Linda Sue Park: A Writer Found

This Newbery Award winning author has globetrotted through history to find her true calling

There is a very special check that hangs in a frame over Linda Sue Park's father's desk. The check, which has never been cashed, was made out to his then nine-year-old daughter and was payment (to the tune of one dollar) for her first published poem - a haiku in the Winter 1969 edition of Trailblazer magazine. As her father has never forgotten his daughter's first brush with life as a published writer, Linda Sue Park has never forgotten that it was her dad who led her into the wonderful world of books.

As soon as she knew how to read, her father diligently kept track of which and how many books each of his children was reading and was constantly on the lookout for good books for them to read. "I don't know how other people think of their fathers, but the strongest image I have of him is associated with his library patronage on our behalf," she told us.

Family history. Linda Sue Park is a special breed of author who writes so convincingly about the past it's as if she herself has actually lived these stories from a time long gone. She has given us such spectacular glimpses into Korea's storied past with books such as A Single Shard (Clarion, 2001), The Kite Fighters (Dell Yearling, 2000) and seesaw Girl (Dell Yearling, 1999), we were surprised to learn that she can only speak and read a small amount of Korean.

As a kid growing up in Chicago, even though there were definitely Asian influences in her life, Linda Sue considered her family to be very Americanized. Both of her parents hail from South Korea, yet met as college students in the United States. She told us she didn't know much about her parents' lives in Korea until she began writing for children. It was when she was researching her novel, When My Name was Keoko (Dell Yearling, 2002) that so many stories from her parents' lives in Korea came bubbling to the surface. "My parents seemed to think there was nothing special about their lives," she remarked, "but I couldn't believe some of the things they went through."

Get ready. Like most authors, Linda Sue Park's journey to becoming a full-time writer for children didn't exactly come easy. After graduating with a degree in English from Stanford University, she returned home to Chicago to take on a job as a public relations writer for a large multinational oil company. Although she knew in her heart that she could not be happy long doing what she was doing, she learned a valuable lesson. By really immersing one's self in the topic at hand, a writer could make nearly any subject interesting - even oil.

While she was working hard at transforming oil into good reading, Linda Sue met her husband - an Irishman who, she says, swept her off her feet. Eventually he had to return to Ireland and she decided that she was going to go with him and attend graduate school in Dublin. From Dublin, the couple went on to London where Linda Sue gave birth to their first child, a son. During her pregnancy, she began reacquainting herself with the books she had loved as a child and couldn't wait to share with her son. "And so, in pregnancy with my son, I began to read children's books again. I thought it was to get ready for him, but actually what I was doing was getting ready for me," she said.

Hyper antennae. Thanks to a woman she had met in the maternity ward who remembered she had a graduate degree in English, Linda Sue later got a job teaching English as a second language at Richmond College, an American-affiliated college. "When you teach ESL, you have to have hyper antennae for language and be aware of every single nuance," she told us. Even after her family's move to the United States three years later, Linda Sue continued to teach ESL. Yet her thoughts of one day writing a book were still, as she put it, "floating around."

A good kick. Apparently, Linda Sue had been expressing her desire to write more than she realized. When she approached her husband in the summer of 1997 to ask how many hours she should teach that summer, he suggested that she take the summer off to write a book. "And so that summer, with the kick in the pants from my husband, I wrote what became seesaw Girl," she laughed. By the time seesaw Girl was accepted for publication, Linda Sue was already well on her way to finishing writing The Kite Fighters and A Single Shard. "The first books were bought and published in such quick succession, that it was total shock for me to win the Newbery Award for A Single Shard," she remembered.

Well, with 11 books either in print or under contract, we're happy to report that the shock is finally over. Linda Sue Park's writing has always had a special place in her father's heart, and now her books have earned a coveted spot in the hearts of children as well.

BY KATHERINE PIERPONT,

SENIOR EDITOR

Copyright Early Years, Inc. Nov/Dec 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved