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Barbara Kerley's book, What To Do About Alice?, won the 2009 Washington State/Scandiuzzi Children's Book Award in the picture book category. The book is illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham, a Seattle resident.


Gretchen Woelfle will speak on Reading and Writing nonfiction: A Study in Serendipity at the California School Library Association Conference in Ontario, CA on Friday November 20. She will also sign books at the Author and Illustrator Brunch on Sunday, November 22.


From Deborah Heiligman: CHARLES AND EMMA: THE DARWINS' LEAP OF FAITH is a Finalist for the National Book Award. Award ceremony is Novemer 18 when the winner will be announced. But I am thrilled to have my book be a finalist.


Helen's Eyes: A Photobiography of Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller's Teacher by Marfé Ferguson Delano was named a 2009 Jefferson Cup Honor Book. Presented by the Virginia Library Association, the Jefferson Cup is an award that honors biographies, historical fiction, and American history books for children.


Sue Macy will be signing copies of her new book, Bylines: A Photobiography of Nellie Bly, on Friday, November 6, at the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) conference in Charlotte. Stop by the National Geographic booth from 3:30 to 4:30 to pick up a book and say hi. And don't forget to mention you heard about it on I.N.K.!



From Jan Greenberg: Christo and Jeanne-Claude Through The Gates and Beyond is on Booklist's Top Art Books of 2009 list. I will be at NCTE on November 20 in Philadelphia signing Side by Side at Abrams booth 1:30-2:15pm and attending the Notables awards for Language Arts session at 2:30. Hope to meet some of you there.

A few weeks ago, I completed one leg of the Trek Triathlon in Long Island, New York. I was the cyclist on a relay team with two friends who were sponsored by Team Survivor, a terrific organization that promotes exercise opportunities for women affected by cancer. We called our squad the Reluctant Racers to commemorate the lunch where we discussed whether we should take part in the event. There was a lot of hemming and hawing until one of us finally said, “I’ll do it if you will” and the others (reluctantly) agreed.

I was thinking back on that race today, remembering the adrenaline rush as I pushed through the four laps of the nine-mile cycling course. I have written several books about other people’s sports achievements, but it’s rare that I’m the one who’s doing the achieving. Four years ago I competed in my first triathlon, doing it all: swimming, cycling, and running. But other than that, I’ve spent the last 35 years or so comfortably watching sports from a spectator’s seat.

I’m not sure if my fellow I.N.K. bloggers will agree, but for me, being an observer is an occupational hazard. I watch, read, listen, and ask questions to gather the information I need to tell the stories of people who do something memorable or significant. I know that writing a book is in itself significant, but my natural inclination, whether learned or developed, is to be a witness. Years ago, I was taught that reporters are not supposed to become part of their stories, and nonfiction authors are basically reporters. To this day, I am more likely to take in a situation than to actively participate in it.

While I don’t want to lose my power of observation, I’ve been thinking lately that jumping into the fray is not such a bad thing. After all, having a variety of different life experiences can only make my writing more vivid and authentic. So I’m trying to participate more. Last Friday night, I actually got up on stage in a bar in Milwaukee and joined some friends singing karaoke. That was definitely a first! (Fortunately, our lead singer was a bona fide professional and the rest of us stayed far in the background.) In consideration of the listening public, though, I’ll concentrate my future efforts in areas where I’m slightly more skilled. For starters, I’m marking my calendar for the next Trek Triathlon in New York, on September 12, 2010. And this time as I approach the starting line, I won’t be reluctant at all.

Over the past year and a half, many of my fellow bloggers and I have written about the importance of photo research to our work. As I thought about what to focus on in this post, I decided to take the topic of photo research one step further and invite you, our readers, to be part of the process. It’s an unorthodox invitation, to be sure, but since I’ve been trolling eBay for people’s archival family photographs recently, it seems to make sense to “widen the net” and ask anyone who’s interested to search their own photos for possible use in my next book.

So here’s my pitch: I’m looking for photographs of your grandmother, great grandmother, great aunt, any female friend or relative with a bicycle in the 1880s, 1890s, or early 1900s. She can be riding or racing or posing with her bike, and there can be men or boys in the picture, too. But my book is about women and bicycles at the turn of the century—more specifically, about how the bicycle changed women’s lives at that time. So the main protagonist(s) in the photo should be female.

Note that the photo should be an original photographic print if at all possible—not a picture in a book, newspaper, or magazine--because reprinting a previously scanned image diminishes the quality to an unacceptable level. I’ll need to borrow the original or have you send me a high-resolution (300 dpi or greater) scan. My book will be published by National Geographic and if I use your photo, I’ll pay you an amount to be determined by the size that the picture appears in the book. But this is no get-rich-quick opportunity. No money will exchange hands until the book is on the way to the printer a year or so from now.

If you have any family stories to accompany your picture, I’d be thrilled to hear them, too. Come to think of it, if you have a great story about a female ancestor’s adventures with a bicycle during that time period, but no photograph to go with it, I’d love to hear it anyway. As I get further into my research, I’m finding that the rich history of the bicycle extends beyond the public record to family lore. So if your great aunt foiled a bank robbery by chasing down the robber on her high wheeler, please do tell.

You can comment on this post in the traditional way, but please e-mail me directly at [email protected] if you have a photograph or an elaborate story. And thanks for bearing with me in this unusual request.

Thank YOU to all the I.N.K. readers who have submitted questions. They are terrific. Isn’t it interesting to get a better understanding of how we all go about researching and writing?

Here are two answers to a great question from Mark Herr. Thanks, Mark. We hope you find these responses useful.

I know there is no "right answer" to this, but in your opinions, how much research is enough research before you start putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard)?

Here’s how Dorothy Hinshaw Patent answered the question:
That’s a good question, Mark, and the answer depends on a lot of things. How much background information do you have to start with? If the topic is new to you, you’ll need to do lots of groundwork before you even know what questions need to be answered by further research.

I find that after carrying out quite a bit of research, I keep finding facts I already have in hand. Less and less of the information is new. That’s a hint that I’ve mined most of what’s available. For facts and figures, you should have two or three different sources you can trust that agree on the information. Another hint you’re getting there is when you start writing the piece in your head.Once you start writing, you may come up with some new questions that you didn’t think of before, so don’t wait until too close to a deadline to begin to write.

And here’s what Sue Macy had to say:I find that when I work on a book, I do several “waves” of research, each tied to a specific stage of the process. After I have a “lightbulb moment” that suggests a book idea, I do the initial research to make sure the idea is solid and the topic really appeals to me. That usually means reading a few articles and surveying the existing literature to see what’s out there on the subject.

If I want to go ahead with the project, I use this initial research to write a proposal. It might include an introduction to the topic, an outline of the proposed book (this will likely be tweaked over time), and a page or two about the marketability of the book, including a survey of any similar volumes in print and notes on who might buy it and where (or if) it might be used in the school curriculum. Some people also write a sample chapter, which requires a whole lot more research at this early stage. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to avoid doing that.

After the proposal has been sold, I’ll start my in-depth research. That might include visits to places of significance to the topic, interviews with appropriate people, and lots of archival research at libraries and on the Internet.

I do a lot of photocopying and print out lots of scholarly papers and newspaper articles, which I place in folders labeled for each chapter of the book. If an item has material relevant to more than one chapter, I use Post-Its to remind myself to move it to the next folder when the earlier chapter is done.

Once I have organized all of the collected material, I read through what I have filed in the folder for the first chapter. Hopefully, by now I have enough material to enable me to visualize the shape that the chapter will take. I jot down the most important points I want to make in the chapter and use that as a working outline.

With this solid foundation, I begin to write. Of course, I continue to do research as I write. Often I’ll find that I still need to fill in more details or check additional facts. And even after all the chapters are finished, I continue to do bits of research because many of my captions contain material not in the text.

Another installment in this month’s theme, “Searching for the Truth”

In thinking about this month’s theme, I immediately came back to a story I related in a post last year. When reporter Nellie Bly was 23 years old, she had herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York so she could tell the world about the horrors visited upon the inmates there. This was in 1887 and there were many horrors indeed. The living quarters were bare and poorly heated. The food was cold, tasteless, and sometimes spoiled, with spiders or other insects occasionally writhing around on the plates. The sanitary conditions were awful and many of the nurses were tyrannical, refusing to treat their charges with human kindness or to show any signs of sympathy whatsoever.

After 10 days at the asylum, Nellie secured her release with the help of her editors at the New York World. And then she shared what she had seen with the newspaper’s readers. On October 9 and October 16, 1887, Nellie took readers “Behind Asylum Doors” with a total of 17 columns of detailed prose chronicling every aspect of her incarceration. After other newspapers picked up the story, the city launched an investigation that resulted in improvements in the way the inmates were treated and a sizable increase in the asylum’s budget.

Nellie Bly pioneered this sort of “stunt journalism,” where an investigative reporter injects herself into the story by going undercover and writing about her experiences. At a time when women were rarely assigned anything but society and fashion articles, Nellie regularly put herself at risk to uncover crimes, corruption, and other abuses. Though her story has been told before, I was anxious to take my own look at what drove this woman to search for and report the truth in such dramatic fashion. The more I learned about her, the more fascinated I became. My biography of Nellie Bly, Bylines, will be out from National Geographic in October.

Though technology has made it possible to spread news (and gossip) instantaneously today, it’s fortunate that there are still many journalists on newspapers, magazines, and even TV news shows and Internet sites who doggedly investigate stories to get at the truth. One such investigation that affected me deeply was accomplished not by a writer, but by a photographer. Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for his “provocative, impeccably composed images of despair after Hurricane Ike and other lethal storms caused a humanitarian disaster in Haiti,” according to the citation by the Pulitzer Committee. Shooting in black and white and using only spare captions, Farrell managed to convey the poignancy and drama of lives forever changed by nature’s violence. It’s impossible to look at his photographs and not be moved. If you're interested in seeing them, they're available on the Pulitzer Prize Web site.

You have questions. We have answers. Here’s what Sue Macy and Cheryl Harness had to say about this question from fellow blogger Loreen Leedy:

What are your main reasons for choosing a topic to write about?

Sue Macy said:
My first criterion for choosing a topic is my own curiosity. I have to want to explore the topic myself. Writing a nonfiction book requires months, sometimes years, of research, and without a personal interest in the content, I probably wouldn’t be motivated to continue.

My first book, A Whole New Ball Game, about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), was fueled by my love of baseball and my experience of studying women’s history in college. When I first found out about the league (it was mentioned in a book about “firsts” in women’s history), I was astonished that I’d never known about it.

I started doing research to satisfy my own curiosity, and I continued because the stories I was learning about the league and the women who played in it ignited my memories of growing up wanting to play baseball at a time when girls were not allowed in Little League or, like today, in the major leagues.

No matter how enticing a subject is, however, there’s another criterion that must be applied: marketability. If a book won’t sell, publishers (usually) won’t publish it, so I need to prove its marketability to them and to myself.

A Whole New Ball Game had the advantage of being the true story of the league portrayed in the movie A League of Their Own, so the publisher knew their would be popular recognition of the topic. (My book came out the year after the movie, but the publisher bought it knowing that the movie was in the works)

Also, since the league started during World War II, it related somewhat to the U.S. history curriculum, so a book about it was likely to appeal to the school library market. Indeed, the book is still in print some 16 years after its initial publication, at least in part because students every year do History Day projects about the AAGPBL.

When I do a book proposal, the inclusion of a page on the marketability of the book is crucial. Highlighting any upcoming events, anniversaries, and curriculum or media tie-ins helps a publisher see the book’s sales potential.

When I’m in the process of researching and writing a book, I am consumed by my interest in the subject, but I’ve found that the best way to sell a publisher on the concept is to communicate both my passion about the topic and the reasons why publishing it is a good business decision.

Cheryl Harness said:
1. Is there an expressed need for a book about a certain subject? Ask a knowledgeable bookseller. Ask librarians, students, teachers, and parents. In her column, Needed Subjects, in the most recent Bulletin of the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators, www.scbwi.org, Libby Nelson reports a desire for, among other things, books about feathers, time-telling, and Nellie Tayloe Ross, the first woman elected governor in the U.S.

2. When I look at what's occupying the shelves at my nearest library and book store, do I see a need for a book that's not there, but ought to be and would be if I ruled the world? Regularly studying what's out there is a sensible habit to form and you know what Frances E. Willard, long-gone-dead head of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, www.wctu.org, said about habits? "Sow an act & you reap a habit; sow a habit & you reap a character; sow a character & you reap a destiny." Which brings me to the business of a. dead people and b. falling in love with them.

3. Deborah Heiligman wrote about this in her July 21 posting and wonderfully, too. I could fall in love with old Frances E. Willard, even though she'd be turning 170 this coming Sept. 28. I mean, just read her telling about how she learned to ride a bicycle http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5038/ when she was 53, five years before her untimely death in 1898. (Yikes: 58!) I could at least develop a cerebral sort of crush on her. That's what I've done with all of my subjects over the years - of course, I'm pretty impressionable.

Your passionate fascination for your subject will fuel your initial studies. You'll need that fizzy enthusiasm/info combo if you're ever going to seduce some editor into doing what’s necessary to get her or his colleagues to sign off on a contract. If your book is ever to see the light of day, you must talk a publisher into gambling their money.
4. Will some editor who's managed to remain employed actually BUY my take on this or any subject? Will people--make that lots of people--out there exchange some of their discretionary income for a book about the subject I've chosen? Somewhere, someone will ask me about my subject's selling points. It'd be good to have an answer. I ought to know about comparable books, how they've done in the marketplace, and the subject's real-world relevance. I wish I'd had all this at my fingertips 20 years ago when I was telling a guy on the phone why a biography on Andrew Jackson would be a far out proposition. Impossible, he told me, bookbiz-wise.

Why?

Too obscure.

Well, there's a perverse pleasure in rolling one's eyes heavenward behind the back of a callow editor, knowing for sure that the world's going to hell in a hand basket, but having a knowledgeable pitch is more useful.

5. Can you link the subject to an approaching anniversary, the bigger the better? We're coming up on a century since the Titanic went down. Two centuries since the War of 1812 in which Andy Jackson got famous at the Battle of New Orleans - ha!

And 2012 will mark 600 years since Joan of Arc was born. (Oh baby!) The best book for finding such nuggets is Bernard Grun's The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events. (4th revised ed. Touchstone).

6. Do you have insider, up-close information on or experience with the subject? Pictures? Interview opportunity?

7. Have you been struck by a deep curiosity to learn all you can about pigs or the world's rivers or Stephen Foster, American composer?

8. For an excellent repository of nifty things to write about, let me recommend this book put out by the Core Knowledge Foundation, www.coreknowledge.org. The Core Knowledge Sequence: Content Guidelines for Grades K-8. (ISBN 1-890517-12-7). It's loaded with lists of concepts, events, creatures, eras, and individuals, all so vivid & interesting & genuine that you gotta wonder how these subjects are routinely lumped under the label nonfiction, indicating what they're not. Ah well. Another subject for another day.

In the end, I'm thinking that settling on what to learn about and write about is a proposition of heart and mind. Be led by the one; dig in deep with the other. Or, I should say, choose your path, follow where it leads & keep your balance--like riding a bike.

Continuing the theme of “great discoveries while researching,” started yesterday by Vicki Cobb….

I’m not sure which was the more amazing discovery: finding Relna Brewer’s pictures or meeting her in person. I found her pictures in 1995, when I was doing photo research for my book, Winning Ways: A Photohistory of American Women in Sports. In those days, one could rummage around in the backroom of the Bettmann Archive in New York City for long-forgotten news photographs. I spent an afternoon looking through banks of file cabinets, opening every folder whose label had anything to do with sports. In one file—I forget which—I found two exquisite black-and-white photographs of a bathing beauty flexing her biceps for the camera. I immediately put them in my pile of photos to be copied.

Besides the Bettmann I.D. number, there was only the sketchiest of information on the backs of the photos: “Strongwoman Relna Brewer, Venice, Ca 11/22/37.” In the days that followed, I searched high and low for more information on Relna, to no avail. (This was a year before the debut of Yahoo and four years before Google was invented. Searching for information was a much more time-consuming, and frustrating, process back then.) Meanwhile, my publisher suggested that we colorize the photos and use them on the front and back covers of the book. I agreed. I thought they represented a breakthrough in the image of American women, co-opting the traditional “bathing beauty” pose to emphasize the appeal of a female athlete’s muscles and strength.

When the book was published in 1996, I still had not found Relna. But then fate intervened. Author and book reviewer Kathleen Krull (now a fellow I.N.K. blogger) received a copy of Winning Ways to review for the Los Angeles Times, and she was surprised to see her husband’s aunt on the cover. Kathleen contacted my publisher, informing them that our cover model, now Relna Brewer McRae, was alive and well and living near San Diego. We sent her an autographed book and a few months later, I traveled to San Diego, where we spent a few days together and did a joint book signing.

Meeting Relna was such a thrill. I spent so many hours staring at those photos, imagining her story, but her life turned out to be infinitely more interesting than I envisioned. At the time the pictures were taken, she was one of the pioneers at Muscle Beach, the plot of sand in Santa Monica, California, famous for launching the careers of bodybuilders, gymnasts, acrobats, stuntpeople, and at least a few Olympic athletes. Relna’s brother, Paul Brewer, was one of the men who staked out the beach in the early 1930s, and Relna was the first girl to perform there. But that was just the beginning. She later became a weightlifter, a trapeze artist, a swimmer, and a skater with the Ice Follies. She also did stunt work in the movies and even served as a decoy for Marilyn Monroe, helping the actress slip away from the omnipresent news media.

Today, Relna is still alive and well, just a few months shy of her 90^th birthday. She is the mother of three and grandmother of four, and this weekend, she will be the newest inductee in the Muscle Beach Hall of Fame in Venice, California. According to its Web site, the hall recognizes “individuals who have inspired, informed, entertained and advanced the art, sport and the science of bodybuilding and physical culture.” On Saturday she will join the ranks of other Muscle Beach immortals, including fitness guru Jack LaLanne and Joe Gold, founder of Gold’s Gym. It's a long way from the backroom of the Bettmann Archive and a fitting honor for a genteel woman who newspapers once labeled "Pretty as a Picture and Stronger Than Most Men."

When I entered college, I planned to be a lawyer. I was interested in public affairs and was particularly passionate about the rights of Native Americans in the wake of the occupation of Alcatraz Island from 1969 into 1971. I took courses in history, Near Eastern studies, and politics, including one called Constitutional Law. During that class I realized it wasn’t the law that attracted me—often the reasoning seemed based on semantics rather than logic and that frustrated me to no end. Rather, I was fascinated by the stories behind the court cases, the circumstances that motivated Homer Plessy to sit in a whites-only railroad car in Louisiana or Linda Brown to fight for the right to attend a white elementary school in Topeka, Kansas. With that realization, I switched my major from politics to history and focused on social history and American studies.

Ultimately, that change in plans made me a writer. I had spent the summer after my junior year in high school studying journalism at the National High School Institute (NHSI) at Northwestern University, pounding out news stories on manual typewriters and trolling the streets of Evanston, Illinois, for feature ideas. That program gave me confidence in my ability to write under pressure, and it helped me get a job as a summer intern on my local paper, the North Jersey Herald-News, three years running. As I look back today, I realize that my career as an author of kid’s books about sports and women’s history grew from the intersection of the ongoing development of my writing skills and my emerging love of history.

There’s a reason why I’ve been thinking about this lately. It’s one of those “brush with history” encounters that’s been on my mind a lot. For while I was deciding not to go to law school, one of my classmates was building toward a career as a lawyer, and then a judge. Sonia Sotomayor and I were both members of Princeton’s Class of 1976, both history majors who took preliminary courses together. We also both were “others,” students who didn’t conform to the traditional Princeton prototype. She was Puerto Rican, I was a Jew. And we were women in only the fourth coed class admitted to the university.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that both Sonia and I embraced our outsider status when it came to our senior thesis projects. She wrote about Luis Muñoz Marin, the “father of modern Puerto Rico” who worked with Congress to gain commonwealth status for the island. I explored the achievements of Alice Davis Menken, a Jewish woman who tried to rehabilitate delinquent Jewish girls in New York City in the early 1900s. For me, at least, there was a little bit of defiance in my thesis choice. It was a good bet that Jewish women’s history was not a hot topic during the first two centuries of Princeton’s existence.

That experience of being an outsider has continued to serve me well in the topics I choose for my books and the point of view I bring to them. And despite the preposterous claims by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, I think it also will continue to serve my classmate well. Given that Sonia Sotomayor has a thorough knowledge and understanding of the law, her life’s journey can only add to her effectiveness on our nation’s highest court. I look forward to the day she takes her seat.

During a recent school visit to the Bronx Early College Academy in the Bronx, NY, a sixth-grade boy asked me if I “make” the covers for my own books. I sometimes find the photographs, I told him, but then a designer and a whole bunch of other people work to make the covers look the way they do.

I’m returning to that class on Tuesday to give a PowerPoint presentation on how a book is made. Like this post I’m calling it “Team Effort,” because despite all the glory that authors get, it takes several football teams’ worth of people to make a book. I asked Marty Ittner, who’s designed four of my books for National Geographic, to help me put together a list of all the stages a book goes through from idea to bound volume. Looking at that list is awe-inspiring and not a little bit humbling.

Sometimes the process does start with the author, if she is the one who has the initial idea. Occasionally, though, a wise editor will plant the seed. The idea for Bull’s-Eye, my photobiography of Annie Oakley, came from National Geographic Editor in Chief Nancy Feresten, while Jennifer Emmett at National Geographic initially suggested that I think about a book on the Olympics. That prompt led to two books, and Swifter, Higher, Stronger and Freeze Frame.

After the idea comes the research. Although I once hired a research assistant to do some on-the-spot digging in California, I usually do my own content research as well as my own photo research. But even then I depend on scores of librarians and archivists to point me in the right direction, as well as experts in the field I’m writing about. If the subjects of the book are still alive, I try to interview them and people associated with them, too.

Once the research is done I start writing. I’m pretty self-directed, but I occasionally consult with my editor and bounce ideas off one or two trusted friends. Months or even years later, when the manuscript is done, it seems that hoards of people descend upon it to make it a book. The editor and sometimes her colleagues read it and ask for changes; the designer comes up with an overall look and then painstakingly lays out the pages; the photo editor helps find and/or obtain photos; the mapmaker creates the maps; the copyeditor checks the style and grammar; the design director consults on the design; the manufacturing people settle on a printer, buy the paper, and arrange for a prepress house to process the images.

When I and everyone at the publisher finally sign off on the designed pages of the book, the files with all the supporting artwork and fonts are sent to the printer. From there a whole other set of people take over, monitoring machines that burn the plates, ink the paper, stitch the pages together, make the cover, and trim and bind the finished book. Along the way people have scoured over proofs and done press checks to make sure the pages look like they’re supposed to. But the process of birthing a book doesn’t end with the binding. After that comes the shipping, the warehousing, the marketing and promotion, the order processing, and the bookselling. Instead of a few football teams, it’s looking like it actually takes a small city to make one book.

Even so, when all is said and done I still feel like it’s “my” book. But I wouldn’t be surprised or upset if some of those other people feel the same way.

A few weeks ago, I was enjoying my Monday morning ritual of reading the New York Times while peddling hard on an exercise bike at my local gym, when the fortysomething man on the bicycle next to me looked over. I was holding Sports Monday, staring admiringly at the clever layout presenting the men’s NCAA Final Four brackets on four big basketballs. But apparently I had offended his view of the social order. “Are you actually going to read the sports section?” he asked, incredulous. “Yes,” I answered. “I write books about sports.”

It was the “actually” that got to me. Like my reading the sports section was so unbelievable that he had to emphasize his shock. It’s been a while since I’ve encountered anyone who was unaware that sports is no longer an all-male domain. But this time it was pretty ironic, considering that at least half of the people panting and sweating on the cardio machines around him were female.

I’ve been an athlete and a sports fan since I was little. I grew up going to Mets and Yankees contests. Watching the football games of my dad’s alma mater, the University of Texas, was practically a religious experience in our house. One of the proudest moments of my childhood took place during a neighborhood softball game, when I hit the rubber softball so hard that it broke a pane of glass in the lamppost across the street from our house. One of my favorite dates in high school involved making my computer nerd boyfriend watch me hit line drives at our local batting range.

Over the years, I’ve seen women athletes go from being anonymous competitors to household names. I’ve witnessed younger generations of females embrace playing sports as a right, rather than a privilege. I’ve met women who have built careers in sports journalism, sports marketing, and sports management.

I’m pretty sure most of those women have had to deal with their share of incredulous jerks who couldn’t believe they had any interest in sports. Fortunately, their passion drove them forward, past doubters and naysayers. I’ve been inspired by them, as well as by the many pioneer athletes I’ve interviewed who stopped at nothing to play the games they loved. With the power of their stories propelling me, a chauvinist on a stationery bicycle doesn’t have a chance.

Last Friday, February 27, 2009, the Rocky Mountain News published its last edition. Though I live thousands of miles from the paper’s Denver offices, this development hit me harder than the shuttering of my local King’s Supermarket that same day. Don’t get me wrong. Losing the King’s, with its excellent appetizer counter and great bakery, was a startling reminder of today’s crashing economy. But the closing of “the Rocky” only two months before its 150th anniversary is one more sign of a cosmic shift in how we get the news and maybe even in how we define what news is.

I can’t imagine life without newspapers. I need to see a story on paper to take it all in. I grew up reading the New York Times and the (North Jersey) Herald-News everyday, and when I was 17, I joined the workforce for the first time as a summer intern on the Herald-News. I spend three summers there, and although I quickly decided that the pace of newspaper work didn’t suit my temperament, I am inordinately proud of my short tenure in this noble profession. Of all the people who write for a living, newspaper reporters are the ones on the front lines, literally and figuratively. Whether they’re covering a war or a ballgame, they’re charged with getting the facts and reporting them swiftly.

Not to mention accurately. Newspaper reporters and editors subscribe to a journalistic code of ethics that goes a long way toward assuring readers that what they’re reading is legit. (I know there have been some well-publicized exceptions, but they are relatively few.) The tenets of this code—objectivity, accuracy, truthfulness, impartiality, fairness, and public accountability—are ingrained in every reporter, including summer interns, and often are displayed in newsrooms. In a touching and informative video account of the Rocky’s final days, sportswriter Jeff Legwold cites a saying that was painted on the wall at his first newspaper job: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

As a non-fiction writer, I turn to contemporary newspapers whenever I tackle a new topic. No other source comes close in helping me travel to another time period, fast. The ads, the editorials, the very language of the articles transplants me to a different time and place, and the eyewitness reports on the topic I’m researching are often the best resources available. If more newspapers go the way of the Rocky, what sources will future non-fiction book authors turn to? Faded printouts of online articles? Vast digital archives of blog comments, tweets, and instant messages?

I don’t know what the news reporting landscape will look like in 25 years, but I hope it still includes newspapers. In the process of making its way into print, an article goes through checks and balances that strengthen its style and content. While the Internet offers immediacy and accessibility, information flashes that originate here need to be augmented with the more substantive articles and investigative reports traditionally found in print.

What do you think? Will newspapers still be around in 2034? If not, what other forms of communication will fill the bill?

I do all the photo research for my books, and there’s nothing I love more than visiting the Library of Congress or a museum or historical society to plumb the depths of their photo files. But when I start a project and again when I’m nearing the end, I often find that my most valuable photo research tool is eBay. If I’m lucky, I can locate artifacts and photographs on eBay that add an extra air of authenticity to my books, usually at a price that’s hard to beat. These items also help me touch the past by literally holding it in my hand.

For example, last fall we were working on the final pages for Bylines, my photobiography of Nellie Bly (due out from National Geographic in Fall 2009). The section about Nellie’s years in business, as president and owner of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company and the American Steel Barrel Company, needed an additional visual element. On a whim, at midnight on a Saturday night, I searched eBay and found an original ad from 1906 for the American Steel Barrel Company’s "Iron Clad" barrels. Before you could say “Live From New York,” I’d engaged the “Buy It Now” option and paid for it with PayPal. It arrived within a week.

Similarly, when I was writing Freeze Frame, my history of the Winter Olympics, I was having trouble finding any visual from the Olympics That Never Were, the 1976 Denver Games. The city of Denver had won the bid to host the 12th Winter Olympics, but had to withdraw in 1972 due to a referendum by local citizens who were afraid of the effect the crowds and traffic would have on the environment. Although there were a few photos available of citizens voting against the Games, they weren’t very interesting. So I checked eBay—and found one of the few souvenirs minted before the withdrawal, a commemorative pin.

Using eBay is as close as one can get to searching the collective attics of everyone in the world. While it’s not an “iron clad” way of doing photo research, more often than not the results are useful and even inspiring. Over the years I’ve found dozens of items that ended up in my books, including:
• A German postage stamp from the 1936 Winter Games.
• A book and a comic book featuring TV’s Annie Oakley, actress Gail Davis (for Bull's-Eye, my book on Annie).
• A complete Round the World With Nellie Bly boardgame, manufactured in 1890 by McLoughlin Bros. (with spinners and other pieces).
• Tickets to various past editions of the Summer and Winter Olympic Games.
• First day covers of the 2002 Nellie Bly “Women in Journalism” U.S. postage stamp.

Thanks to eBay, I've got my own growing collection of ephemera related to the topics of my books. Besides being fun to own, those items come in handy when I do school visits and other presentations about the books.

Has anyone successfully used any of the other auction sites in Cyberspace to find similar items of interest? I'm always open to new sources!

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of meeting Randi Miller, the only female U.S. wrestler to win a medal at the 2008 Summer Olympics. Randi is considering writing a book about her experiences as a woman who’s succeeding in a traditionally male sport, and she asked me for tips on how to get organized. As I e-mailed her my thoughts, it struck me that getting organized might also be an appropriate topic for this blog.

Organization is really important when I write. I do a lot of library research, and before I start writing, I make folders dedicated to different aspects of the story. One example: for the biography I just finished about journalist Nellie Bly, the folders included: About Nellie, Nellie’s Writing, Other Articles, Quotes (Nellie's), Back Matter, Possible Photos, and Memos and Correspondence (mine, about the book). I organize my research by putting everything that I have into the appropriate folders so as I write, I have all the notes and photocopies where I can find them. I keep the folders in a vertical file on the floor next to my desk, within arm's length of my computer keyboard.

I go through this research several times, including once to try and come up with an outline for the book. Will it be chronological or thematic? How will each chapter flow into the other? For a biography, the decision to approach the story chronologically is almost automatic. For my book on women’s sports history, Winning Ways, I originally planned to focus on themes until my editor convinced me otherwise. In the end, I used chronological chapters, but I made sure to touch on ongoing themes such as the media’s reaction to women in sports in different eras and the evolution of the clothes and equipment available to female athletes.

No matter what I plan to write, doing an outline helps. After it’s finished, I sometimes have to make adjustments in my file folders to better match the chapters of the book. I also figure out what additional research I need to do. I may want to interview experts on my topic, and I'll probably need to do more library research. These days, the Internet is an increasingly important research tool. Just last week, I learned that my weekend subscription to the New York Times makes me eligible to download up to 100 articles each month from the paper’s 157-year archive—-for FREE. What an invaluable resource for someone who writes about U.S. history! (If you don’t have a subscription, you can still download articles at a rate of one for $3.95 or 10 for $15.95.)

When any additional research is done, I start writing. Each time I come to a new chapter, I look through its folder and list topics or anecdotes I want to include. I check these off after I write them into the narrative. Sometimes I forget to include one. If that happens, I have to determine if it really needs to be in that chapter, if it can go somewhere else, or if it's not necessary at all. Another alternative is to set aside the anecdote to use in a caption. This process continues until I've written the whole book.

Occasionally, I’ll take an initial stab at a book topic by writing an article on some aspect of it. I did that several times with the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League before starting on my book, A Whole New Ball Game. I wrote about the league for Scholastic Search magazine (an article on how World War II led to its formation), for Scholastic MATH Magazine (an article on women's versus men's batting averages), and for the Sunday magazine of the California Daily News (profiles of several California players). It’s an excellent way to delve into a subject without having to plan out an entire book, and the freelance fees help pay some bills along the way.

One of my favorite sports articles of all time is a retelling of the classic poem, “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe. Only this version, written by K.C. Clapp of the Grand Rapids Herald in July 1945, was not the story of a lost love, but of a lost baseball game. The Annabelle Lee in Clapp’s poem was a left-handed pitcher for the Fort Wayne Daisies of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). On July 7, 1945, she pitched nine innings of no-hit, no-run ball against Clapp’s hometown team, the Grand Rapids Chicks.



Annabelle Lee Harmon, a native of North Hollywood, California, died on July 3 at the age of 86, and as the baseball playoffs begin, it seems like the perfect time to remember her. Hardly any media outlets noted her passing, and that’s a pity, because she was a warm, elegant, delightful woman who made an indelible imprint on the national pastime. She played pro baseball for seven years and threw the AAGPBL’s first perfect game on July 29, 1944. Beyond that, she was the aunt of major league pitcher Bill Lee—and the person who the “Spaceman” credits with teaching him how to pitch.

My most vivid memory of Annabelle is from 1995, when the All-Americans met for a reunion at a resort in Indian Wells, California. Annabelle was there with her mother Hazel, who was close to 100 years old. The paperback edition of my book about the league, A Whole New Ball Game, had just come out, and I had traveled from the east coast to show it off to the women who inspired it. With me were two friends, including Felicia Halpert, a sportswriter and a storied softball player from the women’s leagues in Brooklyn, New York.

It was late—close to midnight—but Felicia had been asking Annabelle if she still had her “stuff.” Annabelle said, “Sure, I’ll show you.” She laid down a makeshift home plate on the edge of the hotel’s patio, stationed Felicia there with a glove that seemed to appear out of nowhere, and walked off her pitching distance. Then, under fluorescent lights in the warm autumn night, the 73-year-old southpaw put on a pitching clinic. She delivered fastballs, curves, and knuckleballs, and Felicia, whose position was shrouded in darkness, did her best to catch them. Pretty soon her former teammates were lined up on the patio, cheering her on.

As I watched, I couldn’t help but think of my favorite line from Clapp’s poem: “The moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the curves of Annabelle Lee.” All these years later, I still remember Annabelle on that patio, firing pitches through the night, a feisty blond with a poetic name, a wicked knuckleball, and a shared legacy as one of the original girls of summer. She will be missed.

“Annabelle Lee Again Arouses Poet’s Muse”
by K.C. Clapp
Grand Rapids Herald, July 10, 1945

It wasn’t so many hours ago
July 7, specifically,
That a maiden there pitched whom you may know
By the name of Annabelle Lee,
And she hurled so well that not a Chick hit,
Going down to her, one, two, three.

She was not wild, this talented child,
Who twirled so effectively.
And no free passes were handed out
By this stingy Annabelle Lee
But the base hits rang for the Fort Wayne gang
For a 6-0 victory.

And this is the reason as 3,000 know
Who witnessed her wizardry
That not a Chick could hit a lick
Off the slants of Annabelle Lee,
So they sharply dropped from second spot
To a humble berth in 3.
But Fort Wayne cheers its peach-clad dears
Because of Annabelle Lee.

The moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the curves of Annabelle Lee.
And the South Field lights will gleam many nights
Before such a sight I may see—
No hits by Ziegler or Tetzlaff or Eisen,
No hits by the bustling “B.”
No hits by Maguire or Petras or “Twi,”
Why? Because of Annabelle Lee.