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MEET BRADLEY STEFFENS Keynote Speaker 2008
by Bonnie O'Brian

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

Bradley Steffens

I liked to play outside. I was immersed in an imaginary world where I was a cowboy, soldier, pirate, spy, or space traveler. I would hop on my bike and go on an adventure. There were a lot of open fields where I grew up. I dug foxholes, buried treasures, or just lay in the deep, cold grass and watched crows fly overhead—from where to where, I never knew.

What books influenced you most when you were growing up?

I remember reading every volume of the old Franklin Watts series of biographies in orange library covers. I loved Robert Lawson’s Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin by His Good Mouse Amos . I also like the novels of William O. Steele. I read all of those. When I was younger, I was a Seussoholic. My mother loved to read Dr. Seuss aloud to me. I was still checking his books out of the library when I was in third or fourth grade. I remember a teacher suggesting that I pick out something a little more challenging, a little more appropriate to my age. I was heartbroken.

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?

I didn’t write stories, unless they were assigned at school. I dabbled in verse. The summer between fifth and sixth grades I wrote a line-for-line parody of “Casey at the Bat” that ended with Casey getting a hit. I didn’t like the ending of the original. I didn’t appreciate it, obviously.

I did do some nonfiction writing as a kid. My father was a great sports fan, and he and I followed the California Angels. A machinist, he worked nights throughout his career. He usually listened to Angel games on the radio at work. When he was working on the Apollo space program, however, he was not allowed to bring a radio to work. One day we were listening to a game at home when he had to leave for work. He asked me to leave a note on the kitchen table, telling him how the game turned out. I decided to go one step further. As the game went on, I got out the typewriter and my printing set and created a sports page that summarized the game. He loved it. That became my summer job. I would create a sports page every night and leave it on the kitchen table for my dad. I got pretty good at it. I figured out the optimum number of characters to make it easy to justify columns (19). I would write parts of the paper during the game, then finish it off when the game was over.

Both of my parents were proud of my newspaper hobby, which was fine with me, but I was mortified when my mother mentioned it to my sixth grade teacher at Back to School Night. The teacher, Betsy Crawford, suggested that I try my hand at writing news stories about historical events “as they happened.” I didn’t have much choice, so I dutifully wrote one about the death of Socrates. I later revisited this event in one of my books about free speech. For variety, I included a “new myth” about the constellation of Auriga the Charioteer. I later wrote a prizewinning poem entitled “Auriga” that appeared in the journal Crosscurrents. Mrs. Crawford made copies of the paper and handed them out to the class—my first publication. I wrote several other papers that year. No doubt my classmates were less than thrilled about the extra reading.

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?

Oddly, not. Despite all the writing I did as a kid, I never thought I would write for a living. I thought I would be an astronaut.

 What audience did you have in mind for your career as a writer - adult or children?

I started out as a poet, so I definitely wrote for adults. When I was twenty-five a theater ensemble staged an evening of my plays-in-verse. It was pretty intense stuff. I started writing for children out of financial desperation. During one period of unemployment I was able to get work as a freelance proofreader for a children’s publisher. The proofreading led to an opportunity to rewrite a manuscript that the original author didn’t want to revise. I was the uncredited coauthor of that book. I rewrote another manuscript. That time I got credit as coauthor. My editor then approached me about writing a book on my own. I have been doing it ever since.

 What was your first job when you graduated from college?

I didn’t graduate, but my first job was with a hat and cap manufacturer in Minneapolis. I worked in the cutting room, laying plies of fabric on top of one another—usually 48 plies high—to be cut by dies or electric knifes. I was a member of the Ladies Garment Workers Union!

 How soon after that was your first book published?

Many years. I was laid off from the hat factory and eventually got a job writing advertising copy. I continued to write and publish poetry. I didn’t get a book contract for another eight years.

When was it published?

1989

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

The publisher approached me, so no rejection. I have file folders full of rejection slips from magazines, poetry journals, theaters, and the like.

 What are the topics are some of your books?

I have written five on free speech and censorship. I have written four biographies: Emily Dickinson, Jesse Jackson, J.K. Rowling, and Ibn al-Haytham, the eleventh-century Muslim scholar who developed the scientific method more than two centuries before the Europeans “discovered” it…by reading his books.

 Do you focus on fiction or nonfiction? Which do you prefer? Do you find one easier than the other?

I have never written fiction, except for a movie treatment—which I enjoyed. I find poetry and nonfiction to be somewhat alike. Both emerge from real events. Both involve finding some theme or meaning connecting disparate events.

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

I have been employed as an advertising copywriter for 25 years in corporations, advertising agencies, and as a freelance writer. I really enjoy advertising. It is the opposite of book writing in many ways. You might need to limit your message to 10 words, rather than 10,000. You might have to finish something in an hour, rather than a few months or a year. You can use humor in ways that would be out of place in a nonfiction book. Advertising is fun. Book writing is more satisfying.

Have any of your books earned special recognition?

My Censorship (1996) was included in the 1997 edition of Best Books for Young Adult Readers. Several of my books have been selected by California Readers to be part of the California Collections. And my Giants (2005) won the San Diego Book Award for Best Young Adult & Children's Nonfiction.

How did your life change when you got married? and had children? Did it make it easier or harder to find time to write?

I didn’t have much time to write before I was married or had children, so I don’t think it took anything away. Being with the children sparked many ideas for poems and stories. One Christmas in Minnesota, my three-year-old son received bubble-blowing soap in his stocking. He wanted to take it outside and blow bubbles. We went out around sunset in sub-zero weather. The bubbles froze in midair. I wrote a poem about that, calling the bubbles “glassy capsules of thin air/that shatter at a touch” and comparing them to Christmas tree ornaments: “As if the lighted tree inside/had loosed its ornaments, and they/whirled out an open door.”

Do you enjoy researching or do you prefer working totally from your imagination?

As a nonfiction writer, I spend a great deal of time doing research. It is one of the most exciting aspects of what I do. I never know what discoveries lurk around the next corner!

Nonfiction—especially historical nonfiction—requires a vivid imagination. The nonfiction author must try to place himself or herself in the time, culture, and situation about which he or she is writing.

Sometimes these imaginary journeys yield extraordinary insights. For example, I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the Muslim scholar Ibn al-Haytham to be stripped of his possessions and placed under house arrest in Cairo in 1010. What would he have done without his books and papers? A man who wrote more than 200 books and treatises could not have sat in a bare room for ten years without doing something! I imagined the scene: a bare room, perhaps a window or crack in the door, a shaft of light cutting through the darkness of his cell. Was it here that he first began to think about and study light? Did he begin to experiment with light because it was the only phenomenon he could study? I looked again at the experiments with light described in his great work, The Book of Optics. They all involve one person working alone in a room—stopping up windows, arranging lamps on a table, creating small openings, or apertures. I came to the conclusion that Ibn al-Haytham may well have started working on The Book of Optics while imprisoned. The first experimental laboratory was a prison cell in Cairo.

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

 I try to work on one book at a time, but that is not always possible. I am often researching one book while writing another.

 Which of your books did you most enjoy writing?

I’m not sure that any one book was more enjoyable than another. For me the writing process is always the same. I am always solving problems with words, searching for the right sequence, the best word order. It all comes from the same place. Having said that, the imaginary process of writing Ibn al-Haytham: First Scientist was the was by far the most challenging and exciting.

 What are you working on now? When do you expect to start submitting it to publishers?

I am currently writing a book about free speech for Ericson Publishing, in a series entitled Ripped from the Headlines. It is my fifth book about free speech. I should turn that in this month. I am also researching a biography of Emily Dickinson for Morgan Reynolds. I hope to have it done by the end of the year.

 What do you most want the students to get out of your school visits?

To know that the market for writing is huge. Every newspaper, magazine, website, television program, movie, book, and advertising piece was written by someone.

Has anyone ever written you a fan letter that you’d like to share?

They always ask if there is something more that I know, other than what I put in the book. The answer is no. I don’t hold anything back. Everything I know is in the book.

 Is there anything about yourself that you’d like to share - hobbies, where you were born, special talents other than writing/illustrating,

I play golf and I enjoy watching thoroughbred horseracing. My favorite racehorse was Alphabet Soup, winner of the 1996 Breeder’s Cup Classic. My kids picked him out one day at Del Mar, and we followed him for two years afterward.