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Back to Featured Interviews >> MEET CINDY NEUSCHWANDER (5/2011)
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| Cindy Neuschwander |
No. I was not particularly interested in writing when I was young. In fact, I actually did not like it. I did love to read, however, and my parents have told me that I had an advanced spoken vocabulary as a child. I was a very active kid so I was outside, playing and using my very vivid imagination instead.
If you did not write as a child, when did you start writing and what inspired you to write?
When I grew up, I became a teacher, first at the high school level and then at the elementary level. I currently teach third grade, which I absolutely adore. When I was teaching at the Frankfurt International School in Germany back in the early 1990s, I met and worked with a wonderful teacher, Ellen Alquist, who became a real mentor to me. She was an amazing math teacher and I learned quite a bit from her. She suggested that teaching children mathematics with stories was a powerful and memorable way to help students understand math. I tried using some stories and liked the results so when I returned to the United States for a home leave one summer, I looked for stories with mathematical themes to use in my classroom. Unfortunately, there were very few so I decided to try to write some of my own. The rest is, shall I say, history.
What was your first job when you graduated from college?
After graduating from Willamette University, I earned a Masters degree from Stanford University in Education and began my career as a teacher.
Was your first book accepted immediately or did you experience a number of rejections?
I had both experiences concurrently with my first two manuscripts. SIR CUMFERENCE AND THE FIRST ROUND TABLE had 14 rejections before Charlesbridge became the publisher. Many other publishing houses thought it was very clever but they were worried that it was too mathematical and would not sell well. But Sir Cumference has been very popular over the years. Charlesbridge has been a wonderful publisher of my books. There are now seven Sir Cumference stories in the series with an eighth underway. While Charlesbridge was considering my first Sir Cumference manuscript, Scholastic was looking for math manuscripts. I had written another book called AMANDA BEAN’S AMAZING DREAM. So I sent them that manuscript. Within 30 days of submission, they offered me a contract.
What are topics of some of your books?
All of my books are about mathematics but they are, first of all, fun stories with the math woven into them. The SIR CUMFERENCE series is mostly about geometry but one book deals with place value and another will be on graphing. AMANDA BEAN’S AMAZING DREAM is a multiplication story. PASTRY SCHOOL IN PARIS is about liquid measurement. I write about math topics that are interesting to me, or ones that I think teachers would like to use in schools with their students.
Do you focus on fiction or non-fiction? Which one do you prefer? Do you find one easier than another?
My stories, all imagined by me, are categorized as non-fiction. This is because they all deal with real mathematical concepts and ideas. The imagined stories are the vehicle that drives the mathematical content. I think I have the best of both worlds. I write about non-fiction (mathematics) but tell the stories through fiction.
Do you work on more than one book at a time?
Yes, I do. Ideally, I like to have one book in production, one at the editing stage with my editor, and one in a rough draft at home. This doesn’t always work out but it is fun to have projects at different stages. It means I have to sometimes switch mental gears, maybe from medieval times with Sir Cumference to current days with some of my other stories such as PATTERNS IN PERU but it adds interest to my writing and thinking. I also have ideas in my head that I just keep there for four to six months, contemplating before I ever begin to write.
Do you write every day and do you have set hours that you work?
Because I am a fulltime third grade teacher, I do not write every day for certain hours. I try to do a lot of my thinking during the school year and write during holidays and summer vacations. Certainly when I have a great idea or a deadline, I write in the evenings and weekends during the school year but that is a bit more difficult because of my school work. When I do write, I often have other things I am doing, like ironing or cleaning the house. I get up and scrub and then while I am doing that, another idea occurs to me and I go back to my computer and write it down. I rewrite quite a bit before I feel satisfied with my stories.