Who is mary downing hahn married to

If I were willing to rewrite my novel, he would be willing to reread it. Although the pages of criticism were daunting, I found myself agreeing with most of the comments and suggestions. My manuscript was indeed too episodic, and many of my "best" scenes added nothing to the story's continuity. Sitting down in front of my old government-surplus typewriter, I began the lengthy process of revising.

Every time I mailed the manuscript to Jim, sure I'd improved it, he sent it back with more suggestions. It was like taking a correspondence course in novel writing. Twelve years later, neither one of us now remembers how many times Sara traveled back and forth from Maryland to New York, but in the fall of Jim invited me to lunch to discuss the manuscript's progress.

After a year of corresponding, I was eager to meet the mysterious editor who had so patiently read and reread my novel. Filled with anticipation and dread, I boarded the train in Baltimore. For years I'd fantasized about having lunch with an editor in New York, and now that it was about to become a reality all I could think of was disaster. Suppose I knocked over a glass of water? Slurped my soup? Spilled something down the front of my dress? Said something incredibly stupid?

Called him Mr. Giblet again as I'd once done on the telephone? Unfortunately, I was all too capable of doing any or all of those things, maybe even simultaneously. By the time I reached the Clarion offices, having survived my first New York taxi ride, I was so nervous I could hardly tell the receptionist my name.

Suppose I'd come on the wrong day? Suppose I'd misunderstood the time and I was late? Fortunately, Jim put me at my ease right away. After getting through lunch without committing any blunders, I boarded the train for Baltimore with my manuscript tucked under my arm. One more rewrite, and Jim would offer me a contract. Of all the exciting things that have happened to me since I became a published writer, that day in New York remains a highlight.

I consider him a The author reading to her daughters Kate and Beth, c. I hear many people complain about their editors. Listening to them makes me feel very fortunate. I knew nothing about Jim when I mailed him The Sara Summer; after four rejections, I chose Clarion from my list of children's publishers because I liked its name. It was indeed a lucky choice. Not long after my second book was published, I married Norman Pearce Jacob.

Considering Kate and Beth's stormy progress through adolescence, Norm took a brave step the day he said "I do.

Before he met me at a library retirement party, he lived a quiet life as the branch manager of the Hyattsville Public Library. In the evenings, he read and listened to recordings of the Gregorian chant. All too soon he was immersed in our chaotic household. While the phone rang constantly in the background, Kate and Beth waged clothing battles up and down the stairs and hallways of our Columbia town house and tried to drown out each other's rock music by turning up their radios. Norm gallantly took phone messages for the girls, helped with car pools, and gave them personal tape players to silence the roar of punk versus new wave.

Like me, he worried when they stayed out past curfew. Every now and then, he baked them special "super" cakes and then shuddered when they ate big gooey slices for breakfast. Looking at the artistic disarray of their bathroom and bedrooms, he once confessed he was learning more than he wanted to know about the domestic habits of teenage females.

Now both girls are away from home, and the house is very quiet. They are both serious about their studies. As Kate once said, "If you wanted us to be engineers or lawyers, you shouldn't have given us all those art supplies.

You encouraged us to be creative, and now we are. And so they are. And I'm very proud of both of them. First my mother wanted to go to art school, then I wanted to go, and now, finally, Kate and Beth are actually there.

In this account of my life, I've revealed many of the sources of my books. My parents' history of loss and abandonment, my feelings about my senile grandmother, our family's brief homelessness, my loneliness, self-doubts, and insecurity, my years as a single parent, my father's emotional distance—all of these elements appear in my novels and give them a sadness readers often notice and sometimes ask about. I can't keep my life out of my books.

I might change events, make them sadder, scarier, more exciting, but emotionally my books are as honest as I can With Norm Jacob at their wedding, Ellicott City, Maryland, make them; no matter how many supernatural turns my plot takes, I put my own feelings into every story I write. Flannery O'Connor once said that anyone who survives childhood has enough material to last the rest of his or her life.

She was right about that. Never in adulthood are you so frightened, so angry, so eager for revenge, so vulnerable, so happy, so sad as you are when you're a child.

Although my books have been fairly successful, I still have trouble thinking of myself as a writer. When people ask me what I do, I usually tell them I'm a children's librarian. Saying I'm a writer sounds pretentious, even precarious or risky. To me, each book I complete is a gift. When I finish one, I worry I won't be able to write another. I keep my job at the library because it's my lifeline, my safety, my sure thing.

What if a time comes when I can't face my word processor? What if someone asks the inevitable question "Are you still writing? When I type "Chapter One," I'm excited by the story's possibilities but not sure I truly have a whole book's worth of ideas. My uncertainty arises from my inability to think ahead. How do I know what I'm going to write until I write it?

Typically I begin a novel by imagining characters in a certain situation and then work out the plot as I go along, waiting for that magic moment when the narrator comes to life and begins to tell me the story.

At that point, I'm in her place, experiencing everything that happens to her. One event leads to another, but not always in a logical order. To me, writing is like entering a forest and wandering off the path. I get lost in swamps, mired in quicksand, come to rivers too deep to cross, tumble into ravines, snag myself on brambles.

If I'm lucky, I find the path again, wide and smooth, leading to a big sign that says "The End. Once I have a beginning, a middle the hardest part , and an end, I know I have a book. After revising the manuscript at least three or four times, I mail it to Jim and wait anxiously to hear his opinion.

He usually asks for two and sometimes three rewrites, but they are never on the scale of The Sara Summer revisions. He's very good at picking up inconsistencies and pointing out scenes where the action should be expanded or contracted. When I visit schools, I bring the seven manuscripts that went into the creation of The Doll in the Garden, my ninth book.

Holding up the pile of folders, I remind the class that the stack they see doesn't include all the changes I made on the computer before I printed each version. Although teachers love my "show-and-tell" display, I'm not sure how the kids feel.

When I was eleven years old and preparing geography reports, when I was twenty-one or-two and writing short stories, even when I was in my thirties and working on seminar papers, I didn't take kindly to suggestions for revisions. Perhaps when I was younger, I was more arrogant, or maybe I was just plain lazy. At my present age of fifty-two, I truly believe that revising is the most important step in writing a book.

However, I admit that my word processor takes a lot of the tedium out of the process. Without my magical writing machine perhaps I would dread going over a manuscript six or seven times, but with the help of my insert and delete keys I don't mind it at all.

Now, while I have more ideas than time, I'm working hard to write as many books as I can. Frustrating as it is to have a novel fizzle out after the third or fourth chapter, difficult as it is to rewrite the same scene dozens of times, painful as it is to see a reviewer pounce on the finished product, teeth bared, I truly love making words into stories.

When I was about ten, I realized for the first time that I'd be sixty-three in the year I'd be old. Really old. I pictured myself hobbling around with a cane, moaning and groaning and complaining about my endless aches and pains. No, wait—my birthday was in December. I'd be sixty-two on the first of January, Subtracting that year didn't console me. Sixty two, sixty three—what was the difference? I'd still be watching the miracles of the new millennium from a wheelchair.

Then and there, I went into a small depression, thinking of the fun I'd miss. It wasn't fair. But who was to blame? If I'd been the last born in my family instead of the first, I would have been nine years younger. Fifty-three instead of sixty-two—still too old. Way too old. My little sister and brother would be ancient, too. As for my poor parents—my mathematical skills simply weren't sufficient to figure out how old they be in Nor did I want to think about it.

Well, as we all know, years fly past like calendar pages in old movies. As neared, some people bought gallons of water, dozens of candles, enough canned soup to fill a swimming pool, and hid in underground shelters fearing I'm not sure what—massive computer crashes, the end of the world, floods, fires, plagues.

Not me. My only fear was dying in a tragic accident before 1 January The new millennium began on schedule. Just as I'd anticipated, I was sixty-two. My hair was gray and I had more wrinkles than freckles, but I did not need a cane.

I had no aches and pains. I still rode a bike and took long walks in the woods. Wouldn't that surprise the kid I used to be? When I was ten, I intended to be an artist when I grew up. Art was my best subject, my favorite subject. Although I loved to read almost as much as I loved to draw, I had no interest in writing—which in my experience meant long, hand-cramping, boring reports complete with deadly outlines and other tedious requirements such as neatness and perfect spelling and good penmanship and following directions.

I wrote them, of course, but I didn't enjoy them. My teachers praised my artistic talent, but they never had much to say about my writing—unless you count negative comments such as "Please Follow Directions," "Poor Outline," "Sloppy handwriting," "Careless spelling," etc. Probably because I spent so much time reading, I began making up stories of my own.

Instead of words, I used pictures to tell my stories. Drawing was easier than writing it never made my hand or wrist hurt the way writing did and it was much more fun. I have a couple of yellowing drawing tablets full of mostly unfinished picture stories. My favorite was inspired by my father. Although he was born in New Zealand, he returned to England with his family when he was about seven years old.

The Downings stayed there until Fearing England was doomed to be defeated by Germany, Grandfather decided to immigrate to America. With six sons and one daughter, ranging in age from thirteen to two, my grandparents boarded the Lusitania for what would be her penultimate voyage.

On her way back to England, the ship was torpedoed by the Germans, setting this country on its journey to World War I. I never tired of hearing Dad's story of his voyage to America. It was the Downing family's watermark, a journey from wealth to poverty, an unfortunate reversal of the poor immigrant makes good saga. My grandfather came from a wealthy London family. He left England with a comfortable sum and set himself up in Maryland as a farmer, a vocation he'd pursued in New Zealand and England.

Unfortunately Grandfather made a series of agricultural blunders and lost all his money. While he sat on the porch of a dilapidated farm house in Beltsville, reading and talking to fellow English exiles, the older boys, including my father, dropped out of school after completing the eighth grade and went to work to support the family. My father retained his love of England and his citizenship, filling out his green card every November, keeping his accent, and speaking fondly of England, his lost Eden.

His motto was "Once an Englishman, Always an Englishman. Pinafore, "He is an Englishman. Under Dad's influence, I became an ardent Anglophile—and I have a picture story to prove it. The first drawing shows a father reading a letter while his eager children look over his shoulder. Although I wrote nothing down, I can tell you exactly what that letter said:.

We are delighted to inform you that you are the sole inheritor of Misty Cliffs Castle in England. Please come to England at once to claim your inheritance. You can't imagine how often I imagined that letter dropping into our mailbox at Guilford Road. We'd pack up at once and leave boring College Park forever and live in a castle in England where magic abounded and fairy folk haunted the woods and green hills. I wasn't sure Mother would go along with this idea. Perhaps that's why the children in my story have no mother.

A series of pictures shows the family traveling by train and ship and finally arriving at a railway station in the English countryside. They are surrounded by suitcases and trunks labeled "Misty Cliffs," waiting for someone to pick them up and take them to their new home.

The next picture was my masterpiece—Misty Cliffs itself, a small castle drawn with great care. Although the pencil sketch is somewhat faded, the castle is clearly on the edge of a cliff. One small island breaks the surface of the sea. Oddly, a suburban style garage and a wishing well stand beside the castle. Write what you know, draw what you know. I was very proud of that castle. Buildings challenged my artistic ability. Walls tended to lean, windows and doors were ill proportioned, and I had a poor grasp of perspective.

I much preferred drawing people, especially children. My men resembled tall, gangling boys with precocious mustaches, and my women stumbled about on oddly shaped high-heeled shoes.

I won't attempt to describe my cars and trains—or even my horses, save to say they were much worse than my dogs and cats. Even though my story was inspired by my father's wish to return to England, it shows the influence of one of my favorite books. Two English children live in the castle, the son and daughter of the caretaker. The boy wears a patterned sweater, knee-length knickers, and argyle socks, my idea of English fashion.

On his shoulder is a pet mouse. Remembering how much I loved The Secret Garden, I cannot help thinking of him as Dickon, the friend of mice, squirrels, birds, rabbits, and foxes.

In the next picture, Dickon and the American boy sit facing each other on a couch. A mouse perches on Dickon's shoulder; he offers another to his new friend. Hanging on the wall behind the boys is a framed motto: "Once an Englishman," it says, "always an Englishman. Two or three more pictures suggest the island off the coast is a dangerous, mysterious place. Alas, the story ends with Dickon lying on his stomach, mouse on his shoulder, gazing at the island through binoculars.

Every time I look at this story, I'm tempted to finish it, not in pictures but in words. And that would surprise my ten-year-old self as much as my bicycle. I suppose the change from pictures to words began when I was about thirteen. Up till then, my stories had been adventures, the easiest sort of narrative to tell in pictures.

In an adventure story, characters DO things—run, jump, swim, meet and fight enemies, find buried treasures, and so on. Think of a comic strip like "Spiderman. But suppose the story teller wants to show what his characters are thinking and feeling? Suppose action is second place, peripheral even. Think of another comic strip: Snoopy lies motionless on the roof of his dog house. Words in balloons float over his head. What if those words were written in Japanese? You wouldn't have the slightest idea what was going on.

In "Peanuts," it's the words that matter. When expressing thoughts, feelings, and dialogue became more important to me than action, I realized I had a problem. I'd never thought of myself as a writer and neither had anyone else.

I was artistic and I read well above grade level, but math continued to plague me. Frankly, I thought I was too stupid to write a book.

I couldn't even outline a report until after I'd written it, proof I was backward. So how could I possibly become a writer? Then the solution came to me. I could write children's books—and illustrate them myself like Robert McCloskey, whose "Homer Price" stories were among my favorites.

Surely children's books were easier to write than adults' books; they were shorter, for one thing. And they had plenty of pictures. In fact, when I was a kid, books written for nine-to twelve-year-olds were almost always illustrated, usually in black and white. I began writing in secret, afraid to tell anyone what I was doing—not my teachers, not my friends, not even my mother—for fear they'd laugh at me.

At the same time, I began a diary. On the first page I wrote a typical kids' list of facts about myself:. It's surprising to see math and physical education among my favorite subjects. Math can be explained by Mrs.

Shank, my favorite teacher, the only one who made numbers understandable. But Phys. Usually it was even more humiliating than math. Eighth grade must have been a better year than most. Although I haven't played hide and seek or tag for a while, I still hike and bike, and my indoor hobbies are much the same as they were when I was almost fourteen. My lovely dog Binky died over forty years ago, and Pete the cat never came back, but I share my home now with Oscar and Rufus, the best cats I've ever known.

My favorite clothes are still jeans and sneakers—or running shoes as we now call them—but I wear T-shirts and sweatshirts more often than plaid shirts. My friend Natalie moved back to College Park, but she died when she was only twenty-seven years old; I still miss her.

My friend Ann moved to Vermont forty years ago; I don't see her as often as I did when she lived next door, but we still consider each other our best and oldest friend.

I've lost track of the other girls but hope they're all happily going on with their journeys. Susan is the heroine of Small Town Life, my first book. She lives in a town much like College Park.

The illustrations suggest she likes jeans and plaid shirts and sneakers—and sometimes sports a baseball cap. Her dark hair is jaw length and cut in bangs. She has freckles. She belongs to Girl Scouts and goes on a camping trip. She rescues a stray dog and brings it home. She hates chores. She quarrels with her younger siblings. In other words, she's just like I was. No, not really. If you read Small Town Life side by side with my eighth grade diary, you'd see many differences. Susan is the girl I wanted to be, not the girl I was.

In real life, I was a tall, shy, skinny, miserably self-conscious girl. I was what is politely called a late bloomer, meaning I was far less mature than most kids my age. I wanted life to stay the same: tree houses, bicycles, hide and seek. Not lipstick, home permanents, nylon stockings. What was so great about growing up? As far as I could see, kids had all the fun.

Who wanted to vacuum, dust, wash dishes, do laundry, and fix meals? Growing up was absolutely boring. And it lasted a long time. For inexplicable reasons, my friends couldn't wait to leave childhood behind. Their new attitude annoyed me. My stubborn immaturity annoyed them. I began to feel left out, even weird. I worried that something was wrong with me. But Susan has no such problems. She's a leader—her friends do what she wants to do.

She isn't weird. She isn't shy. Best of all, in my illustrations, she isn't any taller than anyone else. In short, Susan is everything I wanted to be—my ideal self.

In Small Town Life, I was retelling the story of my own life as it should have been—if only the world were fair. That's why I write fiction. Reality isn't always to my liking. Why write a book about Abraham Lincoln? Everyone already knows the ending. He DIES. You can't change that. It's much more fun to take a few details from here and there—things that happened to me, things that happened to my kids or my friends, things someone told me about—and mix them with lots of what ifs and supposes until they take on a life and a reality of their own, and you find yourself thinking, "Did I make that up or did it really happen?

In other words, fiction writers can spend most of their adult lives daydreaming on paper—just so their imaginings are real enough for people to believe them. I never finished Small Town Life. What stopped me? Did I run out of ideas? Did I decide writing was too hard and I'd rather be an artist? Or did I simply get tired of Susan and her tomboyish ways?

In the spring of eighth grade, my real life improved dramatically. Encouraged by my friend Anne, I joined the chorus of our school's production of The Pirates of Penzance, not as a sister or a cousin or an aunt like Anne, but as a pirate.

Frankly I don't think I sang much better than I solved math problems or hit balls with bats, but Mrs. Hargraves was desperate for pirates and couldn't recruit enough boys. I took a deep breath and cast my lot with the pirates. Being part of a cast which included ninth graders, the elite of junior high, changed my outlook on everything, including becoming a teenager.

We have been rehearsing for Mrs. I am one of the pirate girls in it. I love it very much. It's about the biggest thing in my life now. Hargraves really has some workers in it. Clarence especially. Without him, it would be a flop. He's wonderful! He knows everybody's part, he has the main role of Frederick, the Pirate's Apprentice, and he directs all the songs. I like him a lot. I wish I was in the ninth grade like him.

He's a real nice boy. He has brown hair, big brown eyes, and a nice looking face. He has a good voice. He's going to get the medal for the best music pupil at the end of the year.

I like him practically as much as Jerry now. Larry is very good as the Pirate King, Eddie is simply wonderful as Major General, you wouldn't think he was only in the ninth grade to hear him sing. Betty is really good as Mabel, the leading feminine role. Kay is all right as Mabel on the next night. But gosh, when she and Clarence sing a duet she drowns him out she's such a show-off and poor Clarence can't stand her.

He likes Betty and I don't blame him. I was embarrassed to remember the gawky, immature, bike riding dope I'd been in eighth grade. When Mary later wrote about World War II and conflicted feelings about wars Stepping on Cracks and December Stillness , she was drawing in part from her own childhood experiences.

She remembered the strong support for the troops during the conflict, but she also remembered her devastation when her favorite uncle was killed while fighting overseas. One early influence on her writing was the terrific radio shows of the time. These programs, such as Let's Pretend , were a great way for young people to pick up the art of storytelling just by listening.

Mary also loved to read. After her mother found her adding her own illustrations to the Pooh books, she made sure Mary had plenty of paper to use for practice! Mary has kept her love of drawing all her life. When it was time to go to college, she chose the university in her hometown. There she studied studio art and English and became engaged to law student named William Hahn. Before settling down, she took a summer to visit Europe with her girlfriends in an old-fashioned VW bug with a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day as a guide.

They had a wonderful time. After she was married, she taught art for a year at a junior high school, but she didn't like being an authority figure to the children. She and her husband soon had two daughters. For a while, she stayed at home with them. She loved aloud to read to them and began to make up stories to keep them entertained.

When she and her husband divorced, the girls were still small. There's some of the pain from the divorce and another visit from a frightening grandmother figure reflected in her book, The Time of the Witch. After the breakup, she went back to school to get her Ph. She is a star basketball participant.

She is a member of group […] He then married Heidi Woan in He has a son. He grew to become a distinguished member of Linkin Park together with Brad Delson. Joe Hahn was born on […] She can be ranked within the richest particular person record from United States. She and Susan B. Anthony had been each members of the Nationwide Girl Suffrage Affiliation.