Candice Ransom

Reading through Troubled Times

February 20, 2024 by Candice Ransom

I pulled off the shelf a one-hundred-year-old edition of The Burgess Animal Book for Children by Thornton W. Burgess and took it to bed. The rolled edges of the worn binding felt reassuring in my hands, the thick rag pages soft and gently foxed. Why turn to an ancient children’s book?

Little Lulu Gave Me Fairy Tales

February 20, 2024November 19, 2023 by Candice Ransom

Many children were once introduced to fairy tales by Andrew Lang’s books or the complete stories of Grimm or Anderson. Yet I was steeped in fairy tales through Little Lulu comic books.

Starting Over … Sort Of

November 19, 2023August 3, 2023 by Candice Ransom

The Encyclopedia of Writing and Illustrating Children's Books

This year—after more than 40 years as a fulltime writer of books for children—I feel the need to start over. What went wrong in my career? It’s a long list, I’m afraid

Robert Lawson Gave Me Animals

August 3, 2023May 19, 2023 by Candice Ransom

Is there anything finer than a middle grade book with interior art? Yes, a middle grade book about woodland animals with excellent interior art.

A Lust for Endpapers

May 19, 2023February 17, 2023 by Candice Ransom

They say don’t judge a book by its cover but watch out for enticing endpapers! I discovered the lure of endpapers as a kid leafing through my cousin’s Childcraft series.

Magazine Parade

February 17, 2023November 11, 2022 by Candice Ransom

In which Candice F. Ransom takes a look at American children's magazines from 1789 to today.

When I Was a Wild Pony

November 17, 2022August 27, 2022 by Candice Ransom

The title of this essay comes from a dream I had last night, its memory and meaning caught between mysterious dreamtime and awakening in this harsh end-of-summer world. I was never a wild pony.

Borrowed Sparkle

August 27, 2022May 16, 2022 by Candice Ransom

I sat on a rusted swing hung from an I beam in our basement with a heavy book on my lap. I was ten and lonely because my only sister had left home a year earlier.

Waiting for Mr. Tumnus

May 16, 2022March 5, 2022 by Candice Ransom

Long ago, on windy, wintry nights, I’d look out the window by my bed as trees shifted for a glimpse of a light deep in the woods. The yellow light—on and off as the wind tossed—kept me up late, wondering. We had no neighbors on the other side of our woods.

My Journey with Margaret Wise Brown

January 16, 2022November 11, 2021 by Candice Ransom

How long does it take to write and have a nonfiction picture book published? A few years? Five? How about nineteen?

Listening for Stories

January 16, 2022August 30, 2021 by Candice Ransom

Each morning, when I can, I walk two and a half miles. I walk for exercise because I write most of the day. But mainly I walk to listen for stories.

Crafting a Home of the Heart

August 30, 2021May 6, 2021 by Candice Ransom

It had been years since I last visited the home of my heart, the only place where I can breathe freely. Conicville is in Shenandoah County in the Valley of Virginia, bordered by the Allegheny Mountains. It consists of a church, a cemetery, and a scattering of houses and farms. In 2012, I traveled to meet my 98-year-old cousin. His farm had recently been designated a Virginia Century Farm, land that has been in the same family for a hundred years.

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The Cottage of Lost Play

April 8, 2021April 8, 2021 by Candice Ransom

Working on my magical realism middle-grade novel, I realized I couldn’t visualize where my story is located. I could describe immediate buildings, but the landscape was blank. If I couldn’t see it, neither could a reader.

Finding Wonder

April 8, 2021March 4, 2021 by Candice Ransom

When fairy tale characters step into the woods, they are beset by tests, yet are stronger by the time they find their way out. At the beginning of 2021, I wandered in a deep, dark woods because, as Bruno Bettelheim warns in The Uses of Enchantment, it’s where you go after losing the framework which gives structure to your life.

Losing Wonder

March 11, 2021February 4, 2021 by Candice Ransom

I hadn’t written in months. Yet each morning, during that misty period between sleep and wakefulness, ideas popped into my mind. In the cold winter light, though, those ideas were revealed as withered and drab. Covid stole more than concentration and motivation. It robbed me of wonder.

Making Peace with January

March 7, 2021January 7, 2021 by Candice Ransom

This year, Hal Borland’s Book of Days migrates upstairs with me to read during my afternoon rest and before bed. It’s a daily journal beginning January 1, written from his farm in rural Connecticut, meant to help him answer the questions: Who am I? Where am I? What time is it? At 68, I ask those questions, too. Borland’s entries mix mid-70s science with New England lore, his natural observations of the seasons with his own quiet musings. January 6: Frost flowers fascinate me. They are related to frost ferns, those intricate patterns that formed on windowpanes before we slept in heated bedrooms. Frost ferns were indoor plants, created by the humidity in the room. Frost flowers are wildlings, outdoor grows created by humidity in the starlight.

Magic Needs Humble Soap

March 7, 2021December 3, 2020 by Candice Ransom

When I was ten, I wanted to be a detective-veterinarian-artist-writer-ballet dancer. Never mind I couldn’t stay up late, stand the sight of blood, or ever had a single dance lesson. Ten-year-olds view the world as limitless. When I was a teenager, my dreams shifted to more specific: a writer of children’s books and an animator for Walt Disney Studios.

Together from Afar

March 8, 2021November 24, 2020 by Zachary Stier

“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” (Ryunosuke Satoro)

Tis the season to be… It is hard to sometimes understand how difficult the holiday season will be this year. Although this is difficult, technology has made it possible for us all to connect and participate in holiday fun. For my article this month, I’ve listed activities that you can provide for families to do together during the holiday breaks.

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January 26, 2021November 10, 2020 by Vicki Palmquist

One green thing I wish everyone would do: Give up plastic bags. It’s hard, I know, to remember to carry a bag into a store. I wish we could give up other forms of plastic, like the blister packs encasing everything from Barbie dolls to Bic pens. Back in the days of five and ten stores, it was so nice to simply pick an item out of a bin or off a shelf, pay for it, and not wrestle with tin snips to get it open.

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Jane Langton Gave Me Geese

March 7, 2021November 4, 2020 by Candice Ransom

In Wildness is the preservation of the World. ~ Henry David Thoreau It’s rare a children’s book changes you when you’re an adult. I don’t mean fleeting Harry Potter/Team Edward crossover fandom, but genuine change (as with Watership Down). I was nearly 30 when Jane Langton’s book The Fledgling was published in 1980. At that stage of my not-yet-fledged career, I read children’s books by the boxload and was thrilled to discover a new one by my favorite writer.… more

How the Heather Looks: a Joyous Journey
to the British Sources of Children’s Books

October 31, 2020September 29, 2020 by Vicki Palmquist

If any good has come from the quarantine of 2020, it’s made me a heavy library user — my personal library, that is, since the public libraries are closed. I found this book in a dresser drawer. (When I redid my office, I didn’t want the clutter of bookcases, instead opting for vintage dressers and armoires — lovely to look at but I forget what’s in them).… more

Growing a Nonfiction Reader
and Even a Nonfiction Writer

March 7, 2021March 5, 2020 by Candice Ransom

It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know
than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate. —Rachel Carson One would never guess from the following excerpts that a certain nine-year-old would grow up to write more than 50 nonfiction children’s books. This is from my fourth-grade booklet on Florida: The Cypress swamp is a part of the Everglades.… more

The Crack in the Door:
How I Came to Write Bones in the White House

March 7, 2021February 6, 2020 by Candice Ransom

I’ve been keen on dinosaurs and Ice Age mammals my whole life, since I read Roy Chapman Andrews’ All About Dinosaurs. When I was nine, I added paleontologist to my string of future occupations (writer, artist, ballet dancer, detective). My love for Jefferson began when we moved to Fredericksburg in 1996. I was touring James Monroe’s Law Office downtown one day and learned how the building was nearly torn down in 1927 for a gas station when Monroe’s descendant stepped in and turned it into a museum.… more

Candice Ransom

November 19, 2019November 19, 2019 by Candice Ransom

Books swept me away, one after the other, this way and that; I made endless vows according to their lights, for I believed them. (Annie Dillard, An American Childhood) It’s hard to say which came first: did I adopt traits of the main character in certain books I read, or did I gravitate towards those books because I already had those traits?… more

Welcome to Lizard Motel

December 24, 2019October 29, 2019 by Vicki Palmquist

There is a special period of … childhood, approximately from five or six to eleven or twelve — between the strivings of animal infancy and the storms of adolescence — when the natural world is experienced in some highly evocative way … It is principally to this middle age range … that writers say they return in memory in order to renew the power and impulse to create.… more

No Wraiths or Fetches Necessary

March 7, 2021October 3, 2019 by Candice Ransom

To celebrate our fortieth anniversary this year, we decided to take a Big Trip. My husband suggested Paris. “Cornwall,” I said. “Someplace old.” Not that Paris isn’t old. Instead of a crowded city, I wanted winkles and pasties, lost gardens and standing stones, piskies and Tintagel castle. He agreed and I began putting together a trip that would send us back in time.… more

Enchanted Points of Entry

March 7, 2021September 5, 2019 by Candice Ransom

My first glimpse of Margaret Wise Brown’s house on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, was from a boat. It topped a granite slope, clapboard siding painted the same gray-blue as the sparkling Hurricane Sound. I was so excited I nearly fell overboard. We’d just passed the Little Island that Margaret had made famous in her Caldecott-winning book and I’d spotted a seal dozing on the rocks.… more

Richard Adams Gave Me Rabbits

March 7, 2021May 2, 2019 by Candice Ransom

Knee-deep in spring! The rabbits will be here soon, rangy after a long winter. They like our yard because we have low bushes good for hiding and we let the lawn go to clover and dandelions. I like to think rabbits feel safe because they have little chance elsewhere. If ever there was an animal with “a thousand enemies,” it’s the cottontail rabbit, a creature I never paid much attention to until Watership Down.… more

On the Way to East Dene

March 7, 2021April 5, 2019 by Candice Ransom

One day during this dreary Virginia winter, I came across a talk by Susan Cooper, given at Simmons College in 1980. The talk was titled, “Nahum Tarune’s Book.” To explain the title, she begins by quoting an astonishing passage from the introduction of Come Hither by Walter de la Mare, an anthology of poetry first published in 1923: In my rovings and ramblings as a boy I had often skirted the old stone house in the hollow.… more

When a Map Is a Journey

March 7, 2021February 7, 2019 by Candice Ransom

The first map I remember was flashed briefly on TV, part of a commercial for Story Book Land. It aired on “Captain Tugg,” a local kiddie program. I adored Captain Tugg, so anything he endorsed must be gold. Like the home-movie type kid shows of the 50s and 60s, Story Book Land was a family-owned amusement park. And for my ninth birthday, I was going to Story Book Land!… more

Teaching Passion

March 7, 2021January 3, 2019 by Candice Ransom

When the director of Hollins University’s graduate program in children’s literature asked me to teach a critical class on the history of children’s book illustrators, I said no. Even with an MFA in writing for children from Vermont College, an MA in children’s literature from Hollins, scores of published books, and years of teaching graduate-level creative classes, I still felt like a fraud.… more

The Angel in the Woods

March 7, 2021December 6, 2018 by Candice Ransom

It was the early eighties and I was grappling with my first middle grade novel, a pitiful imitation of Daniel Pinkwater’s Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars. The boy in my aptly-titled “The Doomsday Kid” played Dungeons and Dragons and attended a rock concert that ended in a bottle-and-can riot. For “research,” I tried to teach myself D&D and dragged my husband to a Bad Company concert that ended in his temporary deafness.… more

The Books We Keep Forever

March 7, 2021November 8, 2018 by Candice Ransom

A few weeks ago, I stood at the corner of 37th and Madison Avenue in New York City and gazed longingly at the elegant pink marble building that housed J.P. Morgan’s library, now the Morgan Library and Museum. In late January 2019, the Morgan will host the “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” exhibit. I’m too early. I only travel to New York every three or four years, but I’ll come back to see this exhibit, even if I have to crawl.… more

Tonight is the Night …

March 7, 2021October 4, 2018 by Candice Ransom

… when dead leaves fly like witches on switches across the sky … In the center of our Wegman’s is all the stuff that is not food. Of course, I head there first. Browsing tea towels and sunflower coasters is my reward from having to shop in the too-big grocery store. Recently I found a plate among the Halloween décor.… more

The Need for Secret Places

March 7, 2021September 8, 2018 by Candice Ransom

In the fifth grade, my best friend and I discovered a tangle of honeysuckle in the scrubby woods bordering our school playground. It would make the perfect recess refuge. All we had to do was pull the honeysuckle from inside the circle of saplings it was twined around, leaving a curtain of vines. The next day, we sprinted into the thicket and began ripping out vines.… more

Some Illustrator!

March 7, 2021May 3, 2018 by Candice Ransom

In my next life, I’m coming back either as a cat living in our house (think Canyon Ranch for cats), or Melissa Sweet. I’ve followed her career since she illustrated James Howe’s Pinky and Rex (1990). I love this book for its atypical characters (Pinky is a boy who loves pink and stuffed animals, and Rex, his girl friend, is into dinosaurs), but also for Melissa’s fresh-faced characters and bright watercolors.… more

Pumpkins into Coaches

March 7, 2021April 5, 2018 by Candice Ransom

In 1961, when I was nine, I fell under the spell of a crumbling stone tower. It stood on the weed-choked property of the Portner Manor in Manassas, Virginia, catty-corner from my cousin’s house. As a devotee of Trixie Belden books, I craved mysteries the way other kids longed for ponies. Here was a mystery within spitting distance! My cousin and I talked about the “Civil War look-out” tower until we finally had to climb it.… more

Unexpected Wonder

March 7, 2021March 15, 2018 by Candice Ransom

Last September, we drove to an empty lake deep in the Appalachians for a short vacation, a much-needed chance to relax. I longed to escape writing and house chores and cats and reconnect with nature. When we arrived, clouds draped over the peaks and our room was gloomy. I missed civilization instantly and forced my husband to drive the seven crooked miles back down the mountain to the nearest hamlet so I could hit the Dollar store (the biggest concern).… more

Behind the Sign

March 7, 2021February 8, 2018 by Candice Ransom

I came down with the flu. After weeks of dragging myself to the computer, I finally listened to the doctor and let myself be sick. One afternoon I pulled out my old journals. I haven’t kept a journal in the last few years, instead a planner dictates my days. My composition notebooks are a mishmash of thoughts, memories, observations, scribblings on books in progress, and notes from writer’s conferences.… more

Poetry from Stones

March 7, 2021January 5, 2018 by Candice Ransom

Outside my window right now: bare trees, gray sky, a brown bird. No, let’s try again. Outside my window, the leafless sweetgum shows a condo of squirrels’ nests, a dark blue rim on the horizon indicates wind moving in, and a white-crowned sparrow scritches under the feeders. Better. Even in winter, especially in winter, we need to wake up our lazy brains, reach for names that might be hibernating. … more

True Story

March 7, 2021December 7, 2017 by Candice Ransom

Recently I attended a writer’s conference mainly to hear one speaker. His award-winning books remind me that the very best writing is found in children’s literature. When he delivered the keynote, I jotted down bits of his sparkling wisdom. At one point he said that we live in a broken world, but one that’s also filled with beauty. My pen slowed.… more

Art and Words, Words and Art

November 15, 2017 by Vicki Palmquist

Thirty years ago, I bought a poster of “Jungle Tales” by J.J. Shannon (1895) at the Met in New York City. I took it to my favorite framer, but when it was ready, I was horrified to see they’d cut off Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Children’s Bookshop at the bottom, framing just the image. No one thought the words were important.… more

The Sameness of Sheep

March 7, 2021November 2, 2017 by Candice Ransom

Once, when I discussed my work-in-progress, middle-grade novel with my agent, I told her the character was eleven. “Make her twelve,” she said. “But eleven-year-olds aren’t the same as twelve-year-olds,” I protested. “Those are different ages.” “Make her twelve,” she insisted. “The editor will ask you to change it anyway.” I didn’t finish the book (don’t have that agent anymore, either).… more

The Book Box

October 5, 2017 by Candice Ransom

For a fiction workshop, I asked participants to bring in childhood books that influenced them to become a writer. Naturally, I did the assignment myself. Choosing the books was easy, but they felt insubstantial in my hands, vintage hardbacks that lacked the heft of, say, the last Harry Potter. When it came my turn to talk, I figured I’d stammer excuses for their shabby, old-fashioned, stamped jackets.… more

Windward into Revision

October 18, 2017September 21, 2017 by Vicki Palmquist

In August 2016, I traveled to Vinalhaven Island off the coast of Maine to participate in a week-long festival honoring former resident Margaret Wise Brown. I gave a talk one evening, and, most fun of all, led a workshop in which attendees penned poetry and even a picture book in Margaret’s lyrical style. Back home again, I wrote about my island experience and my personal connection to Margaret in a Knock Knock essay published last August, “Borrowed Magic.”… more

A Working Writer’s Life, Part 2

September 21, 2017August 24, 2017 by Vicki Palmquist

[continued from Part 1] After several months, I realized New York didn’t recognize I was the Next Big Thing. I’d actually have to write my second book and sell it. Timing was on my side. It was the early 80s, when paperbacks filled mall bookstore racks. Series books with new titles each month, priced for kids, were the Next Big Thing.… more

A Working Writer’s Life, Part 1

August 24, 2017August 11, 2017 by Vicki Palmquist

One Sunday morning in May, 1970, I sat on the mustard-colored sofa in our living room with the Spring Children’s Books issue of the Washington Post Book World. I studied the reviews as someone who intended to have her book reviewed in that publication, preferably the Spring 1971 issue. The back page featured an ad for Lothrop, Lee, and Shepard’s new list.… more

“Borrowed Magic”

September 15, 2016August 31, 2016 by Steven Palmquist

Thirteen years. The project I began in 2003 has had that many birthdays. It occupies two large crates in my office. It has dominated my life, involving travel, research, reading. It has spawned four versions, each dragging multiple drafts. Rejections span ten years. Nobody, it seems, wants this book. “Kids won’t be interested.” The subject, Margaret Wise Brown, would find this funny. … more

Writing Books for the Newest Readers

February 22, 2016February 16, 2016 by Steven Palmquist

Level 1 books teem with action. Illustrations match the narrative. If the reader has trouble decoding the text, the art provides necessary cues.

Skinny Dip with Candice Ransom

September 30, 2015September 23, 2015 by Marsha Qualey

Do you like to gift wrap presents? Yes! I’ll buy the gift wrap before I buy the present! Years ago when I was a teenager, Hallmark started carrying their products in Dart Drug. I lathered over the Hallmark section, spending my allowance on Peanuts cards and gift tags and wrapping paper, yarn and fancy bows. My sister once said that I always spent more on the wrapping than the actual gift.… more

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