Frances O'Roark Dowell

A young woman with a college English degree and a master's degree in creative writing gives up her job teaching college English and becomes a housecleaner in the mountains of North Carolina. Her parents probably were not thrilled. But how else do you gain an ear for dialect and a sense of what it is like to live in an isolated community? As author Frances O'Roark Dowell admits, she always knew she could leave the housecleaning job. But the outcome, the award-winning novel Dovey Coe, bursts with authenticity: a feisty girl, in 1928, is charged with murder. On Oct. 20, acclaimed author Frances O'Roark Dowell spoke to our upper elementary students about her life as a writer. Her books, Dovey Coe, Where I'd Like to Be, The Secret Language of Girls, Chicken Boy, The Kind of Friends We Used to Be, and Shooting the Moon, explore the quirks and sometimes painful experiences of the teen and pre-teen social experience. Her celebration of friendship and sympathy for her characters as they navigate their worlds, often as outsiders, resound with our students, who were eager to ask the author questions about her work.




Her two books for younger children, Phineas T. MacGuire--Erupts! Phineas T. MacGuire--Gets Slimed! show the same celebration of friendship and sympathy for characters in a more humorous fashion.

Dowell spoke of her daily work as a writer: "My editor says I revise better than anyone she knows. That's a nice way of saying I write the worst first drafts ever." The hard work, the endless revising, the rejections and the perfectionism: they're a part of being a writer. But Dowell cautioned students against buying into several prevalent myths about writers. She reminded them that they are all writers, whether they even want to be writers or enjoy writing, and that they will have to do it for many many years to come. Myth #1, "Real writers get it right the first time," she debunked with several examples, including the fact that her editor sends her a box of chocolates when a manuscript is really awful. She admitted that once both she and her editor cried. Myth #2, "Real writers don't need editors," also fell as Dowell noted that your best friend is not going to be your best editor; but that a good editor can make your work shine. Myth #3, "Real writers are born, not made," was dispelled with her reminder that all good writers sit for hours at their desks. It is hard work. Like Michael Jordan, who at first didn't make his high school basketball team, writers have to practice for hours just as an athlete does.

I love watching children listen to an author. The physical connection between the book they have read and the real person who wrote it makes a big impression -- this material didn't just appear magically in the school library. This VERY person here before us wrote it. Many students are so eager to ask a question that they leave their hands hanging in the air, endlessly, while the author answers a question. And even though she just answered that question, a student asks it again. In my experience, children's authors are patient, polite, respectful and endlessly encouraging. Frances O'Roark Dowell was all that, and modelled for our students the kind of willingness to accept criticism, and the discipline, that will help them grow as writers.