A back story

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all the nice comments lately. It’s always a pleasure to hear from you whether here or on my Facebook page. My blog posts automatically appear there too and sometimes I forget to check over there for additional comments. Often there are quite a few and they may go unanswered for a while until I remember to look.

This morning I found a lovely FB comment from Ronne Peltzman who was my Lady Bird Books editor for LITTLE BOY SOUP. Many years ago Sandy and I went to England on vacation (excuse me, holiday!) and while there I bought a train ticket to Loughborough, to visit with Ronne in her office there. The man in the ticket window was quite rude because I pronounced Loughborough phonetically, which missed by a mile the way he pronounced the word: something like Luffbra. (Ronne, if you see this, please help with the pronunciation!)

Finally made it to Luffbra and to Ronne. We had a great visit and she introduced me to her boss in a nearby office. Her boss in turn introduced me to a U.S. visitor she was entertaining, a woman who was born not far from there. Her name was Christine San Jose and she worked for Highlights in Honesdale, Pennsylvania.

Christine asked what I had been working on lately, I said poetry, she said she liked poetry and hoped I would send her my work, I said I was hoping for a book, she said that Highlights had just started a book imprint with a line of books of poetry, I said great, she said to send her the poems, I said sure, and that’s how I got started publishing poetry with Boyds Mills Press in 1993, beginning with SOMEBODY CATCH MY HOMEWORK.

David