Cynsations Intern: Stephani Eaton on The Joy of Writing

Stephani Eaton, photo by Tanya Odom

By Stephani Eaton
for Cynthia Leitich Smith's Cynsations

When I was in second grade, I wrote a poem about an impending storm that pleased my dad so much that he hung it in his office. It stayed there for years.

I recently asked if he remembered what it said and he rattled off: “This dark and rainy noon will soon pass the sunset of time.”

I had to laugh at the melodrama of my seven-year-old self. Laughed and said, “What on earth does that mean?”

He defended my first “serious” writing attempt as the start of my writing journey.

Second grade was a pivotal year, one in which words came alive for me. I remember bringing a story to Mrs. Giannone’s desk and in the middle of reading it she put her head on her desk and fell asleep!

Well, she didn’t really fall asleep, but I had used the word “nice” and she was showing me how boring that was for a reader. Her reaction amused me to no end. It lit up my brain and made me want to write, write, write.

Young Stephani at the keyboard

Yet, I learned later that too much pizazz in the writing just gets in the way of meaning. My dad would harp on me to “say what I mean” and not to embellish too much. In a book report on Ivanhoe, I had cooked up some flowery sentences. He asked what they meant and I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t know. Finally, after much back and forth and lots of frustration, I told him that I was just trying to say that the book made me think.

“Say that!” he said. He taught me not only the importance of clarity but precision. That’s what you get when your dad has a PhD in biochemistry but loves to read literature and history. The copy he gave me of Ernest Hemingway’s On Writing (Grafton Books, 1986) is still on my shelf.

In sixth grade, Mrs. Siltman told me I was good at reading and writing only after she told me I needed to stay in for recess because I talked too much. This is probably the year that I discovered Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabitha (Crowell, 1977) and Gilly Hopkins (Crowell, 1978). And it was one year before I met Anne of Green Gables (by L.M. Montgomery, L.C. Page & Co., 1908).

I wore those books out. All the while I was writing, writing, writing at home. We had gotten a new Apple IIc computer and it had Print Shop software on it. I obsessively made newspapers filled with stories of our family life to send to my out-of-state-grandparents. Grandparents are the best audience. 

In high school, the boy who sat in front of me in AP English frustrated me to no end. He aced all the timed writings and our teacher frequently used his work as the model to which to aspire. I was a good student, but no standout.

The same was true of my undergrad experience. I earned a BA in English and secondary education with a journalism add-on, but not with stellar grades. After graduation, I taught middle school and loved it. I had a whole crop of kids to introduce to books and writing. An added bonus, I got to teach my beloved Gilly Hopkins.

I needed to get a Master’s to continue teaching, so I decided I would pursue my first love and what I felt I never had time for in undergrad: creative writing. I worked and worked on a manuscript. I had no idea what I was doing.

I was promptly rejected. Several years and two babies later, I sat back down to write. It felt familiar. It felt right. But it was hard. I realized quickly that I needed and wanted to learn more. I wanted to take all those creative writing courses that I never took in undergrad, that I wanted to take in graduate school. So, I applied to four MFA writing programs.

I was promptly rejected.

It would have been wise for me to remember what I knew as a second grader, that: “this dark and rainy noon will soon pass the sunset of time.”

I boxed up my seventeen drafts that weren’t getting me into school.

And I started over.

I did what I could. I joined a critique group, went to some conferences, and listened to webinars. I read craft books such as A Sense of Wonder by Paterson (Plume Books, 1995) which fueled my purpose to write. I read blogs like this one (but few as good).

About eighteen months later, I had something that looked more like a story. A friend invited me to go with her to an SCBWI conference in New York.

By chance, we met some Vermont College of Fine Arts alumni, who were gracious when I confessed I had been rejected from their program. Later, one of them came to find me and introduced me to VCFA’s recruiter. They both sincerely encouraged me to apply again.

I texted my husband in a flurry of eagerness.

Seconds later he texted, “Do it!”

I did.

Even though I didn’t get in on the first try, when I did get to VCFA it provided me with everything my seven-year-old self could have dreamed of: encouraging mentors, a community of writers, a place to grow and experiment.

Katherine Patterson and Stephani in Oxford

I added to the champions in my corner a hundredfold. I even traveled for a week with, Katherine Paterson (the author of those books I wore out), during a VCFA writing residency in Bath.

But most importantly, VCFA gave me an excuse and a reason to don my favorite hoodie and sit down at the keyboard and write.

Stephani and family on a research trip
to the Bodie Island Lighthouse in North Carolina

Writing has become a family activity. My husband loves to write. My kids write. We share our writing with each other. We go on research trips together.

It has become part of the fabric of our family life.

The writing life is full of refusals, rejections, and revisions. No writer’s life is free of those storms, those “dark and rainy noons.” But those pass.

And even amidst those storms there is joy.

Joy in creation, joy in community, joy in those moments alone with the blank page and the promise of what’s possible.

Oh, and that boy who frustrated me to no end in AP English?

Reader, I married him.

Cynsations Intern: Kate Pentecost

Learn more about Kate Pentecost.

By Kate Petecost
for Cynthia Leitich Smith's Cynsations

“So, wait, you’ve been doing this for how long?” People often ask when I tell them how long I’ve been writing.

“Since the fourth grade,” is the answer. That was the grade in which I learned that I wanted to be a writer—specifically a writer for children.

I learned then that there was nothing that felt better to me than being around children’s books. Discussing them, holding them, reading them, and, most of all, writing them. I wrote my first book when I was 12 and began submitting it when I was 13.

My first rejection letter (a physical one! back when we were still in the snail mail days) came from Scholastic Press.

I framed it, because it meant that I was officially On My Way to becoming a published author. The book itself was about a mercenary who slew monsters and who helped a princess return to her rightful throne—after falling in love with her, of course. (It was pretty derivative, but hey! I was twelve!)

I did not get published at twelve (thank God!) but I did learn that a book can be written and, moreover, that I can write one. I learned that all I wanted was to learn how to tell—really tell—the stories that were in my mind. So I focused my life toward learning how to be a writer.

The path, as it turned out, was filled with both beauty and tragedy that would shape my writing forever. The tragedy, however, is another story for another time, and one that I do hope to address here at Cynsations, so I’ll focus on the beauty for now.

I went to the University of Houston, where I focused on Creative Writing, of course.

I remember being the only one in the program who wanted to write for children—something that seemed to confuse my peers and professors at times. Most of my peers were working on short stories geared toward adults, and writing short stories is an entirely different beast, indeed. But alongside them, I learned invaluable things about style and method. Also about art.

My illustration flourished, and I’m finally fairly happy with it.

Houston is where I became accustomed to hurricanes and floods and unending summers, where I learned what “genderqueer” meant, and that it applied to me.

It is where I made most of my lasting friendships. It’s where I tried drag for the first time, and learned that I make a pretty good Freddie Mercury and a pretty good John Waters (shown here with my best friend, Austin drag queen, Honey St. Clair.)

It’s also where I met my husband, who is the best person in the entire world, and without whom I don’t know where I’d be.

From there, I applied to my dream school, Vermont College of Fine Arts, one of the only places that has an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

When I got in, I actually screamed—something I’d never usually do. It was an amazing, incredibly worthwhile experience that helped inform my writing and my character in more ways than I can describe.

Kate (right) with classmate Autumn Krause, who recently signed her first deal with HarperTeen!

VCFA was, for me, the first place I felt as though I was where I needed to be, the first place I felt like I could completely and utterly be myself and celebrate the art I love so much with like-minded people. It is, in a word, perfection.

Since then, I’ve worked in many different aspects of writing, literature, and education.

Selling books at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan. Trying to keep banned and challenged books on the shelf with the National Coalition Against Censorship. Editing and Performing for a regional publisher in Texas.

And, of course, my day job, teaching American and British Literature at a Title 1 high school in Houston. (Where I get art like this on tests about the Romantic Poets.)

I am now represented by my dream agent, Sara Crowe of Pippin Properties, and am doing my best to balance work and life and love and writing.

Ultimately, however, I have learned that there is nothing better and more rewarding than writing for children. It is what has saved me, and I sincerely hope that I can help others who needed it as much as I did.

Cynsational Notes

Kate has sold the YA manuscript that will become her debut novel, Elysium Girls, to Hyperion for publication in winter 2020.