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MEET ANGELICA CARPENTER
by Bonnie O'Brian

What did you most like to do when you were a child?

Angelica Carpenter

Read Oz books. I still love them and today I am president of the International Wizard of Oz Club. ( www.ozclub.org).

What books influenced you most when you were growing up?

OZ, THE SECRET GARDEN, THE LITTLE HOUSE BOOKS, and BETSY-TACY

If you didn’t write as a child, then when did you start writing and what inspired you to start?

I always wrote, as a newsletter editor or the secretary of a club, but I first started writing books in my 40s. That's when my mother, Jean Shirley, who was a published children's author, retired from her job in St. Louis and moved to Florida, where I was a public library director, to be near me. She had decided that we should write books together and I liked the idea.

W as your first book accepted immediately? or did you experience a number of rejections?

Mother and I sent a proposal for our first book, a biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett, to six publishers as a multiple submission. The first five rejected it, but Lerner Publications bought it, right out of the slush pile. Our editor, who selected it, had recently taken a children's literature course at the University of Minnesota. Luckily for us, she had done her term paper on Frances Hodgson Burnett, and so she knew what an interesting life Burnett had had.

What are the topics are some of your books?

Biographies of Victorian authors: Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. Frank Baum, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll. My website is at www.angelicacarpenter.com.

Which of your books did you most enjoy writing?

I love them all, but since I love Oz the most, the Baum biography was the most exciting. For me writing books is like time travel. I come home from work (as a librarian), I leave the modern world and then I take a trip to Victorian times. I get so involved with my subjects that by the end of each book I feel as if I were a member of their families. I have traveled to places where they lived and taken many pictures. I make photocopies of historical photos that might be good for illustrations. I put these, mixed with my photos, into chronological order into a notebook. This becomes almost like a family album.

Do you write every day and do you have set hours that you work?

When I'm working on a book, I write for an hour each weekday and two hours each weekend day. I take Fridays off. But usually I write much more than this. I get so excited that I write until late at night and have trouble calming down and going to sleep.

When is your next book going to be in book stores?

I have edited a book of essays about Frances Hodgson Burnett that will be published

in October 2006 by Scarecrow Press. It's called In the Garden: Essays in Honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Though it is written for adults, much of it would appeal to anyone who is old enough to have read Burnett books like The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, and it will have lots of photos and illustrations.

When you do school visits, what question do children ask you most?

How old are you? How much money do you make? How tall are you?