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MEET THERESA NELSON
by Bonnie O'Brian

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

Theresa Nelson

I loved reading, going to movies, singing, dancing, and playing the piano—all the things I still love doing today. And because I so admired Anne in ANNE OF GREEN GABLES and Jo March in LITTLE WOMEN, I wanted to be a writer, just like Anne and Jo. I spent countless happy hours writing and directing plays that my ten brothers and sisters and I performed for family and friends. David—the oldest—was always the King; Frances was usually the princess. And I was the witch, who was ancient and ugly, but who somehow always got the most thrilling lines.

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?

The plays were stories (tragedies and comedies all mixed up together). And I wrote poems by the bushel—including a hugely dramatic narrative poem called “The Quest of Emerald,” in which I tried my best to sound like Alfred Noyes in “The Highwayman.” (Here’s Mr. Noyes: “The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees/ The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas....” And here’s my imitation at thirteen: “The world was asleep in springtime/The sky was sprinkled with stars/The moon was old and dreaming/And the wind whispered tales of afar....”) By seventh grade, I had started a novel—THE FRIENDS—about two girls and a lost dog. But once they found the dog at the end of chapter three, I was overcome with a horrible case of writer’s block, so I gave up on writing for the next twenty years and decided to become a movie star, instead.

What was your first job when you graduated from college?

In the early 70s, I acted in local theatre and taught creative dramatics in Houston, Texas, where I had met my husband, Kevin Cooney, in a college play. (The play was “Little Mary Sunshine.” I played Little Mary, and Kevin played Corporal Billy Jester—the funny guy. We were married a little more than a year later—nearly forty years ago now—on September 26, 1968.)

When was your first book published?

1986.

Was it accepted immediately? or did you experience a number of rejections?

I was incredibly lucky. After several years on the road with a theatrical touring troupe, Kevin and I had moved with our three sons to Katonah, New York, and were living in a wonderful old farmhouse about an hour north of New York City. It made me think of Green Gables all over again and reminded me of my old writing dreams, so while Kevin pursued his acting career, I began scribbling short chapter books and rhyming stories. A friend of a friend—the wonderful writer, Judie Angell—suggested I give them to her editor, Richard Jackson, who happened to live nearby, and who also happened to be the BEST editor in the whole world of children’s literature—though I had no clue about any of that, at the time. Dick didn’t publish any of those early efforts, but he saw enough promise in them to encourage me to keep writing. And after two years of false starts and piles of terrible pages (all of which he rejected), I sent him the manuscript of THE TWENTY-FIVE-CENT MIRACLE, and we’ve been working together ever since.

Where do you get your ideas?

From the same places I get my dreams. Memory and imagination, Mark Twain said; those are all you need. My stories are fiction, but I make them out of bits and pieces of my real world. A dog named Sister, the beach where I used to play as a child, my second son’s beloved Pooh bear the Salvation Army took away by mistake—suddenly there they are in my pages, sometimes when I least expect them. (The writer Mary McCarthy called it putting “real plums in an imaginary cake.”)

If some of your fiction stories are factual, do you write about people that you have been interested in for a long time, perhaps since childhood?

My second book, DEVIL STORM, was inspired by a true story my mother told me when I was a little girl. It’s the tale of an old man known only as Tom the Tramp, who risked his life to save a stranded family during the great hurricane that devastated the Texas coast in 1900. EARTHSHINE is my tribute to a dear friend who died of AIDS, and to his daughter, who loved him so. The main character in RUBY ELECTRIC wants to write movies, and her scripts are an awful lot like the stories I wrote in the sixth and seventh grades. And in the book I’m working on now, JULIA DELANEY (set in St. Louis and Montana in 1910), the Irish-American orphan who gets carted off to the House of Mercy has quite a bit in common with my husband’s mother as a little girl. I’ve wanted to tell her story ever since I first heard it, and I believe I’m finally on the right track with it now; I’ve just returned from New York, where I received the wonderful PEN/Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Working Writing Fellowship.

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

JULIA DELANEY is due to be published (by Richard Jackson Books, Atheneum) in 2010.