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MEET PAUL ROBERT WALKER Keynote Speaker 2012
by Bonnie O'Brian

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

Paul Robert Walker

I come from a family in which writing is highly valued.

My maternal grandfather, Paul Hoff Kunst, emigrated from Denmark in 1912 and settled in the Chicago area. He worked as the Chicago correspondent for the Danish-language Danish Pioneer, published in Omaha, Nebraska, and later started his own Danish-language newspaper in Chicago. He also wrote a yearly satirical review for the Chicago Danish community, poking fun at local people in skits and parodies of popular songs—kind of like Saturday Night Live in Danish.

Paul Hoff Kunst was knighted by the King of Denmark for his contributions to Danish-American relations. Unfortunately, it was not a hereditary knighthood, or I could sign my books “Sir Paul Robert Walker.”

My grandfather died just before I was born. I was named after him, and my mother—his daughter—was and still is an excellent writer and lover of literature, who taught me from an early age that books are one of the most powerful forces in the world.

When you went to college, were you already pursuing a writing career?

I caught the theater bug in high school and attended the Boston University School of Fine Arts as an acting major. It was quite an honor, because BU was considered one of the top professional theater schools at that time, and I had to go downtown Chicago for an audition.

Boston was a fantastic place to go to school, and the BU acting program was very exciting—like the television show Fame, which you may still be able to see in reruns. I was a solid actor, but I found myself drawn more to writing. I had started writing in high school, keeping a journal in my theater and English classes, and I had a short story published in the school newspaper—my first experience with publishing. At BU, I turned my journal into a poetry notebook, and wrote a steady stream of poetry.

At the same time, I began to see that a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree in acting was very limited, because all of the classes were oriented toward professional theater training. I decided I wanted to study more about the world and go to a liberal arts college. I also decided that I wanted to see what it was like to live in California sunshine. I had never been to California (and I had never been to Boston before attending BU), but I took a chance and transferred to Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Although I didn’t know it when I transferred, Occidental had an outstanding Anglo-American literature faculty, as well as one of the foremost experts on Indo-European mythology in the world. I received an incredible undergraduate education, and grew as a writer. I had stories published in the Occidental literary magazine, and during my senior year, participated in a prestigious college poetry reading event and won third place in the college short story contest. The latter earned me the princely sum of $20.00...the first time I had ever gotten paid for my writing. I liked it.

What was your first job when you graduated from college?

After graduating magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, in Anglo-American literature from Occidental College in June 1975, I sold turquoise and silver jewelry on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California, from early September through Christmas. At that time, Berkeley was still a center of the hippie culture while also being a vibrant intellectual center, and I worked with and met a fascinating cross-section of people. I worked on commission, with $20/day guaranteed. To give you some perspective on what that meant: I paid $105/month rent for a studio apartment in a bad part of town. Most days I made $20-$35, but on December 23—two days before Christmas—I made a whopping $135 in commissions. So I went out with a bang.

I spent Christmas in Berkeley, and a few days later I sold my Volvo and flew back home to Evanston, Illinois. From there, I flew to Zurich, Switzerland, for the beginning of a three-month trip through eastern Europe, southern Europe, and West Africa. But that’s another story...

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

I experienced many rejections for poetry, short stories, and magazine articles. But my first book contract was actually offered to me, and it’s a strange, funny story. It started when I answered a classified advertisement in the Los Angeles Times that read: “Writers Wanted.” Now, normally, I would be skeptical of an ad like this, because it seemed too good to be true, but I decided to answer it.

It turned out to be a big publisher in San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ), looking for writers for a homework encyclopedia, a 4-volume set designed to help middle school students with their homework. I sent in a writing sample about the history of the theater—which I knew very well—and they immediately asked me to do another series of articles on folklore, which I also knew well. After that, they asked me if I wanted to write a book.

At that time HBJ owned a number of theme parks, including all of the Sea World sites. They wanted to sell the homework encyclopedia at their theme parks, and also wanted to offer two biography series, one for boys and one for girls. There would be four volumes in each series, and I was offered a list of possible subjects. I chose Roberto Clemente, because I was a serious baseball player as a kid, and I remembered how great Roberto was, especially against the Chicago Cubs.

Just as I finished the book, a big European publisher tried to take over HBJ. To fight the takeover, HBJ decided to raise money by selling their theme parks. So the project that included my book was stopped in its tracks. HBJ reviewed the manuscripts that had been submitted and decided that mine was the only one worth publishing. It no longer had to fit the series, so I was able to expand it to become a normal trade book to be sold in bookstores. That was PRIDE OF PUERTO RICO: The Life of Roberto Clemente (HBJ 1988), which is still in print today after more than 20 years The rest, as they say, is history..

What are the topics are some of your books?

I have written about so many topics that it makes me dizzy, and it might make you dizzy, too—but here’s a pretty good list: the American West, the Italian Renaissance, American & World folklore, the Johnstown flood, baseball, basketball, and miracles. I have often been asked if I see a connection among these topics, and I do...but I’m keeping it a secret for now. I’m venturing into a new topic in my next book, REMEMBER LITTLE ROCK: The Time, the People, the Stories, which deals with a key event in the American Civil Rights Movement (see below.)

Have any of your books earned special recognition?

My most recent book, REMEMBER THE ALAMO, won the 2007 June Franklin Naylor award given by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) for the best book for children and young adults on Texas history. The DRT manages and preserves the Alamo, so it’s special to receive this honor for this book from this organization, kind of like receiving an award from the pope for a book on the Vatican. A number of other books have also received honors from various organizations including the American Library Association, the National Council for the Social Studies, the Children’s Book Council, the American Folklore Society, School Library Journal, and Storytelling World.  GIANTS! was in the Elementary California Collection from 1997 to 2000 and in the Middle School Collection in 1999 and 2000. BIG MEN, BIG COUNTRY was in the 2003 Middle School California Collection and REMEMBER THE ALAMO is in the 2009 Middle School California Collection.

 Do you write every day and do you have set hours that you work?

I work all day every day, Monday through Friday, and sometimes on weekends. I don’t necessarily write every day, but I am always pushing my projects forward. I do a great deal of research for my books, as well as in my other job as an editorial consultant for a corporate client. The research takes much longer than the writing, so I am often reading, sending emails, on the phone doing interviews, or traveling to do research and interviews in person. I also spend a lot of time on the business side of being a writer, which includes everything from keeping accounts and invoicing customers to writing proposals for new projects. Being a writer is my job, and I work at it just like any dedicated person works at his or her job. It’s a job, but it’s the job I always wanted, and I am a fortunate person to be doing what I want to do for a living.

When is your next book going to be in book stores?

REMEMBER LITTLE ROCK: The Time, the People, the Stories (National Geographic) will be released in February 2009, to coincide with Black History month. It’s part of the same wonderful, award-winning National Geographic “Remember” series for which I wrote REMEMBER LITTLE BIGHORN and REMEMBER THE ALAMO . The Remember series presents historical events through eyewitness accounts and contemporary images.

This book focuses on the 1957 school desegregation crisis at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Nine courageous and committed black high school students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine, attended a previously all-white high school under a federal court order to integrate after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). Resistance to integration was so strong that Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the black students from entering the school. President Eisenhower ultimately sent the 101 st Airborne Division of the U.S. army to enforce integration. This was the first time I ever wrote a historical book in which many of the participants are still alive, and it was a very interesting experience. Terrence Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine, wrote the foreword for my book and served as my chief advisor on the project.

Has anyone ever written you a fan letter that you’d like to share?

I’ve received many wonderful letters from my readers, but I’m not comfortable sharing them on the web without their permission. However, I would like to share something a 4 th grade student said to me during a school visit. It was very early in my career, and BIGFOOT AND OTHER LEGENDARY CREATURES (HBJ 1992), had just been published. I was struggling to make a living and was seriously thinking of giving up my writing career to get a more traditional job. Since that time, I have visited many schools, but this was one of my first school visits and one of my first opportunities to meet my readers. After my presentation, a blonde-haired boy walked up to me and said, “Mr. Walker, I love your Bigfoot book. I sleep with it under my pillow every night.” That moment changed my life, because then I knew that what I was doing as a writer really mattered.