is published. I still worry that it will have mistakes, but I do the best that I can. To restrict writing about a culture to people who can visit it long enough to feel knowledgeable there is to restrict it to the very rich--not a good idea, in my opinion. Angelica Carpenter, Curator, Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children's Literature
Received on Tue 30 Jan 2001 11:26:17 AM CST