Book Bash
Schoolchildren from across Kansas celebrate award-winning authors
By Scott Rochat
Saturday, October 7, 2006
With bands playing, flags waving and hundreds of fans all around, the two newest winners of the William Allen White Children’s Book Award found themselves at center stage in Emporia on Saturday.
By the time it was their turn to speak Saturday afternoon, Jeanne DuPrau and Sue Stauffacher had already signed books, given late-night readings and even marched in a parade down Commercial Street. But what stood out above all for both of them was the courtesy and the feeling of welcome.
“If this is the kind of people you grow in Kansas, you’ve got a secret you can’t afford to keep from the rest of us,” Stauffacher told an audience of around 600 children this afternoon at White Auditorium.
The White award-winning books are selected each year by the children of Kansas from a list of 30 titles. This year, more than 57,000 children voted for the awards.
Stauffacher’s “Donuthead” won in the third-to-fifth grade category this year while DuPrau took the sixth-to-eighth grade honors for “The City of Ember.”
As a little girl, Stauffacher said, she had always been confronted by the same question from her mother “Why did you do that?” Usually, it had more specific forms like “Why did you drop that beautiful clay piggy bank?” or “Why did you pull your father’s swimming trunks down in front of his friends.”
“I always had the same answer — ‘I don’t know,’” Stauffacher said. “Actually, I did know, but the answer wouldn’t have satisfied my mother. I wanted to see what would happen.”
These days, she said, she runs into the same question as an author: “Why did you write Donuthead?” The book deals with the obsessively neat Franklin Delano Donuthead and his growing friendship with the grubby, fearless Sarah Kervick.
“At first I gave the same answer — ‘I don’t know,’” said Stauffacher. “And I didn’t know until it came time to write this speech. I realized that again, I wanted to see what would happen. What would happen if a boy who was afraid of everything met a girl who was afraid of nothing? What would happen if two children could look beyond surface appearances and learn to see the person beneath?”
That struck a personal chord with Stauffacher who could remember being the uncrowned queen of the sixth grade — until the day she broke up with a similarly cool friend and found herself ostracized. No one would talk to her. No one would sit with her.
Until someone did. A few months later, three girls she had never noticed when she was “queen of everything” asked her to push her desk up next to theirs.
“It was a simple act and it made me feel so good,” Stauffacher said.
People like that are the real heroes, she said.
“Think about the children at your own schools who don’t fit in,” she told the kids. “What would happen if you invited them to sit with you at lunch? What would happen if you reached out? Maybe nothing would happen. But maybe somebody’s life would be changed forever. And maybe your life would be changed too, in a beautiful way.”
DuPrau talked about some of the “behind-the-scenes secrets” of her book, “The City of Ember.” The book is about an artificially-lit city surrounded by a world of darkness. As the food supply dwindles and the light-bulbs begin to run out, two children, Lina and Doon, try to find a way to reach a legendary city of light.
The book took DuPrau two years to write — but those two years had almost 20 years in between them. Her first try at “Ember” came in the 1980s. She wrote the book, read the book, decided it was horrible and put it away.
“Then this very popular book called ‘Harry Potter’ came out,” DuPrau said. “I read it and I liked it. And I saw things in Harry Potter that gave me a clue to what was wrong with my book. My book was really boring.”
She began to bring the action forward and pick up the pace of the story. As she did, she found herself liking it again. The rewritten book became a success and soon two other books had joined it in the series. DuPrau is now working on the final installment.
Some of the “secrets” were little ones, like the intended pronunciation of Lina’s name. DuPrau says “Lie-na,” but has found that almost every reader pronounces it “Lee-na.”
“I put a clue in the book,” she said with a grin. “The trouble is nobody noticed the clue. There’s been maybe three people out of hundreds and hundreds who noticed it.”
Others had to do with the origins of the book and its cast. None of the characters are based on anyone she knows, DuPrau said, unless they’re based on herself. Doon shares a love for puzzles and her childhood interest in insects, while Lina loves running and the world of the imagination.
The book itself has some roots in the fear of nuclear war that pervaded the country when she was a child in the 50s and partly with her love for scary underground places in literature, like Tom Sawyer’s cave.
Neither author had set foot in Kansas before, though DuPrau said she might have rolled through it in a train one night.
“Now I know that Kansas is full of wonderful readers, kind and generous people, and wonderful children like yourself,” she said.
This year marked the first time that Emporia Middle School and Emporia High School band members took part in the parade, along with the EHS color guard. Thirty students from Lowther North and South Intermediate School also helped as “ambassadors” for the event.
After the speeches, both authors settled in to sign more books for a seemingly endless line of children.
“This is the best kind of deluge,” DuPrau said.