Heidi EY Stemple and Andrea Page, hosts for our Working Retreat: Nonfiction and Informational Fiction, joined Highlights Foundation Social Media Manager Cat Galeano on Instagram Live to talk about researching and writing nonfiction for children.

Watch the conversation below. (Please note: closed captions are being added to the video below. When they are finished, you can see them by hovering over the bottom of the video and choosing the “CC” icon.)

Full Transcript:

Cat:
A big hello to our Highlights Foundation family. We’re so happy to have you here with us. For those that may not know me, I’m Cat Galeano, my pronouns are she/her. I’m the social media manager at the Highlights Foundation, joining you from Westchester, New York on the traditional lands of the Seewanoy people. Apart from all the fun things I get to do at the Highlights Foundation, I am also a writer and a reader myself, who’s very excited to welcome our friends and faculty Heidi EY Stemple and Andrea Page, who will be hosting the Working Retreat: Nonfiction and Informational Fiction on our beautiful Highlights Foundation campus next month, May 16th through the 19th, with special guest editor Eileen Robinson.

Yeah, but before we dive in, I just wanted to remind our viewers that joining in on any Highlights Foundation sessions, to do so with no hate, no harm and no harassment of any kind.

And now let’s get started. So my first question is for you, Heidi, I love the topic of your presentation, which for those that may not know, if you are coming to a working retreat, our, our hosts will have special presentations per day. So please please please go check on the website. But Heidi’s in specific is called “Help! My manuscript isn’t working. Getting back to the basics of, the basics to revise.” Can you tell us, Heidi, about a recent time where you took your own advice, and went back to the basics to get to a breakthrough?

Heidi:
Absolutely. First of all, I’ve been doing this specific presentation in many different forms and I, I sort of decided that instead of a talk, since this was a retreat, I thought I’d do a little, a little bit more of a workshop where we’re really sort of getting down and dirty and working on either identifying or working directly in our manuscripts. And I’m switching the whole thing to a nonfiction presentation, so it should be super fun, but yeah, I think my writing style is super linear. I love to sit down, write the the beginning and then just write until I can’t write anymore. Sometimes it’s usually about 2/3 of the way 3/4 of the way, you know about there, where you get stuck, but, but sometimes it’s just straight through the end and so I always am revising; like revision is where I find the actual story. So sometimes I research ahead of time, but not always. Sometimes I just write and then I go back and do all the big research and fix what I’ve written. Like I, I, for Counting Birds, I wrote a whole list of birds in the book itself. And then I went back and did the research and realized that some of the birds that I had said, weren’t actually counted on that first count. So for me it’s always going back to those things. Yeah.

Eileen and I are actually in the middle of doing a mini right now, so an online presentation for Highlights last night and tomorr–and tonight; I should remember that. And we we broke down looking at nonfiction texts in, with four different things. So: the word choices, tone, arc and heart. And so I’m actually going to, to expand on that to really look at the arc, but also the balance within that arc and that sort of thing. So but as a, a project that I just worked on, I actually grabbed this one. This is a new book that’s coming out in July, which I’ll be bringing to Highlights. And that was, that was a super linear project too. Except that, except that I wrote it, I wrote it about 7 times before it even got to the place where it was submission-ready. And I mean, then writing within those researching and fixing it, revising within those seven to seven, really seven different books. So it was all about going back and looking at my word choices and deciding it was just totally wrong. And how could I make it better? So that’s that’s my process.

Cat:
I don’t know if you want to add to that, Andrea. If you’ve had any breakthroughs with, with going back to basics with your revisions.

Andrea:
Well. Heidi, I’m excited for Heidi’s workshop. The way she’s talking about it and you know, it’s always good to learn and the revising part I think is where the work happens and you’re writing and trying out different ways and different points of view and different structures and, and I think that’s been a big aha for me because I think going through the revision process helps you to find that heart of the story. Or that “why” that will keep readers coming back, and it’s always so hard to get that emotional “why.” And that comes in the revision part. So, I’m excited, so.

Cat:
I, I’m jelly I can’t be there because this, this, this already sounds so cool because revision is a scary thing. For me at least because I’m just like “I don’t know what I’m doing. I keep rewriting this.” So I’m glad that you’ll, you’ll sort of break it down for our people that will be there.

So my second question is: we know that one of the cool aspects of the working retreat is time to actually work on your project while sharing community with other creative people. Andrea, we also know that you’re going to be giving a talk about research tips and tricks. When you come to a retreat like this, what does your process look like? Have you done the research and now you’re going to focus on the words or are you diving in and drilling on the research trip, to get the words later? How are you balancing this? And also Heidi, please feel free to answer as well.

Andrea:
That’s a big question. Whenever I go to Highlights and I’ve been, you know, kind of blessed to be able to go to Highlights many times now, I do bring work in progress, a couple of them. And, but Highlights tends to be very magical and things happen very unexpectedly. Like last year, when I was doing my research presentation, a new topic kind of made its way into my life that I’ve been trying to work on for the year. So research is dependent on like your curiosity and your wonder, and I love researching and I tend to research all the way through a project beginning, middle, end. So I’m going to be sharing tips and tools again like I, I did. It will be a little bit different than last year. Being in Highlights in community with people makes such a difference and you never know what’s going to happen.

Cat:
And so exciting because I know we can’t give away those tips and tricks and you just simply have to join us on campus for that.

Andrea:
Right.

Cat:
Thank you, Thank you for letting us know that, like you did, you bring different works in progress, and so you research kind of through that is wonderful. Heidi, you wanted to add anything?

Heidi:
I have to say when we were putting this together, when I was approached: “say, you wanted, do you want to do this and? And what would you like to do? And they said, well, Andrea Page is going to be along and I said: she must speak about research. Her talk needs to be about research because I consider Andrea a master researcher. They have friends who, like me, I love to do research. But I sort of, I don’t dig in real deep in the beginning, I kind of do it all the way along. But I, I when I watch Andrea talk about the research she does in the beginning, it just gets like, it gets me so excited about doing research. So I was really happy, Andrea, that you decided to do that.

And I’ve decided that in these working retreats that I will try, I will try–again, you never know when you get there–what, what you’re going to work on, and also if a revision is going to come in. If I get a revision come in, I may have to jump out and do that. But I did, it was on, I was visiting my daughter and I went to a place–I won’t tell you now where it was, because the ideas is just percolating. And I went into the gift shop. And said oh, I want to see all the children’s books that have been written about this. There were none.

So today I have been going through and printing out a ton of research because I thought well, maybe that’s my sign to write this book and it’s, it’s an eco, an ecological humans and animals. You know: humans do bad things and then they do good things kind of feel-good story. So that’s, that’s my thought and maybe I’ll be sitting with Andrea on a porch doing research.

Cat:
Yeah, that is so exciting as, as someone who used to be a former journalist, research is kind of a thing I love to do. So I’m so, so jelly I’m not going to be able to be at this retreat. But people, please, please, please, be there and maybe you’ll give me a little tips that were, you can leak a little tips from from these brilliant minds. So our third question is:what do you hope people leave the retreat with, in their journey to inspire kids through story?

Heidi:
Andrea, do you wanna start?

Andrea:
Sure. I hope that people will leave more confident in their writing projects and that they’re going to be encouraged and inspired being in community with people. I love that part because I like to brainstorm ideas back and forth. If you get stuck on something, it helps to just talk about it and journal about it. And then all of a sudden you, you find the right path to go on. So just being creative and having more confidence in yourself as a writer and being inspired. I hope that’s how people walk away from the Highlights retreat this year.

Heidi:
So mine kind of dovetails exactly with that, which is I think writing can be a super lonely business. The journey is occasionally just you and the people in your head talking to you. So I hope they come away with it with a new sense of community. Maybe even some new writing partners or critique partners. I think that writing can be daunting. Like it’s, it can be intimidating when you sit down with the blank page or you, your critique partners or an editor say you need to revise this. So I hope they come away with a new set of tools for writing and revision and research.

And I think that life can just make that, keep, prioritize writing and creativity in general, so hope they come away with sort of a refresh, a refreshed sense of their creative self. Those are my, are my 3 wishes.

Andrea:
That’s an awesome way to describe it.

Cat:
And, and it helps that you don’t have to do anything while you’re at Highlights. Everything will be taken care of for you. All your basic necessities are taken care of for you. So all we want you to do is to be on campus. To be in community, to brainstorm, to research, to learn, to absorb, to write, to do whatever it is that you need in your process. But to join us, so we truly, truly hope we see you next month. And Heidi and Andrea, is there anything you’d like to add before we wrap up?

Heidi:
My goodness. I yeah, go ahead.

Andrea:
No, I was just going to say thank you for the invitation to do something new. And people getting, you know, are able to do something new at Highlights with us. Heidi is amazing. You know Alison’s amazing, the whole community, so thankful and grateful for Highlights.

Heidi:
Yeah. And I’m just really excited to get back on campus because I haven’t been there in a little while and it really is magic there. I always come up with something new that I, I had no idea that I had in me. I just…actually I have, I have some really exciting projects brewing that started there or started there because of the connections I made there. So yeah, I’m really excited to be there. I’m excited to work with Andrea and see you again. And I’m excited to see Eileen. I know she and I are gonna hole up in a cabin and talk about some projects we’ve got going on. And I hope to see you all there.

Cat:
We can’t wait to see you. If you’d like to spend time on our beautiful campus with Heidi and Wendy, please–sorry, Heidi and Andrea. Geez. So sorry, Heidi and Andrea, please make sure to sign up for the Working Retreat: Nonfiction and Informational Fiction, running May 16th through May 19th with special guest editor Eileen Robinson. You can register on our website highlightsfoundation.org and lastly you can purchase Heidi and Andrea’s books at our virtual bookshop, poweredby bookshop.org. Thank you so much, Heidi. Thank you so much, Andrea, for joining us today and we can’t wait to see you on campus.

Heidi:
Thanks Cat.

Andrea:
Bye everyone and thank you so much.