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MEET ANNIE BARROWS
by Bonnie O'Brian

What did you most like to do as a child?

I liked—no, loved is the proper word—to read. At least twice a week, I went to my little library and took out a stack of books that balanced precariously in my bicycle basket as I pedaled home. Then I’d place the pile beside the sofa, stretch out, and read through them one by one—or until my mother forced me to go outside and breathe fresh air.

When you were a child, did you ever have moments when you decided that you were going to be a writer when you grew up?

I didn’t, because I believed that writers were essentially magic, and I knew very well that I wasn’t magic (no wings, no wishes, no witches stopping by the house). I was quite confident that writers were not people like me, but specially marked out by Providence. I was a little confused about the form the mark might take—sometimes I pictured it as being born with a quill in hand, sometimes it was instant, perfect, natural writing. Sometimes, oddly enough, I pictures writers with a special cylinder on their heads containing all their stories.  In any case, the upshot was that I was not a writer.

What gave you the idea to write IVY AND BEAN?

When my older daughter was six and half, she ran out of things to read. She was too young to read mid-grade chapter books and she wanted to move on from picture books, and after we had trekked through Junie B and Magic Treehouse, we were up a creek. I was appalled—Someone Should Do Something About This, I thought. And then it occurred to me that I was a writer—I  should do something about this. Suddenly, my extremely detailed memories of my childhood became valuable information, rather than useless bits of fluff clogging up my brain. I really can remember how I felt as a seven year old, and using that recall, I summoned up the characteristics of the kind of book I would have really liked at that age—a story that reflected my own reality, a story that was funny, a story in which the adventures were possible but interesting, a story that wasn’t dependent upon grownups. That was the birth of Ivy and Bean.

Where do you get your ideas?

I get the ideas for my stories from watching kids—my own daughters, their friends, and the kids I meet on classroom visits—and from remembering things I did when I was a kid. IVY AND BEAN: DOOMED TO DANCE, for instance, is based on my own disillusionment with ballet, which followed close on the heels of being cast as a nougat in a ballet about candy.

What other types of writing do you do?

In addition to writing for kids, I also write for grownups. I was co-author, with my aunt Mary Ann Shaffer, of THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY, and I’m now working on a new novel, which has no title as yet. I have written non-fiction in the past—books on opera, fortune-telling, urban legends—but I think I’m done with that.

Do you work on more than one book at a time?

It takes a long time to write a novel (the grownup kind), and the Ivy and Bean books need to come out once a year, so I have found myself writing two books at once. However, I’ve found that I can’t write for grownups in the morning and kids in the afternoon. The cognitive dissonance is too much for me. I shut down the novel for a month and give myself over to kid-brain and the joy of writing about my girls. I sternly forbid myself even to think about the characters in the novel—which doesn’t work, by the way.

Do you like to include humor in your stories?