ON WRITING THE NIGHT HORSE

After my first book (To Rabbittown) was accepted, I took a class at UCLA called “Writing Poetry For Children”, taught by Myra Cohn Livingston. Myra was a crusty woman.  Opinionated.  Passionate about metrics, good poetry, not talking down to children.  Her insistence on excellence was hard.  I cried after many of her classes.

I also learned a tremendous amount.  She had us do what I called “poetry scales”—lots and lots of practice of the basic tools of poetry.  She piled on the homework.  It was understood that if you signed up for Myra’s class, you signed away your life.  You had no time to work on other writing projects.

One assignment was to write a children’s story in iambic pentameter rhymed couplets.  That means that every two lines have to rhyme, the stress is on the second beat, and every line had to have five “beats.”
(For example, say these two words:, “July” and “summer”.  In English, we naturally say “July” with a stress on the second syllable.  We naturally stress the first syllable of “summer”.  When writing something in iambic, I can’t use the word “summer”.  I have to find an iambic word to fit what I want to say.  It’s HARD!)

I went up to her, after class, trembling.  I was thinking that after all, I had gotten a children’s book/poem accepted for publication that did not rhyme, hadn’t I?  And it was Myra who had accepted the first poem I ever had published in her book Poems For Mothers, and that poem didn’t rhyme.  So I said, “Myra, I would rather not rhyme this assignment.”

Myra looked at me for a moment.  Then she said, “You will not only rhyme this assignment, you will rhyme every assignment for the rest of this class, even if the others are told not to.”

I went home, tail between my legs, and struggled with iambic pentameter couplets.  I brought it into class the next week, triumphant.  She returned it with her trademark red, unreadable small handwriting covering–covering–both pages of this work.  I burst into tears.

But Myra was not saying that my idea was abominable or that I was a terrible writer. She was saying, “This idea has promise.  Work on it.  Here’s how.  You can do it.”

She worked closely with me on that story for a year and a half.  At the end of that time, she said, “It’s ready.”  I sent off my manuscript and Scholastic accepted it and published it as The Night Horse, with illustrations in pastel colors by Vera Rosenberry .

It’s dedicated to my husband, Gary.

THE NIGHT HORSE can be heard on the award-winning CD/MP3 IT’S NOT MY TURN TO LOOK FOR GRANDMA AND OTHER STORIES