Interview with Clea & John Adams | Sound Authors Radio

February 8, 2009

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! I’ve got four wonderful guests on the show today. Three of course are authors and one is a musician. I have Clea Adams, the author of the Dragonfly Secret on at the beginning. Then I have professor Rothbart on, known as the father of chronic pain elimination. My third guest then will be Kristin Tillquist, author of Capitalizing on Kindness, Why 21st century needs to be nice. That’s something great in these tough economic times when around here in New York when you go out on the street you’re taking your life in your own hands because people just aren’t nice; times are too hard to be nice. And at the end of the show I’ve got a great musician, composer and educator Yosvany Terry, an amazing jazz player. So without further ado, my first guest on the show, her name is Clea Adams. She’s the author of the Dragonfly Secret. It’s a beautiful children’s book. Welcome to the show.

Clea Adams: Hi Dr. Kent, thank you and I do have my co-author John Adams on the line as well with you.

John Adams: Hi Kent!

Dr. Kent: Hi, so Clea and John Adams, the co-authors and tell me how this book came about.

Clea Adams: Well it was just released last October and the first book in the dragonfly series was called the Dragonfly Door and both books help children cope with a lot. in this particular story, we like to describe it that all children love secrets and this book has a secret to help children, especially those who may have suffered a lot and it basically takes place in a beautiful garden where a mysterious boy named David befriends a little dragonfly named Leah and without much explanation, David asks Leah to do three things for him and she the dragonfly starts her special assignment. She meets other people that need her help too and its not until the surprise ending of the story that you begin to realize that its really a book about loss, hope and love all being carried on the wings of this little dragonfly.

Dr. Kent: This book has gotten several awards, including the Benjamin Franklin Award, which is incredibly prestigious. Talk about the life of this first book that you had – The Dragonfly Door.

John Adams: The dragonfly door has won several awards and really that’s a story about these two insect friends Leah and Nan and the struggles that Nan has to go through when her friend disappears from under the marsh where they live together. Really this story has two purposes. Number one is it shows children who may have had a loss in life that their feelings of loss are normal but then at the same time what it does is gives parents and grandparents the tools to express their own fears about life and death and we’ve heard from a number of teachers, parents, grandparents. Many people love to use this book because there’s so many layers to it and really ambiguous enough to where you can go any direction that you want. If it’s just talking about friendship, talking about patience, diversity or something as serious as loss and change.

Clea Adams: And I would also add that both books now have won the moms choice gold award and that actually hasn’t been announced. I think they’re going to announce that at the end of January.

Dr. Kent: Isn’t that wonderful! And the thing about children’s books that’s so wonderful, I know from my own childhood that my favorites were the Dr. Seuss Books, The Lorax and the Butter Battle Book and there’s always a greater dimension to a good children’s book. What goes into writing it?

John Adams: Well I think from our perspective, we want our books to really have a purpose and that’s one of the reasons why we pushed forward with both of these books. We find that so many other publishers want to have other genres that their kind of lighthearted but I think it’s fair to say we’re willing to tackle some very serious issues because we think its very worthwhile books that will stand the test of time and help people.

Dr. Kent: What inspired you to start writing this first book and now the second one about the dragonfly?

John Adams: I’m the guilty one there. About 34-35 years ago when I was 13 I had a very tragic loss in my family and the memory of that loss and the pain from that loss has been with me all my life. I carry that and then about four or five years ago, I learned about a teenager, a girl named Ann, who was 13 years old and she had lost her sixth grade friend, a boy who was 11 years old at the time and as part of her grieving process and reaching out to others in the community, she and her friends actually went forward and started a grief outreach program called the dragonfly project. When I learned about that is it carried me back to when I was a child and I thought about everything that I went through and when I look at what Ann and her friends were doing following a tragedy to someone they were very close to, they were reaching out to a community of others and in fact to this day they’ve reached out to about 20,000-21,000 people throughout the world with this outreach program they formed. So I certainly think about that and what I could do to help children. That started pushing me along the way to write this book.

Clea Adams: And I think as well both John & I are real nature lovers and we’ve really had found in our personal lives comfort from nature and I think you’ll find that both of these stories have a comforting message using nature as really the centerpiece of that.

Dr. Kent: And the neat things about children’s books is that the visual has come back. I think as adults we’re sometimes scared to say we like picture books but I got to say I have a huge collection of children’s books because I love looking at the pictures. What does the artwork mean to you?

Clea Adams: Oh my gosh! Well that’s so true for us too and there’s so many beautiful books out there today and we were lucky to find Barbara Gibson who actually, she started her career with the National Geographic Children’s Magazine and to this day I think she’s done over 40 children’s books. What she was able to detect was not only really the heart and soul of the story, but do it in like you’re saying, a very captivating way. What’s really unique about her talent is the first book really takes place completely under the marsh, except for this one last scene where the dragonfly transforms into a beautiful, well a water nymph turns into this beautiful dragonfly. So Barbara has really captured all those muted colors but she really has had made the creatures within the story just really lovable.

Then with the second book, which takes place in a garden, she is able to bring a brilliancy to the colors and that really complements the hopefulness of the story when you write it. The illustrations can make a huge difference in any story.

Dr. Kent: What’s interesting about children’s books to me is that the text is usually, I don’t want to say simple, but very concise and I know that again, I said earlier I love Dr. Seuss. I know he spent weeks and months on each one of his books, if not years. How long did it take to craft these books and what’s that process like?

John Adams: Well both of the books we spent about a year writing the text, so each story is between 1500 and 1800 words and I think with a lot of people its hard to imagine why it would take that long but we were very diligent in how we crafted the words and trying to put everything together to show what was taking place within the story. Then at the same time we were very diligent about having professional critiques with those stories and I think with each one we went through about five or six critiques to make sure that we were moving in the right direction because it was important that we approached it with the understanding that these books need to stand on their own. Not because of us or anything but because they had a purpose for children. We also by the way I would add that with the first book in particular, we spent some time with two child psychologists because the whole purpose again was to help children with loss and change. So we wanted to make sure that we had a psychologist’s perspective and were approaching it the right way.

Dr. Kent: What’s your background both of you?

John Adams: We both come from the business world so this is totally unexpected for us. Its one of those things where you’re inspired and you move beyond the edge a little bit and there’s a saying “If you jump your parachute will appear”, well that’s what we did. We jumped.

Clea Adams: That’s a good way to describe it and I would say I’ve been writing and reading my whole life and when we do school visits we do try to reiterate with kids that its important to be inspired and to feel fire that you’re writing for a purpose and I think that the kids really respond to that message. Because we usually give a lot of examples too and its funny you should bring up the Dr. Seuss books because we do use those as an example of how they are classics and how you do want to keep returning to something that has either made you laugh in childhood or maybe taken you on an adventure or something like that.

Dr. Kent: I see, one of my other favorite books is the one with Where the Wild Things Are.

Clea Adams: Oh yeah, and I’m a big Nancy Drew fan so I think I’ve read all of those.

Dr. Kent: Oh absolutely! So what is it? Are you going to continue with this series? Do you want to sort of keep doing this and get them out to more schools and clinics and things like that? What’s the plan?

Clea Adams: Yeah, exactly. We would like to do more school visits but as far as the writing goes, we have a couple ideas cooking in our heads and a couple on paper and we would like to continue to write and produce more books, but I think right now as you know, the focus for us with this newly released book The Dragonfly Secret, we’re focused on the marketing and promotion. Sometimes I wish we had more time to be writing but we’re hoping to get back to that later in the year and possibly with another dragonfly book within that series. And maybe go off on a different tangent as well, so we’ll see what happens.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor chatting with Clea and John Adams, their book is called The Dragonfly Secret. It’s a wonderful story and gorgeous pictures; even the back cover with the picture of a dragonfly landing on a flower is just stunning. So I hope it does really well, just as the Dragonfly Door has done.

Clea Adams: Thank you very much, thanks for having us!

Dr. Kent: Absolutely and we can visit their website online at dragonflystories.com. My next guest on the show will be a fellow named Professor Rothbart and he’s going to tell us about chronic pain elimination so come on back for that.

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