A Novel Choice

Newbery Medal-winning alumna Sharon Creech has made a career of writing what she knows

While growing up, Sharon Creech, MA English ’79, wanted to be a lot of things, including a teacher and a reporter. “I soon found that I would make a terrible reporter,” she says. “I didn’t like the facts, so I changed them.”

Creech did become a teacher. After completing her master’s degree at Mason, she taught high school English and writing in Switzerland and England for more than 10 years at schools where her husband, Lyle Rigg, was the headmaster.

After teaching so many good books, she soon had the urge to write one of her own. “While teaching great literature, I learned so much about writing—about what makes a story interesting and about techniques of plot and point of view,” she says. “I think what inspired me was a love of good stories, and wanting to read led naturally to wanting to write.”

Her first two novels were published in England and are now out of print. Her first book to be published in the states was her 1995 Newbery Medal-winner Walk Two Moons, which was actually written in England.

In fact, when you see the photos of Walnut Tree Cottage in Surrey, England, where she wrote five of her books with its white-washed walls and trellised rose bushes, it isn’t at all surprising that Creech found her muse there.

Many of Creech’s books are loosely based on her own experiences. The family in her novel Absolutely Normal Chaos is a lot like her own, in fact the boys in the family have her brothers’ names. And her best-selling A Fine, Fine School, illustrated by Harry Bliss, is based in part on her life at the schools where her husband ran things.

“Being the headmaster’s wife is a lot like being a preacher’s wife,” she says. “And my husband always really loves the school he is at, so he gets us involved in many things.” The picture book is a humorous look at one very enthusiastic principal who loves school so much he decides to have the students come every day, even on holidays.

Her picture book, Who’s That Baby, illustrated by David Diaz, also sprang from personal experience and a craft project. “I took—and still take—an awful lot of photos of my granddaughter, Pearl,” she says. “For her first Christmas, I made a small book for her: little songs and poems to accompany some of the newborn photos, trying to imagine what she might be thinking in each one.”

But many times, particularly for the novels, Creech doesn’t know where the story is going when she sits down to write. “For me, a book usually begins with a very clear image in my mind of a person and a place. These images come unbidden; they’re always a surprise,” she says. “I don’t ever decide what the book will be about. I just explore and keep going.”

On winning the Newbery Medal, the highest honor in children’s literature, Creech says, “No one was more shocked than I was. But one of the best parts about the Newbery is that you have the chance to meet so many people—students, teachers, librarians, authors—who love books that it renews your own excitement about writing.”

Did it affect her writing? “What I felt was a boost of confidence. Each book is the best I can do at the time, and the only one I can do at the time, and I can’t predict which might receive awards. It’s much more meaningful to write what feels as if it has to be written.”