Edmund Weisberg is the author of the new children's picture book While You're at School. He has worked for Greenpeace, the International Clinical Epidemiology Network, the American Association for Cancer Research, and the University of Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in Voices in Bioethics and Impakter Magazine. He is based in Philadelphia.
Q: How did you come up with the idea for While You’re at
School?
A: Faithful to the book’s introduction—and as my mother has
relayed to me through the years—I did ask her when I returned home from
kindergarten one day what she did while I was in school. Her cherubically
playful, sarcastic reply indicated that she waited all day for me on our living
room couch while I was at school. What else was there to do?
These details remained solely part of a fun family anecdote
for years until I started writing children’s books. The core meaning of that
conversation with my mother just struck me as a worthy vehicle for exploring
children’s early separation anxieties in a facetious as well as realistic way.
I might not have been thinking along those lines if I hadn’t
already written a couple of unpublished children’s books, though. A few years
earlier, a friend of the older of my two sisters mentioned that she completed a
series of illustrations and wondered whether they told a story. My sister urged
her to send the illustrations to me; I thought they told a story, so I wrote it
out.
We shopped it around, with some decent leads and praise for
the text. This whole process helped to open the floodgates for me, as I
reworked that story, wrote two sequels, and felt inspired to turn my mother’s
retelling of our conversation into While You’re at School.
Q: What was the process of collaboration like between you
and illustrator Loel Barr?
A: Electric. And electronic. We hadn’t seen one another in
more than 15 years. We communicated frequently through email and collaborated
well, working through occasional miscommunications. It was especially
satisfying when we each traded ideas about the text and illustrations and saw
each other’s comments influence the final version.
For instance, the working title of the book was “While You
Are at School.” I had been so focused on having skirted disaster related to the
sound and possible waggish response to the original title (“While You’re in
School”—“you’re in” sounds like “urine,” after all), I had unconsciously backed
away from the more comfortable, vernacular, and potentially joke-proof adjustment
that Loel later insightfully suggested.
Q: Can you describe how the book came to be?
A: I wrote the first draft of the book in 2001, and asked
Loel for a sample illustration. Her drawing—an edgier version of the
penultimate illustration that appears in the book—convinced me of her clever
artistry, and from then on I was wedded to the idea of collaborating with her.
In the ensuing years, I workshopped and sent the manuscript
to publishers, and occasionally attended children’s writing conferences in
Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. Although I wrote an alternative
non-rhyming narrative version and occasionally tweaked the original, I didn’t
devote much time to getting it published in the last few years.
About a year and a half ago—as I realized how much
crowdfunding had changed the world—it dawned on me that I might be able to build
a community of backers to help fund Loel’s work. I launched a Kickstarter
campaign in October 2015 and more than 110 supporters [Editor's note: including me!] made it a success a month
later. Loel and I worked together in the past year to realize the vision, I set
up a publishing company, and self-published in October 2016.
Q: How have readers responded to the book so far?
A: Positively, and emphatically at that, I’m happy to
report. I’ve heard from several people who have stressed how much they “love”
it. Of course, this is a self-selected sample of readers, but I’d select that
sample any time.
It occurs to me that, at least in these early days since the
book was released, the feeling for me is almost akin to having a dog. Not
unconditional love per se, but in the same way that dogs make every day better,
I’ve been at the receiving end of passionate, affirmative reactions when I
least expect it and they elicit an automatic boost to my day.
And I can’t help loving the stories of reader referrals, hearing
that my partner Sara’s boys and my college roommate Dave’s son excitedly
announced their intentions of taking the book to school, and learning that
children are insisting on having the book read to them every night. I’m told by
reliable sources that that’s how I consumed Green Eggs and Ham in my early
childhood… every night for weeks on end.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Too much as usual, as many folks in my life would say. Besides
my writing/editing role at the University of Pennsylvania, I’m working on
several essays on the environment, climate change, and bioethics.
Far afield from that material—and perhaps to keep myself
relatively sensible in an irrational world—I’m putting the finishing touches on
two books of limericks, which I don’t recommend for children of the non-adult
variety. Of course, not all adult children will find them appealing, either.
In the children’s realm, I have an anti-bullying story that
is ready for editing, and stories with themes on jealousy, greed, honesty, coming
into one’s own, and other topics are in various stages of development. I hope
they get to see the light of day.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’ve long paid attention to politics and issues of
justice at many levels. This has left me exceedingly cynical in my day-to-day
life. The fact that I’ve clung to my idealism surely contributes to a struggle
to balance my appreciation for social and cultural strides that we’ve made
while also tragically pushing our species and many others to the brink of
oblivion.
It is also abhorrent to me that native populations, women,
racial, sexual, gender, religious and other minority groups, and the poorest living
in developed and less developed countries have consistently suffered varying
but salient oppression through the course of the human condition.
I was a child of the 1970s. Some of the art that created an
impact then and really resonated for me included Marlo Thomas’s Free to Be You
and Me, Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, and the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign depicting
a Native American crying over modern pollution.
I am disappointed, to say the least, that the lessons from
such stories have not been as pervasive as warranted. Put simply, despite a
life devoid of much of the worst of what the world has to offer in a material
and spiritual sense, my global outlook is relatively dark.
I offer this glimpse into my psyche, I suppose, to
underscore how truly satisfying it has been to evoke smiles of pure joy from
those who I have seen react to While You’re at School and others who have
shared their feedback. The unrestrained smiles and words like “glorious” and
“delightful” buoy my spirits. In that sense, I hope the book is delivering a
genuinely reciprocal experience.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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