Biography phyllis reynolds naylor

The end. Because I was born during the Great Depression, my Dad left college, studying to be a minister, and became a salesman for H. Heinz Company. My mother finished college about the time my older sister Norma was born. Five years after I came along, we had a little brother, John, the son my dad always wanted, and I was very jealous.

Today, however, John, an architect, is one of my favorite people, and although we live across the country from each other, we are very close in our beliefs and politics, and are in frequent contact with each other. Like most other people during the Depression, our family had very little money. I would staple the pages together, write my words at the top and draw pictures at the bottom.

My teacher asked if I would mind staying inside at recess to compose a poem to be read aloud at the celebration. It was the first time I had been asked to perform my own work, and I was both nervous and pleased. The second time I was asked to perform my own work was as a freshman in high school. We were given the assignment to write anything at all to read aloud to the class as a creative writing assignment.

I stood in front of the class and read it to much laughter, and the harder the audience laughed, the more dramatic my reading. In fact, the teacher was laughing so hard, I noticed, she had tears in her eyes. It was adapted into a live action film in Eleven year old Marty must decide whether or not to return an abused beagle to its rightful owner, an unkind man.

Starting With Alice is the first book in the trilogy of prequels of the Alice series. Eight-year-old Alice McKinley is the new girl in third grade. Desperate to meet people, Alice learns that making friends is harder than it seems. As Alice navigates the ins and outs of third grade, there are plenty of bumps, giggles, and surprises along the way.

Every girl should grow up with Alice, and with this irresistible new look, a whole new generation will want to. Alice was four when her mother died. Plotkins, and grow to respect her as did Alice. Both poignant and funny, this first in the Alice series introduces a girl who grows up literally in each successive installment. As Alice grows, so does the sophistication of the issues with which she deals.

The feline adventures begin when Marco and Polo, always indoor cats, taste freedom and the Burger King dump. The cat brothers meet others memorable mousers along the way in this first of a series of books about the Cat Pack. It wasn't. I wonder sometimes what my life would be like if I were not a writer. I'm certain I would not be as happy—could not be—because I need to write for so many different reasons.

One reason I write is that I'm working out problems on paper where they aren't so scary, deciding how or even whether I could cope. I write to put myself in the place of other people whose lives are very different from mine, to see how and why they make the decisions that they do. I write as a catharsis, to work through strong feelings that immobilize me temporarily.

I write to laugh, because I need humor in my life. In some ways, I was not an easy child to raise. I did not get into any serious trouble, but when I was small I was fearful, and when I reached my late teens, I had religious doubts that troubled my parents. I don't know what it was that made me fearful. We were poor, but I never bothered myself about that.

I remember Mother crying when she broke our fever thermometer, and again when my sister spilled the vanilla—needless waste. I remember Mother taking in washing to help support us, and my sister and I taking the clean clothes back to the neighbors after dark, at my sister's insistence. I was too young for it to faze me then, though I put all this in my book, Walking through the Dark.

What terrified me in kindergarten was a doll without hair. If anyone even brought it near me I screamed. I also cried when the teacher left the room. Separation from those I loved or perhaps from one's hair was the most frightening thing of all. So strong was my fear of being separated from Mother that I almost lost my life. To get to school each day, I had to cross some railroad tracks.

In the mornings, I walked with my sister, but when I came home at noon, I was by myself. One day on the way home, I saw a freight train coming and panicked. I remembered going to the store sometimes with my mother and how, if a train came by while we were inside, it often stopped, blocking the road while boxcars were added or taken off.

To a child of five, waiting beside her mother, it seemed to take forever for the train to get moving again so we could cross the tracks and go home. But to a child alone, the thought of the train separating me from my mother was unbearable. And so I ran. I reached the other side only seconds before the engine thundered by, the whistle shrieking.

I can still see the horrified face of the engineer as he leaned out the side window. At home, white and shaken, I told Mother what had happened. For a long time she walked me home from school herself, then promised me candy for each time a train came and I waited. Each day I came home from school and said proudly, "I didn't run in front of a train today," only because no train happened to come.

Yet deep down, I knew that if I were once again put to the test, I would run. As I grew older, my worries were fear of the dentist, fear of the Nazis, fear of hell, and fear of losing both my parents. A daytime fantasy that caused considerable anguish was what I would do if the Nazis ever came to me and said they were going to kill one of my parents; which one should it be?

And when I would answer that it was impossible for me to choose, the Nazis would say that if I didn't, they would kill them both. This fear of having to choose one parent over another surfaced, in a somewhat different way, in my book The Solomon System. I was afraid, too, of swimming. Swimming lessons never took, and I was in high school before I learned to stay afloat.

This fear may have stemmed from a near brush with drowning when I was small. My mother and aunt took a bunch of us cousins to a lake to swim, and as the two women chatted on the grass, we children frolicked about in the water. At some point I stepped into a hole and went in over my head. I remember floating on my back about six inches under the surface, unable to right myself, watching the bubbles from my nose and mouth streaming up through the green water above me and thinking, "So this is what it's like to die.

I remembered all the missionaries I had heard about who had lost their lives, and thought how the newspaper would report my death. It was only after a cousin rescued me that pain set in, and I crawled gasping and coughing out of the lake. My mother hadn't even noticed. The fears of my teens were of math, algebra, and public speaking. I also worried that my feet were too big.

But a strange thing happened on the way to growing up. Despite my terror of trains separating me from my mother, Amtrak is now my favorite form of travel. I can also swim. I speak often to large crowds and it doesn't bother me a bit. My feet no longer make me self-conscious, and my toes are absolutely gorgeous. My mother was a fearful person, too.

I remember her worry when my father had to drive home from a long trip on Christmas Eve during a snowstorm. Separation again. In our growing-up years, we were to hear many times how Mother could have drowned but didn't. In college, she and some girlfriends set out in two canoes for a trip down a river. They had stopped along the shore at one point to rest, and soon the girls in the first canoe set off once more while the girls in the second were still getting ready.

Then came the screams as the first canoe went over a dam, and all the young women in it drowned. Life, I learned, was risky. The wrong decision could cost you your life. What if, what if …? True, and yet against this drumbeat of alarm was my father's optimism. While Mother could take a wonderful event and think of all the reasons it might be ruined, my father could take the worst of problems and think of all the reasons it might get better.

He did not believe in looking back. Mother's imagination versus Dad's practicality. We had no health insurance, and Dad, with bad kidneys, was unable to get life insurance. Yet he always believed things would be better. He taught me drive and persistence. He read the Dale Carnegie books about success, and believed that you could accomplish anything you wanted if you really tried.

When I was young, my father always seemed so sure of himself, so competent, that when he was sixty-five and his kidneys were failing at last, it was very difficult for me to know how to be helpful. On one of the last times we were together, I was packing his bag for the hospital and saw him trying to put on his shoes. His hands were shaking, and his feet were unsteady.

I wanted so to go to him and help, but was afraid it might embarrass him. And so I let him struggle the best he could. I chastise myself now when I think about it: I didn't even tie his shoes. But Dad would probably say the usual: "Don't cry over spilt milk. Many of us grow up becoming a composite of our parents, and so did I: I am still a fearful person when it comes to matters of life or limb, but adventurous when it comes to social or professional challenges.

If the worst that can happen is a rejection slip or a missed opportunity or the loss of a thousand dollars, well, that I can stand. We even discover, as we become adults, that some of the negative aspects of our upbringing can't be turned into pluses. My mother's what ifs are, in fact, the basis of every book and story; you start with a common situation and see how far you can take it.

Even her tiresome "What will people think? Not all of my mother's imagination went into worrying, of course. To our whine of "What can we do? Card games made out of old cracker boxes. Or our favorite pastime of "train," in which we lined up all the dining room chairs like the seats on a train, and covered them with a sheet. The Depression years, with our finances and my father's health problems in the background, may have been the worst time for my parents, but my own worst time was yet to come.

When I was eighteen, I married a brilliant man at the University of Chicago who, five years later, showed all the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. I had completed two years of college when he became ill, but had not yet learned to drive a car, had never written a check or made out the income tax, and could not type. Yet I was suddenly faced not only with supporting us, but coming home at night to a man who was suicidal, who bought a gun to "see the president," who sat with it loaded, waiting for the Communists who were corning up the stairs, he said, to get him.

Later, traveling from Illinois to Wisconsin to Minnesota, as he looked for a job where he might feel safe, I wrote and sold short stories to pay our bills, and though many of them were bleak and brooding indeed, others were also funny. Fifteen years later, long after he had been committed at last to a state hospital, I wrote a book, Crazy Love , about this experience, recording the terror and guilt and sadness of this time in my life.

I received many letters, and soon discovered that other people had experienced far worse. The letters haunted me. Would I have made the same decisions, I wondered, if I had been a mother at the time? About ten years after writing this book, I began to think, "How would a teenager have handled it? What if he was a young teenager, still awkward and ill at ease?

What if, in his vulnerability, he suddenly found himself the keeper of a secret that his mother, in all her anguish, simply could not share with anyone outside the family, as I could not do for a while? It seemed to speak to the problem of how you can rely on a loved and familiar person who is suddenly no longer to be trusted.

Biography phyllis reynolds naylor

I almost never write two books of the same kind in succession. If I write a serious novel, I usually follow it up with something funny. An adventure story for children may be followed by a novel for adults. It is not for my audience that I change about, but for myself. And here's the dichotomy again: while I want all of my books to be different, I wish I could keep the same agents and editors forever.

While I may place one book in Iowa, another in Illinois, and still another in West Virginia, I do not, myself, like to move. I want to live in the same house on the same street forever. I am quite content, for weeks at a stretch, when one day is just like the one before—with me sitting in my comfortable chair, a clipboard on my lap, writing.

It takes only an occasional trip to satisfy my need for travel. Yet I love the change of seasons, could never live happily in a place where the landscape stayed the same. These contradictions within myself and in the characters I write about are a constant puzzle to me. Of all the books I write, humor probably comes easiest. I like humor that takes place in the context of ordinary life, which is why I so enjoyed writing The Agony of Alice and its sequel, Alice in Rapture, Sort Of.

The first book begins with Alice reflecting on how she used to eat crayons in kindergarten. One day when she was bored, she stuck two crayons up her nostrils, then leaned over her desk and wagged her head from side to side like an elephant with tusks, and the teacher said, "Alice McKinley, what on earth are you doing? I receive a lot of letters asking, "Did you really stick crayons up your nose?

I remember thinking, "I am now looking at the stupidest thing I have ever seen in my life, and will remember it always. My role as a doubting Thomas in my late teens also provided fuel for books, though I didn't know it then. Actually, the questions about religion began when I was small. I just didn't ask them aloud. Our lives revolved very much around our church.

In Mother's Sunday school class, there were Bible drills in which she would call out a book of the Bible, chapter and verse, and we would scurry to see who could find it first and read it aloud. At home, in addition to the other books our parents read to us, we would hear a chapter a night from the Bible storybook, and when at last the huge book was finished, Mother would start all over again.

I was a fellow traveler with the Israelites on their journey to the promised land. I would never, I was sure, have worshipped the Golden Calf or mocked Elisha. Not me. And yet, as Mother read those stories, a still small voice piped up from time to time. We were told that the Israelites had to destroy Jericho because, as the storybook put it, "it stood in the way to the promised land.

If they could march around it in the first place , the voice inside me asked, how could it have "stood in the way"? Why didn't they just go around it? I was certain, too, that if I had been one of the men carrying the ark of the covenant, that precious repository for the Ten Commandments, and the ark started to tip, I too would have reached out one hand to steady it.

Why on earth would God strike me dead? Never mind that He had commanded that no one touch it. Didn't anybody get points for using his head? Questions unresolved stay with us all our lives, and I reached the point where I could not say absolutely that I believed this or that when there was no proof. Neither, of course, could I say I did not believe.

While I feel that there is a power beyond ourselves, the only answer I can give with certainty is that I am too small, and the universe too big, ever to understand it all. I'm content with saying "I don't know," without making up answers to explain things or accepting someone else's suppositions or faith as true. I am as uncomfortable with people who insist that their talents are gifts from God as I am with those who claim that accidents and illnesses are punishments from the Almighty.

They do seem related, for if God has chosen to favor some, then He has apparently decided to shortchange others. And because I cannot believe that a loving God would do this, I continue to read and think and wonder. But coming from a deeply religious background in which many things are accepted on faith, I also understand the need for answers.

Caught in the middle of this push and pull, I know what it is like for those who dare to question, or to choose a different church that speaks more specifically to their concerns. My novel A String of Chances was my attempt to grapple with such a situation. I used as parents in the story my own paternal grandparents, and their home in southern Maryland as the setting.

A sense of place is very important to me in a novel. It helps set the mood, determine the characters; it can even help form the plot. I once copied down two quotes by Willa Cather without having any idea, really, of how they applied to me: "Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet," she said, and "The years from eight to fifteen are the formative period in a writer's life.

In my own formative years, vacations were spent with grandparents. If we drove west to Iowa, we would be met at the door by my German-Scottish grandmother, who promptly fed us and put us to bed. Hugs were reserved for arrivals and departures only. Some summers, however, we headed east instead, where the land became mysterious and hilly about the time we reached Pittsburgh.

From then on the terrain was rolling, the roads curving, and we would hang eagerly out the car windows watching for the first sign of Maryland's purple clay soil. This world seemed light-years away from the farm in Iowa. My paternal grandparents, Pappaw and Mammaw, were from the South. My father himself was born near Yazoo City, Mississippi.

It was said that Pappaw's courtship of Mammaw began when he was a young boy and she just a baby. He would carry her about in his arms and announce proudly, "This is the girl I'm going to marry. In Iowa, by contrast, my maternal grandfather started his courtship of my grandmother by sending her a formal letter, two weeks in advance, asking her to accompany him to church, references provided.

In Maryland, my most vivid memory of my southern grandmother was going fishing with her along the Potomac. When my sister and I needed to urinate, she took us back in the woods, stepped up on a stump, and announced that she was going to show us how to do it without all that messy business of squatting down in the grass. Whereupon she lowered her slacks, thrust her body forward, and projected a stream as skillfully as any man.

I watched, dumbfounded, in awe. So far, she has written over books, and about articles. Naylor says that she will write "as long as she can hold a pencil. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. American writer born Rex Naylor.

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