Three Things You Might Not Know About Me by Mary Ann Rodman

 My husband laughed when I told him the subject of this post.

"What can you possibly write that you haven't either put in a book or blogged about already?"he said.

He had a point. Thanks to Facebook, I've been over-sharing for years. 

This was supposed to be an "easy" post to write. Ahem...not! But here we go

1.  I kissed Tomie de Paola.

My daughter Lily was (and still is) a huge fan of Tomie de Paola. She recognized his distinctive illustration style long before she could read. 

"Look, Mama, a Tomie book," she'd say, gleefully pulling his books off library shelves. 

Fast forward a couple of years. I made plans to attend the NYC SCBWI conference. Lily asked what authors would be there. I don't remember who else was on the program, but I did tell her that Tomie dePaola would be there. By that time, she was enamored of the 26 Fairmont Avenue books. 

Her excitement surprised me. (Lily was not a kid that got excited.)

"Really? Tomie's really going to be there?" she shrieked. "You'll get to see him?"

I said "probably," thinking in terms of me in a ballroom with a couple of hundred other Tomie fans listening to him being his hilarious self.

"Well, if you see him," Lily said, "please give him a hug and a kiss from me and tell him I think he's a genius."

"I will if I get the chance," I sort-of-promised. I mean, what were the chances?

One night a bunch of friends and I were knocking back chardonnay at the lobby bar. Across the lobby was a reception for the speakers. And then I saw him! I'd told my friends about Lily's Tomie crush, and now they were egging me on.

"Do it, Mary Ann. Do it! Go talk to Tomie. Give him Lily's hug."

I'd had quite a lot of chard by then, so I got to my feet, sailed across the lobby, into the reception and right up to Mr. DePaola. In one breath I rattled off, "You don't know me but my seven-year-old thinks you're a genius and wants me to give you this." And to my own surprise, I hugged him and smacked his cheek. Without missing a beat, Tomie dePaola said, "My dear, your daughter has impeccable taste. Here's a hug for her." 

Over the years, I've brought Lily a lot of cool stuff from writer's conferences...but nothing as cool as Tomie dePaola's hug.

2. I Was Interviewed by the National Enquirer

Girl librarian, 1984

Seriously. 

I was a brand new school librarian. I was working as hard as I could since the school district could fire me at any time in the first three years. So I came in early. I stayed late. Busy little librarian beaver.

So I was there one afternoon, when my intercom clicked on, and the assistant principal told me I had a long-distance phone call in the office. Who would call me long-distance at work? Had something happened to my parents? 

I picked up the phone.

"Hello, is this Miss Mary Ann Rodman, head librarian" said a voice with an extremely phony accent--part Alfred P. Doolittle, part Crocodile Dundee.

"Yes?" I answered, suspicious. I was the only librarian. Maybe it was a salesman.

But no, the person on the other end introduced himself as a 'student of Oxford University" who was "writing his Ph.D. paper" on children's literature.

Oh. OK. Crank call. Phony accent. A phone connection that clearly was not international. And "a Ph. D. paper?"  Before I could hang up, Mr. Phony Voice started asking me questions about my students reading preferences.  R.L. Stine's Goosebumps (it was a 7-12 school) and anything by Stephen King, I told him. I kept waiting for the punchline of the call to be something like "What size bra are you?" or something equally dirty...but it didn't happen. After ten minutes, the guy thanked me for my time and hung up.

I forgot about it. Until a couple of weeks later when students started telling me, "Hey, Ms Rodman, do you know you're in the National Enquirer?" Yeah, yeah, I thought. Pranking the new librarian. Real funny.

But it wasn't just a couple of students. It was a lot of students. Finally, one of my student assistants asked if I wanted his copy of the National Enquirer, "for your scrapbook."

"Sure," I said, calling his bluff. "Bring it to me."

And he did. The next morning, he met me at the school door with the Enquirer folded back to a headline: Horrors! Do You Know What Your Children Are Reading? 

In typical Enquirer fashion, the title was the most salacious thing about the story. And I was quoted, by name, correctly....proving their thesis that teenagers were gore-loving consumers of horror novels.

I was horrified. I was a new teacher in a conservative small town. What would these people think of me? What would my principal think?

Ironically, that blip in the Enquirer gave me street credit with locals. Everybody read the Enquirer, and their new librarian had put their school on the map. They were darn proud of me. 

Thank you, National Enquirer. RIP. 

3. I have not read any of the Harry Potter books.

Well, not quite true. When the first HP book came out, Lily was seven and dying to read it. I checked the audiobook out of the library to play on a long car trip. We listened to what seemed like pages and pages of description and backstory. Finally, Lily asked, "When does the story start? Can we listen to something else?" Fortunately, I also had Carl Hiaasen's Hoot with me, so I put that in. I even "got lost on purpose" so we could hear the end of that one. Still one of Lily's favorite books.

I have nothing against Ms Rowling. I think she's a flat-out wonder that she got so many kids reading again. But then,, I've never been a fantasy fan, not even as a child. Still, I might be the only children's writer who couldn't make it through the first book of the series. I don't think J.K. will take it personally, though. 

There you have it. Three things I'll bet you didn't know about me. (Maybe)

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

This Magnificent Madness

“One tiny Hobbit against all the evil the world could muster. A sane being would have given up, but Samwise burned with a magnificent madness, a glowing obsession to surmount every obstacle, to find Frodo, destroy the Ring, and cleanse Middle Earth of its festering malignancy. He knew he would try again. Fail, perhaps. And try once more. A thousand, thousand times if need be, but he would not give up the quest.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Last time I wrote about my ongoing search for a new agent. Until my stories find this champion, I continue to study in hopes of mastering my craft. And to that end, I told you about a new discovery, Donald Maass’ book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction.

In my quest, I returned this week to an old favorite, a steady, inspirational read by Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (Michael Wiese Productions, 1992)

While the book explores the monomyth, made famous by Joseph Campbell, and its impact in the storytelling process, Vogler expands the myth to include the writer herself. Every storyteller bends this archetypal pattern to her own purpose or the needs of her culture. That’s why the hero has a thousand faces, states Vogler. But at the heart of the story is always a journey.

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

The hero’s journey, you may remember, is found in all sorts of storytelling, most especially in adolescent and young adult. The profound truth of adolescence is the separation from parent, the search for uniqueness and the triumphant integrating into wholeness – the return to being. You can see how this hero’s journey is mapped out in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief.

Writers go on a similar journey, states Vogler. In fact, as he states, “The hero’s journey and the writer’s journey are one and the same.”


Most writers I know received their call to adventure at a young age. George Orwell knew he wanted to be a writer by the time he was five. Neil Gaiman also discovered his love of story at a young age, describing himself as “a feral child who was raised in libraries.” J.K. Rowling wrote her first story at age six, a book about a rabbit with measles. Raised by her grandparents, Lucy Maud Montgomery battled a debilitating sense of loneliness by creating imaginary friends, Katie Maurice and Lucy Gray, who lived in a fairy room behind a bookcase.

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Writing is certainly hard work, “a perilous journey inward to probe the depths of one soul.” It is a fearsome process, no matter how many books one has under their belts. Sue Grafton, author of the wildly popular Kinsey Millhone Alphabet Series, once stated, “Most days when I sit down at my computer, I’m scared half out of my mind.” The mighty Stephen King noted, “I’m afraid of failing at whatever story I’m writing – that it won’t come up for me, or I won’t be able to finish it.” Even the mythic J.R.R. Tolkien said, as the first book of his iconic series was published, “It is written in my life-blood…I am dreading the publication, for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.”

So why write, we ask ourselves? We go through all this agony!

Says Mary Karr (The Liar’s Club), “I write to dream; to connect with other human beings; to record; to clarify; to visit the dead. I have a kind of primitive need to leave a mark on the world.”

Vogler shows that anyone – new as well as established writers – who sets out to write a story encounters all the trials and tribulations, joys and rewards of the hero’s journey.

A writer encounters her trickster, taking shape as computer problems, doctor appointments, family responsibilities, and time management issues, and other “enemies of the status quo" that also bring perspective on the process.

A writer meets the grumpy threshold guardian in the form of our inner and relentless judgments of our work. The tension rises as we face the searing remarks of a reviewer, a copyeditor, an agent, or an editor. And finally, we cross the Rubicon. We are published. But the journey is just beginning, as we “fully enter the mysterious, exciting Special World” of a published writer. The ordeals become all the more exhausting as we face deadlines and revisions and more rejections. As we build our platforms and speak – holy moly! – to readers. And our beloveds go out of print, and favorite editors retire, and face the rise of the internet dragons.

Along the way, if we are lucky, we meet our sidekicks, our Dr. Watson, our Clara Oswald, our Hermione Granger. Our Samwise Gamgee. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we meet our Dumbledore or our Gandolf the Wise wielding his magic purple crayon, who gives advice, who tells us to keep going, just keep swimming. Don’t give up.

Take hope, states Vogler, “for writing is magic. Even the simplest act of writing is almost supernatural…We can make a few abstract marks on a piece of paper in a certain order and someone a world away and a thousand years from now can know our deepest thoughts. The boundaries of space and time and even the limitations of death can be transcended.”

“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

--Bobbi Miller

Just a reminder about our wonderful giveaway, a chance to win your a copy of GREAT MORNING! ~ Poems for School Leaders to Read Aloud (Pomelo Books), by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong, and includes a poem by our very own April. See more information on her post here.