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Issued by: Kathy Quirk 414-229-3144 kquirk@uwm.edu Date: March 26, 2002

UWM Co-Sponsoring Visit of Noted Children's Author

Billingsley's second book, "The Folk Keeper," won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Excellence in Children's Literature in 2000. "The Folk Keeper" respects the power of folklore and "combines the foreboding romance of ballads with the Gothic drama of ancient legends," the New York Times said in a review. Corinna, the title character, is a young girl who serves as a buffer between the human world above and the supernatural creatures below.

The editors of Booklist named Billingsley's first book, "Well Wished," one of the Top 10 First Novels for Youth in 1997.

"Franny Billingsley writes wonderfully complex fantasy featuring strong female characters," says John Stewig, director of the Center for Children's Literature, part of UWM's School of Education.

At the event, Billingsley will work with the children, showing them the process an author goes through in writing a book.

Her own first book took more than eight years to write, says Billingsley, a former lawyer.

A long two-week visit to her sister in Barcelona, Spain gave her the opportunity to re-think what she wanted to do with her life, she says. She loved to read when she was a child, but had drifted away from reading for enjoyment as she grew older. She took many of her favorite books from her childhood to Spain with her as a break from reading "all those terrible legal documents."

After reconnecting with her childhood favorites, she decided to become a children's writer. "I think you tend to be happiest in your career when you can create what you love," says Billingsley.

After three years writing in Spain, she moved back to Chicago in 1986 and continued to write. She supported herself by working as a children's book buyer for an independent Chicago bookstore. In 1999, two years after her first book was published, she retired from the bookstore to write full-time. She and her husband, Richard, have two children, ages 12 and 7.

In her presentations to children, she helps them explore the process of writing and re-writing. At the Muskego presentation, she'll be working with children to share the "beginnings" of many good books and showing them the many unsuccessful drafts of her own starts.

She'll also work with the children on exercises to help them learn to develop characters. Plot and character work together, she says. "If you have a plot with a dangerous adventure, you have to develop a character who has courage or is reckless enough to go on the adventure."

Although it took her a discouragingly long time to get her own first book published, she considers it time well spent - "It allowed the story time to mature, and gave the story elements a chance to link up with each other and resonate," she says.

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