Too Rich for Children…

I don’t like poetry.

At least I always thought I didn’t.

Turns out I was wrong.

Despite my love of song lyrics, I’ve never read straight poetry. And though Cindy owns several, in all my thousands of books I don’t believe I have a single poetry book which doesn’t bear the name of Shel Silverstein or Dr. Suess.

When I first started to write, it was children’s stories which ran through my mind and landed on the pages. The first one I wrote was called, “The Magic Money Tree.” Cindy had asked me to write a short story about money. It was a fun prompt, yet writing it in normal language seemed somehow… boring. I had the title and an idea of what I wanted the story to be, but I wanted colorful language to match the vision in my head.

One afternoon, while the children were resting and I was alone with the dishes, this line did the mambo in my mind:

Frugal Francis lived alone with her spendthrift mother, Wasteful Joan. Who spent their money (every dime) on useless products, all the time.

The rest of the rhyme rained in my brain like a sudden shower. I literally had to dry my dishpan hands and quickly grab a notebook. I felt an undeniable high, a spark in my brain I’d not felt before. I shared the story with Cindy that evening, then wrote another, and another, piling poems until I had a portfolio packed full enough to pitch an agent.

These are exceptional, the agent said.

I was happy.

Then I read the rest of the email.

Unfortunately, I am tone deaf when it comes to children’s stuff.

The agent told me I could use his name, then referred me to one of the nation’s largest agencies for children’s authors. The query section on their website was scary, two things in particular:

You may only query one story and We sign approximately three authors per year.

Gulp.

The site also said there would be an eight week wait for any sort of response, and that their volume of submissions prohibited them from responding to the majority of queries. I chose what I thought was my strongest piece and waited the required two months.

I heard nothing.

Crushed, I finally emailed again. A few weeks later I was told something I will never forget:

Your vocabulary is too rich for children.

I did not blame the agency. An agent’s job is to sell what publishers are buying. A publisher’s job is to sell what consumers have a history of looking for. Yet I saw this as sad commentary nonetheless. At the time, Cindy and I were still running our preschool. I was reading those same rhymes to a group of toddlers each day, some of who memorized them and recited them back by heart – all without the benefit of illustrations.

I realized I did not have the heart to query my work only to be told that the children of today could only handle language at its most elementary. I immediately decided to develop my own audience, determined to grow it to a size that would render a publisher superfluous.

Writer Dad was born one week later.

I stopped writing for children and started writing for grown-ups instead. Soon, I forgot about my rhymes.

I don’t like poetry.

That old thought returned and for some reason, it didn’t go away. Not only did I stop writing in rhyme, for the longest time I was a bit embarrassed every time I did. It wasn’t until mid-way through last year when I finally realized how much I actually enjoy writing in rhythm. I love the way it makes my brain work. It is entirely separate from any other type of writing I do.

Writing rhymes is like writing songs with music that only I can hear.

I decided to nurture that part of my inner writer, and soon revisited rhymes I’d written a year before. The old ire returned – the vocabulary isn’t too rich for children; it is the sort of vocabulary which turns children into lovers of language and pushes them to explore a world of words beyond the all too simple readers which are handed down to them with little expectation that they could ever want or need anything more.

Syllable Soup was born.

I now have about fifty rhymes finished, with a page count growing thicker all the time. I’m not sure when the book will come out, as Dave will probably fly from Florida and punch me in the teeth if I add anything else to our schedule, but it will be coming someday.

In the meantime, I’m excited to share my Syllable Soup with you. The first one’s tomorrow!

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