I Have Good News! Part 1

Hey, I’ve got good news!

After years of working hard without seeing any results, I finally have some results to share–two results, actually.

First, I wrote a children’s book. Yes, me, David Hicks, the serious novelist of serious literary fiction—I wrote a children’s book, called The Magic Ticket, illustrated beautifully by Kateri Kramer, to be published by Fulcrum Press in July. (You can pre-order here.)

But here’s the catch. I know when you hear “children’s book” you think cutesy or feel-goody. But this one is not.

It’s sad. Somewhat uplifting at the end, but still, it’s sad.

In the words of my agent, “David, this is the saddest f*#@ing book I ever read. I can’t sell it.”

Or in the words of my dearly departed father, “Why does everything you write have to be so sad?”

Because life is sad! my younger self would have responded. But now, my older self would say . . .

Well, I guess I would say the same thing: Because life is sad!

And it’s okay. I’m comfortable with that. Life is also happy, too, of course, but in spurts, and hopefully in the long view, too. But much of life sure is sad. Even when it’s happy, that happiness is usually borne of sadness or loss. It’s earned, in other words. It is relative to any sadness or suffering that preceded it. It doesn’t just happen.

So yeah, I write sad stuff. Sorry, Pops.

And I don’t know how we got to this point, but we really need to stop protecting our children from sad stories. When my wife Cynthia was young, she demanded that her mother read The Little Lame Squirrel’s First Thanksgiving to her, over and over, even though it made Cynthia cry, every time. Because it made her cry. And my son’s favorite film when he was young was about a snowman and a little boy who frolic together all night long (with the saddest damn musical score ever written), only to end with the snowman melted in the morning sun. And my daughter seemed to wallow in sad stories, all of them—as a Pisces, she lived for the opportunity to cry. And still does, only now she prefers horror movies.

And they are the three most beautiful, joyful people I know.

The Magic Ticket is about a boy who loses his sister and is of course devastated, initially. Eventually he finds sanctuary in reading, at first quietly in his room, then at school, then at the public library. Confused about what happened to his sister, forced to be quiet at home with his grieving parents, the boy retreats into a world of stories, a world of books, and in the end, he decides that when he grows up, he wants to write his own book, about his sister.

And yes, if you haven’t guessed by now, that little boy is me.

As a writer, professor, and MFA director, I give a workshop to writers of all ages about the basic structure of stories: “Once upon a time . . . . Then, one day . . .” (In other words, Once upon a time there was a person who lived in a place. Then, one day, something happened. Yep, it’s that simple.) And during one of those workshops, in Salida, Colorado , to preoccupy myself when the workshop participants were writing, I scribbled down my own version of it—the first thing that came to my head:

Once upon a time, there was a happy boy who lived in a happy house with his beautiful mom, his kindhearted dad, his big brother, and little sister.

Then, one day, his sister died.

It seemed a little too obvious. Too simple and too big at the same time. What, no ambiguity? Was this really the main story of my life? If so, why hadn’t I ever written it?

Then, on my last book tour, while at the Moravian Academy in Bethlehem teaching that same workshop to high-school students, I went back to that story, my story, about my sister’s death. Then again at a workshop with adult writers at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda; then with children at the Richmond Young Writers Center; then with adults again at Writespace in Houston; at Charlotte Lit; at Chicago’s Story Studio; and so on.

I realized that for decades, I had been avoiding the most obvious Story of My Life. Sandra’s death had changed everything, at least temporarily—we had gone from a happy family to a deeply sad family all at once; and, believing I had been responsible for her death (I had been sick, and then my sister fell ill, so I assumed she had caught my illness and died from it), I retreated into solitude and silence, crying at the drop of a hat “for no reason” and reading like crazy (books of Peanuts cartoons, at first, but then any book I could find, no matter what the genre, at the Harrison Public Library). I became absorbed in other people’s stories, then continued that absorption as a professor of literature, until finally, decades later, I acquired enough confidence to believe I could write my own story.

But even then, I wrote around my story. Away from my story. The Big Story, that is. The event, you could say, that had made me a writer.

Until finally, while distractedly writing while my students were writing—that is, without really thinking too much about it—I had intuitively set down the skeleton of that Big Story.

As Picasso said, all art comes from the unconscious.

Then, of course, came the revision process—really the learning process, because I had never written a children’s story—and I simply couldn’t have done it without children’s/middle-grade/YA author extraordinaire, Denise Vega; the superb editor at Fulcrum, Alison Auch; my illustrator/co-author Kateri Kramer; my friends Deann Rasch, Ted Downum, and Jim Seitz; and my wife Cynthia, the best editor I know. I was, and still am, way out of my league. But, as always, I’m learning as I go.

So here I am, in a place I never thought I would be. I’m a children’s author! And the story—my story—is sad. But beautiful.

Just like that little boy, so many years ago.

[To pre-order The Magic Ticket, click here: And to follow David’s Magic Ticket Tour, with appearances at schools, children’s hospitals, and libraries, scroll down to sign up for his newsletter, or bookmark this page:]