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MEET MYRON UHLBERG
by Ann Stalcup

What are the topics of some of your books?

Myron Uhlberg

My books for children are based on my life as a child. They are autobiographical fiction. They are mostly true, but I’ve added a fictional element to increase their dramatic intensity. My first book was based on a record snowfall, and a boy who had a dream that he could fly; then there was a book about a boy who adored his deaf father, who was a printer who saved his coworkers by alerting them to a fire by using sign language, the language of the deaf; that book was followed by a story about the same boy—a few years older—who was taken by his deaf father to see the first game that Jackie Robinson ever played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In between these books, was one about a fool who was never satisfied with the life he had. That book was based on my grandfather who came to this country from Hungary where he was the youngest child of a family of gypsy Jews.

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

I was born on the day that King Kong fell 1,200 feet to his death from the top of the Empire State building, July 1, 1933. Thus it was no surprise to my mother and father that my favorite things to do as a child was climb . . . anything: trees, telephone poles, even the brick face of my apartment house building. I was considered to be one of the best climbers in my section of Brooklyn. I loved high places, the higher the better.

What was your first job when you graduated from college?

I went to college on a football scholarship. After I graduated, I went into the U.S. Army, and became a paratrooper. One day I found myself in the open doorway of an airplane, 1,200 feet up in the air. Looking down, I understood how King Kong must have felt. Then I jumped. After the Army, I spent the next forty years in the men’s fashion clothing business, my feet solidly planted on the ground the entire time—except for the elevator ride that took me to my office.

Did you write stories when you were growing up? And what single thing that you did as a child influences your later writing life?

I never, as a child, wrote anything on paper other than what was strictly required of me in school. My penmanship was atrocious; my spelling was worse. Thus my teachers couldn’t read what I wrote, and when they finally deciphered my scribbles and scrawls, they could make no sense of the words I had invented. But since my parent’s were deaf, I wrote on air, in sign language, not merely in sentences, and paragraphs, but in entire picture stories. Stories of what I thought about on any given day; stories of what I imagined my life was about; stories of play, and friendships made and lost; and sports, the games we played on our macadam street, utilizing a ten cent rubber ball, and a sawed off broomstick—simple games that absorbed me for hours on lazy timeless summer days in Brooklyn so many years ago. And I read. This was a time before TV, Video games, iPods, cell phones, and all of today’s distractions available to children. All we had were books, the radio, and the Saturday matinees that featured two movies, four shorts, the Pathé newsreels, a drawing for dishes, and the coming attractions. And of these, reading was my passion. And it remained so for the rest of my life. Reading, and how I internalized what I read as a child, was surely the greatest influence on my later life as a writer.

What is the best advice you have ever received about writing?

Write!

Was your first book accepted immediately?

No my first book, Flying Over Brooklyn FLYING OVER BROOKLYN, was rejected by ten New York publishing houses, as being “too New York.” Then Peachtree Publishers, based in Atlanta, Georgia, bought it thinking it was a simple book about a boy’s universal dream that he could fly. They were right.

How old were you when your first book was published? And what did your friends say to you at the time?

I was sixty-six years old when my first book was published. I was an overnight success; a geriatric wonder. My friends asked: “What took you so long?”

Do you do other types of writing?

Yes, I also write adult memoirs.

Why do you write?

I began writing as something to do in my later years. Originally, I approached my writing as purely a hobby. But when I began writing stories about a hearing boy and his deaf father and mother, I began to tap into the crucial part of my life, the part that shaped who I am today. I continue to write stories based on this subject so that I can regain those memories, and in doing so, try to make sense of them. I will often start a book merely recalling a specific incident, without really knowing what direction the story will take. Often I am as surprised as the reader at how the story ends.

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

I spend most of my days either actively writing, or am otherwise engaged in researching my next book. I find that at my age I am most productive from early morning, to early afternoon. I always try to stop writing just at the point that I can’t wait to write the next sentence. That “next sentence” becomes the gateway for my next day’s effort. As for research, when I arrive at a point in my daily research that I can’t wait to begin writing, I know I’ve ingested enough information for that day.

When is your next book going to be in bookstores? What’s it about?

My next book, published by Bantam, is an adult memoir titled, HANDS OF MY FATHER. It will be in bookstores January/February 2009. This memoir has as it genesis my children’s books, THE PRINTER, and DAD, JACKIE, AND ME. It is the story of my growing up the first-born hearing child of two deaf parents in Brooklyn, New York, during the Great Depression and WW II. At the heart of the book is the boy’s love for his mother and father, a love that is infused with shame. At the age of six the boy becomes his father’s interpreter, and the human interface with the hearing world. After an initial—quite short, actually—period of time where the boy feels great pride in the role of interpreter for his father, he soon becomes disenchanted at the prospect of spending his childhood years acting in such a grown up capacity. The book recounts how the hearing boy blends his life in the hearing world with his life in his silent deaf world, and the adjustments he must make between being a child and acting as an adult—along with being a buffer, and protector, between his deaf father and the often hostile, uncaring hearies (his father’s term for hearing people). Woven throughout the book are vivid descriptions of the expressive beauty of his parent’s deaf language, American Sign Language, the boy’s first language.

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

If you can talk, you can write. And the easiest subject to write about, is yourself. You, and no one else, is an expert on that subject.

What is the best question a student ever asked you?

“Isn’t it sad when your cat dies?”