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11/14/2018 06:00 AMOnce upon a time there was a little girl who lived in Brooksville, Maine. A 2nd grader, she was very bright and easily bored. Her reading partner in a program at the Brooksville Free Public Library, an adult, tried one book, after another, after another, from the time this little girl was in kindergarten.
It was hard to find any book that would hold the little girl’s interest.
Then, one day, this little girl and her reading partner settled in with a book called The Growing Sweater.
The little girl loved the story.
She loved the pictures.
She loved all of it so much she took the book home so her mother could read it to her again, that very same night.
Pretty soon word got around town. And the book called The Growing Sweater started flying off the shelf.
“Thank you so much,” the little girl’s reading partner wrote in a letter to the author. “We are a small town library with what I consider to be a great children’s collection...your...books have made it greater.”
The thing is that The Growing Sweater very nearly languished, unpublished, forgotten, in the basement of the home of the author, Guilford’s Jason Marchi. It wasn’t until it was a finalist in the 2006 Tassy Walden competition that Marchi decided to go ahead and self-publish it.
“What the Tassy Walden Awards did for me was to get the ball rolling again. Placing as a finalist renewed by courage and fueled my desire to see The Growing Sweater as a stand-alone hardcover children’s book,” he says. “So the Tassy people gave me permission slip, if you will, to finish the project and get a book out there into the marketplace. Without that Tassy win, the story would probably still be in a file folder in a basement file cabinet.”
Encouraging, Nurturing
The annual Tassy Walden Award (TWA) competition is designed to do just that: encourage and nurture the creation of exceptional books for children by unpublished Connecticut authors. There are cash awards, but the competition is known for so much more than that. Ask any of the winners, and even some of those who entered and may not have won yet, and they will tell you about how now they feel like they are part of a supportive community helping to guide them through the arduous process of getting their work out into the world and into the hands of a child, a child for whom a very particular book might be life changing, sparking a lifelong love of reading.
“We just literally created this just as a kind of cheerleading creative project back in 2000,” says Doe Boyle, one of the 2018 Tassy Sponsors, and one of the founding members of TWA. “In a nutshell, we envisioned this as a local grassroots project that would simply encourage people to polish their writing and learn how to prepare manuscripts in a professional manner.”
The submission deadline for work this year is Friday, Feb. 1, 2019. There will be a free workshop, open to all, on this Tuesday, Nov. 20 at the Guilford Free Library, 67 Park Street, Guilford from 6:30 to 7:45 p.m. The founding members will be at the workshop, along with winners and finalists of the TWA New Voices in Children’s Literature competition. Reservations are requested by emailing to tassy@shorelinearts.org or calling 203-453-3890. For those who are interested but not able to make the workshop, additional workshops might be added, and Boyle says there is a wealth of information available online at www.shorelinearts.org/tassy-walden-awards, including submission information, past award winners, success stories, helpful tips, sample manuscript pages, and tips on how to get started.
There are five award categories:
• Picture Book (text only)
• Illustrated Picture Book (text and illustrations)
• Children’s Book Illustrator’s Portfolio
• Middle Grade Novel
• Young Adult Novel
Boyle says the founders would love to add more categories, but that they don’t have the financial backing for that right now.
The support TWA does have right now comes from the Shoreline Arts Alliance, along with several other organizations and foundations including the Guilford Foundation, the Seedlings Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the NewAlliance Foundation, and others.
The entires are judged by professional literary agents and illustration agents currently working in the children’s book industry. Entries that make it past the first round are then sent out for review by editors and art directors are major publishing houses. Winners, finalists, and honorable mentions are then selected.
Fresh Set of Eyes, Ears
Boyle says she encourages participants not to think in terms of winners and losers. There are those who are published, she says, and then those who are “pre-published.” For children’s authors who are not yet published, it’s often a matter of try and try again. The competition is set up in a way that recognizes that. A fresh set of judges is picked every year.
“We encourage people to revise and stay on top of their game,” she says. “Who knows, maybe you wrote a manuscript about dogs and the editor loves cats. What you need is a fresh set of eyes, and a fresh set of ears, and we always provide that.”
The standards, she says, are rigorous.
“All of our judges are at the top of their game, and well respected, and are currently involved in the category they are judging,” she says. “We aim for the top. We go to the highest level we can. Executive editors. Publishers. Vice presidents of whatever it might be. Art directors. But if you remain pre-published, you can submit again and again and again. It will always be submitted to fresh eyes. And it will be reviewed according to the zeitgeist of the current market.”
Boyle says much of the guidance they give authors is “not particularly mysterious.”
“Actually it’s pretty simple and straightforward,” she says. “We let people know there are very strict standards for how to prepare a manuscript. Something typewritten. On white paper. Eight and a half by eleven. One inch margin. Every page double spaced, 12-point font.”
TWA also provides links and information about other reputable groups and organizations that can help. The international Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators is one such group, and there are also local and regional chapters of that organization that provide workshops and conferences for children’s writers and illustrators, from beginning to accomplished. TWA also recommends joining a critique group.
The TWA community also is a great place for writers who want to avoid being scammed. Unfortunately, there are scamsters who prey upon people wanting to get a children’s books published.
“Absolutely. Definitely,” says Boyle. “We haven’t ourselves prepared any literature that spells out how to avoid that, but what we can do is point people in the right direction. That is exactly what we are trying to do.”
For all that rigor of the TWA competition, the TWA community is also incredibly supportive.
‘The Joy of It’
“That is part of our mission,” says Boyle. “We 100 percent want people to feel franchised, not disenfranchised, not marginalized or at sea in any way. That is one of the beautiful outcomes of the award. I think we have been successful in that. I shouldn’t be too prideful. But I think we have created a community of writers and illustrators. Many of our pre-published people have formed critique groups, or joined groups already existing. We are constantly in touch with one another. If you have a question or concern, there will be a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen. No one will shut that door. I really, truly feel that most people will agree that we have tried to create a climate of inclusivity and spiritual support.”
Much of that connection, Boyle says, comes from the passionate commitment of those who seek to get their books into the hands of children.
“People who are creating art and lacing together words for children, are hoping to make change in the world,” she says. “These are people who are encouraging healing and learning and creativity and there’s a tremendous solidarity in that regard. It’s all very life affirming. That is the glory of it. That’s the joy of it.”
Leslie Connor of Madison, who won for her picture book, an immigration story called Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel, agrees. She says winning the TWA was life-changing.
“I have stayed in touch with the founders, yes. They are dear friends and they are the backbone of the supportive environment that writers of young people’s literature enjoy in Connecticut,” says Connor, who went on to win more prizes with her books, and recently published her seventh book, The Truth as Told By Mason Buttle in January, 2018.
Marchi, the Guilford author of The Growing Sweater, keeps the copy of the letter from Brooksville, Maine on his wall at home. He, too, uses the word “joy” when describing what it is he is trying to do. He’s had numerous little boys come up to him and tell him they did not like to read until they read one of his books. He says that changed him as a writer, and made him realize what a huge responsibility it was.
It “made me realize that writers (and publishers) of children’s books have a huge responsibility to create good stories that children can remember the rest of their lives. What young people are exposed to will make or break them as adults, help or hinder them,” he says. “If we can turn children on to the joy of reading, then there is hope that these boys and girls will become lifelong readers for pleasure and entertainment...the best learning comes from the experience of reading.”