Schools

Author Talks Inspiration, Cancer And Frank McCourt

Children's book author Jordan Sonnenblick visited students at Northbrook Junior High Wednesday.

“I have survived the stormy seas of adolescence,” children’s book author Jordan Sonnenblick told a group of sixth graders.

“And I can actually tell you, it’s very easy to get from there to here. Figure out one thing that you’re good at and love to do—and video games don’t count.”

Sonnenblick visited (NBJH) Wednesday to give presentations to students who had read his book Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie, about an eighth-grade boy whose 5-year-old brother is diagnosed with cancer.

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After seeing Sonnenblick speak three years ago at an event for librarians, NBJH Library Resource Center Director Annette Farmer said she was determined to bring him to Northbrook.

“He was just such a dynamic speaker, so engaging, so funny,” Farmer said. “He writes books that mirror our students’ lives, and they read his works, they think, ‘Aha, someone gets how I feel.’”

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So Farmer put NBJH on Sonnenblick’s waiting list, and more than two years later, he finally arrived. Sonnenblick, who grew up in Staten Island, NY, now lives in Bethlehem, PA, with his wife and two kids. He wanted to be a writer as early as fourth grade, according to his website, when Susan Cooper’s fantasy novel The Dark is Rising inspired him to become a novelist.

Sonnenblick was also inspired by Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Frank McCourt, who was Sonnenblick’s homeroom and creative writing teacher during his senior year at Stuyvesant High School in New York City.

“He was Yoda,” Sonnenblick said, explaining that McCourt’s style of teaching involved repetition of enigmatic phrases. McCourt’s words stuck with Sonnenblick, who was always wrote stories that made his classmates laugh.

“Someday you’ll head for the deep water,” McCourt would say every time Sonnenblick read one of his stories aloud.  

Nearly two decades later, Sonnenblick did, with his first book, Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie.

Inspiration Walks Into The Classroom

Sonnenblick was an eighth-grade teacher in New Jersey for the first 11 years of his career, but always wanted to write a book. He just wasn’t able to “get off the couch,” he joked.

Then in 2002 he met Emily, a student in his honors eighth grade English class.

“Emily walked into my classroom and giggled every day,” he said.  “I never caught Emily talking—she just laughed.”

Sonnenblick tried seating different people next to Emily, assuming it was the girl sitting next to her who was making her laugh. But no matter whom he put next to her, he always caught Emily giggling. And so nearly every day, he reprimanded her. 

Then one day Sonnenblick noticed there was a donation box in the school office for a kid with cancer. The boy had the same last name as Emily. As Sonnenblick found out, her little brother was dying of the disease.

“I’d been yelling at this little girl who’d been laughing while she should have been crying,” he said.

During a parent-teacher conference with Emily’s mom, Sonnenblick brought up the situation and offered to find some books that would help her daughter talk about it,.

But he couldn’t find a single one. So he decided it was finally time to do what he had been telling his wife and his friends he always wanted to do—write a book—and that this should be the subject.

“I stayed up super late, every night, for 10 weeks,” he said.

The first publisher Sonnenblick approached accepted his book, and it was set for publication in June of 2003. In May, Sonnenblick got news that Emily’s brother had passed away.

“That was the worst moment of my teaching career,” he said.

A few weeks later, when the book came out, he got a phone call from Emily’s mom.  

“You got it right,” he remembers her saying.

The book “means a tremendous amount, I think, to her mom,” he added. “Her son created a ripple in the world.”

That phone call also made Sonnenblick feel like the whole project was worth it, he said. Since then, he has written several more books, including a sequel to Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie, called After Ever After, which tells the story from the point of view of the little brother in Dangerous Pie, whose cancer is now in remission. Sonnenblick said he was inspired to write that book when a support group for cancer survivors wrote to him asking why there wasn’t a sequel to Dangerous Pie.

“Take That Thing You’re Good At … And Use It To Serve Someone”

While he’d told the NJBH students that part of being a happy adult was finding something they loved to do, he emphasized that just doing something you love isn’t enough. What ultimately makes a profession satisfying is knowing that it helps others.

“Take that thing you’re good at that you love to do, and find a way to use it to serve someone,” he said.

The sixth graders followed up his speech with several questions.

Favorite book? The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst.

How do you practice to become a writer? Read a lot. “When I was a kid, I read a million, bajillion books.”

And what’s Emily doing now? She’s a senior in college who will go on to graduate school and become a teacher, Sonnenblick said.

 

 


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