FINDING MY NICHE
From Ten Steps to Publishing Children’s Books by Berthe Amoss and Eric Suben.
Writer’s Digest Books 1997.

Whitney Stewart writes biographies and magazine articles for children, and she has just completed her first novel for middle-school readers. She also uses biographical material for interactive Internet programs for students in grades three through eight. She lives with her husband and five-year-old son in New Orleans.  Her books include: To the Lion Throne: The Story of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Aung San Suu Kyi: Fearless Voice of Burma, her latest title.

Stuck behind an elderly woman in the checkout line of grocery store in Concord, New Hampshire, anxious to buy my boarding school, late-night-study snacks, I spotted a sign that read WRITE CHILDREN'S BOOKS. I couldn't wait to grab it. I was so impatient I forgot my popcorn, chocolate-raisin gorp and butterscotch drops. I just wanted to know how to get my stories published. This was it. I met my destiny in a grocery store. I even forgave my bad manners as I bustled past the frail, old woman to snatch up the sign before anyone else stole my dream.

I was in eleventh grade, and I’d wanted to be a writer since fourth grade when my best friend, Suzy Tewksbury, and I stapled together our first book of poems on flimsy yellow paper. Hers were much better. They rhymed. And her handwriting looked like that of a writer, all swirly and pretty. Mine was scratchy and uneven. But I had passion and unbending will.

I submitted writing samples to the people who made that sign, and they accepted me. Not the writing really, but me. Their letter said I could take their course to become a children's book writer. I didn't realize I'd have to pay money for my dream, or find time after French papers and loathsome, trigonometry to write stories, but I was thrilled and relived that someone else understood I was a writer.

I didn’t finish the course. My homework alone kept me up nights. I despaired. I studied writers; their lives enflamed me. I ate up six biographies of George Sand and perfected my French. I read Proust, Hemingway, Woolf and Plath, and imitated their sentences if not their lives. A French, a Spanish and an English teacher understood me; all three led me through literature, through biography. But, publishers rejected the stories I sent.

I went on to college, learned more languages, traveled the world and got more rejection letters, the impersonal kind. Finally, a college linguistics professor guided my independent thesis on children’s books. She suggested I focus on children’s biography, and I turned up my nose. Too dull, I said. She persisted. I gave in. I spent the next eighteen months bored by fictionalized biographies. This was the early eighties, and children’s nonfiction was nothing like it is today.

Then I read Jean Fritz. Nonfiction was suddenly alive as fiction. I couldn’t get enough of her. When I’d gone through every Fritz book I could find, I wrote the author herself. And, to my excitement, she wrote me back. And what’s more? She understood me, my view of nonfiction for kids. She even wrote that we were "on the same wave length as far as biographies for children are concerned." She, too, thought most children’s biographies back then were "pretty dull." She said she wanted to explore human nature and so satisfy her own curiosity when she wrote biographies. Her letter struck me at a heart nerve. Fritz could never have known just how she worked on my inner puzzle.

I still didn’t know yet I would write biographies. I continued to send out mediocre picture book manuscripts while doing anything I could to be near professionals in the children’s book world. I took a part-time job as a children’s librarian and ready my was through the collection, took summer courses on children’s literature at Simmons College where I met dozens of my favorite authors, subscribed to the newsletter of the Society of children’s Book Writers, and learned editing skills working on a college publication.

After college, I became a travel agent in New Orleans so I could travel cheaply, and I begged my way into the job as a publication coordinator of a travel newsletter. Finally, I published short travel pieces, but his only fed my desire to publish a book. And it had to be for children. Nothing could sway me. As a travel agent, I’d come home exhausted and out of ideas, so I wrote very little after dinner. Then I signed up for an evening course with Berthe Amoss, and I came home with new ideas. I had renewed fervor. But alas, my day job zapped me of creativity, and my stories lacked authenticity.

I was laid off from the travel agent’s job (a disguised blessing, I know now), so my mother and I were free to go to Asia. This trip was the final puzzle piece.

After biking in China and eating dust for weeks, we flew to Lhasa, Tibet. I stood motionless viewing the Potala Palace where the fourteenth Dalai Lama once lived. I imagined the little monk scurrying through a thousand rooms, his worried attendants in pursuit. As I toured his residential chambers, I wiped my hand along walls hoping to touch his fingerprints that somehow remained after the Red Army invasion of the Tibetan leader’s winter home. I wanted to live in Lhasa, to know the people, to belong to that rugged landscape, even if it meant having more nightmares and delusions from lack of oxygen.

With great regret, my mother and I did leave Lhasa, but we traveled on to Nepal, to the Khumbu Valley below Everest. This place too stole my mind, heart and breath. How could I go home after the Potala and Everest? I saw myself donning maroon robes and meditating at an unknown monastery like a renegade character from Lost Horizon. Was I trying to escape the mania of Western life, reconnecting to a past lost except to my subtle consciousness, or experiencing the spasms of the writer’s newest inspiration?

When I returned to the flat bayous and sticky air of New Orleans, I knew I needed to find my way back tot he Himalayan range. AS much as I delighted in Spanish moss and sweet olive, my present mind was caught on a rocky slope above the marketplace of Namche Bazaar, Nepal. I’d write about the Dalai Lama, I thought, and learn history as it happened in the highest lands of the world. Few American children would have ever heard of the Dalai Lama, and his story was a rich one I would love writing and children would love reading.