Peninsula People
Twice Upon a Time: A Tale of Two Authors
By Judith B. Herman
Warning to anyone considering a career as a children’s author: "It’s bunny-eat-bunny out there!" The rabbits have turned even more rabid since celebrities joined the competition. Everyone from Jerry Seinfeld to Jimmy Carter – and now even Madonna – has written a children’s book. So what are the odds of someone without a famous name getting a children’s book published? Very small.
What are the odds of two writers from the same four-person Palos Verdes critique group having children’s books released by major publishers at the same time? Most statisticians would say very, very small. Yet that’s what’s happening to Nancy Minchella and Marie Torres Cimarusti, who have spent years listening to and offering suggestions about draft after draft of each other’s books.
Minchella and Cimarusti are as different as their books. Cimarusti bounces into critique sessions late, tote bags on each shoulder and in each hand, loaded with books, articles and snacks and bursting with news about a book idea or another publishing success. She sets down her burdens, plops into a chair and swings her long, dark hair over her shoulder, "Did I tell you what my editor said?" she asks.
Minchella may have news, too, but she waits with perfect poise, her pale blue eyes serene, until her turn comes up. Minchella’s well-crafted prose reveals her way with words, but Cimarusti is the one popping with puns throughout the discussion. Two authors, two tales.
Lift-the-Flap Queen, Marie Torres Cimarusti Marie Torres Cimarusti has something in common with Leonardo da Vinci. She’s had a work in the Louvre, too. Although Cimarusti’s was in the gift shop, not a gallery, and "Peek-a-Moo!" may never be as famous as the "Mona Lisa," it has come a long way for a toddler’s lift-the-flap book.
Now in its 13th printing, the book with the coy cow on the cover has sold over 100,000 copies in the United States. It has also been translated and published in France, Italy, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Great Britain and Australia.
Animals make different sounds in different languages, it turns out. For example, an Italian mouse says, "Squitt!" but a French mouse goes, "Couic! Couic!" Even the British version required a little translation. "Rooster" became "cockerel" and "barnyard" was changed to "farmyard."
Though she lives in Rancho Palos Verdes only a dozen miles from her childhood home in Redondo Beach, the author has also come a long way. For years she dreamed of combining motherhood with a career as a writer, but she clung to the security of a steady paycheck. One day her secure job vaporized and she took a chance on pursuing her dream.
The gamble paid off. She was 41 when she heard her first book would be published. The other half of her dream came true when her daughter was born, only two days later.
Cimarusti was born in California, but her roots extend to a Spanish-speaking community in rural Taos, New Mexico, where generations of her family, including both her parents, were born.
Because Marie Torres Cimarusti is proud of her heritage, she says, "I still use my maiden name as part of my full name. As a child, seeing Hispanic people in positive roles, like teachers, doctors, writers, artists, performers, etc., encouraged me. Will seeing a book written by an author with a Spanish surname encourage another Hispanic child towards pursuing the dream of writing? I don’t know, but I hope so."
Young Marie Torres loved spending vacations on her grandparents’ farms. "Peek-a-Moo!," her first book, takes her back to her roots. "An oink, a moo, a cock-a-doodle-doo. Who’s in the barnyard playing peek-a-boo?" The bright, quirky illustrations attract young listeners. They love to guess which animal is hiding its face with its paws and to lower the flap to find out.
The sequel, "Peek-a-Zoo!," arrived in bookstores February 24 and Dutton Children’s Books has already ordered a third printing. Child magazine calls it a "winsome follow-up to the popular ‘Peek-a-Moo!’" and "a rowdy, knowledge-building book."
Who would suspect that writing a book for an audience as likely to gnaw on it as listen to it might require research? Cimarusti demanded accuracy in her animal noises. The farm animals were easy. Marie got up close and personal with them on her grandparents’ farms.
"One of my claims to fame is that I’ve been chased by just about every kind of farm animal. A chicken doesn’t seem very threatening, but if you have a rooster coming at you with its claws out, it’s very scary."
When it came to the sequel, "Peek-a-Zoo!," Cimarusti called the Los Angeles Zoo and asked whom she could interview about animal sounds. "I thought they would give me the guy who sweeps out the cages, but I got an appointment with Michael Dee, the General Curator.
"I had to try my hardest not to laugh because I was sitting in his office with my little manuscript making all these animal sounds. He was very good at it and quite serious. I asked him if a chimpanzee would say, ‘Ooo-ooo, eee-eee, aah-aah,’ and he said, ‘No, it’s more of an ooo-ooo-ooo.’
Although "Peek-a-Moo!" was her first book, her talent for writing showed up early. In second grade Cimarusti and a friend started a classroom newspaper, providing the latest local news hot off the mimeograph.
Journalism was Cimarusti’s favorite class at Redondo Union High School. Working on the school newspaper gave the self-described "shy person" an excuse to interview classmates and teachers.
Despite her early talent, Cimarusti came late to professional writing. At UCLA she assumed everyone dreamed of being a writer, so she opted for a practical major, sociology.After college and a brief stint selling mobile homes, she took what she thought was a boring but secure job, scheduling projects at Hughes Aircraft. That was in 1981. By 1992 the aerospace business plummeted, taking job security with it. Fortunately, Hughes provided parachutes. Laid off employees were paid school expenses for a year.
This time Cimarusti decided to ditch security and follow her dream. She spent her year studying journalism at Cal State Long Beach where the faculty’s nuts-and-bolts approach to teaching gave her the confidence to be a writer. An internship at the Easy Reader in Hermosa Beach taught her not only the inner workings of a newspaper, but also "some of the things going on around the town that weren’t being talked about." Class assignments lead to publication in the Daily Breeze and the Los Angeles Times.
Ironically it was her insistence on accuracy and reporting the whole truth that turned her away from journalism. Frustrated with unverifiable information and sources who squirmed out of quotes, even when they were on tape, she decided that the only way to get the story right is to make it up.
So, she turned to fiction. One evening while driving back from a UCLA Extension class on writing for children, the title "Peek-a-Moo!" popped into her head.
The book owes something to the freeway as well as the farm. "I get a lot of my ideas when I’m driving. I get to a different level of consciousness. If I’m trying to write a story when I’m alone in the car, ideas just seem to be deposited into my head."
Although she is not an artist, Cimarusti took felt pen in hand and made up a "dummy" to show how the animals’ paws would flip down to play peek-a-boo. "In my original version, my cow looked like it had mad cow disease," she says. "Still, it got the idea across."
It did not take long for a "packager" (a company that coordinates authors, artists, and paper engineers who design moving parts in books) to pick up "Peek-a-Moo!" The packager took their dummy of the manuscript to an international book fair and sold the publishing rights in eight countries.
Two days before her daughter was due, Cimarusti heard that Dutton would publish "Peek-a-Moo" in the United States. She was, "ecstatic. It was a dream of mine to have a book published, but I kind of had more important things on my mind."
Her daughter, Channing, now five, shares her long dark hair and pixyish smile. "It’s only recently that Channing realizes that I write. When she was younger, for all she knew everyone’s mother wrote books. Now she’s showing everyone the second book. But my husband, Don, is my biggest fan. He always has a copy of my book out in his office and makes a point of telling everyone his wife is an author."
Although she is bursting with ideas for more children’s books, a young adult novel and articles on health and safety issues, "I put a lot of my writing on hold," she says, "because having waited to have a child makes me more aware of the fleetingness of Channing’s babyhood. I don’t want to miss any of it." Now she does her writing in the wee hours when her daughter and husband are asleep. "I’ll miss her when she’s at school but it will be good to have more time to devote to my writing."
Cimarusti has reserved a special copy of "Peek-a-Moo!" for Channing. Though the book almost wrote itself, she has spent four years working on the perfect inscription for her daughter. It will say, "Having a book published has always been my dream, but it pales in comparison to the joy I feel from being your mother."
"I feel blessed to have both." Cimarusti says.
Picture Book Poet, Nancy Minchella. To be heard above the "Ka-ching!" of celebrity names, some authors crank up the volume, adding cartoon characters, comic strip words like zap! and pow! Or computer chips with real sound effects.
Not Nancy Minchella. Some editors said that her books were "too quiet," but Minchella respected her own vision. For more than a dozen years she kept polishing and perfecting her stories, never giving in to flash and fashion. Now her poetic, reassuring picture book, "Mama Will be Home Soon," shines on bookstore shelves alongside all the boom and bombast.
Minchella drew on memories of how much her daughters, missed her when she traveled, and how much she missed them to write "Mama Will be Home Soon." From the cozy nest of her office in her Rolling Hills Estates home she took an uncomfortable mental journey. She put herself in the place of Lili, a little girl whose mother is going away for the first time.
Lili is staying with Grandma while Mama is away for a few days. Mama said she would be home soon, but "soon" never seems to come. Lili thinks she sees Mama’s yellow hat wherever she looks, but when she chases the distant speck of yellow it turns out to be only a balloon or a sundress or a beach umbrella. At the ferry dock, Lili finally spots mama’s yellow hat. They rush toward each other and meet in a big hug – an ending both reassuring and comforting.
Publisher’s Weekly praised "Mama Will Be Home Soon," saying, "Compassion and understanding ripple through Minchella’s perceptive debut…[She] certainly knows her preschoolers…"
Keiko Narahashi illustrated the book with flowing, transparent watercolors that have just enough detail to tell the story, like Minchella’s words.Minchella and Narahashi have never met or communicated with each other. When Minchella learned that editor Lauren Thompson had chosen Narahashi as the illustrator, she rushed to the library to check out all the books she had illustrated.
"I love her illustrations. They suit the story. She has a soft touch and she paints with emotion, a lot of feeling and warmth."
"This is where it all began," says Minchella, seated at her iMac computer. Glossy white built-in bookcases on two walls bulge with adult and children’s books. A knotty pine secretary holds still more books and a bronze figurine of a girl reading. In the middle of the soft, pearl-colored carpet is a floral easy chair, perfect for curling up with one of the books.
Now that her older daughter, Mary, has started her own family and younger daughter, Gina, is in graduate school, it’s a perfect time for Minchella’s writing career to take off.. She’s glad her grandchildren, Ralphy, age three, and Anna, one, live in nearby San Pedro so she can see them often. She believes they will inspire "a treasury of children’s stories."
Although Minchella does not plunk herself down in front of the computer at a certain time each day and stare at the screen until words emerge from her typing fingers, writing is on her mind much of the time. The initial ideas for books come to her in a flash, she says. Then it’s write, rewrite, refine and polish, sometimes for years, until she is satisfied that every word is right.
One of her favorite quotations is, "The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug." (Mark Twain credited fellow humorist Josh Billings with the insight.).
"Even now my husband and daughters don’t understand," she says. They ask in disbelief, "You’re still working on that?"
Minchella is off on her daily walk at 6 am. Plots, dialog and turns of phrase churn through her head as goes. She attends Mass every morning, has coffee with friends, then, like as not, it’s up to her office, to get the words onto the computer. She also likes to write late at night when the house is quiet.
Minchella dreamed of being a writer since the second grade when an Easter poem she wrote made her teacher declare, "I think you’re a poet." She has always loved crafting words. It’s not surprising that her favorite poets are Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Mary Oliver who all infuse spare language with great power.
Since that day in second grade Minchella never stopped writing . At Mount Saint Mary’s College she majored in creative writing, edited the literary magazine and served as assistant editor of the college newspaper.
For a while she entertained the idea of becoming a screenwriter. Following college she was secretary for a vice president of television production at 20th Century Fox. Later she worked for Paul Monash while he was producing Peyton Place and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But, she says, "Motherhood was my career plan." She quit work when Mary was born but continued to write and take classes.
She still studies poetry and writes it for her own enjoyment, but not for publication. Instead, the poetry surfaces in her picture books. The books are not in verse, but they sing with the clarity of poetry because of her attention to word choice, rhythm and image. "I’m concerned with the feelings evoked by the sounds of words," she says.
Around 1987, a class led by local writer Barbara Abercrombie pointed her toward children’s writing. An exercise had students begin, "I remember…" "Of course," says Minchella, "I zoomed right back to my childhood for a story." Abercrombie encouraged Minchella to pursue picture book writing, saying she had the voice for it.
Minchella continued to hone her talents by writing, studying, attending conferences and by reading lots and lots of children’s books. She would sit on the floor of the library and surround herself with books, read some there and take more home.
After a disappointing day chasing spots of yellow, Lili despairs and sobs to her grandma, "Mama’s never coming home," but Minchella has more inner strength than her young heroine. The love of writing sustained her through years of wondering whether her books would ever see publication. When she submitted her manuscripts she was buoyed by praise, but let down when editors found her writing "too quiet."
Minchella was determined to tell her stories in her own way. "I think that’s just my voice. There’s a place for quiet, especially in today’s world."
With the publication of "Mama Will Be Home Soon," Minchella has found her own happy ending.
Now the critique group buzzes with ideas for book promotions. Cimarusti, who still considers herself shy, waves animal placards while leading groups of preschoolers in "Old Macdonald Had and a Zoo" and other fractured folk songs at her book signings. Minchella’s style is different. As she reads to a group, her soft voice matches the tender, poetic tone of "Mama Will Be Home Soon."
The two authors, who have shared the roller coaster ride to success, inscribed books for each other, each thanking the other for seeing her through the long years it takes to make an idea a reality.
Twice Upon a Time: A Tale of Two Authors
By Judith B. Herman
Warning to anyone considering a career as a children’s author: "It’s bunny-eat-bunny out there!" The rabbits have turned even more rabid since celebrities joined the competition. Everyone from Jerry Seinfeld to Jimmy Carter – and now even Madonna – has written a children’s book. So what are the odds of someone without a famous name getting a children’s book published? Very small.
What are the odds of two writers from the same four-person Palos Verdes critique group having children’s books released by major publishers at the same time? Most statisticians would say very, very small. Yet that’s what’s happening to Nancy Minchella and Marie Torres Cimarusti, who have spent years listening to and offering suggestions about draft after draft of each other’s books.
Minchella and Cimarusti are as different as their books. Cimarusti bounces into critique sessions late, tote bags on each shoulder and in each hand, loaded with books, articles and snacks and bursting with news about a book idea or another publishing success. She sets down her burdens, plops into a chair and swings her long, dark hair over her shoulder, "Did I tell you what my editor said?" she asks.
Minchella may have news, too, but she waits with perfect poise, her pale blue eyes serene, until her turn comes up. Minchella’s well-crafted prose reveals her way with words, but Cimarusti is the one popping with puns throughout the discussion. Two authors, two tales.
Lift-the-Flap Queen, Marie Torres Cimarusti Marie Torres Cimarusti has something in common with Leonardo da Vinci. She’s had a work in the Louvre, too. Although Cimarusti’s was in the gift shop, not a gallery, and "Peek-a-Moo!" may never be as famous as the "Mona Lisa," it has come a long way for a toddler’s lift-the-flap book.
Now in its 13th printing, the book with the coy cow on the cover has sold over 100,000 copies in the United States. It has also been translated and published in France, Italy, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Great Britain and Australia.
Animals make different sounds in different languages, it turns out. For example, an Italian mouse says, "Squitt!" but a French mouse goes, "Couic! Couic!" Even the British version required a little translation. "Rooster" became "cockerel" and "barnyard" was changed to "farmyard."
Though she lives in Rancho Palos Verdes only a dozen miles from her childhood home in Redondo Beach, the author has also come a long way. For years she dreamed of combining motherhood with a career as a writer, but she clung to the security of a steady paycheck. One day her secure job vaporized and she took a chance on pursuing her dream.
The gamble paid off. She was 41 when she heard her first book would be published. The other half of her dream came true when her daughter was born, only two days later.
Cimarusti was born in California, but her roots extend to a Spanish-speaking community in rural Taos, New Mexico, where generations of her family, including both her parents, were born.
Because Marie Torres Cimarusti is proud of her heritage, she says, "I still use my maiden name as part of my full name. As a child, seeing Hispanic people in positive roles, like teachers, doctors, writers, artists, performers, etc., encouraged me. Will seeing a book written by an author with a Spanish surname encourage another Hispanic child towards pursuing the dream of writing? I don’t know, but I hope so."
Young Marie Torres loved spending vacations on her grandparents’ farms. "Peek-a-Moo!," her first book, takes her back to her roots. "An oink, a moo, a cock-a-doodle-doo. Who’s in the barnyard playing peek-a-boo?" The bright, quirky illustrations attract young listeners. They love to guess which animal is hiding its face with its paws and to lower the flap to find out.
The sequel, "Peek-a-Zoo!," arrived in bookstores February 24 and Dutton Children’s Books has already ordered a third printing. Child magazine calls it a "winsome follow-up to the popular ‘Peek-a-Moo!’" and "a rowdy, knowledge-building book."
Who would suspect that writing a book for an audience as likely to gnaw on it as listen to it might require research? Cimarusti demanded accuracy in her animal noises. The farm animals were easy. Marie got up close and personal with them on her grandparents’ farms.
"One of my claims to fame is that I’ve been chased by just about every kind of farm animal. A chicken doesn’t seem very threatening, but if you have a rooster coming at you with its claws out, it’s very scary."
When it came to the sequel, "Peek-a-Zoo!," Cimarusti called the Los Angeles Zoo and asked whom she could interview about animal sounds. "I thought they would give me the guy who sweeps out the cages, but I got an appointment with Michael Dee, the General Curator.
"I had to try my hardest not to laugh because I was sitting in his office with my little manuscript making all these animal sounds. He was very good at it and quite serious. I asked him if a chimpanzee would say, ‘Ooo-ooo, eee-eee, aah-aah,’ and he said, ‘No, it’s more of an ooo-ooo-ooo.’
Although "Peek-a-Moo!" was her first book, her talent for writing showed up early. In second grade Cimarusti and a friend started a classroom newspaper, providing the latest local news hot off the mimeograph.
Journalism was Cimarusti’s favorite class at Redondo Union High School. Working on the school newspaper gave the self-described "shy person" an excuse to interview classmates and teachers.
Despite her early talent, Cimarusti came late to professional writing. At UCLA she assumed everyone dreamed of being a writer, so she opted for a practical major, sociology.After college and a brief stint selling mobile homes, she took what she thought was a boring but secure job, scheduling projects at Hughes Aircraft. That was in 1981. By 1992 the aerospace business plummeted, taking job security with it. Fortunately, Hughes provided parachutes. Laid off employees were paid school expenses for a year.
This time Cimarusti decided to ditch security and follow her dream. She spent her year studying journalism at Cal State Long Beach where the faculty’s nuts-and-bolts approach to teaching gave her the confidence to be a writer. An internship at the Easy Reader in Hermosa Beach taught her not only the inner workings of a newspaper, but also "some of the things going on around the town that weren’t being talked about." Class assignments lead to publication in the Daily Breeze and the Los Angeles Times.
Ironically it was her insistence on accuracy and reporting the whole truth that turned her away from journalism. Frustrated with unverifiable information and sources who squirmed out of quotes, even when they were on tape, she decided that the only way to get the story right is to make it up.
So, she turned to fiction. One evening while driving back from a UCLA Extension class on writing for children, the title "Peek-a-Moo!" popped into her head.
The book owes something to the freeway as well as the farm. "I get a lot of my ideas when I’m driving. I get to a different level of consciousness. If I’m trying to write a story when I’m alone in the car, ideas just seem to be deposited into my head."
Although she is not an artist, Cimarusti took felt pen in hand and made up a "dummy" to show how the animals’ paws would flip down to play peek-a-boo. "In my original version, my cow looked like it had mad cow disease," she says. "Still, it got the idea across."
It did not take long for a "packager" (a company that coordinates authors, artists, and paper engineers who design moving parts in books) to pick up "Peek-a-Moo!" The packager took their dummy of the manuscript to an international book fair and sold the publishing rights in eight countries.
Two days before her daughter was due, Cimarusti heard that Dutton would publish "Peek-a-Moo" in the United States. She was, "ecstatic. It was a dream of mine to have a book published, but I kind of had more important things on my mind."
Her daughter, Channing, now five, shares her long dark hair and pixyish smile. "It’s only recently that Channing realizes that I write. When she was younger, for all she knew everyone’s mother wrote books. Now she’s showing everyone the second book. But my husband, Don, is my biggest fan. He always has a copy of my book out in his office and makes a point of telling everyone his wife is an author."
Although she is bursting with ideas for more children’s books, a young adult novel and articles on health and safety issues, "I put a lot of my writing on hold," she says, "because having waited to have a child makes me more aware of the fleetingness of Channing’s babyhood. I don’t want to miss any of it." Now she does her writing in the wee hours when her daughter and husband are asleep. "I’ll miss her when she’s at school but it will be good to have more time to devote to my writing."
Cimarusti has reserved a special copy of "Peek-a-Moo!" for Channing. Though the book almost wrote itself, she has spent four years working on the perfect inscription for her daughter. It will say, "Having a book published has always been my dream, but it pales in comparison to the joy I feel from being your mother."
"I feel blessed to have both." Cimarusti says.
Picture Book Poet, Nancy Minchella. To be heard above the "Ka-ching!" of celebrity names, some authors crank up the volume, adding cartoon characters, comic strip words like zap! and pow! Or computer chips with real sound effects.
Not Nancy Minchella. Some editors said that her books were "too quiet," but Minchella respected her own vision. For more than a dozen years she kept polishing and perfecting her stories, never giving in to flash and fashion. Now her poetic, reassuring picture book, "Mama Will be Home Soon," shines on bookstore shelves alongside all the boom and bombast.
Minchella drew on memories of how much her daughters, missed her when she traveled, and how much she missed them to write "Mama Will be Home Soon." From the cozy nest of her office in her Rolling Hills Estates home she took an uncomfortable mental journey. She put herself in the place of Lili, a little girl whose mother is going away for the first time.
Lili is staying with Grandma while Mama is away for a few days. Mama said she would be home soon, but "soon" never seems to come. Lili thinks she sees Mama’s yellow hat wherever she looks, but when she chases the distant speck of yellow it turns out to be only a balloon or a sundress or a beach umbrella. At the ferry dock, Lili finally spots mama’s yellow hat. They rush toward each other and meet in a big hug – an ending both reassuring and comforting.
Publisher’s Weekly praised "Mama Will Be Home Soon," saying, "Compassion and understanding ripple through Minchella’s perceptive debut…[She] certainly knows her preschoolers…"
Keiko Narahashi illustrated the book with flowing, transparent watercolors that have just enough detail to tell the story, like Minchella’s words.Minchella and Narahashi have never met or communicated with each other. When Minchella learned that editor Lauren Thompson had chosen Narahashi as the illustrator, she rushed to the library to check out all the books she had illustrated.
"I love her illustrations. They suit the story. She has a soft touch and she paints with emotion, a lot of feeling and warmth."
"This is where it all began," says Minchella, seated at her iMac computer. Glossy white built-in bookcases on two walls bulge with adult and children’s books. A knotty pine secretary holds still more books and a bronze figurine of a girl reading. In the middle of the soft, pearl-colored carpet is a floral easy chair, perfect for curling up with one of the books.
Now that her older daughter, Mary, has started her own family and younger daughter, Gina, is in graduate school, it’s a perfect time for Minchella’s writing career to take off.. She’s glad her grandchildren, Ralphy, age three, and Anna, one, live in nearby San Pedro so she can see them often. She believes they will inspire "a treasury of children’s stories."
Although Minchella does not plunk herself down in front of the computer at a certain time each day and stare at the screen until words emerge from her typing fingers, writing is on her mind much of the time. The initial ideas for books come to her in a flash, she says. Then it’s write, rewrite, refine and polish, sometimes for years, until she is satisfied that every word is right.
One of her favorite quotations is, "The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug." (Mark Twain credited fellow humorist Josh Billings with the insight.).
"Even now my husband and daughters don’t understand," she says. They ask in disbelief, "You’re still working on that?"
Minchella is off on her daily walk at 6 am. Plots, dialog and turns of phrase churn through her head as goes. She attends Mass every morning, has coffee with friends, then, like as not, it’s up to her office, to get the words onto the computer. She also likes to write late at night when the house is quiet.
Minchella dreamed of being a writer since the second grade when an Easter poem she wrote made her teacher declare, "I think you’re a poet." She has always loved crafting words. It’s not surprising that her favorite poets are Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Mary Oliver who all infuse spare language with great power.
Since that day in second grade Minchella never stopped writing . At Mount Saint Mary’s College she majored in creative writing, edited the literary magazine and served as assistant editor of the college newspaper.
For a while she entertained the idea of becoming a screenwriter. Following college she was secretary for a vice president of television production at 20th Century Fox. Later she worked for Paul Monash while he was producing Peyton Place and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But, she says, "Motherhood was my career plan." She quit work when Mary was born but continued to write and take classes.
She still studies poetry and writes it for her own enjoyment, but not for publication. Instead, the poetry surfaces in her picture books. The books are not in verse, but they sing with the clarity of poetry because of her attention to word choice, rhythm and image. "I’m concerned with the feelings evoked by the sounds of words," she says.
Around 1987, a class led by local writer Barbara Abercrombie pointed her toward children’s writing. An exercise had students begin, "I remember…" "Of course," says Minchella, "I zoomed right back to my childhood for a story." Abercrombie encouraged Minchella to pursue picture book writing, saying she had the voice for it.
Minchella continued to hone her talents by writing, studying, attending conferences and by reading lots and lots of children’s books. She would sit on the floor of the library and surround herself with books, read some there and take more home.
After a disappointing day chasing spots of yellow, Lili despairs and sobs to her grandma, "Mama’s never coming home," but Minchella has more inner strength than her young heroine. The love of writing sustained her through years of wondering whether her books would ever see publication. When she submitted her manuscripts she was buoyed by praise, but let down when editors found her writing "too quiet."
Minchella was determined to tell her stories in her own way. "I think that’s just my voice. There’s a place for quiet, especially in today’s world."
With the publication of "Mama Will Be Home Soon," Minchella has found her own happy ending.
Now the critique group buzzes with ideas for book promotions. Cimarusti, who still considers herself shy, waves animal placards while leading groups of preschoolers in "Old Macdonald Had and a Zoo" and other fractured folk songs at her book signings. Minchella’s style is different. As she reads to a group, her soft voice matches the tender, poetic tone of "Mama Will Be Home Soon."
The two authors, who have shared the roller coaster ride to success, inscribed books for each other, each thanking the other for seeing her through the long years it takes to make an idea a reality.
