Children's author still revels in power of story

Somewhere today, a youngster is curled up with a book whose story has captured his or her imagination in a way that nothing else has.
Anna Myers has known that for a long time, and the power of a story has led her to write 17 books for young people. Myers, a Chandler resident and retired middle school English teacher, is among the state’s most-honored young adult writers, with several Oklahoma Book Awards, Sequoyah Children’s Book Awards and other prizes to her credit. Her 17th book, “Spy,” centers on Nathan Hale, an American hero known for the famous line, “I regret that I have but one life to give my country.” It will hit bookstores this fall.
Myers said she still considers herself extremely lucky to be making a living writing books that engage young people. She also gets to indulge her love of historical fiction by weaving tales around real-life characters or events.
“Story is the most important thing in the world, besides love,” Myers said this week. “Don’t ever write a kids’ book to teach a lesson. That’s the worst reason to write a story. Write a story that needs to be told.
“One of the best things that ever happened to me was at a school visit. I was signing books, and it was after ‘Assassin’ (whose story focused on John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln) had come out. I saw a little eighth-grade red-haired girl, and I could tell she wanted to talk to me. After everybody cleared out, she came up to me and said, ‘I know Lincoln had to die, but I kept hoping for a way out.’
“To me, that’s the power of a story.”
Myers grew up knowing the influence of a story. Her parents, aunts and uncles were natural storytellers, and her older siblings read aloud to her, she said, not so much because they adored her but because she aggravated them until the only way they could read was to read aloud.
Her family moved to Chandler when she was 15 and, like most 15-year-olds, she thought she knew more than  most people, she said. But then she met Mabel Rushing, her Sunday school teacher and the county librarian, who steered Myers to her love of history, reading and writing.
“She’d say, ‘Girls, if you don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you’re going,” Myers said. “It seemed like she was 4 feet tall but, oh, what a powerful woman. Everything I’ve read or written since then has a thread of Mabel Rushing in it.
“I believe that’s a weakness in our people — not just our kids, but our people — that we don’t know enough about where we’ve been.”
Fifteen of Myers’ 17 books are historical fiction. “Red-Dirt Jessie,” her first book published in 1992, centered on a young girl trying to hold her family together during the Great Depression. “The Graveyard Girl” was set during the yellow fever epidemic in Memphis after the Civil War, and “Stolen by the Sea” tells of the hurricane in Galveston in 1900. Several of her books are set in Oklahoma, including “Tulsa Burning,” about the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921.
Myers’ last two books are considered contemporary humor, a genre she tackled at the urging of her editor. “Wart” and “Confessions From the Principal’s Chair” are best described as situational humor, she said, with some of the tales coming from her real-life classroom anecdotes. It was a challenge to write humorously because people don’t all laugh at the same things, she said. (Although we usually cry at the same things, she added.) Much about humor depends on its delivery, which isn’t as powerful on paper, she said.
Myers also spends a good deal of her time doing school visits around the nation and speaking to teachers and librarians. For her school visits, she transforms herself into a character from one of her books and dons a costume for the performance. It’s always a minor character, she said, and she never gives away the end of the story.
“Book talks are a good way to get kids interested,” she said. “Speaking to kids is like it was in the classroom — you have to be something of an entertainer in order to carry it off. It’s very good for me to see the kids, especially since I’m no longer teaching. That’s my contact with kids.”
Myers has written a book every year since she was first published, she said, and there are always plenty of ideas and the desire to immerse herself in historical fiction. When people ask her where she gets her ideas, she says that she gets them from the same place that Mary, mother of Jesus, got her ideas.
“It says in the Bible that Mary was a writer,” Myers said. “It doesn’t say that she wrote for the Jerusalem World Companion or the Bethlehem Gazette, but in the King James version, it says, ‘And Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.’ That’s what a writer does — ponders things in her heart — then she takes them out later.”
Myers also stays busy as the regional adviser for the Oklahoma chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. This year, she’s also the featured small-town columnist for Oklahoma Today magazine, writing about life in a small town and the joys of her renovated 1925 home.
To learn more about her books or to contact the author, go online to annamyers.info.