Back to Featured Interviews >>

MEET TIM MYERS
by Bonnie O'Brian

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

Tim Myers

Play, play, play! In my family, we consider play a kid's job, and we told our kids that as they were growing up. I remember playing Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves with cut-off broomsticks and garbage can lids for swords and shields*I remember damming up gutter-water with sand and leaves after it rained*I remember building forts, and playing rocking-horse on a big tree branch, and shooting baskets, and ambushing my sister with a wet kitchen-rag thrown into her face (Don't worry*she got me back, big time). Oh, and I remember mixing up everything we could find in the kitchen, like ketchup, mustard, salt, pepper, to make Super-goop. But I also remember my mom didn't like that, for obvious reasons*and I remember never doing it again.

On the other hand, I'd also find myself looking at books sometimes, getting lost in them. I didn't have many, but it was as if I'd slip into another world.

Did you write stories when you were growing up? at school? Or at home as a hobby? As a young child, or as a teenager, or both?

When I was in seventh grade, I suddenly got interested in rock and roll, and I'd take my dad's tiny transistor radio and listen to it. At about the same time, I started writing. I wrote poetry. Pretty soon I was writing a lot*just because I wanted to. And I started writing songs on the old piano my mom got and kept in my brother's and my room. I just kept on from there.

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?

Just the opposite. I never had the slightest thought about being an "author." I never considered myself a writer*I just lived the life. In fact, as an adult I wrote and wrote and wrote, filling up scores of journals for example, before the thought of publication ever occurred to me. Writing is part of the way I live, something I do for its own sake; I don't know why I'm that way, but I am. I didn't submit any writing to publishers till I was almost 40. It was kind of like the way an apple ripens on a tree; one day I could just feel that I was ready.

What are the topics of some of your books?

My books are about all kinds of things. One is about a poetry contest between a fox and a famous poet. Another follows what happens when a brand-new human baby and a brand-new troll baby are switched. My latest book is full of crazy and sleepy poems for bedtime, including one about a hamster who thinks he's a rock star. And I've got lots of manuscripts I'm trying to have published*one about a big race held for snails*another about sailors on a long voyage who get depressed because they lose their muffin tins and can't have muffins*another called Hip-Hop Honey Bee, about a bee rapper.

Do you do other types of writing*for example, educational, nonfiction, magazine work?

I seem to write almost every kind of thing there is. I've published over 100 poems for adults and won a national poetry contest. I write haiku, and folktales, original and retold, and non-fiction for kids and adults, and essays, and novels, and short stories, and science fiction and fantasy, and more besides. To me it's like being at a huge royal feast*I want a taste of everything!

Have any of your books earned special recognition?

I'm happy to say they have.

Basho and the Fox made The New York Times best-seller list for children’s books, was read aloud on NPR by Daniel Pinkwater, was a Smithsonian Magazine Notable Book for Children, and won recognition from Bank Street, Storytelling World, the Children’s Book Council, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the IRA, and PBS Teacher Resource. It's also been adapted as a play, a dance, and is being used for a character-education program in California schools.

Tanuki’s Gift got an excellent boxed review with art in the New York Times, was a Nick Jr. Family Magazine “Best Book of the Year," a Bank Street Honor Book, an Anne Izard Storyteller’s Choice winner, an Asian Pacific American Honor book, and was recommended by PBS Teacher Resource.

Basho and the River Stones is now with Scholastic Book Clubs, was a Junior Library Guild selection, and an NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Trade Book. It was also performed as a play and is used in character education.

Two of my stories have been SCBWI Magazine Merit Award Runners-up, and “Rock Takes a Name" (Storyworks) got an award from the Association of Educational Publishers. It's now part of an enrichment text for middle school from Glencoe/McGraw Hill.

An adult science-fiction story I wrote won a prize in the international Writers of the Future Contest, and an essay I wrote was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.