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MEET BETSY FRANCO
by Bonnie O'Brian

What did you most like to do when you were a child?

Betsy Franco

Creativity was encouraged in the house where I grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio.  I thought I wanted to be an artist, and was a painting major at Stanford—even won the Humanities Award my senior year for the most likely to succeed as an artist. 

What was your first job when you graduated from college?

All the while I was painting on my own, I worked at educational publishers and taught in grades K-12, except third grade, in some capacity. 

How did your life change when you got married? and had children?

But once I had children—mischievous, creative sons who got into everything—it became harder and harder to take out my oil paints, which were literally poisonous to young children.

So...I figured I could write with just a pencil and paper.  I did an experiment to see if I could transfer my creativity from art to writing.  And it worked.  I wrote for educational publishers for years while writing my own books in the early morning hours and after my deadlines were met.

Where do you get your ideas?

My children and the children at their elementary school gave me ideas for my books.  My own childhood is always a resource, too.  But I find that although the emotions of children have always been the same (toys, playgrounds, technology, classrooms) of today's children are a bit different.

Do you do other types of writing?

About five years ago, one of my editors challenged me to write a novel, and I added novel-writing to my repertoire.  (Metamorphosis, Candlewick 2009, illustrated by my artist son Tom, audiobook by my actor sons James and Dave)  Along the way, I also started compiling anthologies of teenage work and getting it published.

What are the topics are some of your books?

One of my specialties is bringing math to life—showing how beautiful, sassy, creative, and fun it can be, such as in the book ZERO IS THE LEAVES ON THE TREE.  I like to do the same with poetry, which is what I've done in A CURIOUS COLLECTION OF CATS.  I've tried to literally bring cat poems to life through the words and the visuals.

What led you to write A CURIOUS COLLECTION OF CATS? Where did the original idea come from? Please share any stories about the writing process. 

I grew up with dogs, but in my adult life, my pets have all been cats.  At first I felt like a traitor, but now I adore felines.  I keep snippets of ideas in folders in my office.  Many of the ideas were about cats, and I've written many poems about the mischief my cats have gotten into.  Presently, my cats are Frida and Jada, but when I was writing the book, Lincoln and Jada were my companions.

Every morning, I wake up early, meditate, and write.  The cats are my companions, and they provide me with neverending visual antics to write about.  Going in and out the door over and over again, walking on my computer keys and adding to my email messages, coming inside with spiderwebs on their ears, catching spiders in the corner of my office for a breakfast snack.

It wasn't hard to write the collection with my subjects adding to the book every day.  I also talked to my neighbors and a cat-lover-friend in Minnesota about the strange and charming things their pets did.  Patch is a six-toed female cat across the street.  Rosie the dog used to carry Mathilda around in his mouth.

Once I got started, I realized what a rich subject cats are.  Actually, to be honest, I wrote visual poems about cats and dogs to begin with, and eventually narrowed it to cats because they were fighting for space.

Visual poetry came naturally because I was a painting major at Stanford, and everything is visual to me.  Cats lend themselves to this type of poem because they're always doing comical and beautiful things with their bodies.  I'd never seen a whole book of visual poems on the same subject.  But here it is.  Ta-da!

I wanted to show all kinds of visual poems, concrete and otherwise.  I tried to mix it up.  Some are shapes filled with words.  Some of the text is written in a way that reflects the subject, such as the bumpy line of "cat under a blanket."  Sometimes the way the poem is read is the visual aspect, such as "Princess," in which the reader reads up and down, up and down, the way a cat travels back and forth through my legs when it wants to be fed.  The text can be upside down if the cat is upside down.  The back and foreward slashes were perfect for a catdoor in "Cat Door."  Michael Wertz, the illustrator, is crazy creative and even hand lettered all the poems!

When revising the book, my new kitten Frida would sit in front of the computer and track the cursor.  If my email icon bounced up and down, her head would bounce up and down, too.  She's a nightmare on a desk, has no idea of desk etiquette.  She would run off with important post-its in her mouth and bat my pencils off the desk.

My cats always make me laugh.  This book was a lot of fun!

What led you to write ZERO IS THE LEAVES ON THE TREE? Where did the original idea come from? Please share any stories about the writing process. 

Zero is such an interesting subject.  It's the first official number.  It's got a real presence and importance.  Heck, we couldn't even have the number 10 without it.

The easiest part of writing this book was making the text beautiful and lyrical, because I see math that way, and always have.  The hardest part was figuring out a way to make it concrete enough. On each spread, I included "0 leaves," "0 ducks," "0 sounds," to make it more obvious and more concrete for kids, and that seemed to do the trick. 

I lived in Japan when I was five and six years old, so having Shino Arihara illustrate this book in such a simple, beautiful way really fit with the images I had in my head.  One of my favorite images is the boy looking for a ball in the empty bin.  I got that idea from the playground at the elementary school I walk to every morning (I'm the constantly visiting author).  The ball bin empties fast!"

How many books have you written?

Last count, I had over 80 books—picture books, poetry collections, nonfiction, anthologies, young adult novels, and innovative educational books.  I also invent toys. 

Is there anything about yourself that you’d like to share?

I'm proud to say that our sons are all artists of one kind or another.  James and Dave are actor/writers, and Tom is an illustrator/sculptor.  My husband Doug has a nonprofit to help women and children in third world countries.