Why I Write for Children . . . Debby Dahl Edwardson

Photo by Iulia Mihailov on Unsplash

When people ask me why I write for children, I have an easy answer: I raised seven children, read a whole lot of well-written children’s books, and decided to try my hand at writing for this audience.

There’s another answer to this question, of course, and I sometimes share this, as well. I live at the top of the world in the northernmost community on the North American continent, a community where the majority of the population is Inupiat, the people indigenous to the Arctic. My husband and our children are all part Inupiat but when I began to look for books for them, I didn’t find any that spoke authentically of their life. And since it’s my belief that all kids deserve to see their lives reflected in the books they read, I decided to write some. As Nicki Grimes said of her own early reading experience, “No child deserves to feel invisible within the pages of a book.”

But the core truth of why I write for children goes even deeper--back to my own childhood.

My earliest memories are of the room filled with books that my father called his Den. My father used to hold me in his arms in that room and sing me to sleep. He had a beautiful tenor voice, and I remember watching those books over his shoulder as the rumble of his voice lulled me to sleep. There were worlds hidden in those books. I knew this to be true because my parents read to me. My father read me Rudyard Kipling which taught me the beauty of the language although some of the stories frightened me. My mother read to me from the Tall Book of Make Believe which introduced me to poetry and magic with writers such as Walter de la Mare, Lewis Caroll, Katherine Mansfield and Robert Louis Stevenson. Oh, how I loved that book!

Through books I came to love the power of story and to believe in magic. Late at night when the curtains of my open bedroom window fluttered, I discovered that I could float up to the ceiling, light as a light itself, and fly out into the starry night. I wasn’t afraid. I was exhilarated. I even called for my mother one time to come see me—it was so real—but when I opened my eyes, I was back in bed and the one who stood beside me was my father, not my mother. I realized many years later that I was actually leaving my body, but I didn’t have a name for this as a child. It was simply a bit of the magic that was mine.

I remember, too, the recurring dream of my childhood. There was a hidden room between my room and my parents’ room. It took on many forms, but I remember mostly that it was a safe place, covered in soft velveteen and beauty, a place I loved to escape to.

Some will recognize these bits of magic as signs of something more sinister and in fact they were, but I didn’t understand this until many years later. It was the magic that saved me and remained with me.

Books were my world as I grew older. My heroes were writers. I even had a deck of author cards--I have no idea where they came from, but they gave me the names of the writers I would someday read. Among them were female writers like Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austin and Virginia Wolfe. Books were my refuge then, a place where the real magic was that of story. I heard Bruce Colville say once that he writes for that 12-year-old boy who had the capacity to lose himself within the pages of a book. I think we lose that capacity as we age, and I miss it terribly. These days I read with the critical eye of a writer and too few books captivate me the way the books of my childhood did. And I know—because I am just now beginning to understand it—that those books of my childhood also shaped who I have become as a human being. Such is the power of children’s books. It’s a privilege to write them.

As a children’s writer, I often write what one editor referred to as books on the cusp, characters straddling that space between middle grade and young adult. I think this is one of the places inside me where that child-shaped hole that Marion speaks of resides. Those early teen years were painful for me. I was that profoundly shy girl standing outside of the crowd, alone. The one who sometimes hid in a bathroom stall to avoid walking the length of the lunchroom.  The one who never knew the rules of small talk and, in fact, still doesn’t. But here’s the thing: inside, that girl was something powerful, the power of story and magic and the endless possibilities that come with these, unspoken because she was too shy to speak them. I write for that girl. To give her a voice. To reveal her power.

I have a four-year-old granddaughter who’s named after me. Like me, she is the youngest in her family. And to the frustration of her family, she hides things—keys, a shoe, a toy. Her family doesn’t understand why she does this, but I understand. I understand because like my granddaughter, I found a way of claiming a certain degree of power over my life when I was small and needed it most by hiding people’s things. I write for that girl.

I write for both boys and girls to give them the power to recreate themselves through story, as I did.  There is something primal in the power and magic of the kind of story a child can get lost in for days on end. And all I want, all I ever wanted, was to be the one writing those stories.

I take no offense when people ask me, as they sometimes do, when am I going to start writing for adults. Maybe I will someday. Maybe I’ll write about the kind of old people I aspire to be, the ones who keep finding their way into the children’s books I write.

Debby Dahl Edwardson grew up in Minnesota, spending summers on an island in a lake near the Minnesota/Canada border where she, Jane Buchanan and Marion Dane Bauer hosted LoonSong, a retreat for Children’s Writers. She earned a BA from Colorado College, attended Nansenskolen in Norway, and earned an MFA in writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College.  She has lived for over forty years in northern Alaska.

Her books have earned many stars and awards including ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults, IRA’s Notable Books for a Global Society, Banks Street Best, Junior Library Guild and Booklist’s Top Ten Historical Fiction for Youth, 2010. Her most recent novel, My Name is Not Easy, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Debby and her husband George Saġġan Edwardson have co-written, Welcome to Iñupiat Nunat, a picture book illustrated by Newbery award-winner, Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, coming in 2025.