Back to Featured Interviews >>

MEET JULIE CRABTREE
by Bonnie O'Brian

Did you write stories when you were growing up? at school? Or at homeas a hobby? As a young child, or as a teenager, or both?

Julie Crabtree

I became an author at the tender age of five. As a kid from the Los Angeles area, I hadn’t had much exposure to farm animals. On a trip to the country, my mother and I discussed the cows that dotted the hillside. Strange and curious child that I was, I really wanted to see which had udders. I made up a poem right then:

Udder Udder, come come

(I know, stunning, the early genius of that prose)

My mother actually still has this “poem” in a scrapbook, ready to be trotted out and displayed as my first literary effort. I wrote little poems and stories and journals like this throughout my childhood. Still do. Hard to match the level of the Udder Work though.

When you were a child did you ever have moments when you decided thatyou were going to be a writer when you grew up?

I did, I fanaticized about writing Trixie Belden books. I thought that would be the pinnacle.

When you went to college, were you already pursuing a writing career?(or a career in illustrating? or just art in general?)

I majored in English, but I did not have the confidence or even the courage to contemplate a writing career. My parents had raised me to think I needed a “real” career, so I planned to go into law. A lot of frustrated, would-be authors end up in law school, trying to get creative with dry legal briefs and drafting endlessly wordy opening statements. I didn’t become a lawyer though (a few years as a paralegal had me running in fear from this career move), and I didn’t become a career writer (in my head or literally) until ten years after college.

What was your first job when you graduated from college?

I worked for McGraw-Hill grading standardized high school tests for the State of California. I read the essay portion. I made five dollars and hour, but felt proud because they only hired college graduates. There were several hundred of us doing this work, and we sat in a drafty warehouse at long conference tables, stacks of essays piled around us, our butts numb from the folding chairs. My assigned piles came from different counties in Southern California, and it was stunning to see the range of literacy. The wealthier counties’ kids wrote eloquent, beautifully structured essays, while schools not an hour away would remit stack of essays that were mostly blank pages, gang art, or saddest of all, great, horribly failed efforts to construct an essay. I remember one kid had written, literally, “I wish I new (sic) how to do this.” Anyway, that was my first college grad job, and it profoundly changed my thinking about the public school system.

Was your first book accepted immediately? or did you experience a number of rejections?

My first published book is actually the third book I have written. My rejection pile got so big that at one point I had to make a special trip to Target for one of those large plastic storage boxes. When I finally sold my third novel, I recycled my rejections, and now that box is in happier service as a Christmas ornament holder. I am so much savvier now, I believe I can remarket my first two books successfully. If not, I am not going to keep my rejection letters anymore. Where would I put the ornaments if I did?

What are the topics are some of your books?

I focus on coming of age themes. I think the years when kids are caught in between childhood and adolescence, about 10 – 13, are pivotal and strange and difficult and wonderful. I remember well the incongruity of that age and the struggle to self-define. I remember one afternoon in fifth grade, my mother took me shopping for my first bra. I was feeling so mature and sophisticated. Yet on the same trip, I talked her into buying me an inflatable Barbie pool. I remember feeling embarrassed about the childishness of the toy, but I really wanted it too...it’s that feeling I try to capture…a bra in one hand and a Barbie pool in the other.

Do you focus on fiction or nonfiction? Which do you prefer? Do you findone easier than the other?

Fiction. What I lack in research skills (hence the scanty portfolio of non-fiction), I make up for in imagination. I am also too lazy to write non-fiction—it’s a lot more work, and I have great respect for those that write it. I take the easy way out and just make stuff up.

Do you do other types of writing - for example, educational, nonfiction, magazine work?

I have written for The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, MotherVerse, Greenprints Magazine, Highlights for Children, and Knowledge Quest Magazine (the American Library Association’s Children’s Book Council publication). I am still actively marketing several pieces in the magazine market.

Have any of your books earned special recognition?

DISCOVERING PIG MAGIC was awarded the Milkweed Prize for Children’s Literature. It has received several positive, critical reviews. See my web site ( www.julie-crabtree.com ) for links.

What are you working on now? When do you expect to start submitting it to publishers?

The sequel to Pig Magic is completed and currently undergoing editorial grooming. My middle grade fantasy book THE HIDDEN ONES is completed, and will be submitted for consideration this spring. I am currently writing my first adult novel, and in the early stages of drafting the third and final of the Pig Magic series.

Do you like to include humor in your stories? Or adventure? Or mystery?

I love humor. It makes me laugh. You may have noticed my humor is not exactly sophisticated, and I tend to be a bit dry. My readers have told me they love the humor in my writing, so I guess I am not the only one with an oddly shaped funny bone.

When you do school visits, what question do children ask you most?

The kids always surprise me with their questions. How much money do you make, how old are you, can you tell me is that Wet and Wild Cherryberry lip gloss you’re wearing…those are the questions that let me know they have really connected to the story (those are real questions I have fielded). Seriously though, the kids usually ask fantastic questions, probing the characters’ actions for hidden motivations, searching for meaning, telling me how their own lives parallel a plot line within the book. I love talking with the kids in middle school. They have a lot to say.