Personal Essay
My work as a writer and a photographer grew out of my love for the farms and small towns of America. I spent several joyous years of my childhood in a small town in Indiana, where I vividly recall bicycling around the neighborhood, swimming at the municipal pool, and stopping for ice cream at the local hotspot. Later, when I was ten years old, our family moved to a little farm in Michigan. I missed my hometown, yet I loved taking care of the livestock and exploring the woods, marsh, and open fields, and simply being outside in the light and weather. The land was bursting with wildlife, and I became a delighted naturalist. I was thrilled to be alive, deeply experiencing the world around me, and thought about becoming a wildlife biologist when I grew up.
I bought a small plastic camera by collecting Bazooka bubblegum wrappers and sending fifty cents to a distant post office box. During my spare time, I photographed scenes around our farm. So, I also started thinking about becoming a photographer. Then, in fifth grade, I wrote a story, which was published in our little mimeographed school newspaper. In blurred purple ink, the story wasn’t much, but my teacher and friends really liked it. A small flame was kindled within me, and I began to think that I might want to become a writer. Children often ask me, “When did you become a writer?”
I always answer, “When I wrote a story in fifth grade.”
Children also ask, “Who most inspired you to become a writer and photographer.”
“My teachers,” I always respond.
Every one of my elementary school teachers kindled my intense love of learning, especially history, geography, and literature. Several of my teachers also strongly encouraged me to become a writer and artist.
Other people also helped me along the way. After seventh grade, when I was thirteen, I went to work for the summer, baling hay for a neighboring farmer— a fine, cheerful, hardworking man. I came to admire him so much that I decided to become a farmer. However, that August our family moved back to Illinois, and I was devastated. I deeply missed my old home, the farm and my many friends there. Luckily, I was again blessed with several fine teachers, who encouraged me to work hard. In eighth grade, I won a local writing contest, which strengthened my interest in becoming an author. In high school, I wrote stories for the newspaper and enjoyed my history and English classes in particular. I went on to the University of Illinois, where several distinguished professors again inspired me. They taught history and English with such fervor that I could not help but be impressed by their example.
At this time, I also considered becoming a teacher, although I was “supposed” to become the lawyer in the family. My mother had long encouraged my three brothers, my sister, and me to go to college and enter a profession. My older brother planned to become a dentist, and one of my younger brothers was slated for a career in business, while my youngest brother and my sister intended to become teachers. It appeared sensible that I become a lawyer—except that I had little interest in pursuing this career. I was accepted into law school at the University of Illinois, but after long and careful thought, I decided to forego law school. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, only that I had come to a crossroads in life.
After graduating from the university, I decided to work for a couple of years until settling on what to do with my life. I accepted a job and moved to the East Coast, where I soon realized how much I missed the rural landscapes of home. Vividly, I recall flying home for Christmas and walking along the tree-lined streets of our small town amid the hush of a snowfall. The snow came down so quietly, filling up the streets, glittering against the street lamps, that I was overcome with the beauty of that moment.
The next day I borrowed a camera from my brother and drove the back roads, swaying with the pitch of the land, absorbing the subtleties of light, the fields brilliant with snow, the sky so phenomenally blue. I made my first photograph—of a barn riddled by wind—and several others. These scenes were so remarkably lovely, beyond any words. Images were the only way of sharing my feelings about them with others. I also was struck by the changes that had occurred in the region during the few years since I had left for college. When I returned to the East the memory of those two episodes—one on a hometown street muffled with snow and the other wandering in the country—stayed with me. I had to find some means of capturing them and sharing them with others.
Thereafter, on every visit home, I drove along the back roads through the countryside, often taking photographs. I sought to capture the vanishing rural landscape, making photographs of fence posts stacked in a woodlot, of gas pumps in front of a grocery store, of a broken cafe window. These first photographs were in color, but I quickly came to appreciate black and white images, notably the ability of the interplay of light and shadow to evoke a distinctive mood through which I could both document a subject and express myself. My photographs were meant to be art, with significant content, not just because they were carefully made, but also because they evoked profound feelings. I liked the pulse of city life, but I also loved to return home to wander the rural roads, observing the subtle play of light, and seeking those subjects that had mattered to me so much in my youth. The plains swept relentlessly in every direction, with scarcely a dip for a streambed or a rise for a line of trees to interrupt the eye. The sky appeared to overwhelm the land, and I seemed to be the least significant object on the horizon. The velvety black fields, dappled with troughs of snow, and the height of the winter-blue sky were exhilarating.
I often say that photography and writing “happened to me,” just as dreams come to us while we sleep. I did not consciously decide to become a creative person. Ever since grade school, I had harbored a quiet wish to become an author. During my early twenties I wrote stories and articles, all in a lyrical, highly visual style. I briefly attended graduate school in journalism, but longed to be more expressive. So, I moved back home, where I immersed myself in the countryside as I sought to become both a writer and photographer.
Forsaking a safe, relatively comfortable profession as teacher or lawyer, I became the “starving artist,” working in factories and on farms. I yearned to become an accomplished writer, but wasn’t sure if I were best suited to poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. I also almost subconsciously sought to become an artist with a camera, although I wasn’t at all sure what that meant. As a friend once observed, artists are the only people who must declare themselves “artists” before they have a body of work to substantiate the claim.
I describe these early years at length because they had such a pervasive influence on my work as an author and illustrator of children’s books. During these anxious and uncertain years, I pressed on and continued to hone my skills as a photographer. Although full of doubt about many things, I felt that I had to create works of enduring value. Self-taught as a photographer, I carefully studied the images of master photographers, mostly through books checked out of the local library, even as I insisted upon remaining true to my own unique style, which blended strong documentary and creative elements. Also self-taught as a writer, I simply read one library book after another, admiring Mark Twain and other great authors, but always seeking my own voice.
Over the next few years, I published a few more stories and articles. I loved to write fiction, but it was my photography that came to be enthusiastically received from the very beginning. However, it took me a while to accept this “gift” as I continued to work doggedly on my writing. I apparently had an eye for photography, and I had a few exhibits. My black and white photographs were also collected in several books, mostly small editions, published by university presses.
When it finally occurred to me that I might apply my skills as both a photographer and writer to creating fine books for children, my first editor asked me, “Where have you been hiding yourself?” I answered that I had devoted myself to a long apprenticeship making black and white photographs before I turned my attention to writing and illustrating my first two children’s books: Corn Belt Harvest and County Fair. I explained that anyone who can make good black and white photographs understands light and can thus make color photographs with ease. In fact, I bring to my children’s books the same technical expertise, artistic sensibility, and lyrical feeling regarding light and composition that distinguished my work for adults.
I have since made more than 50,000 photographs, and have published more than one hundred books for children and adults, all of which are intended to be both lovely and useful. For many of these books, such as Corn Belt Harvest; Amish Home; Portrait of a Farm Family; A Handful of Dirt; The Super Soybean; and others, I have been drawn back to the rural and small town life that I have always loved. I believe that adults as well as children should live fully, not only in their minds, but also through their senses.
In recent years, I have broadened my interest in American cultural and social history, focusing on how common people lived their daily lives. I have published Frontier Home; The Underground Railroad; Where Lincoln Walked; One-Room School; Ghost Towns of the American West; Tenement: Immigrant Life on the Lower East Side, Where Washington Walked; The Shaker Village; and Ellis Island: Coming to the Land of Liberty.
For seven years, I devoted myself to a signature series about Native American people entitled “Lifeways.” The photo assignments for the twenty-eight books in this distinctive series carried me far from home. I traveled all over the United States and Canada to visit Indian tribes and make photographs of the people in these places. In this grand undertaking, I visited the forests of the East and South, the sweeping plains, the mountains of the West, and the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. Many times I journeyed to Montana, but also to California and Washington, as well as Alaska and the muskeg of northern Canada. In all of these varied locales, I have been honored to meet so many wonderful people.
Never one to shy away from work, I also published a set of five books called “Building America.” Including The Canals, The Farms, The Forts, The Homes, and The Mills, this group of books shows how everyday people worked hard to settle various regions of the United States.
In the research, writing, and photography for all of these children’s books, I have been concerned with several primary elements. Essentially, I have been devoted to a quest for excellence in writing and photography. As a serious writer and photographic artist, I have committed myself only to those projects that have mattered deeply to me. I have only published books for which I have felt a compelling need to learn more about a particular subject or better understand another culture. I have insisted upon high production values in editing, design, and printing. Fortunately, my editors have been dedicated to the same principle: that children deserve the very best.
The most important and satisfying aspect of publishing children’s books has been that others—young and old alike—enjoy the books. As “crossover books,” they may be read to young children by parents, teachers, and grandparents. Children in the middle grades can read them in groups or on their own, and adults are drawn to the books because they enjoy the photographs or are curious to know more about a particular subject.
More than thirty-one years ago, I married Linda, my lovely and wonderful wife, and we have two daughters and a son. Over the years, as our children grew up, I told stories to them on our screened porch or in the backyard, as night eased over the neighborhood—just as my grandfather once told stories to my mother and her friends out on their porch.
I have always loved to write fiction and was especially pleased that many of these “porch stories” were published in The Fresh Grave and Other Ghostly Stories, which was dedicated to our daughter Anna, who also made the striking black and white illustrations for that book and later for a short novel entitled The Ghost of Honeymoon Creek, a sequel to The Fresh Grave. This second book was dedicated to our daughter Sarah. To be fair to all of our children, my most recently-published collection, Dripping Blood Cave and Other Ghostly Stories, was dedicated to our son Luke. Anna again made pen-and-ink drawings for this book, and she and her husband Jack collaborated on the beautiful cover illustration. Although pure fiction, these ghost stories are rooted in my experiences with my mother and grandfather, and inspired by my youth in small towns and farms. My novel Shadow Island has become a favorite for children who love scary and fun suspense fiction.
For the past twenty-four years, Linda and I have lived in an old house in a mid-sized town in the Midwest, where we’ve raised our children. Above all else, I have loved being a husband and a father, even now that we have an empty nest of sorts. For me, the only thing better than being a child is to grow up and raise one’s own children. In making books, I now draw upon experiences with our children as well as my youthful memories. For many years, we liked to blend photography assignments with vacations so that we could be together as a family. I now mostly work at home in the midst of our family, which includes our four dogs, two cats, and an assortment of other pets. So, I am able to write and make photographs, enjoy my family, and lead a purposeful life. Who could ask for anything more?