DAVID HARRISON: It comes more naturally to me than anything else.

I can write about children and do, but I do like animals, and I'm at home there.

And you don't have to worry so much about whether it's a boy or girl, or what culture or whatever.

You can just write about animals doing animal things, and it's still something we can all relate to.

[theme music] Children's books and stories are their own special and endearing form of literature, engaging and entertaining like popular adult audience books, but with a child developing educational quality and focus.

Each of us can remember favorite children's books from our youth and often their contributions to our growth and learning.

My guest today is award-winning and well-known children's author David Harrison who will share his experiences and enjoyment of his craft.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

Well I'm joined by a very special guest today.

Thank you for taking time to come and talk to us.

Jim, thank you for inviting me.

I'm just delighted to be here.

You have a long history of accomplishments and things that we want to talk about.

But why don't we just start off and talk a little bit about your background, where you grew up.

DAVID HARRISON: Sure, yeah.

I was born here.

Not here here, but in Springfield.

JIM BAKER: [chuckling] And, when I was about five, my mother and dad and I moved to a little town in Arizona, spelled A-J-O, pronounced Ah-ho.

It was a mining corporation town, copper mining, and my dad took a job out there for about five years.

The second World War ended, we could get gasoline and tires again, so we came back home.

And Dad started a concrete block company, Glenstone Block Company.

And I became a third grade student at Oak Grove Elementary School, which is now a headquarters for the Junior League, but then it was a great school.

And then, where did you go to high school?

I went-- well when I went in town to go to middle school-- junior high school then, of course-- it was Jarrett.

And then from Jarrett over to Central.

And at that time, in the 50s, there were two high schools in town, one for the white kids and one for the black kids-- Lincoln and Central.

And Central had something like 3,000 kids or something.

It was just quite big.

Parkview opened, I believe, the year after I graduated.

So I was in central.

I fell in love with a classmate who was a little bit younger than I.

So when it came time for me to go to college, I was trying to decide if I wanted to become an entomologist, study entomology, and I had fellowships around the area-- well, in Kansas, and Arkansas, and Missouri.

But I just couldn't go off and leave her because I knew somebody else would get her.

JIM BAKER: [chuckling] DAVID HARRISON: You know, when you're that age, you have your priorities straight.

JIM BAKER: Right.

So I went across the street to Drury, which turned out to be a wonderful decision for all kinds of reasons.

And at Drury I stayed with science.

But it was too early to specialize anyway at that point, so I was mostly in just science classes, and physics, and chemistry, and biology of various kinds, and mathematics.

And that was what I did at Drury.

Yeah, it kind of jogged a little memory for me in the sense that one time I was talking to a student and I said, "How come you chose Missouri State?

", because I thought it was because of the academic programs, or the cost, or whatever.

And he said, "Well, my girlfriend's coming here."

Sure.

And I thought, well OK, DAVID HARRISON: [chuckling] --That simplifies it down a little.

DAVID HARRISON: It makes a very-- Makes you a little bit more humble in you're thinking, I suppose, as well.

Now did you go, did you go on to graduate school?

I did, yes.

When I finished Drury, I wasn't quite sure what I should do next with an undergraduate degree in science and zoology, really.

And my advisor was Doctor Laura Bond, a wonderful woman and Professor and friend.

She advised me to try Emory.

A friend of hers, Chauncey Goodchild, who, at one time, was head of Biology here at MSU, was then, at that point, head of the department at Emory.

So, I took a test, a very long-- I think it was two days.

Anyway, I qualified, and they gave me the best fellowship they had.

And I was thrilled.

There was just one caveat, I had to study parasitology-- JIM BAKER: [chuckling] --because that's what his fellowship was in, and he was able to give these big fellowships, his grant rather.

He was able to give good fellowships because he was an authority on the study of parasites, and so, his grant recipients had to study parasitology.

So that was the last thing on my list of interest, but it was good money, and paid my way to go to school.

JIM BAKER: A very prestigious school.

DAVID HARRISON: Yes it was.

And so I became, for a brief period of time, an expert on a little tapeworm found only in rats named hymenolepis diminuta.

And I could go on about that, but nobody cares, including the rats.

I couldn't get a job after I graduated.

JIM BAKER: When I was working on my PhD the major professor said your job is to learn more and more about less and less.

So I think that's exactly what happens, you get slotted off.

I think this is going to go in a circle, but how in the world did you get involved into poetry as you were working through the science side of things?

It does come back later on in your work.

DAVID HARRISON: Yeah.

Big time.

Mm-hmm.

Oh, yeah.

My last semester at Drury, which is, if you know a liberal arts philosophy-- Drury aims to give their graduates a rounded view of the world, but I hadn't done that.

Apparently I had taken too many labs.

Doctor Clippinger, Frank Clippinger, was the dean, academic dean, at that time.

And he called me in his office and gave me a hard time just as I was getting ready to enroll for my last semester, second half of my senior year.

And he said, I don't care what you take, but you can't have any more science.

You've got to get out of the science building.

So I took a history class, and one of drama, and one called comparative schools of psychoanalytic thought-- that sounded like fun-- and a creative writing class.

And again, Doctor Bond was instrumental in that because the guy who taught-- Clark Graham-- Doctor Graham taught the creative writing class.

I had no requisites whatever for that class.

I had no business being in it.

But she and he were friends.

And so she sweet talked him into letting me in.

She just slyly suggested that I should put that on my schedule and see what happened.

And her reckoning was that her roommate when she was at Wellesley was brilliant and did her research on Drosophila, the fruit fly.

But when it came to writing her PhD, she failed.

She couldn't write complicated stuff.

So she figured out for me, before I knew it, that I should profit from having a creative writing class.

So I did.

I got in there.

And Doctor Graham came in the first day, he had a wonderful voice, music to hear.

He was a former Shakespearean actor on top of everything else.

And he said, well, in my course this semester you can write poetry, you can write a short story, a play, start a novel.

Well, I was terrified.

I was used to dissecting cats and that sort of thing in the laboratory.

But I did eventually write a story which he liked and bragged on.

And at the end of the semester, as I was graduating, I was going to be married the week after that, and then shortly after that, I'd be heading to Emory.

And he said, I know you're going into science, but you're very good with words.

And I urge you to keep that thought in mind.

And there's no reason why you can't be a writer as well as a scientist.

So I carried that around in my head.

For some reason it became very important to me.

It was a change point in my life.

I wasn't expecting it, and once again, a teacher saw something in a student that the student didn't know was there.

And pulled it out on me to the point that I went to Emory, extremely busy with the research involved there.

Married, as I said.

Our first child was born, Robin, our daughter, while we were still in Atlanta.

And I went to Mead Johnson in Evansville, Indiana.

They didn't have any openings for a parasitologist, but they did have one for a pharmacologist, and they wondered if I could handle that.

And I said, of course I can.

I had no idea what a pharmacologist did.

And it turned out I could handle it, and was promoted and so forth.

But I spent my days in the laboratory injecting animals with chemical compounds of one kind or another, always looking for the next breakthrough in medicine.

But at night, after Sandy was in bed and Robin was asleep, I began to pursue that dream that had been latent for quite some time at that point.

And I would write a story.

And I felt so sure it was perfect because I had written it, and I had a professor who told me I was good.

And, of course, it was just terrible writing.

It was absolutely atrocious, I know.

I would show it to Sandy the next day and she would do her very best to be a good soldier about it and say, Oh honey that's just really nice.

[chuckling] JIM BAKER: Nice is not a good word sometimes, is it?

Yeah, uh-huh.

Or cute, there's another one she would try once in a while.

But the proof was when I would send a story off someplace and, of course, it came back.

And a lot of stories went out and a lot of stories came back for the next six years.

Were they mostly just short stories, I take it, or was there poetry involved, or was it mostly just doing stories?

DAVID HARRISON: I was still writing for adults at that point.

I hadn't yet discovered that I would eventually become a children's writer.

JIM BAKER: Right.

I was hot after John Updike.

I was about to become the next short story writer of fame.

I just knew it was in me.

It wasn't.

The short stories, were they mostly focused on kind of science and things from your background, or was it just-- DAVID HARRISON: Whatever.

JIM BAKER: --sort of whatever?

I had a wide range of interests, and so some were science, some were not.

I did get one or two published, but I still hadn't done what I wanted to do.

I wasn't there.

And after three years at Mead Johnson, I convinced myself-- now this is something that it takes a young man to do-- I convinced myself that it was somebody else's fault that I wasn't getting published, it couldn't be mine.

It must be the environment.

It must be because what I did during the day was very serious work.

We had to sign off on one another's papers-- JIM BAKER: Sure.

--the day's research, and initial it or sign it.

And I had to sign with that middle initial, which is where the David L. Harrison came along, way, way, way, back.

Well, Sandy, being at all times a wonderful partner, agreed that if I felt that it was time to make a change that was OK.

It wasn't all because of writing.

I also was not terribly fond of what I was doing during the day.

And to be promoted further would take a PhD, which I was offered a couple of pretty good opportunities, but it would involve a great deal more chemistry.

JIM BAKER: Right.

And I can handle a lot of things, but chemistry wasn't on my top 10.

And so I was weighing that against what I really wanted to do, and, eventually, started sending out query letters to companies around the Midwest.

I wanted to get back closer to Springfield, Missouri, and no farther away than Dallas, or Wichita, or Tulsa, just in the general area.

I don't know how many letters I mailed out, probably, I want to say, 50-- that may be an exaggeration-- but a lot.

Almost nobody responded, however Hallmark Cards did, in Kansas City.

And they indicated that there could be some interest in having me come because I had, on my little form that I filled out and mailed, indicated that I did some writing.

I still wasn't published.

Sandy and I went on vacation and returned here to Springfield.

And while we were here, I called Hallmark and said, I'm this close.

I don't have an appointment to see you, but what would you think?

Should I just maybe drive up?

Would somebody be able to talk to me?

And they said, sure come on up.

I did.

I was interviewed by actually the head of the vice president of research for Hallmark.

They assumed that with my background that's where they would put me if they put me anywhere.

After a day of it they also introduced me to the vice president of editorial, because something I said or how I said it made them think that I might be an editor.

Eventually, they offered me a job as an editor for Hallmark Cards, and I accepted.

Went back to Springfield, packed up, went back home to give my notice in Evansville.

There was a letter waiting for me in Evansville, and it was a rejection letter from Hallmark Cards that I didn't know I had.

It had arrived after I had left to come here.

So Hallmark didn't know that I didn't know that they had already turned me down.

They thought I was so eager to be hired that I wouldn't take no for an answer.

I believe that's why I got the job.

Anyway, I wound up, I left off operating on cats one week at Mead Johnson and a couple of weeks later I was editing cards.

And they gave me children's cards because the children's editor had recently left town and there was an opening.

And so I was editing cards for kids.

I was still writing for adults at night.

But that's where the-- eventually something happened that made me think, maybe I should try writing for kids and I eventually did.

So were the cards the kind with the little insets with the small, some verses in it and things like that, or was it a larger kind of a document?

Well, my job at Hallmark began as an editor.

Just going through drawers that had thousands and thousands of sentiments in, and pulling it out, and assigning a sentiment to a stock number, and all that, and trying to balance the line so that there's something for everyone.

I was promoted over the years until I was-- when I left I had been the editorial manager for some time.

So I was responsible for all the sentiments published by Hallmark Cards.

So it was something like a billion dollars worth of business at that point that I was-- editorially speaking-- I was responsible for.

But I wasn't writing at any time for Hallmark.

I was strictly an editor.

JIM BAKER: Yeah.

DAVID HARRISON: Yeah.

But that's where the writing for kids happened at night while we were in Kansas City.

So, when did you start really developing the interest in doing the children's poetry?

Was it during that time at Hallmark?

Yeah, it was.

I had been interviewed in the "Kansas City Star" about an adult story of mine that had received an award.

So, someone called me-- I don't remember who-- to talk about that story, and during the course of it said, I noticed that you are an editor for Hallmark Cards.

At that point, I was still the children's editor.

She said, I suppose you write for children, too.

I said, no.

She said, well I guess I'm surprised.

And that sort of triggered me thinking, well, it's not a bad thing to do.

And I eventually tried that and it became a book called "The Boy With a Drum", and I sold it in 1967.

It came out two years later, 1969, and it sold two million copies.

So I thought maybe I should go back and write another one.

JIM BAKER: Yeah, I would think so.

Now, was that a regular, was that in the poetry form or was it just a regular story?

It was in rhyme.

It wasn't a poem, but it was a story in rhyme, and there is a difference.

But I grew up liking things that rhyme.

My mother was good at it.

I was pretty good at it, although I had never had a particular reason to do it.

But it came naturally to me.

So, "There once was a boy with a little toy drum.

Rat-a-tat tat-a-tat, Rum-a-tum-tum."

is how this story began.

But still, I didn't turn to poetry until almost 25 years after that.

When I went to work at Hallmark, one of the things I picked up was a book on poetry by Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum.

And it turned out to be another changing situation for me because I read that book on how to write poetry-- well, it wasn't on how to write poetry, it was an explanation of poetry-- and I read it more than once over the next several years.

And I kept thinking, it's kind of a different area for me.

But I started off with writing fiction, and then, some years later, I added non-fiction, and then, some years later, I thought, I need another something.

And so it was finally time to try poetry.

So I took off three years from my normal writing, and wrote nothing but poetry for three years, and accumulated about 100 poems.

I threw away a lot, but that's what I kept, and I should have thrown away most of them.

But I was in England on a trip to see an editor there who had published something of mine, and she had another visitor there at the same time who turned out to be somebody from "Highlights for Children" in Honesdale, Pennsylvania.

But the woman had been born in England, not too far from where I met her.

She said, what are you working on?

I told her poetry, and she said, oh, I love poetry.

You must send me your poems.

I'm thinking, it's a magazine, lady, maybe one poem a month.

I've got 100, do the math.

But she was such a persuasive woman with a wonderful English accent.

I sent her the whole shoebox full of them.

And she said, well what you don't know is that we're starting a book company, and Kent Brown is the editor.

He was also the main guy at "Highlights," the editor-in-chief.

But he wanted to do a line of books of poetry.

So he hired a woman who was an NYU professor, Bernice Cullinan, and a former president of-- it was International Reading Association then, now it's ILA-- Literacy Association.

So, she was his editor-in-chief for poetry.

They got their heads together and read my poems, and flew me to Pennsylvania.

And I had a nice long talk with Kent Brown.

And he said, well I want to be your publisher of poetry.

And I said, well, I don't know anything about publishing poetry.

Do I have enough here for a book?

And he said, well, we think you have enough for probably five books.

So, he said, if it's OK with you, we'll just have a handshake contract here that, until death do us part, or until either of us is unhappy, I want to publish five books of your poems.

And so, it turned out to be more like 15, but that's how we started.

Well fast forwarding a little bit, we've got a few minutes left.

Obviously, you've been very successful.

One thing I love about working at the university is that you can watch faculty as they work with students and triggering different kinds of thoughts in them.

It's such a spectacular feeling to watch that develop.

So I'm really happy to hear your story.

You became a Poet Laureate of Drury.

Is that a title you still-- I still have it.

JIM BAKER: --you still retain?

It started with John Moore, in the 80s, when he was president.

And one evening I was at a back table at a banquet, an awards banquet, and John was sitting up front trying his best to stay alive and interested while a couple of gasbags just went on and on and on and on with their acceptance speeches.

And I could tell he was glazing over, and everybody had to pee.

It was just a terrible evening.

And so I started a poem about the pain and so on.

I finished it when I got home and eventually I sent it to Dr. Moore.

And he liked it so much he had me sign it, and he framed it and put it on his office wall.

And he named me Drury's Poet Laureate.

JIM BAKER: Of course you've had a lot of accolades and lot of honors, and you have an elementary school named after you.

I always thought that's a pretty cool kind of a thing.

Are you still actively doing children's poetry and publishing?

Oh, yes.

2020, in spite of all the problems, has been a wonderful year for me as a writer.

I've had four new books come out, numbers 97, 98, 99 and 100.

100 just came out last week.

And yesterday I had a Zoom conference about number 99 at the virtual NCTE conference.

And this afternoon at 2 o'clock I have one coming up with number 100.

JIM BAKER: One thing I was going to ask you about, too-- and we just have a couple of minutes-- is you're doing a lot of your children's poetry about animals.

DAVID HARRISON: Mm-hmm.

So, can you kind of explain just a little bit-- of course with your science background and with the writing background-- DAVID HARRISON: Well, yes.

It comes more naturally to me than anything else.

I can write about children, and do, but I do like animals, and I'm at home there.

And you don't have to worry so much about whether it's a boy or girl, or what culture or whatever.

You can just write about animals doing animal things, and it's still something we can all relate to.

JIM BAKER: Yeah, I saw the one that you were doing about nocturnal animals.

I thought that was pretty fascinating.

DAVID HARRISON: Thank you.

"After Dark" was the first book that came out this year.

JIM BAKER: Yeah, so you you've been very active with that book.

I really-- well, we could talk forever.

I was going to ask you a whole bunch of real technical questions about how you construct a poem for a child, but we'll get into that maybe a different show.

But I really do appreciate your taking time to be with me today.

Oh, thank you.

I've loved every minute of it.

JIM BAKER: Thank you very much.

We'll be back in a moment.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

Children's authors and their work provide many life enriching benefits to young readers among those, enhanced concentration, creativity, communication, and language skills.

They become the foundation for future educational enjoyment and success.

I want to thank David Harrison for being my guest today and invite you to join us next time for "OzarksWatch Video Magazine."

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