I'm a newly published children's author, but as you may gather from the World War II setting of my debut novel (not to mention my photo), I have been around a while. I grew up as Lee Anne McIntosh in Lincoln, a small town in Kansas not unlike the fictional town in my book.
I've always loved to write. I like the feel of a keyboard under my fingers or a pen in my hand. My favorite school work involved writing, from the time when my first grade teacher—gentle Miss Brown—showed me how to separate the two cursive "n's" in my middle name, and I fell in love with the soft scratch of pencil on paper, to the dawn of personal computers that allowed me to type my Ph.D. dissertation without carbon paper. I never loved carbon paper.
My writing was mainly academic until I retired from teaching at Riverside Community College in California, met some astounding children's authors, and began to delve into children's literature. I began to recall being read to as a pre-schooler. I suppose that's where my love of fiction began, although I didn't decide to write it until many years later.
One book that stands out clearly in my memory, not a classic, I fear, because it's no longer around, featured a kitten, and its repeating phrase was "Purr-severance wins!" I remembered early literature-related experiences, including mixing, rolling, and tasting sweet brown dough at school, then cutting out gingerbread men. Thirty little g-men ran to Miss Brown's apartment across the street and ran back after recess, crisp from the oven, in time for mid-morning milk break. And I remembered the early discovery that I, too, could put thoughts on paper.
Shady Grove is a fictional town, and all of the characters and events are fictional as well. What is real, I believe, is the tenor of the times, the emotions of the children and adults, and the pervasiveness of the war in the everyday lives of Americans, even very young Americans, at that time.
I wanted a story that reflected the way it was in a small town where life revolved around home, school, church, and Saturday night at the movies—not for the sake of nostalgia but because that is one part of the historical picture, one piece of America's past. Let's not forget any of the pieces.
As I was doing research for this book, I found that the victory gardens were of far more importance to the war that I had ever known. Nearly half of the vegetables consumed in the U.S. during the second world war were grown in back yard gardens. Children played a large part in that. So that seemed like a good place to begin to tell children today about the war and how life was for mid-western American children then.
I took a grain of truth about my father's tomato theory, watered it with some imagination and research, and raised my fictional victory garden. I hope children will enjoy it and talk with grandparents who might remember life in the 1940s.