Category The Mouse Was Out at Recess

Jul 19 2017

A day of mixed emotions

Hi everyone,
Yesterday I attended the final meeting of Reading Roundup, a group that has raised tens of thousands of books for Springfield Public School Libraries over the past eighteen years. We used the last of our funds to support as many librarian requests as we could, said our goodbyes, and that was it. For me it’s the end of thirty-five years of volunteering that has involved a multitude of causes, most of which have been literacy related. The only board I’m still on is the Highlights Foundation.



On a brighter front, Macmillan in India sent me a permission request for a poem of mine called “The Secret.” I was embarrassed that I couldn’t recall writing a poem with that name. I remembered one called “The Purchase of Small Secrets” (from the book of the same name, BMP, 1998) and a story called “The Little Boy’s Secret” (from The Book of Giant Stories, American Heritage Press/McGraw Hill, 1972), but drew a blank of the one requested. I had to ask for the source or first lines. Turns out the poem they like appeared in The Mouse was Out at Recess (BMP, 2003). Last time I was reprinted in India (different publisher), I was paid in rupees so I suppose I’m in for something like that again. Anyway, the poem will appear in a textbook for English readers with a first print run of 10,000 copies.

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Mar 23 2017

And the kids said, “Really?”

Hi everyone,

This morning I hope to finish the poem I’ve been working on for ten days or so. I haven’t spent much time on it most days but enough to make it seem like it has taken a long time. At the festival one child asked how long it takes me to have a book published. The longest for me was THE MOUSE WAS OUT AT RECESS, my second book of poems about school, which came out in 2003.

The first book about school, SOMEBODY CATCH MY HOMEWORK, illustrated by Betsy Lewin, was released in 1993 and sold well. It went into a third printing during its initial year. I decided to do a second school collection and eventually sent my manuscript to my editor, Bernice (Bee) Cullinan. She liked it and was proceeding with it. Before it got too far I reread the manuscript and contacted Bee to tell her I didn’t want to publish the book yet. She seemed surprised but was gracious about it.

I got busy on other projects and it took me some time to get back to work on the second set, but I eventually discarded some of the original poems, revised others, and added a few new ones. Bee liked the second effort and put it back in line to be illustrated. Before that happened, I revisited what I’d sent her and found several pieces that I didn’t like and wondered how I could have thought they were good enough. I contacted Bee. She agreed to let me have another chance to make whatever improvements I thought necessary.

By the time I finally sent the third version of THE MOUSE WAS OUT AT RECESS to Bee and it became a book, nine years had passed. I had written seventy-four poems and kept twenty-five of them for the book. All the others were discarded along the way.

P.S. The book was nowhere near as successful as SOMEBODY CATCH MY HOMEWORK. Maybe I should have tried harder.