Another Voice on Why I Write for Children

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Caren Stelson is the author of Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor’s Story, which was longlisted for the National Book Award as well as A Bowl Full of Peace, Stars of the Night: The Courageous Children of the Czech Kindertransport and the forthcoming Returning the Sword.  Caren’s stories explore history’s difficult moments through the lens of resilience, hope, light and peace—times in history she would have wanted to understand better as a young person. Caren and her husband live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They have two adult children and three grandchildren.

I have a Certificate for Excellence in Writing framed in my office. My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Depatis, presented it to me when I won first place in an elementary school writing contest. The Blue Ribbon was made from blue crepe paper with two little chocolate candy bars glued to it. The certificate and the memory of it remind me I was once a young reader—and a young writer.

I remember the feeling of writing that award-winning Westward Ho story, a derivative of the Little House on the Prairie books, although I was unaware of the concept of “derivative.” As a ten-year-old, I was totally immersed in writing that story. The words came fast. My imagination whirled. I was living what I was writing on the page. It was exhilarating. I still have that feeling when I’m deep in a story I’m writing.

But why write for children now that I’m an adult? Why not “grow up” and write for people my own age? Because there’s no other audience I would rather write for than children—and the child within. I am not alone among my writer-friends.

We write for children because our cellular selves have not healed from the bruises of childhood, the struggles, the embarrassments, the yearnings, the lost dreams. We are comrades with the children who pick up our books and find comfort in what we write for them, whatever the story because the story always leads to a healing path of hope. That’s our job as children’s writers—to offer hope at the end. It may be only “the crack where the light comes in”—but that light is one of hope . . . and love.

That’s what I yearned for as a child—hope, love, light—as I read at night under the covers or scratched a story on paper in my loopy cursive writing. It’s no different now. Every time I sit down to write for children, fiction or non-fiction, I am following a storyline that leads to what helps make us whole and connected to ourselves and others, the gifts of hope, love, and light.

That fourth-grade certificate was an early lesson in giving those precious gifts away to whoever read my story.