Christy Mihaly writes about the power of Music and Silence

by Sue Heavenrich

Today I’m talking with GROG’s own Christy Mihaly about her book, Music and Silence: The Passion and Protest of Pablo Casals, illustrated by Mariona Cabassa. It will be released next month by‎ Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. Christy and I have been critique partners for nearly as long as she’s been working on this book, and it’s been a wonderful journey to watch it grow up and, now, hit the shelves. 

When Christy began working on her story that would become Music and Silence, she was at the beginning of her writing journey. She had just returned from a year of living in Spain (her husband was on sabbatical). 

Christy: When our family moved to Seville, I left my job as a lawyer in Vermont and resolved to spend the year evaluating whether I could start a new career as a writer for children. 

in Cordoba

During that year, I encountered fresh inspiration on every corner. Everything I did and saw felt new and unfamiliar. Everywhere I went I thought, “This would make a fun story for kids.” So, I wrote and sold an article to AppleSeeds magazine about the Pinzon brothers, Spanish sailors and navigators that all Spanish schoolchildren know about and without whom Columbus wouldn’t have succeeded. 

I also continued with my cello lessons, and I decided to learn more about Pablo Casals. So we visited Barcelona and went to his birthplace and museum. The more I learned about him and his life, the more I admired and appreciated him, his ideals, his activism, his pacificism, his principles, and his passion. I started thinking I’d like to write a book for kids about Casals. I realized lots of people in the U.S. didn’t know his story, but I thought maybe they should!

 dressed for la feria

Sue: With all that inspiration, you wanted to write something for children. Can you share your navigation from story idea to writing a book?

Christy: When I returned from Spain, I attended a workshop at the Highlights Foundation about writing nonfiction for kids. I learned a huge amount and started seriously on the path to becoming a nonfiction children’s author. 

Sue: We met at that workshop!

Christy: And that was the beginning of our years-long collaborative friendship. In 2014 I took an online writing class and wrote an initial draft of the Casals book. I was still researching the life of Pablo Casals, viewing videotapes and movies about him, listening to recordings, and studying the co-written memoirs he left as well as biographies and press articles. I studied mentor texts. I explored possible themes and put together musical word lists. I shared drafts with critique partners and revised. I also started, prematurely, sending the manuscript out to editors. Editors under a certain age didn’t know who Casals was, so they didn’t understand why people would want to know read about him. Clearly, I had more work to do.

Sue: One of the things we’re told as writers is to come to our story from different angles. 

Christy: Yes. I changed the focus and tried different approaches. Some of my drafts included direct quotations from Casals, in boxes. I loved this; the editors, not so much. I laid out the page turns and tried to squeeze Casals’s whole life into 12 spreads - thankfully, the final book is much longer than the typical 32 pages! I cut down the words about his childhood and then put them back in. I cut pages from his later years. One time, I received a thoughtful critique from an editor and, at her invitation, edited and re-submitted. But that revision was rejected.

I must have revised my story more than twenty times that year, and I continued working on it into the next year, 2015 when I sold my first picture book, Hey, Hey, Hay! – a rhyming picture book about making hay. That was a thrill, and an educational process. 

signing the contract with Erzsi

And then, in 2016, I submitted the Pablo Casals story to literary agent Erzsi Deak, who loved it enough to offer to represent me. Yay! At last! Erzsi had a couple suggestions, so I tweaked the manuscript and then she started submitting the story. But nobody bit. 

Meanwhile, the political winds in the U.S. were shifting, and Erzsi and I discussed bringing more emphasis to the anti-fascism theme in Casals’s story. I made more revisions while also trying new approaches to the story. In one draft Pablo’s cello narrates, and another draft is told in verse. I didn’t end up with any of those versions, but each one informed how I eventually wrote the story of Casals’s life. 

In 2018 we started a new round of submissions. The story felt more timely than ever. After about a half dozen rejections, we received an offer from Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. Over the next seven years the story wended its way through the publishing process, getting delayed for a bit by Covid. In 2022, when the search for an illustrator started, I knew I wanted an illustrator from Catalonia, Casals’s homeland. I pushed for Mariona Cabassa, whose work I knew because she had beautifully illustrated my 2021 book, Barefoot Books WATER: A Deep Dive of Discovery. It took a while, but it was worth the wait. I am so glad she brought her gorgeous art – and love of Casals – to this project.

Sue: Fourteen years is a long time to keep believing in a book. What words of wisdom might you offer to kidlit writers who are having a hard time getting an editor to love their stories? 

Christy: Write the story that is in your heart. Because that’s what writing is about. Don’t get distracted when people tell you what the market wants, or how to sell to a certain editor – unless those are stories your heart also wants to tell. Editors and agents love to read work in which they can sense the author’s passion and commitment, stories that are animated by the author’s love of the topic, the characters. If you don’t love what you’re writing, write about something you do love writing about.

Sue: You started playing the cello as an adult. What advice might you offer to folks who want to learn how to play a cello – or any instrument – later in life?

Christy on the cello

Christy: First, accept that you’ll never be a brilliant player. Or, you won’t develop the level of competence you would have if you’d started young. So let go of that expectation. Do it for the joy of making music, for the pleasure of learning a new skill – that’s what keeps us young.

Second, you must practice. A lot. But don’t overdo it, because you do not want to injure yourself. (I speak from experience.) Take breaks. 

And third, find others to play with. My cello teacher organized a group of students to play together. I love making music in a group, together with other (older) musicians. I also loved playing duets with my daughter, who was taking violin lessons and who is  a better player than I’ll ever be. What a joy! You might look for a local community orchestra or band to play with. Or draft your family members and friends.

Sue: I should probably have asked you this first. What is it about Pablo Casals’s music that absolutely gobsmacks you?

Christy: I love the emotion that permeates his playing. I love that he isn’t afraid to show us his passion through his musicianship. His technique, obviously, is lovely, and he produces a gorgeous, mellow tone. But what I love most is that when he makes his cello sing, you can hear the music of his heart.

Thank you, Christy, for sharing your book love and your lessons on how to courageously dive into new things! 

Christy Mihaly has written books on topics from civics to sunlight, and math to moose, including a picture book about making hay when the sun shines! You can find out more about Christy’s books and writing life at her website, www.christymihaly.com. 

And if you'd like to preorder Music and Silence here, (OR Christy's book coming out in May, America's Founding Myths ... And What Really Happened here), her local indie, Bear Pond Books, is taking orders online. Christy will sign your book before it goes out. You can specify how you want it personalized .... or call the bookstore and let them know. Thank you!

Finding the Right Container: How a 10-Year Research Rabbit Hole Finally Took Flight by Todd Burleson

Every historical fiction writer knows the danger of the research rabbit hole. You go into the archives looking for a simple background detail to flesh out a scene, and you stumble across a footnote so staggering it derails your entire project.

For me, that footnote was a date: April 26, 1944.

I was working as an elementary school librarian, researching the Wright brothers, when I learned that on this day, Orville Wright stepped onto the tarmac at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, to take his final flight. He climbed aboard a Lockheed Constellation, a sleek, futuristic aircraft whose 123-foot wingspan was actually longer than the entire distance of his historic first flight at Kitty Hawk forty years earlier. During the 50-minute flight, Orville even took the controls, later joking, "I guess I ran the whole plane for a minute, but I let the machine take care of itself. I always said airplanes would fly themselves if you left them alone".

As a writer, my brain lit up. The poetic contrast between that fragile 1903 flyer and the massive 1944 wartime transport was irresistible. I was determined to tell this story.

My research journey hit a gold mine when I connected with George Hatcher Jr., the son of Colonel George Hatcher, the pilot who flew Orville that day. George Jr. generously shared his father's firsthand accounts, including articles, personal reflections, and even audio recordings from a local radio station. Having those primary sources, hearing the actual voices and reading the immediate reflections of the people in the cockpit, infused the history with an authenticity I could never have invented.

Armed with this incredible research, I sat down and wrote the story. Because of my background in the school library, I envisioned it as a 1,000-word picture book. I polished it, sent it out on submission, and waited.

It was rejected across the board.

For years, the manuscript sat dormant. I couldn't understand why a story with such incredible, primary-source-backed history wasn't landing.

It took a conversation with a brilliant publishing innovator to help me realize my mistake: the history was solid, but I had put it in the wrong container. That single historical moment was too heavy, too complex to be confined to a 1,000-word picture book. It didn't want to be the entire story; it wanted to be the symbolic anchor for something much larger.

I took the story down to the studs and rebuilt it a dozen times, but it now lives as a middle-grade historical fiction novel, The Secret War.

In the expanded canvas of a novel, Orville’s brief appearance on the tarmac took on a much deeper meaning. To my 12-year-old protagonists, the Lockheed Constellation represents the thrilling dawn of modern aviation, but it also casts the dark shadow of wartime progress. By 1944, the pure dream of flight born in a bicycle shop had evolved into terrifying machinery, while their own hometown of Dayton was secretly processing radioactive "spark plugs" for the atomic bomb. The history finally had room to breathe, perfectly encapsulated by a realization in the book: "The plane was the dream. The cloud was the cost".

It took me more than ten years to realize that a rejected manuscript doesn't always mean a bad idea. Sometimes, our meticulous historical research just needs a bigger canvas.

To my fellow writers: do you have a "failed" prototype or a rejected manuscript sitting in a drawer? If you look at the research you gathered for it, is it possible the story isn't dead, but just waiting for you to build a different container?

---

The Secret War officially launches on April 1st. To learn more about the book, download the free Educator's Guide, or explore more of the history behind the story, please visit my website at toddburlesonwonders.com.

Changing Your Creative Routine and THE ARTIST'S WAY by Kathy Halsey

 

Changing Your Routine and The Artist's Way

We are blowing through March in a hurry.  My wintering season is waning, a season where I intentionally slowed down to nurture myself and in my 13th yearsof writing, changed up my routine. Maybe you feel you need something new to light you up also.

 It began with the decision to take the seminal writing book The Artist Way and really commit to the craft of it and the 12-week course. I am now on week 9. I have finished 60+ Morning Pages (3 notebook pages written long-hand, every morning.) You may have picked up this book or done morning pages, even taken an artistic date. or two. But the power of it is the consistency of devoting time to yourself to spill what's in your reptilian brain and retrain yourself to put your creativity and yourself above all else.

 Here's what I know I must do for this practice, your way of using the book may be different.

1. There is no wrong way to do it, except not to do it. Knowing there are no mistakes is freeing. I cross things out, use stream-of-conscious style, review my previous day, and my gleanings on what was helpful. I mope, give myself room to dream, and hold a mirror up to observing myself as a creative person.

2. The silly things and odd exercises the book asks you to do daily DO matter. These include writing, an affirmation each day, reading/reciting the BASIC PRINCIPLES every morning, (I don't do them again at night, but it's suggested.), create a "safety circle graphic" showing your creative boundaries. Inside your circle you write what you need to protect and name people who support you. Outside the circle boundary name things and people you must be self-protective around. (I find these change--some people go on the edges of the boundary.)  Make up your own mantra and affirmations. 

3. Keep your artistic date with yourself every week, even if it is small. I began my Artist Dates in a big way, signing up for a 2-hour watercolor class at The Franklin Park Conservatory. It was easy as all the materials were given to us. The instructor gave us notes and lists for supplies afterwards. She circulated among the students to demonstrate techniques, too.

Other dates have included repotting my Christmas cactus along with buying it a proper mister, going on a rock walk, using cartoon panels to frame my # #haikusaturday posts, going to a "sketch-in" at the Columbus Art Museum, buying watercolor pens, redecorating my office with my own art and hanging a painting I never mounted. 

4. Don't share your Morning Pages, but further in Week 9, you will begin reading your pages to highlight new insights and actions needed. I found recurring issues over time, procrastination, and fear of not knowing how to do something "right". I noticed giving myself advice and a way to counteract a block. I became more protective of my own time. I listened to my heart and gut first. I feel more confident, calmer and more accepting of who I am. 

5. Trust the process for reclaiming your artistic self. Yes, you will find more abundance in your life, more time, more gifts that seem to drop in your lap. At first, I didn't believe this. But the more I open myself up, the more opportunity I find magically appears in my life. This is synchronicity, the Creator, God, the universe opening. By now I have learned that, "As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle, but powerful changes are to be expected." - Julia Cameron