Q&A

Vera B. Williams's latest book, Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart (Greenwillow, 2001), tells the story of two young sisters who are finally reunited with their father. The father, it turns out, has been serving a prison sentence—an unusual topic for a book intended for young children. Although the story is fictitious, it's derived, in part, from Williams's own childhood, and presented as a series of prose poems—a first for the author-illustrator. Williams spoke to us from her home in New York City. (For SLJ 's review of "Amber and Essie," see September, p. 209.)

Why is Amber and Essie's story an important one for young children to hear?

First of all, just plain and simple, a lot of children do have parents in prison—we have a very large prison population…. [Also, the story is important because] there are a lot of longings and hope, longing for an absent parent to come back.

What led you to write the story?

Leaving room for mystery, I think probably two elements. One, a growing appreciation for my relationship to my sister, who is two years older, and whom I see frequently and probably more than I used to when I was younger. So, I think a sense of tenderness and affection and gratefulness for my sister… who helped me through the difficult times of my childhood having to do with the absence of our father.

Did you ever find your father?

Depending somewhat on my memory and then a lot on what my sister has told me, our father was probably jailed for some kind of financial wrongdoing, which occurred right after the [1929 stock market] crash. [He] was away from us and we didn't see him for perhaps two years. Now I wasn't even four when this happened, so the details of it, as far as memory goes, aren't exactly dependable.

Why did you decide to write the story as a series of prose poems?

I actually wrote a version of the story, probably about five or six years ago, in prose… not in prose poems. But my editors did not like that treatment of it. So I put [the story] away… and didn't work on it. I did Lucky Song (Greenwillow, 1997) instead, which was my last book before this book, "Amber and Essie." It came to a point where my editors kept saying, "What are you going to do next? When are you going to show us something?" Suddenly, I began to write these poems. I wrote them everywhere. I wrote them in my address book and on recipes and on scraps of paper. And I wrote transitional pieces, too. [The story] sort of [evolved] from a poetically told story into these poems. And then once I got on the track of these poems, I wrote them quite quickly and easily.