Standing for Socks by Elissa Brent Weissman

Thanhhà Lại made up stories with her mother as a girl in Vietnam, while Yuyi Morales struggled to create a truly original painting as a young teen in Mexico. Rita Williams-Garcia kept a daily chronicle of her offbeat elementary school life. Tom Angleberger planned for an epic novel about a plaice called Yodium. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor wrote mysteries on used stationery during the Great Depression. And, unfortunately, I had the space to include only a fraction of today’s tremendous talent.Įven so, the collection you’re about to read contains a fascinating variety of work from a range of voices, styles, backgrounds, and experiences, arranged by the age at which the works were created, from seven up through sixteen. Some were too busy creating something new to dig out something old. Others saved but consider their work too personal to share. Some wrote or drew, but they didn’t save their work. Some now-famous authors didn’t write as kids. This book contains just a small sample of that childhood creativity.

Over the past two years, I’ve had the joy of talking to some of today’s most-beloved children’s authors and illustrators about their early artistic endeavors. What did they draw? I couldn’t be the only one who’d want to know. What, I wondered, did other children’s authors write when they were their readers’ age? Illustrators, too. I knew I couldn’t be the only one with a box in a basement.

Others made me laugh because they were so bad. Some stories in the box made me laugh, they were so clever. At the very bottom are ruled lines on yellowed paper, my six-year-old handwriting large and exact. Below that are notebooks (spiral-bound, then marble-covered), then loose pages of text I once hammered out on my dad’s typewriter. The stories on top of the pile are long and typed they’re stapled pages from an ink-jet printer, with chapter titles in funky fonts. Going through the box is like going backward in time. And it’s filled, to the brim, with stories from my childhood. It’s brown and heavy and one of many marked Elissa. OUR STORY BEGINS with a box in a basement.

Standing for Socks by Elissa Brent Weissman