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MEET APRIL HALPRIN WAYLAND
by Ann Stalcup

April Halprin Wayland

There are many days that I feel very lost. When I am writing on spec, I

write,
mother,
procrastinate,
and am afraid
in equal parts.
I can also be cranky.

But my when I am writing on deadline, fellow writer Rebecca Gold and I walk fast and hard together for an hour by the ocean or we take a very tough exercise class. Then we go to a Berkeley-esque coffee house (couches, fireplace, chess board, lots of books and other writers) and write for hours and hours while looking very sophisticated sipping our lattes. Such a great routine. Rebecca calls it our W & W—walking and writing.

I can't tell you what an incredible breakthrough coffee house writing has been for me. I always thought I'd be distracted by the music and the people chatting...but the music is 1940's music and kind of seeps in quietly...and the people aren't chatting to me, so it just kind of wafts by and makes me feel part of the world.

Meanwhile, there's no telephone, no email, no plants to water, no laundry to put in, no doors to answer, no repair guys...no pets to distract me. It's very solid focused writing time.

It feels wonderful. I’m having the most fun I've ever had writing. Even if my editor doesn't accept my next manuscript, it almost doesn't matter. The process is very, very different from sitting alone at home in front of my computer with that invisible whip in my hand, trying not to answer e-mail or answer the phone. It’s incredibly satisfying.

I swim past the fear and focus on the single page I’m working on at that moment. There are still grey days when I wonder if I can do it...it’s very Zen when I’m cranking. And very scary when I’m not. But if I’ve written something—anything at all—I go home and stand at the top of a convenient mountain, raise my fist to the air and shout, “I’M A WRITER, HEAR ME ROAR!”

There is something about the flames of a deadline licking my heels that makes the exercise/coffee house/virtuous-writer-on-the-mountain-top the rule, rather than the exception.

Do you have a favorite fan story?

Hmmmm…well, here’s one. It’s from a bookstore owner who said that she photocopied a poem from GIRL COMING IN FOR A LANDING and hung it in her staff women's restroom. Here’s the poem:

PERIOD.
It sounds so final.
Like things stop.
When you get it. I know that when I finally get mine,
I'm going to be so thrilled I'm going to call it my
Exclamation Point.

How's that for an inventive marketing!

Can you tell us about the class you teach at UCLA?

I’ve taught Writing Picture Books for Children through the Writers Program at UCLA Extension for six years now. I call my classes “G.I.Curious George”. They are six-week boot camps with lots and lots of homework.

The picture book, to me, is a miracle. It is the pairing of two worlds, the visual and verbal, to make an entirely different art form. Our art is in the language, the humor, the respect for our audience, and in the cutting away of all unnecessary words. We only get 1,000 words--1,500 max--to create the atmosphere, define characters, tell the story and get out.

The energy in my classes runs somewhere between worship and exhilaration. Somewhere between voices singing the Messiah in an old church in England and six-year olds jumping up and down and talking really fast because someone put a grasshopper in their pants and because it is so damned exciting. And it is exciting--to be on this road doing this thing, writing for kids. What could be more terrific than writing a picture book?

What advice do you have for young writers when you visit schools?

# 1: One of the most important things I learned from my mentor, poet Myra Cohn Livingston, was to really observe before I write. Do I want to a write about a tree? Then I go outside and study a tree for ten solid minutes by the clock, taking notes about all the things I see, smell, hear, and feel about it.... I count the branches, listen to the birds on it, touch the bark, crush the leaves and smell them, etc. I think about the emotions and memories that come up when I look at this tree and jot those down, too. THEN I go inside and write about a tree.

In the same way, I went to a middle school on the first day of school and observed students and interviewed them on their thoughts that day. Then I went home and wrote a poem for my book about my character's first day of school. That poem—and other details from that school day—is in my book, GIRL COMING IN FOR A LANDING.

#2: Enjoy your writing. Make it delicious. Play in it. Try to turn off society’s urgency about success, fame, and publication. Just plunge in and take a bath in other people’s words—and then write your own.