BIO

Vera B. Williams lives in New York City.

In Her Own Words...

"Throughout my childhood I was encouraged to make pictures, tell stories, act, and dance--all of this at a heaven in our New York City neighborhood called the Bronx House.

"Saturdays I painted with a crusading art director, Florence Cane. In her book THE GROWTH OF THE CHILD THROUGH ART, I appear under the name Linda. I was sixteen when the book appeared and embarrassed by it. But at age nine I had been totally proud when a painting of mine was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and I was later shown in the Movietone News explaining to Eleanor Roosevelt its Yiddish title, "Yentas."

"In 1945 I went to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a unique educational community. I graduated in 1949 in graphic art, which I studied with Josef Albers. Along the way I planted corn, made butter, worked on the printing press, and helped to build the house in which I lived with Paul Williams, a fellow student I married there.

"I wanted that connection of art and community to continue. And it did at the Gate Hill Cooperative, a community we built with other Black Mountain people, a poet, musicians, and potters. I lived and worked there from 1953-1970 (after which I moved to Canada). My children (Sarah, Jenny, Merce) grew up there. For them, we branched out into a school, part of the Surnmerhill movement. The gingerbread houses that led to my first book for Greenwillow I first made in sticky variety at our school. I have always liked to teach and have taught art, cooking, writing, nature study, for nursery age on.

"At forty-six, no longer married, living in a houseboat on the bay at Vancouver, British Columbia, I did my first book. But before that could happen, the fates decreed a stint of cooking and running a bakery at a small school in the Ontario countryside. My love affair with Canada included also a 500-mile trip on the Yukon River. Many of those adventures I put in Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe.

"I also write and draw for adults-short stories, leaflets, and posters. As a lover of children, I try to do what I can to help save their earth from nuclear disaster. This pursuit, too, has added its excitement to my biography, including, in 1981, a month's stay in the federal penitentiary in Alderson, West Virginia (an outcome of a women's peaceful blockade of the Pentagon). Perhaps this experience will some day appear in one of my books. So far I've found children's books a wonderfully accommodating medium where any of my various activities might pop up."

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INTERVIEW

December 12, 2001

When their family experiences financial hardship, sisters and best friends Essie and Amber support each other with their talents, their optimistic outlook on things, and their love. Join Kidreads.com writer Molly McVeigh as she chat with author Vera B. Williams about her own life, artwork, and the poems make Essie and Amber such a dynamic duo.

KRC: You started writing later on in your life. What did you do before you became a children's book author?

VBW: I'm now 74 --- I've had a lot of years of varied passionate interests. Among them are: founding (with others) a cooperative community, raising three children, starting a school. [So, I've always had lots of kids to do things with: bread sculptures and gingerbread houses, stories, costumes, masks, puppets, hikes, gardens, trips. I also kept journals, wrote poems, studied Japanese calligraphy, designed covers for a pacifist magazine, organized against militarism, injustice, the threat of nuclear destruction. . .  What else? I was a cook in a Summerhill school in rural Ontario, Canada. I made a 500-mile canoe trip on the Yukon River, and moved into a houseboat in Vancouver, B.C. I also started writing short stories, and illustrated my first book with Remy Charlip (HOORAY FOR ME). Of course, I also found my way to Greenwillow [Publishers] and moved to NYC. The goes on and on . . . too much to tell. But here I am today as excited about AMBER WAS BRAVE, ESSIE WAS SMART --- my thirteenth book --- as anything I've ever done.

KRC: Most of your books look at families closely and lovingly, shedding light on the imperfections, personality quirks, and struggles that real families face. What draws you to this topic again and again?

VBW: I love woods, the moon, rivers. . .  But my writing was mostly flavored in the soup pot of family and New York City's multi-ethnic neighborhoods. Mine was a fiercely scrapping, loud-talking, loving but unsettled family struggling to make a living, as were so many around us. We were also radicals, world meddlers, people lovers, and lovers of literature, art, and music. My books seem to be telling something of all that and, at the same time, celebrating it.

KRC: You begin AMBER WAS BRAVE, ESSIE WAS SMART with two beautiful portraits of each girl. Did you draw these before you began to write? Or did the words come first?

VBW: The words came first. All the verses had been written. It felt complete, with no need for pictures. Still, I tried watercolors. I wasn't pleased with them, but as soon as I had my fingers around a fat colored pencil, portraits of Amber happened, and then Essie, then lots of other colored pencil paintings. It was exciting. I had a hard time selecting the ones to use. I hadn't wanted any illustrations, and now I love them.

KRC: Did you know from the onset that AMBER WAS BRAVE, ESSIE WAS SMART would be written in free verse?

VBW: About five years ago I wrote a prose version of AMBER WAS BRAVE, ESSIE WAS SMART. The Greenwillow editors were drawn to the subject but not the telling. It seemed to have a "concocted" quality. I put it away and did LUCKY SONG instead. Last year I found myself setting down bits of verse on scraps of paper. I recognized I was "coming home" to what I had deeply wanted to tell. I wrote the Amber and Essie poems with the same mysterious ease I felt in writing A CHAIR FOR MY MOTHER. I think that because the story comes out of deeply felt but incomplete memories and impressions of my very early years, it is well served by free verse.

(c) Copyright 2001, Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.

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