I survived the attacks of September 11, 2001 – the graphic novel version of the latest in Lauren Tarshis popular I Survived – series for children. She talks about how it began.
“I started writing the series more than ten years ago. And I would say it was shaped by a couple of different forces. One – I had spent almost my entire career at Scholastic ( Books) in the magazine division… (It’s) whole mission is to take big important stories and engage kids…These are resources used in classrooms so I’ve spent a lot of my time with teachers and kids in class rooms I noticed that kids were always fascinated by history if there was a child at the center of the story. Even topics that seemed quote boring or irrelevant to them.
At the same time, I have four children,. and I just noted that I really did have trouble finding exciting meaningful stories for my kids to read… So with both those hats, my mother hat and my editor hat, my writer hat ..I saw this, kind of this little niche on the bookshelves. So that’s the long story about how it started…and It’s just kind of continued,”
“I started writing the series more than ten years ago. And I would say it was shaped by a couple of different forces. One – I had spent almost my entire career at Scholastic ( Books) in the magazine division… (It’s) whole mission is to take big important stories and engage kids…These are resources used in classrooms so I’ve spent a lot of my time with teachers and kids in class rooms I noticed that kids were always fascinated by history if there was a child at the center of the story. Even topics that seemed quote boring or irrelevant to them.
At the same time, I have four children,. and I just noted that I really did have trouble finding exciting meaningful stories for my kids to read… So with both those hats, my mother hat and my editor hat, my writer hat ..I saw this, kind of this little niche on the bookshelves. So that’s the long story about how it started…and It’s just kind of continued,”
The theme of my series is resilience, unity people pulling together. I try not to model an unrealistic vision of what resilience means I think people can overcome incredible hardship and loss. But it often takes time to heal. People need to know to ask for help.
So many times in life we go through things and we don’t realize that our children are going through them too. We think that they are in their own world, you know, and that they won’t notice these things. But they do and I think it’s just great that you’re pointing these things out.
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