End of Penn’s Dancing Career
Leads to New Calling as Children's Author

A Kiss Goodbye
(Tanglewood, 2007)
by Audrey Penn
ISBN-10: 1933718048
ISBN-13: 978-1933718040
Buy this book
via Amazon.com.

“I’m not one of those writers with imagination,” says ballerina turned author Audrey Penn. “If something doesn’t fall in my lap, I’m stumped.”

It was what was sitting on the train tracks at a local park that inspired Penn’s New York Times bestseller The Kissing Hand (CWLA, 1993; Tanglewood, 2006), a tender picture book whose second sequel, A Kiss Goodbye (Tanglewood) hits bookstore shelves May 25th.

“The mother took the baby’s hand and pressed it open with her own hand,” Penn recalls. “Then she rubbed her face in the baby’s hand, and the baby put its hand on its own face. I stood there stunned. What hit me was, look at this mother caring for her baby.”

Penn was so curious about the raccoons’ behavior that she asked a park ranger about it. He told her that before the mother leaves to find food, she rubs her scent on the kit’s hand. The baby can put its hand to its face, smell her, and not be afraid.

Penn’s daughter spent her entire first day of school with her hand to her face, and The Kissing Hand was born.

Even after a decade, the book continues to strike a chord with families facing separation anxiety issues. The Kissing Hand still sells around 100,000 copies every year, and has been distributed by the U.S. Army to help families deal with the stress of deployment.

“I was quite blessed to be in the right place at the right time,” Penn says of The Kissing Hand’s success. “I always tell people that’s why I had to stop dancing. If I hadn’t gotten sick and stopped dancing, that book probably would not have been written.”

Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis ended Penn’s dance career in the late ‘70s, but set her on a second calling as a children’s author. Her first book, the Caldecott-nominated Happy Apple Told Me (Independence) was published in 1975.

Penn drew on her dance background to create her mid-grade adventure novel Mystery At Blackbeard’s Cove (Tanglewood, 2004), out in paperback last month. Set on Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, an area frequented by Blackbeard and his crew, the book follows the danger-filled quest of four kids trying to fulfill an old woman’s dying wish to be buried at sea.

Penn spent 30 years visiting Ocracoke, getting to know its locals and lore. When she was ready to write the book, she “choreographed” the entire story with the aid of four island children.

For the scene in which the kids “steal” the old woman’s body for its briny burial, Penn took the children to a local church to see how that could be done. The church was locked. As the group stood out front, the caretaker arrived and asked what they were doing. When Penn told him they were trying to figure out how to break in, the caretaker vanished – reappearing with the local police in tow.

After Penn explained what she was doing and why, the entire group – police, caretaker, kids, and author – brainstormed how to break into the church.

The only way it could be done, the group concluded, was through the bell tower. When Penn sent the kids up the tower – with their parents’ permission, of course – they did get in, but not without falling and knocking over a stack of chairs and a candlestick. Luckily, the candle was not burning.

“Well, it isn’t lit now, but it could be in my book,” Penn remembers thinking. “And wouldn’t that be fun!”

The mishaps didn’t stop there. A gurney carrying a coffin getting stuck in the sand, the coffin shooting off the gurney, a boat transporting the coffin coming untied and floating away – it all really happened as the kids helped manufacture the story.

Now, in addition to crafting her own books, Penn teaches children to write through her Writing Penn workshops, traveling to schools, libraries, and children’s hospitals.

Many of the tools and techniques she shares with student writers, she also recommends to aspiring kid-lit authors.

Often, writers will “tell a story as if they’re watching it, instead of participating in it,” Penn says. She advises authors to “move inside the story with the characters,” adding loads of sensory details to create time, place, tension, and action.

She’s also a strong believer in finding a story’s ending first. “It’s like using a map,” she tells. “You find out where you want to end up and trace it back to the beginning. It makes it much easier in the middle if you know your ending as well as your beginning.”

And, most important, Penn urges writers to constantly re-read, revise, and “take out all the superfluous words. It takes me a long time to weed out what I don’t want in order to find out what I do want.”