About Paul Fleischman

Paul Fleischman (pictured right) is the author of many books for young readers. Many are novels for young people: novels in which readers of all ages can easily immerse. These combine an almost mythic kind of mystery, one part enchantment, one part characters and characteristics you could almost recognize in yourself, with a powerful and easily flowing use of language. In Paul's novels, there are often brushes with unspeakable evil, amazing goings-on, yet his  deep love for and understanding of nature --- both the human kind and the environmental (and animal) kind --- makes gives his work immediacy and power. Yet as a child, he told School Library Journal, he "... certainly had no plans to be a writer. My youth in Santa Monica, California, was spent not in libraries or curled up with a book, but at the beach, on the playground, in alleys, riding my bike."

Paul still loves the beach --- he now lives in the oceanside community of Monterrey, California --- but he did become a writer, as well, after a few detours that weren't really detours at all. An ardent collector of precious junk and found objects as a kid, some of which became, as he grew older, sculptures. The finding, the recycling and recreation resonate for him strongly with the writing process. "A found sculptor is forever trying to solve problems," he told School Library Journal. "keeping an eye on both the sum and its parts, constantly judging and revising...I go through every one of these stages when I'm writing a book."

Like Crescent  Dragonwagon, Charlotte's Zolotow, he is a second generation children's book author: his father is Sid Fleischman, who in 1987 won a Newbery for his novel The Whipping Boy --- just two years before his son. One early project the Fleischman family shared was a small, old-fashioned, long-before-there-were-computers home press. Paul and his sisters made stationary, business cards, and "began learning a language no one else on our block spoke,"  printer esoterica. (You can visit Sid's website at http://www.carr.lib.md.us/authco/fleischman.htm. Sid is pictured just above, to the left, while his son, Paul, is pictured left, at the top of the page. Do you think they look alike? )

Paul's writing

Paul's novels include The Coming-and-Going Men,  Bull Run, I am Phoenix, and The Borning Room, a 1991 Golden Kite Award Honor Book.  All of these are books Charlotte has edited, as she did the 1989 Newbery Medal-winning Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices (pictured below, in his comments about working with CZ), a radiantly beautiful book of poems for dramatic reading aloud, from the point of view of insects (he later did I am Phoenix, a similar imaginative and poetic tour de force about birds). 

More recently, and with other editors, he has written the novels Westlandia (pictured above), SeedFolk, and Whirligig (pictured below). 

Paul Fleischman on being edited by Charlotte

"Editors peer through both the hand lens and the telescope, helping to shape their authors' sentences as well as their entire careers. In both sorts of seeing, Charlotte's vision was acute.

"On the sentence level, she was the least intrusive of editors. She was no blood-spattered literary surgeon. Her occasional comments in the margin were soft-voiced and in the subjunctive mood, not the imperative. Yet they were as deftly placed as an acupuncturist's needles. In the Socratic manner, she posed questions and left you to answer them, never rewriting your words. Her respect for her authors precluded that, for which reason her authors gave her their love and respect in return. Future editors should study her marginalia with the care rabbinical students give to the Torah. (Paul is pictured above.)

"In matters of larger scope, her vision was truly exceptional. She was an astounding discoverer of talent. Once she'd found you, she didn't rewrite you any more than she did your sentences. Ideas for books weren't thrust upon you. The latest trends in publishing were never bandied about. Charlotte operated on the theory that the best book you had inside you was the one you most wished to write, no matter what happened to be selling at the moment. Perhaps no other editor would have accepted my two-voiced poems. Sincerity and quality were her bottom line; awards and a glittering backlist followed. (Pictured above: the cover of Paul's Joyful Noise, one of his extraordinarily marvelous and irresistible-to-read-aloud books of "two-voiced poems." The book won a well-deserved Newberry Award.)

"It wasn't that she was lucky picking horses. She made her choices on the basis of respect --- for her authors and for the glory of the word. I'm sure I'm not alone in missing the sight of her penmanship and those magical words, 'Welcome to the list.' "