Source Database: U*X*L Junior DISCovering Authors

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

"On February 6th, [1995]" writes Sharon Creech in Horn Book magazine, "I was home alone in England and had been wrestling all morning with a manuscript. Feeling ornery and frustrated, I fled to our back yard to vent one of my muffled screams (muffled because I am a headmaster's wife and it isn't seemly for me to scream too loudly). In the midst of that scream, the phone rang.

"A ringing telephone in a headmaster's house often signals a crisis," she continues, "and when it rings, I'm well-trained; I grab pencil and paper.... That afternoon, I scribbled: American Library Association and Newbery Med...

"The writing trails off there."

Sharon Creech describes herself in the same article as unknown in the United States in field of children's literature. Her previous books had all been published first in England, where she and her husband live and work during the school year.Walk Two Moons, the 1995 Newbery Medal Award winner, changed that. "I still don't know how I feel about it," she confesses to Judy Hendershot and Jackie Peck in Reading Teacher. "It's like someone has given me this beautiful suit of Armani clothes. They look nice and everyone admires them, but I'm a little uncomfortable in them. I like to wear them for brief periods of time and then change back to my blue jeans."

Despite her years living and working in England, Sharon Creech is an American citizen. She was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, part of "a big, noisy family ... with hordes of relatives telling stories around the kitchen table," she explains in the Seventh Book of Junior Authors & Illustrators. "Here I learned to exaggerate and embellish, because if you didn't, your story was drowned out by someone else's more exciting one." She was an enthusiastic writer throughout grade school and high school, and she was often captivated by the "instruments of writing: paper, pens, pencils, books. I hoarded them." She was an equally enthusiastic reader. "I don't remember the titles of books I read as a child," she recalls in the Seventh Book of Junior Authors & Illustrators, "but I do remember the experience of reading--of drifting into the pages and living in someone else's world." "I loved myths--American Indian myths, Greek myths, and the King Arthur legends," she concludes, "--and I remember the lightning jolt of exhilaration when I read Ivanhoe as a teenager."

After receiving her bachelor's degree from Hiram College, Creech went on to George Mason University in Washington, D.C., for her master's. "During graduate school," she states in the Seventh Book of Junior Authors & Illustrators, "I worked at the Federal Theater Project Archives and longed to write plays. Next I worked at Congressional Quarterly, as an editorial assistant, but this was not pleasant work for me, for it was all politics and facts." Nonetheless Creech spent several years in Washington. She married, had two children, and was divorced. In 1979, she persuaded the headmaster of TASIS (The American School in Switzerland) England School, a grade school for the children of expatriate Americans, in Thorpe, England, to hire her as a teacher of literature. "Before receiving an offer of employment, however," writes Lyle D. Rigg, Creech's husband, in his Horn Book appreciation of his wife's work, "Sharon had to convince the headmaster that she, a single parent with two young children, could handle the considerable demands of teaching in an international day/boarding school in the suburbs of London. Although I have never read Sharon's letter to that headmaster, I have heard that it was a masterpiece of persuasion and was instrumental in getting her hired."

Sharon Creech and Lyle D. Rigg were married about three years after they met. "I think it was a combination of our Buckeye roots and ice cubes that drew us together," Rigg recalls. "We met on our first day in England, when Sharon borrowed some ice--that rare commodity in Europe--from me." Rigg had been hired as assistant headmaster--the British equivalent of a school principal--and soon after he and Creech were married, they were transferred to the TASIS branch in Switzerland. In 1984, Rigg returned to Thorpe as headmaster of the English branch, and he and Creech have been there ever since (although they do spend their summers in a cabin in Chatauqua, New York). "As a teacher of American and British literature to American and international teenagers," Rigg writes, "Sharon has shared her love both of literature and of writing. She'd open up Chaucer's world in The Canterbury Tales and then head off to Canterbury with her students so that they could make the pilgrimage themselves. She'd offer Hamlet, and then off they would all go to Stratford-upon-Avon."

Creech's teaching took a lot of time away from her writing. For many years she devoted her time almost exclusively to her teaching and her family. "In 1980, when my children and I had been in England for nine months," she recalls in Horn Book, "my father had a stroke. Although he lived for six more years, the stroke left him paralyzed and unable to speak... Think of all those words locked up for six years..." "A month after he died in 1986," she concludes, "I started my first novel, and when I finished it, I wrote another, and another, and another. The words rushed out."

Public recognition did not come easily to Creech. The first recognition she got, Rigg explains, was in 1988, when she received the Billee Murray Denny Poetry Award for her poem "Cleansing." She wrote two novels for adults, The Recital and Nickel Malley; a play, The Center of the Universe (which was produced off-off-Broadway); and a young adult novel, Absolutely Normal Chaos, before any of her books appeared in the United States. "Sharon wouldn't like for me to suggest that this was all as easy as it might sound," states Rigg. "She'd also spent two years writing an eight-hundred-page manuscript which sits on her closet shelf, and she received her fair share of rejections along the way." Absolutely Normal Chaos, her first book directed at young adults, saw print in England in 1990.

"When I wrote Absolutely Normal Chaos," Creech tells Hendershot and Peck, "I didn't know it was a children's book." Absolutely Normal Chaos deals with a variety of themes, some specific to adolescence (first love, growing up, schoolwork), and others that can apply to any period in life (dealing with relatives and friends, learning to become compassionate and understanding). The book is the journal of one summer in the life of thirteen-year-old Mary Lou Finney of Easton, Ohio. At the beginning of the book Mary Lou begs her English teacher not to read the remainder of the story. Her summer, it becomes apparent, has been more bizarre than usual. "Her life is disrupted in more ways than one by the arrival of a gangling, uncommunicative cousin, Carl Ray, from West Virginia, by his curious relationship with Charlie Furtz, the genial neighbour from across the road, who subsequently dies of a heart attack, and by her own budding romance with Alex Cheevey," explains Joan Zahnleiter in Magpies. These circumstances force Mary Lou to confront issues in her own life and to come to terms with her own family and the way it works.

Throughout her summer, Mary Lou learns to confront such diverse issues as classic literature, death, questionable legitimacy, and family life. "Mary Lou is a typical teen whose acquaintance with the sadder parts of life is cushioned by a warm and energetic family," states Cindy Darling Codell in her School Library Journal review. "Her entertaining musings on Homer, Shakespeare, and Robert Frost are drawn in nifty parallels to what is happening in her own life." "Her own hilarious brush with culture shock occurs when she accompanies Carl Ray on a trip to his home," concludes a Horn Book reviewer. "This visit also provides Mary Lou with some insights into what her cousin has had to endure at her house. Mary Lou grows in a number of important ways throughout the summer, and the metaphors she now recognizes in the Odyssey could, she realizes, very well apply to her own life."

The same themes of growth and self-recognition appear in Creech's second YA novel (the first published in America), Walk Two Moons. It is the story of Salamanca Tree Hiddle, another 13-year-old girl like Mary Lou, who relates the tale of her friend Phoebe and how her mother has left home. What makes Phoebe's story particularly relevant to Sal is the fact that Sal's mother Sugar also left home and never returned. Sal is on a trip to Idaho with her grandparents in order to visit her mother's grave; Sugar died when the bus she was riding in was wrecked in an accident. It becomes clear as the story goes on that Sugar was suffering from depression after losing a baby in a miscarriage and having to undergo a hysterectomy. "Sal finds that recounting Phoebe's story helps her understand the desertion of her own mother," explains Deborah Stevenson in the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. "Creech skillfully keeps these layers separate but makes their interrelationship clear, and the plot moves along amid all this contemplation with the aid of a mysterious noteleaver, a local `lunatic,' an eccentric English teacher, and Sal's budding romance."

Some of the elements of Walk Two Moons, Creech explains, came from her own life and experiences. "In every book I've done," she tells Hendershot and Peck, "the characters are combinations of people. I do draw very much from my family, and so I've speculated that Salamanca and her mother are very much me and my own daughter combined." Creech explains that the idea that originally sparked the writing of Walk Two Moons came from a message she found in a fortune cookie: "Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins." The framework of the story was based on a family trip to Lewiston, Idaho that she had made when she was twelve. Sal's Native American ancestry, ideas and concepts, are also taken from the author's own life. When she was young, Creech often fantasized about being Native American, sometimes even telling people that she was a full Indian. "I inhaled Indian myths, and among my favorites were those which involved stories of reincarnation," she states in her Horn Book Newbery acceptance speech. "How magnificent and mysterious to be Estsanatlehi, `the woman who never dies. She grows from baby to mother to old woman and then turns into a baby again, and on and on she goes, living a thousand, thousand lives.' I wanted to be that Navajo woman."

Sal's own name, Salamanca Tree, evokes Creech's connection with her Indianness and the outdoors. "I think I spent half my childhood up a tree, for I had somehow got it in my mind that Indians climbed trees," she recalls in Horn Book. "You could climb and climb, and you could reach a place where there was only you and the tree and the birds and the sky. And maybe the appeal of trees also lay in the sense that they live `a thousand, thousand lives,' appearing to die each autumn..." "The Indianness is one of the best things about this book," declares New York Times Book Review contributor Hazel Rochman, "casual, contemporary and mythic, not an exotic thing apart. Sal is only a small part Indian, and she knows her parents gave her what they thought was the tribe's name but got it wrong. Still, the heritage is a part of her identity. She loves the Indian stories her mother told her, and they get mixed in with Genesis and Pandora's box and Longfellow and with family stories and, above all, with a celebration of the sweeping natural world and our connectedness with it." "For once in a children's book," Rochman concludes, "Indians are people, not reverential figures in a museum diorama. Sal's Indian heritage is a natural part of her finding herself in America."

Despite the many awards Walk Two Moons has won, some reviewers objected to some of the elements in the story.American Spectator reviewer Diana West complains of "the book's desolate, if prize-winning, theme of dysfunctional family life. Miseries abound." A Kirkus Reviews contributor states that "Sal's poignant story would have been stronger without quite so many remarkable coincidences or such a tidy sum of epiphanies at the end." "Creech's surprises," declares Ilene Cooper in Booklist, "... are obvious in the first case and contrived in the second." Joanna Brod, writing in Metro Times, explains that "some have found the plot of Walk Two Moons too contrived, while others have called it overly realistic. There's a grain of truth in both accusations, but in each case Creech reveals a keen understanding of the age group for which she writes."

Chasing Redbird, a 1997 novel, takes place in Bybanks, Kentucky, the same setting as Walk Two Moons. The story concerns thirteen-year-old Zinnia (Zinny) Taylor, who must come to terms with the death of her beloved Aunt Jessie. When Zinny discovers a twenty-mile path which runs from her parents' farm to Chocton, she takes on the arduous task of clearing weeds and uncovering markers along the length of the trail. Her endeavors lead to an understanding of her family's history. In Horn Book, Ethel L. Heins declared that Creech "has written a striking novel, notable for its emotional honesty." A Publishers Weekly reviewer termed the work "an affecting tale of love and loss."

One of the most dramatic themes in both Absolutely Normal Chaos, Walk Two Moons, and Chasing Redbird is that of death. Related to this concept are those of grief and loss. Mary Lou and Carl Ray have to come to terms with the loss of Charlie Furtz. Sal has to deal with her mother's death and her own sense of desertion and loss. Zinny has to learn how to cope with her emotions after the death of her Aunt Jessie. These themes are also linked to Creech's life. "When I read Salamanca's story now, with some distance," the author reveals in Horn Book, "I hear such longing in her voice--for her mother, for her father, for the land--and I know that her longing is also my longing ... for my children, my larger family, and for my own country." "Every day my students stared into Pandora's box, rifled with all the evils of the world," the author declares. Yet buried deeply within both stories is an element of hope. "Salamanca and I need to face the evils," Creech states, "but we also need mystery, and we need hope. Maybe you do, too."

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