How I Became a Writer and Oggie Learned to Drive

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Not that Oggie was insanely happy or anything. He wasn’t. The real Disney World was as far off as it had ever been. We both knew we’d probably never get there.

  We were living our double life again, going back and forth, back and forth. By this time, even Oggie had started to figure out that Mom and Dad had no idea of fixing things. He never talked about it, though. He kept up a good front. As far as anyone could tell, his main ambition in life was getting out of Mrs. Pinkerton’s and into first grade.

  All this time, no one said one word to us about the new baby. To keep a lid on things, we didn’t let on that we knew. Cyndi kept getting bigger and bigger. She and Dad kept having more arguments. Where things were headed, we didn’t dare guess.

  Finally, one afternoon when Oggie and I arrived at Saturn from school, Cyndi handed us a full bag of chips and told us to sit down, she had something to tell us.

  “Your dad and I are breaking up,” she said.

  She was wearing a huge pink blouse over her pants, and her stomach was sticking out a mile. Naturally, Oggie asked, “What about California?”

  “Oh, I don’t plan to go anywhere,” Cyndi said. “I’m just moving up the street a little. You’ll be able to come see me anytime. I’m having a baby, did you know? She’ll be your little sister, sort of, and she’s coming really, really, really, really soon.”

  Oggie and I didn’t know what to say to that. The big question was how we’d ever fit another planet into our schedule, but we didn’t mention it. We just sat and watched while Cyndi finished off the chips. We weren’t that hungry, anyway, so we didn’t mind.

  There was only one thing that saved me during this whole madhouse period of time. My book.

  Now that was about to change.

  Late one night on Jupiter, while Oggie was outside at the curb driving the old heap (he was determined to keep in practice), I went in the bathroom and put the finishing touches on The Mysterious Mole People.

  It was kind of strange to come to the end of that story. I’d been writing it for so long that when I got to the last sentence, I hated to give up. I’d come to really like Amory Ellington. The character Raven was a great person, too, and the Mysterious Mole People were still so mysterious. There was a lot I hadn’t uncovered about them.

  I thought for a while I might make a sequel and just keep going forever. But stories need to end if they’re going to mean something. And writers need endings, too, or they might go nuts from writing about the same thing.

  That night, after I wrote the last sentence of The Mysterious Mole People, I closed the spiral notebook and put it in a big manila envelope I’d bought at Wong’s. I took out another piece of paper and wrote a letter that said: “To the Editor … I am submitting this story to your company. Please contact me if you want to publish it. If you don’t want it, please send it back in the self-addressed, stamped envelope I’ve enclosed. It’s the only copy I have. Signed, James Archer Jones.”

  I got out another manila envelope and wrote my own name and address on the outside, stuck a lot of stamps on it, folded it in half and put it in the first envelope with the notebook.

  Then, on the first envelope, I wrote the name and address of the publishing company I’d picked out. I found the address in the front of a book I liked the looks of at the bookstore. It was a pretty famous company. I thought I might as well start at the top.

  By the time Oggie came in, I was sticking on more stamps and writing my return address. He came over and kind of sucked in his breath.

  “Did you finish?” he whispered.

  I said I had.

  “Are you going to mail it?”

  Tomorrow, I said. I sealed up the envelope with The Mysterious Mole People inside.

  “How long do you think it will take to hear back?”

  I said I wasn’t sure. A couple of months at least.

  “What are you going to do now?” he asked me.

  Well, that was a terrible question, because I didn’t know. I hadn’t given it any thought. The end had come and I was unprepared. For a minute, the whole world went to pieces in front of my eyes.

  I didn’t want to tell Oggie that, though. If you have a little brother, you know that you never want to tell him certain things, especially that you’re unprepared.

  “Oh, I’ve got some ideas,” I said. “I’m tossing around a few thousand ideas. Well, maybe not a few thousand, but ten or twenty, anyway.”

  “Like what?” Oggie said, giving me the hairy eyeball. I could see he wanted to know, right then, what story he was going to be listening to next.

  “Well …” I was trying desperately to think. I was rifling through every part of my brain trying to come up with something. Anything!

  “Actually, I was thinking of writing about a family” I told him finally. I wasn’t really thinking of that at all. I only said it to shut him up so he wouldn’t ask me anymore.

  “A family?” Oggie said. “You mean, like ours?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I could write a story about two kids whose parents were getting a divorce. So they have to orbit between these two homes they call Saturn and Jupiter. There is this gang in their neighborhood called the Night Riders, who they get dragged in with. One kid wants to be a writer and is trying to write a book. Even though he knows it will never get published in a million years, he sends it out to a publishing company at the end. The other kid wants to drive a car, but he knows he never will because he’s only six years old.”

  Oggie looked at me.

  “It’s a story about fighting back,” I explained to him, “about doing something amazing that no one believes you can do. Then you show them you can.”

  “That sounds like us,” he said. “What’s the name of this story?”

  Well, I didn’t have the slightest idea. I was just kidding around, really, but all of a sudden, out of the blue, or maybe out of the brown, I knew what I was going to call it.

  “‘How I Became a Writer and Oggie Learned to Drive,’” I said.

  “What?”

  “‘How I Became a Writer and Oggie Learned to Drive.’ That’s the title.”

  Oggie looked a little confused. “This is going to be a book?” he said. “If this is going to be a book, when are you going to start writing it?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  And that’s what I did.

  A Personal History by Janet Taylor Lisle

  I was born in 1947 to young parents starting a life together in a tiny New York City apartment, just after the Second World War. My father had been a bomber pilot flying out of England during the war, a shattering experience for him. Returning from Europe, he took a job at the New York Herald Tribune. City living worsened his anxieties, however, and so my family and I moved to a rented house on a quiet road near the Rhode Island seacoast.

  My first memories are of this place: the woods and fields around my home and the rocky shore nearby, where my father fished and gradually regained his emotional balance. By the 1950s, he had found a job at an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. I was the first of five children, and my four brothers and I grew up in outlying Farmington, walking to local schools and later attending private school in West Hartford. But every summer, my family returned to Little Compton on the Rhode Island coast. The place, a natural haven for sea birds and wildlife, was more home to us than any other. It would become the imaginative setting for many of the stories I later wrote, including Forest, The Lampfish of Twill, and The Great Dimpole Oak.

  My father revered fiction. At one time, he had contemplated becoming a fiction writer himself. From our earliest school years, my brothers and I internalized this aspiration. We were a reading and writing family, familiar with overflowing bookshelves and tables stacked with books. We were accustomed to seeing our parents reading in the evenings, and to being read to ourselves. By third grade, I was writing stories and feeling magical about it. My pencil was a wand. I waved it and my imagination fell open onto the page. It was all so easy.

/>   By high school, though, I had lost this wild and fearless sense of writing. In my classes, I began to read the novels of the great writers, Henry James, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf, among many others. I compared my work with theirs and saw my own ineptitude.

  At fourteen, I left my family to attend a girl’s boarding school. It was a completely different world. I missed my brothers and parents, but among my teachers was Miss Arthur, who taught me how to write a tight, well-constructed sentence. Three years later, I entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I majored in English and learned the art of writing a pleasing term paper. But I kept my head down when it came to more imaginative forms of writing. I was self-conscious, thin-skinned, and mortally afraid of criticism. In a way, my education had silenced me.

  The war in Vietnam was raging when I graduated in 1969. Like many young people at that time I opposed American intervention there, including the killing of civilians and the US draft that threatened to put my friends in harm’s way. My new husband was among those at risk. Together, we joined VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) to shield him from service. For the next two years I lived in Atlanta, Georgia, organizing food-buying cooperatives in the city’s public housing projects and teaching in an early childcare center. The work opened my eyes to a world of poverty I’d barely glimpsed before. My old yearning to write flared up. I went back to school—journalism classes this time—at Georgia State University. It was the beginning of a reporting career that extended over the next ten years.

  Journalism, with its deadlines and demand for clear, straightforward text, has often been a precedent profession for authors. So it was for me. I learned to write all over again, and lost some of the self-consciousness that had dragged me down before. A decade later, when my daughter’s birth kept me at home, I was ready to test a voice of my own, through fiction. “Voice,” in fact, was suddenly my greatest strength. After years of newspaper interviewing, my ear was attuned to catching intonations that can underlie an ordinary remark and reveal unspoken meaning. I could write these kinds of sentences in my stories to bring my characters to life.

  In 1984, my first book, The Dancing Cats of Applesap, was accepted for publication by Richard Jackson, editor of Bradbury Press. “I love your cats! Call me!” he wrote in a letter I’ve kept to remind myself of the moment when I “became a writer.” I had lucked into a talented editor. Jackson’s belief in the power of voice in fiction, and his uncanny sense of narrative timing would soon make him famous in the children’s book world. We worked together over the next fifteen years, publishing some of my strongest titles, including Sirens and Spies, Afternoon of the Elves, Forest, and The Lampfish of Twill.

  Today, I live full-time in Little Compton, Rhode Island, in a gray shingled house near the same rocky beaches I tramped as a child. The area’s storms and tangled woodlands, open pastures and salt water ponds, still make an appearance in almost everything I write. Like my father, I’ve found my balance there.

  Lisle and her mother in Rhode Island in 1948.

  Lisle’s mother reading to her children at their Farmington, Connecticut, house. From left to right: Geoff, age six; Crane, age two; Lisle’s mother; Lisle, age eight; and Hugh, age six. All the cards in the background indicate that this photo was taken around Christmastime, and they are “probably reading ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

  Lisle at age eleven, in Farmington.

  Lisle with her husband, Richard, and her daughter, Elizabeth, at their Little Compton house in 1978.

  In 1983, Lisle received her first acceptance letter for fiction when Richard Jackson, editor of Bradbury Press, made an offer for The Dancing Cats of Applesap.

  Lisle’s first book signing (for The Dancing Cats of Applesap), at Davoll’s General Store in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in 1984.

  This photo was taken in Petworth, England in 1986. The tree behind Lisle was her inspiration for The Great Dimpole Oak, published in 1987.

  Lisle and her brothers in a photo taken in the early 1990s at their Warren’s Point house, in Little Compton.

  An elf village built by third graders at East School in New Canaan, Connecticut. The village, which the kids named “Elf Canaan,” was a school project connected to Afternoon of the Elves, inspired by Lisle’s visit to the school.

  Lisle circa 2001 at Warren’s Point in Little Compton, Rhode Island—the setting for the coast of Twill in her novel The Lampfish of Twill.

  Kayla, Lisle’s Siamese cat, at seventeen years old. She often sleeps on Lisle’s writing desk when Lisle works, and she is the model for Juliette in Lisle’s Investigators of the Unknown series. When Lisle does school presentations, she tells children that Kayla is her muse. Perhaps she is.

  Lisle hard at work in her writing room, in 2001.

  Lisle with her husband, Richard, and her daughter, Elizabeth, in Little Compton in 2005.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2002 by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

  978-1-4804-4154-5

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

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