When was phyllis naylor born

I don't enjoy research. I resent the time spent in traveling or reading or digging up facts, thinking how I could be well into the book if I didn't have to do all this work beforehand. And yet I must. During the writing of Unexpected Pleasures , it took months of calling to locate an ironworker who knew something about bridges.

But the effort was well repaid once I found a man who had helped build the second Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Most of what I have learned about writing has come from the process itself, from my husband's criticism and that of fellow writers, and from the rejection and acceptance letters of editors.

I wanted to write for Jean Karl of Atheneum for many years before I finally submitted a manuscript to her. When she replied that she would consider it again if I would revise it, this turning point was one of the great good fortunes of my career. I have also, from time to time, asked the help of my sons. Jeff and I once co-authored an article on mummies—he doing the research and I the writing.

When working on my novel The Year of the Gopher , which takes place in Minneapolis, I enlisted the help of my daughter-in-law, Julie, in getting the setting just right.

Once I sat in on one of our younger son's weight-lifting sessions so I could describe it in a book. I even paid Mike and three friends twenty dollars to play poker so that I could catch the rhythms of play and the conversation during the game. While research is a low point for me in writing, and reading galleys is even worse, one of the most embarrassing things that happened to me came during an interview on a TV program.

I had written a book called In Small Doses , which was a compilation of short humorous essays about family life, based loosely on my own family. I had changed Rex's name to Ralph, Jeff's to Jack, Michael's to Peter, and had imported an imaginary daughter named Susan to round out the family.

Not having a daughter, I used myself as a young girl as my model, and some of the ridiculous things that I did as an adolescent found their way into the book as performed by the hapless Susan. The interviewer had a copy of In Small Doses on his lap, and was telling the TV audience how much he had enjoyed the book. He went on to describe some of the funny things Susan had done, while I became increasingly uncomfortable.

Please, he insisted finally, tell the viewers something more about this funny daughter of yours. I could not sit there and lie to him and the people watching, so I said, "Look, I've got a confession to make, I don't have a daughter.

I just made her up. The interviewer did not laugh. He didn't even smile. He stared at me for a full five seconds, and finally held the book up to the camera and said, "Of course you have a daughter!

It says so right here! The scary part of being a writer is that there is no vacation pay, no sick leave, no guarantee that even if I put in a fifteen-hour day for two or three years, I'm going to have anything to show for it in the end—anything that someone will buy. I am always conscious of the time when I go out for the evening. I know that if my mind is to function the next day, I must have plenty of rest; I know that if I am upset over something else in my life, it will be hard to concentrate and the writing will be flat.

No one will pay me for sitting at a desk and putting in my time. With every new idea for a book, there is that awful mixture of anticipation and terror; I am wildly excited by what I want to do but am never really sure that I can do it.

One of the things that happens to us, I think, as we grow older, is that the differences that divide people do not seem as important as their similarities.

I am closer to my brother and sister now than I was as a teen, and we share the same concerns as parents. And I'm far more interested in trying to be a "healer" than a "hurter"—a person who smooths the way rather than a person who enjoys stirring up trouble. Perhaps this was a lesson my mother had to learn as well, for it was the theme of a book we coauthored, Maudie in the Middle , about the early years of her life just after the turn of the century in Sioux County, Iowa.

I know that I carry many different people inside me, and I call on them from time to time when needed. There are moments I still feel like a scared child, yet I can draw on this panic when I need to in my writing. I also know what it is like to be the strong one when necessary, the supportive one, and sometimes I have to talk to myself like a reassuring mother.

If I never experienced fear or jealousy, could I write about them convincingly? Perhaps not. And so, when I go through a difficult time, I tell myself, "Remember this; perhaps you can use it in a book. All of us, authors and readers alike, will have both joy and pain in our lives. I have never been one to think "Why me? The difference between author and reader, I guess, is that after going through a difficult time, the writer is less likely to give himself a good hard shake and get on with his life; he grabs hold of the thought, the worry, the experience, the feeling, and doesn't let go, painful though they may be.

He insists on dissecting, examining, and re-creating them on paper in a way that will provide release. The more he can touch upon universals, the more his experiences will speak for others. The main reason I write, I must admit, is for the "high" that writing gives me—that certain moment when, through dialogue or narration—a character comes to life on paper, or when a place that existed only in my head becomes real. There are no bands playing at this moment, no audience applauding—it's a very solitary time—but it's what I like most.

My life is very busy, orderly, and planned—more so, at times, than I like. I have given up a lot for writing—oil painting, madrigal singing, dozens of books I'd planned someday to read but never do. I see a year not so much in seasons as in projects: "It will take me from now until spring to do the revisions on such and such, and then I can start work on so and so, with a break in the fall for a talk in Michigan, and perhaps by next January, I can take another look at the novel I put away last year.

I resolve to add more spontaneity to what my husband and I do, and sometimes I am successful. A late night swim or a weekend at the ocean or a trip to an apple orchard makes a joyful interlude. But there is always a book on my mind.

Getting ideas is never a problem; keeping them away while I'm doing something with my family or working on a different manuscript is the rub. They are like bees at a picnic, and I continually swat them off. Because ideas make good company, however, being alone for hours at a time or even days is exhilarating, not depressing. There is a difference, of course, between solitude by choice and being alone by fate, and I am lucky to have my family. But I am also lucky to have the troop of noisy, chattering characters who travel with me inside my head.

As long as they are poking, prodding, demanding a place in a book, I have things to do and stories to tell. Much has happened in the fifteen years since I submitted my material for Something about the Author Autobiography Series and much has stayed the same. Our older son Jeff and his wife Julie have two daughters now, Sophia and Tressa. We don't live near either family, so the times we can all be together are very special. In , the book I wrote about an abused beagle, Shiloh , was awarded the Newbery medal.

Some authors have a strong suspicion that a book of theirs is on the "short list" for consideration because professional journals often predict in advance who they think might win this wonderful award. But no one mentioned Shiloh. And while one reviewer wrote, "… a moving and powerful look at the best and the worst of human nature as well as the shades of gray that color most of life's dilemmas," another said, "… this title is not up to Naylor's usual high quality.

Whenever one of us has a new book, we present it to the group. I remember standing before them, clutching the first copy of Shiloh after publication, and saying plaintively, "No one will ever love this book as much as I do.

I've known authors who said they waited by the phone the day their Newbery award was announced, their bags half packed, hopefully anticipating that trip to New York and their appearance on the Today Show.

On that January morning, however, my husband was out jogging and I was calmly eating my shredded wheat when the phone rang. I answered and heard a woman's voice telling me that Shiloh had won the Newbery. And I heard my own voice saying, "I don't know what to say! The next thirty-six hours, however, said it for me. I was told that the Today Show would be calling me shortly, and that I would need to be in New York that evening.

After I hung up, I stared at our two cats, grooming themselves in a patch of sunlight, and I wondered if I had imagined it all. Then the phone rang. Rex and Phyllis Naylor, It was NBC. When my husband got back from jogging, I was standing on the front porch in my robe telling him I had exactly twenty-four hours to lose thirty pounds. The next six hours were a blur. The phone rang constantly. Bouquets of flowers began to arrive. Bottles of champagne. A photographer from the Washington Post.

How could I pack? I wondered. What would I wear? We zapped our lunch several times in the microwave, but could not eat because of the interruptions. I phoned a few friends and relatives to tell them we would be in New York, and finally, by late afternoon, we were on our way. A limo was sent to our hotel the following morning, and I found myself in a holding room at NBC along with David Weisner, winner of the Caldecott award.

David and I scarcely had time to greet each other before we were whisked onto the set, where Jane Pauley was substituting that day. A technician off to one side was counting off seconds before air time: "Seventeen … sixteen … fifteen …" as another technician hurried over to me with a tiny microphone and said, "Slip this up under your dress, behind your bra and out the neckline of your blouse," while the first technician continued, "Eleven … ten … nine …".

Jane Pauley leaned forward and said to us both, "Now this is going to be short and painful. I meant pain less! Afterwards, of course, our respective publishers took us out to lunch with much fanfare, and when Rex and I arrived home that evening, we found more flowers and champagne waiting for us on the doorstep. But when we stepped inside, we found a surprise of a different sort: little heaps of vomit.

Our two cats had feasted on the flowers that had arrived the day before and thrown up all over the rug. Those were the first thirty-six hours of the Newbery. But what was happening to me was no crazier than what was happening to Clover, that little dog back in West Virginia, and to our friends who had taken her in.

The Washington Post called them with news about the award and wrote up the story. Over the next few months, Frank and Trudy Madden received phone calls from as far away as Denver, asking them to bring Clover to their town, all expenses paid, so that children could see the dog who had inspired the Newbery book.

Our friends didn't do that, but they did, on request, take her around to schools and libraries in West Virginia, where she would stand on a library table beside a stamp pad, and as students lined up to have their books signed, the Maddens would take one of her paws, press it on the stamp pad, and "paw-tograph" each book. She loved it! I was told. She basked in all the attention. But after about the thirtieth pawtograph, she would lie down, roll over, and hold one paw up in the air as if to say, "Do what you will with it, but I'm going to take a nap.

The downside of winning the Newbery is that I am busier than I really want to be. There don't seem to be those long leisurely stretches of unbroken time to spend on a manuscript, and more often than not, a book-to-be is started and stopped and started and stopped, so that it is finished at last by intensive sessions of writing separated by travel and speaking.

But who should complain over that? I have learned to make Amtrak my writer's retreat. A cross-country trip of three days and three nights in my own little bedroom, with America rolling by outside my window, has proven to be one of my favorite places to write. I had told myself I would write no more books about Shiloh. I did not want to turn it into a series, crowding bookshelves with Shiloh Goes to the Beach and Shiloh Goes to the Moon.

But as letters from readers continued to arrive in huge batches, I was concerned at the depth of their rage over the character of Judd Travers, who had abused the little dog. So I wrote a sequel, Shiloh Season. Then I realized that only one thing would ever convince Marty that Judd would never again hurt Shiloh, and that would be for Judd to risk his own life to save the dog.

The final book in the trilogy was titled Saving Shiloh. The first two books were made into feature films and can be seen on video. Rex and I were invited to Los Angeles to watch the filming, and we went down for a few days when Shiloh Season was in progress. It was a wonderful experience to see the talents of Rod Steiger, Michael Moriarty, Scott Wilson, and Ann Dowd all come together to bring the story to life on screen.

The younger cast members had to be replaced for this second movie because the child actors in the first movie had grown too old for their parts. And the role of Shiloh was actually played by two look-alike beagles who were specially trained for the movies. In general I was pleased with the films because the director and the producer, Dale Rosenbloom and Carl Borack, had worked hard to capture the spirit, theme, and setting of the two books.

I believe you must look at a book and its movie counterpart as two separate entities, because what might work as a book does not always work on the screen. Time must be abbreviated, for example, and action, not musing, is the keyword. Film rights have been sold for Saving Shiloh but it is not in production at this time. When I wrote The Agony of Alice , published in , I had no idea it was going to turn into a series.

I had simply wanted to write about a motherless girl, being raised by her father and older brother, and her search for a female role model. She finds it not in the beautiful sixth-grade teacher, Miss Cole, whom she longed to have for a mentor, but in homely Mrs. Yet at the end of the book, it is Mrs. Plotkin who has won her heart. Then the letters from readers began to arrive, and reviewers said such things as, "Alice's many fans will await her further adventures," and I said, What?

If there were to be more Alice books, I wanted there to be growth and change. I did not want the series to turn into a sitcom that goes on the same way, in the same year, forever and ever. So Alice is slightly older in each Alice book. I am planning a total of twenty-eight, including three prequels, and the very last one will take her from age eighteen to sixty, touching on the highpoints of her life.

Actually, a draft of that last novel sits in a fireproof box in my office, with instructions to my sons to send it to the publisher should I be run over by a bread truck. But I am sure I will revise it many times before it is officially finished.

It is astonishing to me that the Alice series has appeared on the list of the most challenged books in the United States for many years now. While Alice and her friends are very frank with each other about what they feel and think and believe, and while some of these topics deal with bodies and sex, these scenes are a normal part of teenage life. The letters I receive daily, both by post and by e-mail, bear this out. But the number of critical letters I receive are far outweighed by others telling me that the Alice books have provoked some wonderful classroom or dinner table discussions, and I am grateful to my many readers for their support.

Mike Naylor reading to his six-month-old son, Garrett Riley Naylor. I can more easily answer questions and take suggestions from readers this way. I think I learn as much from them as they learn from me. I try never to write the same type of book twice in a row. Novels such as Walker's Crossing and Sang Spell provide an entirely different climate, requiring new research, a new voice.

Parade magazine once featured a young skinhead, a person who had taken a hard look at himself—at the loathsome things he had done—and decided he did not like what he saw. He changed his life, and I was struck by the ability of someone so young to have this insight.

I began to research hate groups, those home-grown militia organizations. With the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which provided me with much of my background material, I began to educate myself about what makes these groups tick, composed as they are by a wide assortment of individuals. The common denominator, it seemed to me, was fear—fear of change. Fear that they might lose their jobs, their guns, their women, their children, their homes, their country.

And because fear needs an object, they seek one out: minorities, Jews, the government, Communism, the United Nations, you name it. I wrote Walker's Crossing , about a twelve year-old boy on a ranch in Wyoming, because I wanted young people to see how violence can begin. Sang Spell was more different still. In a column by Jack Anderson many years ago in the Washington Post , I was reading about economic conditions in Hancock County, Tennesssee, and he mentioned a group called the Melungeons, a mysterious dark-skinned people with European features who lived high up in the hills, and were thought to be descendants of survivors of a Portuguese shipwreck.

As soon as I read that paragraph, I had to know more. The research stretched over a period of several years. I finally went to Tennessee and talked with a Melungeon who has written several books about his heritage. My fascination with him and his people took hold, so I wrote Sang Spell , a blend of history and fantasy.

Many years ago I saw a scary movie called The Hand , about a severed hand that crept around the house at night, and it scared me half out of my wits. Thinking about it some more, I reasoned that most of my readers had probably not seen it, so why not resurrect that hand in a story of my own choosing? The voice became one of Judith Sparrow, a young girl in the s, going to live with a relative in the Carolinas, and I had a great time writing that book. Our two cats, Ulysses and Marco, now gone, figured in four of my books, and to be perfectly honest, I wrote for revenge.

Ulysses had a habit of swallowing anything long and wiggly—grass, tinsel, rubber bands…One Christmas I set up a little gift-wrapping area in the basement. On a curtain rod over a card table, I placed four rolls of crinkle ribbon so that I could quickly pull a piece down when needed. Little did I know, when I closed up shop for the evening, that Ulysses was still down there. He must have jumped up on the card table in the night and taken the end of the gold ribbon in his mouth. As he swallowed, the ribbon kept unwinding, and when the gold ribbon was gone, he ate the blue, then the red and green.

Several months later when I took the cats for their shots, the veterinarian said, "Mrs. Naylor, I can feel a huge tumor in your cat's abdomen. Two hours later he called and asked, "Are you sitting down? It cost me four hundred and fifty dollars, and when I got that cat home again, I looked him in the eye and said, "I'm going to earn that money back! I'm going to write a book about you! The stories are about two housecats who make their escape and join a club of cats whose mission is to discover the great secrets about their human masters.

Some took much longer than others—some required research, some required none. I also finished After , a novel for adults that was nineteen years in the making. I was writing other things too at the time, but for some reason it took years of thinking about it before it all came together. As always, my husband Rex is the first person to read my manuscripts once they are completed. He is also, perhaps, my most severe critic—fair, but thorough—so I don't let him see anything until I feel it is as good as I can do.

It is never as good as I can do, however, and he makes me write better than I think I can. After I make the revisions he suggests, I read the manuscript aloud, a few chapters at a time, to a critique group I have been meeting with for twenty-three years. We are all published writers, so we know both the delights and the disappointments of writing as a profession, and though we are gentle with each other, we are honest.

It wouldn't work otherwise. And so my life goes on very much as before, but there are always changes. I still have the same great agent, Bill Reiss, but I lost one of my longtime editors, the wonderful Jean Karl, to cancer. There are changes in family too. My father died in , but in the early nineties, in three successive years, I lost first my ninety-year-old mother, then my brother-in-law, then my sister, and a few years after that, my husband's brother.

I feel a sharp regret that my mother did not live long enough to celebrate the Newbery with me, but the pain of losing my sister was deeper than I ever expected. The more people we have to love, of course, the more people we add to our worry list. But the arrival of grandchildren is a constant reminder that life renews itself, and I get great satisfaction out of dedicating some of my books to these children and reading along with them.

I have lived long enough to know that just as the world situation can become seemingly hopeless at times, periods of violence and unspeakable cruelty can be followed by periods of progress and calm. Through it all, I still have family. I still have friends. I still have my work. The Bradford pear tree we planted outside our kitchen window when the world situation looked especially bleak—our tree of peace, we called it—fell down and was replaced by another.

That too proved fragile, and Hurricane Isabel toppled it when I was away on a speaking engagement. We know, of course, that world peace does not depend on our tree, but we wanted a symbol of hope to remind us of the good in human beings, and now a brilliant crimson maple thrills us in the fall.

I generally write about three books a year, but the stack of three-ring notebooks beside my writing chair grows. Each has the name of a book-to-be in masking tape on the spine. She has been described as prolific she has written over one hundred books, most of which are for children and young adults and versatile she writes picture books, fiction, nonfiction, and instruction books.

Her protagonists, or main characters, are strong, honest, determined characters that mature as a result of having prevailed despite adversity. Naylor's books portray her understanding of the trials and tribulations of childhood and adolescence.

She writes about serious issues such as mental illness in The Keeper , crib death in A Story of Chances , and difficult moral questions in Shiloh.

She also writes humorous mysteries the Bessledorf series and books about the supernatural the York trilogy and the Witch trilogy. Naylor hopes that by writing about sensitive topics and exposing her readers to characters and ideas that are different, she can encourage them to become more open minded.

Reynolds and Lura Schield Reynolds. Her family moved many times during her childhood because her father was a traveling salesman; consequently, Naylor doesn't consider any single place "home.

Her paternal grandparents her father's parents , openly warm and affectionate people, lived in Maryland and her maternal grandparents her mother's parents , no-nonsense people who reserved hugs for arrivals and departures, lived in Iowa. Naylor's summer visits made an impression on her; she has relied on memories of Maryland and Iowa to create settings and characters for several of her books. Even though Naylor grew up during the Depression and her family was not well off, she never felt poor.

She taught me how to use make-up, however, and better yet, how to play the piano by ear, even though we had both taken piano lessons. When she died early of cancer, it was one of the saddest times of my life. Both of us married young. She married her handsome high school sweetheart and started her family. I married even younger, right out of high school—once again, copying her. My husband was a University of Chicago grad student I met in our neighborhood. I had a romantic view of marriage, that it could solve anything, but four years later, when he suddenly showed signs of a serious mental illness, I realized it could not.

I managed to get two years of junior college before I went to work myself—first as a clinical secretary at a University of Chicago hospital, then as a third-grade teacher on a temporary teaching certificate. But in a futile attempt to find peace for my paranoid husband, we moved from place to place, supported only by the money I earned writing and selling short stories, and I finally borrowed money to admit him to an expensive hospital in Maryland.

When it became clear that even this hospital could not help him, we divorced, and fifteen years later I wrote about these years in my nonfiction book, Crazy Love. I met my second husband, the love of my life and the father of our two sons, at a church book discussion group. I walked in the door, and there was Rex, and we both remembered noticing each other and feeling attracted. He drove me home that night, and called me early the next morning to go out with him.

We spent that whole afternoon just talking on a blanket in a park, then went out to dinner, and I knew I was in love. You may help us to build the dating records for Phyllis Reynolds Naylor! You may read full biography about Phyllis Reynolds Naylor from Wikipedia. Coco Chinelo. Kaiman Wong. Celebrities Born in United States. Jodie Davis Cricket Player. Madeleine Keating Model. Andy Hilbert Ice Hockey Player.