In her nine novels, Joan Bauer explores difficult issues with humor and hope.
Her books have won numerous awards, among them the Newbery Honor Medal,
the LA Times Book Prize, the Christopher Award, and the Golden
Kite Award
of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. She has twice
participated in the State Department's professional speaker's program, going
to both Kazakhstan and Croatia where she talked with students, writers,
educators, and children at risk about her life and her novels.
Joan has also been the recipient of the ASTAL Award for Outstanding
Contributions to Literature for Young People, the Michigan Thumbs-up!
Award for Children's Literature, the Delacorte Prize for a First Young Adult
Novel, the Pacific Northwest Library Association Award, the New Jersey Reading
Association M. Jerry Weiss Award, the New England Booksellers Award, and the
Boston Public Library's "Literary Light" Award. Her novels have been chosen
for many best book lists, among them, ALA Notable Books, ALA Best Books, ALA
Quick Picks, American Bookseller Pick of the List, School Library Journal Best
Books, Smithsonian Notable Children's Books, VOYA's Perfect 10s. Her novel
Rules of the Road was chosen as one of the top young adult books
of the last
25 years by the American Library Association.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, computer scientist
Evan Bauer, and their intrepid wheaten
terrier Max. Joan is a member of the Writers Guild of America East,
the Authors Guild, and the Society of Children's Book Writers and
Illustrators.
I was born at eleven A.M., a most reasonable time,
my mother often said, and when the nurse put me in my mother's arms for
the first time I had both a nasty case of the hiccups and no discernible
forehead (it's since grown in). I've always believed in comic entrances.
As I grew up in River Forest, Illinois, in the 1950's,
I seem to remember
an early fascination with things that were funny. I thought that
people who could make other people laugh were terribly fortunate.
While my friends made their career plans, declaring they would become doctors,
nurses, and lawyers, inwardly I knew that I wanted to be involved somehow
in comedy. This, however, was a difficult concept to get across in
first grade. But I had a mother with a great comic sense (she was
a high school English teacher) and a grandmother who had been a funny
professional
storyteller, so I figured the right genes were in there somewhere, although
I didn't always laugh at what my friends laughed at and they rarely giggled
at my jokes. That, and the fact that I was overweight and very tall,
all made me feel quite different when I was growing up--but it's given
me a lot ofmaterial as a writer.
My grandmother, had the biggest influence on me creatively.
She taught me the importance of stories and laughter. She never
said,
"Now I'm going to tell you a funny story," she'd just tell a story,
and the humor would naturally flow from it because of who she was and how
she and her characters saw the world. She showed me the difference
between derisive laughter that hurts others and laughter that comes from
the heart. She showed me, too, that stories help us understand ourselves
at a deep level. She was a keen observer of people.
I kept a diary as a child, was always penning stories and poems.
I played the flute heartily, taught myself the guitar, and wrote folk songs.
For years I wanted to be a comedienne, then a comedy writer. I was
a voracious reader, too, and can still remember the dark wood and the green
leather chairs of the River Forest Public Library, can hear my shoes tapping
on the stairs going down to the children's room, can feel my fingers sliding
across rows and rows of books, looking through the card catalogs that
seemed to house everything that anyone would ever need to know about in
the entire world. My parents divorced when I was eight years old,
and I was devastated at the loss of my father. I pull from that memory
regularly as a writer.
Every book I have written so far has dealt
with complex father issues. My dad was
an alcoholic and the pain of that was a shadow that followed me for years, but
I've learned things from that experience that have made me resilient.
I attempted to address those issues in Rules of the Road, and I took
them even further in the companion book, Best Foot
Forward.
The theme that I try to carry into all of my writing is this:
adversity, if we let it, will make us stronger.
In my twenties, I worked in sales and advertising for
the Chicago Tribune, McGraw-Hill, WLS Radio, and Parade
Magazine. I met my husband
Evan, a computer scientist, while I was on vacation. Our
courtship
was simple. He asked me to dance; I said no. We got
married
five months later in August, 1981. But I was not happy in
advertising
sales, and I had a few ulcers to prove it. With Evan's loving
support,
I decided to try my hand at professional writing. I wish I could
say that everything started falling into place, but it was a slow,
slow
build -- writing newspaper and magazine articles for not much money.
My daughter Jean was born in July of '82. She had the soul of
a writer even as a baby. I can remember sitting at my typewriter
(I didn't have a computer back then) writing away with Jean on a blanket
on the floor next to me. If my writing was bad that day, I'd tear
that page out of the typewriter and hand it to her. "Bad paper,"
I'd say and Jean would rip the paper in shreds.
I had moved from journalism to screenwriting when one of the biggest
challenges of my life occurred. I was in a serious auto accident
which injured my neck and back severely and required neurosurgery.
It was a long road back to wholeness, but during that time I wrote
Squashed,
my first young adult novel. The humor in that story kept me
going.
Over the years, I have come to understand how deeply I need to laugh.
It's like oxygen to me. My best times as a writer are when I'm working
on a book and laughing while I'm writing. Then I know I've got
something.
