REMEMBERING EDITOR DINAH STEVENS0N (1942-2024): A Champion of Children’s Literature

Dinah Stevenson, 2017

I was sad to learn of the passing of Dinah Stevenson, long time editor at Clarion Books, where so many of my books have been published, the first Pets Without Homes (1983) and the most recent Global Warming and the Dinosaurs (2010).  Although Dinah was not my editor at Clarion, I knew her from attending Clarion events at conferences, visits to the Clarion office in New York, and other occasions. The last time I saw her was in Los Angeles in January 2017, when she came to accept the FOCAL award for Russell Freedman, an author she had worked with for many years.

Her obituary, highlighting her history and many achievements is in Publishers Weekly (Feb 1, 2024). Dinah was one of the great children's book editors. She will be greatly missed.

REMEMBERING MY EDITOR, VIRGINIA BUCKLEY (1929-2020)

Virginia Buckley, 2005

Amid all the momentous events of the past days, I learned that Virginia Buckley, my editor for more than ten years at Clarion Books, passed away on October 21, 2020, at the age of 91. Virginia had a distinguished career as a children’s book editor and I was proud to work with her. As one of Virginia's colleagues described her, she was “an old school editor.” She took a deep personal involvement in all the books she edited–from working with the author on revisions, to final editing and the production of the finished book. My years with Virginia were before the current age of online editing programs. My manuscripts were submitted on paper and came back peppered with corrections marked in red pencil. Comments were attached on yellow post-it notes to the side of the page. If a question arose, sometimes it was easier to discuss it over the phone. Together we made changes to make sure that the final product was the best that it could be.
Virginia’s  career in publishing began at Thomas Y. Crowell in 1971 and in 1980 she moved to Dutton to be editorial director of Lodestar Books. In 1997 she went to Clarion Books where she became my editor after Dorothy Briley, the editor I had worked with previously, died suddenly. Over the next thirteen years Virginia and I worked together on eight books.
Because Virginia lived on the East Coast and I in California, we did not meet in person very often. Occasionally I made a trip to New York, or I saw her at a national conference. The last time I saw Virginia was in 2005, when I received the Washington Post/Children’s Book Guild Award for Nonfiction for my body of work and she was invited to give my introduction at the award luncheon. (Unfortunately, my only photo of her is from that event and the picture is fuzzy because my camera did not work well in low light.)

Award from the Washington Post/Children's Book Guild

Many of the books Virginia and I worked on were illustrated with beautiful watercolor illustrations by Laurie Caple. Laurie put as much effort into researching her artwork as I did in researching my text. Virginia told a story about how Laurie had purchased a giant fossil tooth as a model for her illustrations for my book Giant Shark: Megalodon, Prehistoric Super Predator.

The last book I worked on with Virginia was Global Warming and the Dinosaurs, published in 2009, about dinosaurs that had lived in Earth’s polar regions. Virginia retired from Clarion in 2010 and I lost contact with her. I often think of her when I share my dinosaur and fossil books with children at my school visits. I was sad to hear of her passing. Her work will live on in the many books she edited, both mine and those of many other authors.

For more about Virginia Buckley and her work with other authors and editors, see her Obituary in Publishers Weekly.

 
My Clarion Books (Houghton Mifflin) edited by Virginia Buckley:
Giant Shark: Megalodon, Prehistoric Super Predator (2000)
Easter Island: giant Stone Statues Tell of a Rich and Tragic Past (2000)
Dinosaurs With Feathers: The Ancestors of Modern Birds (2001)
When Mammoths Walked the Earth (2002)
Uluru, Australia’s Aboriginal Heart (2003)
Pterosaurs, Rulers of the Skies in the Dinosaur Age (2007)
Giant Sea Reptiles of the Dinosaur Age (2004)
Giant Sea Reptiles of the Dinosaur Age (2007)
Global Warming and the Dinosaurs (2009)

SHADOWS ON A WALL: The Autobiographical Writings of Lester Lewis Scheaffer (edited by Caroline Arnold) now an ebook at Amazon

My father's memoir, SHADOWS ON A WALL: The Autobiographical Writings of Lester Lewis Scheaffer, is finally up at Amazon as an ebook. (I am the editor.) These are poems and essays about his family, growing up in Kenosha, Wisconsin in the 1920s and 1930s, and a few stories about his life as a settlement house worker. If you enjoyed reading his story, Celebration at Tea Lake (about the memorable family celebration of my parents' 13th wedding anniversary) that I recently posted at my travel blog (The Intrepid Tourist), you may enjoy reading his other stories too.
The title of the book comes from a quote by Wallace Stegner, saved by my father in a folder he called "food for thought."
I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine the life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or a rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?
Wallace Stegner, THE SPECTATOR BIRD, p. 162

My father passed away in 1994. Here is the editor's note I wrote when I published a paper copy of the book in 1996:

            My father, Les Scheaffer, began this project in the late 1980's after the completion of his book Lutie and Mercy Ann, A Story of the Lockridge-Gibson Family 1875-1918, an historical account of the lives of his maternal grandparents.  The new book was to be a collection of his writings about his own life--poems, essays and stories--that focused on his family, childhood, school and early social work experiences.  Some of the pieces had been written as part of a creative writing class at the College of Marin, others were occasional pieces and some were created specifically for this project.  Two of the stories are about Camp Bovey, perhaps the greatest achievement of his life.  He once wrote, “But if there was a contest I think I would win: Camp Bovey, seventeen summers!  That was my great luck and my great love.” 

            From the earliest years of his life my father was a saver and keeper of records.  Many of his writings include excerpts from diaries, letters and notebooks or were inspired by them.  In all the pieces in this book as well as his other creative writing he always had the support and encouragement of my mother who was his “in house” editor and critic.  Some of the later stories are about experiences they shared.

            Born in 1914 at the beginning of World War I, my father’s life encompassed the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War and tumult of the 1960s, moving from the Midwest, to the East Coast, back to the Midwest and finally to California.

            When my father died on May 1, 1994, he had made the final corrections on most entries but he had not yet begun assembling the book.  That job has fallen to me.  Not knowing exactly how he planned to organize the book, I have chosen to arrange the pieces chronologically and by theme.  Although I have listed myself as editor, I have changed as little as possible.  I have made a few spelling and punctuation corrections and, in a few cases, I’ve changed some words for clarity.  As far as I could tell he had not yet selected a title for the book, so I borrowed Shadows on the Wall from the Wallace Stegner quotation that he had chosen to be part of the book under a category he called “Food for Thought.”  The “shadows” in this book are vivid and multifaceted and tell us a great deal about the man that was my father.  We are fortunate that my father had the desire to tell the stories of his life and that he had the gift of telling them so well.  This book is a portrait of what it was like to grow up in a small Midwestern city in the 1920's and 30's and a glimpse into the lives of settlement workers just before and during World War II.  But that is not why he wrote it.  He wrote this book “for the kids” so that we might know a little of what made him the person he was.  For that I am glad.

                                                            Caroline Scheaffer Arnold

                                                            October 1996