February 11, 2022
Hello ,
I did not grow up with the book Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown. A friend gave it to us when our first baby was born. I thought it was bizarre and couldn't understand what parents saw in it.
The more I read it aloud, the rhythm grew on me. This year the world celebrates 75 years since Goodnight Moon was first published. I only just now learned the books author was radical for her time. In more ways than one.
Margaret Wise Brown revolutionized children's literature, though her most famous quote is "I don't especially like children."
She had impassioned and turbulent love affairs with both men and women [once at the same time] in the mid-20th Century when being lesbian was dangerous. Some were locked up in mental institutions.
No "Little Old Lady Whispering Hush"
Goodnight Moon combines the best of the style Margarent Brown Wise became know for: inspired nonsense, simple, rhythmic language and bold artwork. It debuted to acclaim from the New York Times, which told parents it “should prove very effective in the case of a too wide-awake youngster.”
Initially, sales weren't impressive, 1,500 copies in 1953, but have since exploded to 800,000 copies a year.
In the 1930 when Brown started writing, books for young children mostly told classic fables and folktales and didn't hold back on moral instruction. She wanted to write stories closer to real lives of real children.
She believed young children had a “keenness and awareness” they often lost as they grow older. “[At age five perhaps, is the stage of rhyme and reason.... ‘Big as the whole world,’ ‘Deep as a giant,’ ‘Quiet as electricity rushing about the world,’ ‘Quiet as mud.’ All these are five-year-old similes. Let the grown-up writer for children equal or better them if he
can.”
Brown became prolific, ideas coming from dreams and thin air. The idea of The Runaway Bunny came to her while she was skiing and she wrote the whole story, on her ski receipt.
Margaret's effervescent personality matched her movie-star beauty with blond hair and green eyes. She bought an abundance of flowers with her first royalty check, inviting friends to celebrate in her floral filled apartment. She founded a group she called the Bird Brain Society which seemed to consist of members declaring Christmas any day of the year and celebrating together.
Despite her growing success as a children's writer, Margaret had dreamed of writing adult literature and her diaries suggest she longed for a lasting love relationship. Her buoyant spirits at times turned melancholy. At one point telling saying:
“I hope to write something serious one day as soon as I have something to say. But I am stuck in my childhood, and that raises the devil when one wants to move on.”
Margaret Wise Brown, courtesy Sterling Publishing.
Margaret seemed to have found happiness and was engaged to a much younger man,
“Pebbles” Rockefeller, when she died suddenly of a blood clot while on a book tour in Paris. She was 42.
Her stories, told through the eyes of children, live on "with equal parts wonder and terror at the infinite world, and a brave yearning for independence," wrote Barbie Hardymon for NPR.
"The world is measureless and vast. Live in it with curiosity and intensity."
Margaret Wise Brown believed one of her main creative challenges was to make way for her unconscious to spill onto the page from the "child that is within all of us... perhaps the one laboratory that we all share.”
Sources
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/07/the-radical-woman-behind-goodnight-moon?
https://nypost.com/2017/01/07/goodnight-moon-author-was-a-bisexual-rebel-who-hated-kids/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/surprising-ingenuity-behind-goodnight-moon-180961923/
https://www.npr.org/2017/01/22/510642518/goodnight-moon-author-margaret-wise-brown-was-no-old-lady-whispering-hush
https://slate.com/culture/2012/03/the-restless-life-of-margaret-wise-brown-author-of-goodnight-moon.html
So excited Kirkus Reviews mentioned CLOSE-UP ON WAR in an article this week entitled Nonfiction for Young Adults is "Real Reading. The author says, "Nonfiction can offer all the creativity, suspense, well-rounded
characterization, rich vocabulary, and gripping prose as fiction," and lists ten recent or upcoming books as examples.
Don't forget to mark your calendar for one of my book launch celebrations!
One in real life and one via zoom!
If you're in the Spokane, WA area, I hope you'll come to my real, live, in-person event at Auntie's Bookstore. Mark your calendar!
March 22 at 7pm
Auntie's Bookstore
402 West Main Avenue, Spokane
Still in the planning stages, so stay tuned!
Aunties requires proof of vaccination for all instore events.
March 24th at 7pm (Pacific)
In partnership with Wishing Tree Books, this zoom event will include myself and two acclaimed authors of nonfiction. Planning is underway. I'm pretty sure there will be prizes.
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