Valiska Gregory: Her images, metaphors and memories create books that are keepers

Teaching Pre K-8, Feb 2000 by Winarski, Diana L

A lifetime of memories is woven through each of this craftswoman@- books

Determined to make a birthday card for her best friend, Bonkers, Maggie McDougal rummages through "Gram's Good Stuff Box" and uses the old string, buttons and glitter she finds. '"Think succotash," Maggie says to her grandmother, a staunch believer in recycling everything from leftover peas to old keys. "A little bit of this and a little bit of that and this will be the best card Bonkers ever got."

Like Maggie, the resourceful young protagonist she created in the chapter book Happy Burpday, Maggie McDougal (Little, Brown, 1992) Valiska Gregory relies on bits and pieces of recycled material to craft gifts. In Valiska's case, however, the bits and pieces are her experiences and the gifts she makes with them are award-winning books.

Gathering the material. Since 1986, Valiska (also a writer-in-residence at Butler University in Indianapolis,) has published a dozen books. But unlike many of her colleagues who '"rite for the market very well," Valiska lets her books develop at their own pace.

"Ideas tend to come to me in images or metaphors," Valiska explained during her Connecticut visit. "Mey may be things that I know will be a story later so they get filed away. I tend to save ideas like some people save bits of string, and I never know when they will develop... the idea can be a poem or it can be a children's book; it eventually finds a form."

Valiska confessed with a laugh that in college, she studied Medieval Poetry (admittedly not the most marketable area) with an eye toward becoming a teacher. While she did end up teaching, it was kindergarten music and art classes that she was first offered. "I thought at the time, it was a detour- a way to make money so my husband and I could get through graduate school. It turned out to be the most wonderful training I could have had if I was going to end up as a children's book writer, which I didn't know I would be."

Valiska's first book was adult poetry, published after she began teaching at the college level. When her two daughters were born and she began to read picture books to them, she changed her focus. "I became intrigued by the interplay of art and text in the books I was reading to them ... it presented a challenge.

"I'm really committed to the idea that children need books; they need stories. Maybe that's because, as a child, I used reading to learn about the possibilities in life that otherwise I wouldn't have had."

Sating the hunger for words. In the Depression-era Chicago home where Valiska grew up, there were only three books: the Bible, a dictionary and a book of Grimm's fairy tales. Though her father was an avid reader in his native Czechoslovakia and he told Valiska fantastic stories (she later recognized one as The Odyssey) in English, he could barel read and write; her Polish mother was not much more fluent. Eager to satisfy Valiska's voracious appetite, her father explained that if she learned to read, she could read all the stories she wanted.

Though she says she was in no way a "pushy" child, Valiska was desperate to read. She urged her parents to bring her to school, and she talked her way into the kindergarten class as a four-year-old. "My mother says that I came home the first day sobbing. When she asked why, I said that they told me when I went to school I would learn to read, ...and I still can't do it! ...

Weaving the words into stories. As inauspicious as her literary beginnings may have been, Valiska Gregory loves language and the things she can create with it. "Part of what home is to me is the making of things. As a child, I thought everyone made things. My father copied toys we coveted; the aunts would make doilies with intricate Czech designs and my grandmother wove rag rugs on the loom in her basement. That's where I played - in the basement next to the furnace and the loom."

What appealed to Valiska then, just as it does now, is 'the idea that things can be made out of scraps of things - whether the scraps are rags made into rag rugs, or poems made of words - to me it all feels like the same thing. if rm making a quilt or writing a story, it's the same thing." When Valiska writes, she can still hear the rhythm of the loom.

Stories surround her. Valiska's husband, also a writer and college professor, shares her literary passion. The two even honeymooned at a Shakespeare festival in Canada. Naturally, their now-grown daughters absorbed their parents' addiction. Daughter Melissa is finishing a Ph.D. in Victorian Fiction at Indiana University and is married to a playwright. Holly, Valiska's younger daughter, is the host and star of a children's show on a PBS station.

As a child, Holly named a pet hamster Norman Noggs after a Charles Dickens character. Years later, Valiska borrowed Norman to star as the central character of her newest book A Valentine for Nan Noggs (Harper Collins, 1999). "All these things sort of come together and become part of a book - sometimes when you least expect it."