“I was very curious about reading and writing,” recalls celebrated author Linda Bailey about her Winnipeg childhood. “I knew all my nursery rhymes and fairy tales, but there weren’t a lot of books in the family home.” Dad favoured cowboy stories and Mom liked magazines.
Enter Winnipeg’s Public Library. When the library’s bookmobile made its rounds and showed up on her street two hours a week, well, it changed Linda’s world. She devoured whatever crossed her path. Her favourite was a series of books featuring Freddie the Pig, “the smartest and cleverist” of the pigs on an upstate New York farm. Freddie assumed a host of personas: detective, magician, pilot, and other identities while pursuing his various adventures.
“I didn’t really know how much I would love to read until I discovered Freddie,” she says. “At the age of seven or eight, I just ripped through those books.”
Today, as a best-selling children’s author, Linda has created her own stable of characters, Eddie the bug, Lizzy the figure skater, and Stanley the dog among others and, oh yes, Frankenstein’s monster. Well, not the monster, exactly, but the person responsible for creating the character in the first place, 19th century author Mary Shelley. Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein is the latest in a long list of Linda’s titles, 37 to date with more on the way.
“She was a reader and a dreamer, which is absolutely the two things I was,” says Linda about the author.
As she researched her subject, Linda uncovered a trove of fascinating material: adolescent banishment to Scotland; a teenage elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley; and a late-night discussion between the Shelleys and Lord Byron at which they challenged each other to write a ghost story. Mary’s contribution was Frankenstein. And the rest, they say, is history.
“The middle of the night thing resonated with me. It sang out to me,” says Linda. Delicious fodder for an in-depth biography, all part of the story, but Linda wanted to focus on the key question, what drove Mary Shelley to write a horror story?
“She was 18 years old, hadn’t written a thing and manages to write a book that becomes enormously influential. I just thought that was such a triumphant story arc for the life of a young girl who’s a dreamy reader.”
The result is a 50-page picture book that celebrates the power of imagination.
It’s easy to see Linda’s fascination with her subject. She, too, is an introvert, living inside her head.
“I have a very dull outer life, but I have a very rich inner life,” she admits. “An introvert? For sure. You have to be willing to spend a lot of time alone, and a lot of extroverts do not.”
Not that she shies away from adventure. Fresh out of high school in the 1960s, Linda took a secretarial course, did odd jobs, and financed a trip to London and then Melbourne, where she stayed for a couple of years. She travelled across the Australian Outback, “where we had to report to the police before we got on the track.” Years later, she travelled by ship to Mexico and then hopped on a bus up the west coast of California towards home.
“For whatever reason, I was dreaming of the BC forests while I was in Australia,” she admits. “I’d wake up and think WHAT? I came back to Canada, lived in Winnipeg for a few months and moved to Vancouver.”
She later enrolled in the English program at UBC.
“I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t have the nerve to write. I thought only important people in New York and London were writers, which certainly wasn’t me. It just seemed like an impossible dream.”
Inspired by her children, Linda started to create while supporting herself editing educational materials for the Open Learning Agency.
“Reading to my kids was huge,” she says. “There was nothing better in my children’s childhood than to have a giant stack of books and just cuddle up together reading. There was a period of six or seven years when I was writing picture books and they weren’t selling,” she continues. “I was writing. I was sending things out. I was getting nice feedback. It seemed like I should hang in and keep trying, but I wasn’t being published. I did other stuff. I took classes, I went to workshops and I was still working. I was doing both.”
And then the breakthrough.
“There was a point where I realized, wait a minute, there’s a hole in the Canadian market here,” says Linda. “Nobody was doing mysteries with a girl. Girl, mystery, humour. There was nothing like that. The first publisher I sent it to, snapped it up.”
The Stevie Diamond series – girl, mystery, humour – was tremendously successful when it first launched in 1992. A flood of delightful characters followed: the Binkerstons, who live near the Good Times Travel Agency and time travel to foreign lands; The Tiny Hero of Ferny Creek Library in which a tiny bug foils a plan to close a school library; and let’s not forget her first novel for older children, Seven Dead Pirates.
“She’s very prolific and she’s written in so many genres,” says Phyllis Simon, founder and co-owner of Kidsbooks, a major Vancouver retailer. “She’s excelled in fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, and she’s done picture books. For someone to jump over into different fields like that is very, very impressive. She’s just a unique and very, very special person for our community.”
The two met when Linda’s first publisher released the inaugural Stevie Diamond book and asked the bookstore to host a little party for her.
“So, I said sure, why not? We had a party on a Saturday afternoon, served refreshments and had a very nice turnout,” says Phyllis. “That’s how I became familiar with Linda’s earliest work. She came into the store frequently, and we became good friends.”
Linda publishes one or two books a year. A self-declared insomniac, she often gets her ideas in the middle of the night.
“When I’m in a half doze, trying to fall asleep, something will start to come up,” she says. “I write a little something. It might have a few lines of dialogue. It might have a setting.”
She writes it down in a file she affectionately calls her Vault, ready to embellish it months or even years down the road. When she couldn’t find a market for a manuscript she wrote in 2008, she set it aside, waiting for an opportunity. Nine years later her publisher asked her if she had something about Canada to celebrate the sesquicentennial.
“I said, as a matter of fact I do. They accepted it immediately and [Carson Crosses Canada] was a very big book in 2017. That’s another rule of writing, timing is everything.”
Travel still inspires Linda. In 2019, she embarked on a literary pilgrimage with friend, Ellen McGinn, to walk in the footsteps of English writers “who are really meaningful to me.” Their travels took them to Bronte country, Jane Austen’s house and, as a rare treat, Linda received special permission to view Mary Shelly’s original Frankenstein manuscript, which is usually kept under lock and key.
Mostly, though, she takes her cue from children.
“I find dinosaurs fun. I wrote a book about pirates. I love trying to imagine ghosts. The things that kids love are really fun for me to explore.”
Linda says writing is an evolutionary process involving many drafts and re-writes. She’ll often let a manuscript sit for weeks or months before looking at it again and sprucing it up.
“I’m not happy at the end of the day if I haven’t done something,” she continues. “Sometimes, it’s writing, sometimes, it’s research, sometimes, it’s dealing with the business end, but every day I go to my computer. Because I live by myself, my home is really my office. It’s all quiet and calm.”
Disciplined? Definitely. Focused? For sure. She has no problem finding the time to write – even when her children were still living at home.
“I never really cared that much about housekeeping. Fortunately, the rest of my family didn’t either,” she laughs. Her older daughter, Lia, is a freelance journalist and a flamenco dancer with the dance troupe, Fin de Fiesta.
“She has enormous energy,” says Linda. “She can do that dance thing all day long. She’s lived big chunks of her life in Spain in Seville, the heart of flamenco country. My other daughter, Tess, is doing a post-doc in biology at Princeton. I have a granddaughter there, too.”
If Linda’s critical of anything, it’s with wannabe writers who think kidlit is an easy route to fame and fortune.
“A lot of people think you don’t have to do much of anything, just sit down and write and send it off, but boy, there’s a lot to learn. If somebody wanted advice, I would say learn your craft. Immerse yourself. Learn everything you can about the writing community and the publishing industry. It took me six or seven years before it led to publication and, over that period, I learned a huge amount. I ended up aware of the market, aware of how publishing works, aware of writing skills and word counts. Most of all,” she says, “immerse yourself in the great books of childhood, the classics, as well as the new ones.”
Children’s literature has staying power.
“If you ask people to name the most important book in their lives, they’ll often go back to Anne of Green Gables or something like that. For adults, reading a book is a passing experience. It doesn’t stick in the same way that an earlier book does.”
A children’s book, Linda maintains, has the power to shape attitudes and influence behaviour.
“Parents still want their children to read books and they’d prefer their children to read a book rather than a screen. People still see that as very valuable.”
Linda’s happy to continue writing children’s books; she says she’s not interested in adult genres. When asked about the Bailey appeal, she says her books are warm-hearted. Add the word “gentle” to the mix. With Princess versus Dinosaurs, a new title her publisher is releasing this fall, two combatants are fighting over the same turf. When the action escalates, a giant rubber ducky enters the scene. Marvellous.
“She has a twinkle in her style of writing and in her eye,” says her friend Phyllis Simon. “She’s mastered the ability to write formally but in a casual way. Kids can easily get into her stories. There’s no problem understanding where they’re headed and, at the same time, she really does have a strong literary capability, as well.”
“I have a certain confidence in the kind of things that I know how to do now,” says Linda. “I believe you get better and better at this and I think my skills are getting sharper.”
Snapshot
If you were to meet your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give to her?
“I think I would tell her to do it earlier, just go for it and risk failing. At least try.”
Who or what has influenced you the most and why?
“Libraries and particularly the Winnipeg bookmobile of my childhood. It was parked two hours a week on the corner near my house and gave me my first experience of the joy of reading.”
What are you most grateful for?
“I’m grateful that I get to do the thing I love to do. I’m grateful that I’m still here. It’s been 28 years since I first got published, and I’ve had a steady career the whole time.”
What does success mean to you?
“It feels like success in my life when I have managed to figure out how to do what I love to do and earn a living at it. It’s wonderful to be recognized and valued.”
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