Catching Up with Deborah Lee Rose, Walnut Creek Children’s Book Author

When my sons were two and four years old in 1991, I reluctantly took a job in San Francisco. Sometimes stepping onto the BART platform, grief welled up inside of me as I prepared to board a train that would whisk me miles away from my children and their world. 

One lunch hour in a bookstore downtown, I found a children's book that expressed all that I felt but somehow put a positive spin on it.  With upbeat rhyming verse, the story followed the parallel day of a mother at work and her child in daycare and reunites them at day's end. The train pictured in the book's bright illustrations even looked like BART.  I clutched the book even more tightly when I saw the author's photograph on the book's jacket flap.  It was Deborah Rose, a mom at the same preschool my boys attended right in Walnut Creek.

That book Meredith's Mother Takes The Train  was Rose's second published book. On Wednesday evening, Rose launches her 11th published book, All the Seasons of the Year with a reading at the Walnut Creek Library at 7 p.m. The event is free.

In the intervening years, I have catalogued copies of Rose's books that she has generously donated to school libraries where I was volunteering, I have heard her read from her books at school book fairs and in classrooms and I have often run into her at one of our mutual favorite places: the Walnut Creek Library.  

Despite her busy schedule as a science writer for UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science, children's book author, wife and mom, Rose always takes time to talk with me during our serendipitous library encounters. Last Friday was no exception. Here's what Rose had to say: 

How did you start writing children's books?

After my daughter Miranda was born, I came across a story, a folk tale from India about people who had stood up to save a forest. I thought it would make a good kids' book. It was around Earth Day and I began to see environmentally-themed children's books in stores. So I wrote to one of those publishers with my idea and they grabbed it. This year is the 20th anniversary of that book, The People Who Hugged Trees and it is being included in a reading anthology in South Africa for schoolchildren. I also got an e-mail from Laos that an English teacher there is using it. To hear this 20 years after was extraordinary. When a book goes into a library, it has this huge ripple effect. I wrote that book for one little girl and it has been read by hundreds of thousands of kids.

What's your favorite children's book by another author?

Charlotte's Web.  E.B. White wrote a lot about writing. He wrote The Elements of Style.  I re-read Charlotte's Web after I became a writer and it seemed to me that it was about being a writer; and that made me love it even more.

Now that your own kids are older do you find it hard to write books for small children?

I remember what we did, especially when I watch other people with little kids. It is a way to give my children a gift of memories. I was not a good scrapbooker. These books are like my scrapbook and my journals of my own kids' childhoods but at the same time I try to make them universal.

How do experiences from years ago inspire you?

I find that often it only comes to you years later how significant something was. If you can look back at something that happened and laugh about it, that's usable. Kids love funny stories. For example, when my son Ben was at Parkmead Elementary, we took home the classroom chicken incubator over the weekend. The chicks all started hatching and running wild. That scene is in my book The 12 Days of Kindergarten. It is fun to put experiences like that in a book. It is a way of sharing.  

When do you write?

I write very early in the morning.  Sometimes the idea for a book comes to me and I am nowhere near the computer. I can be doing laundry or waiting to pick up a kid. I've had to have a very good memory because it can be very unpredictable. I walk and I swim - getting out in the open clears my mind so I am open to new ideas. And I also sew. I make miniature quilts. Sewing frees up part of the mind.

Advice for someone who wants to write children's books?

 Get involved with the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). They're a great group. And keep at it. It is not a fast process. It took five years from the time I conceived the idea for my new book "All the Seasons of the Year" to publication. 

About that new book, what inspired you?

I always wanted to write a seasons book. One day, I was listening to the trees make beautiful sounds and this phrase popped into my head - when spring breezes through. I thought,  I have to write a book that has that phrase in it. A lot of seasons books are geared to specific parts of the country. I wanted to make my book as universal as possible. Leaves fall here but not until the end of November so the book never implies that fall comes at a specific month. It is much more experiential. I am intentionally reading it at the library on the first official night of fall. My birthday is in October. I love fall.