WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 41Author Profile
Cooper adds that she and Kellogg started referring to each
other as shipmates and addressing their editor, Neal Porter, as
Cap’n. “We even have a picture of Neal wearing a pirate hat,”
she says.
Cooper’s other new book will perhaps bring to many readers’
minds her most celebrated work, 1973’s The Dark Is Rising,
which won a Newbery Honor in 1974. Like that novel, which
centers on the day Will Stanton turns 11 and finds out he can
do magic, The Shortest Day (Candlewick, Oct.), illustrated by
Carson Ellis, is set on the darkest day of the year—the winter
solstice. Cooper says that the seeds for the text were sewn more
than 40 years ago, when she attended a performance of the
Revels, a “deliberately not religious” celebration of the solstice
featuring song, dance, and poetry. After the show, she was intro-
duced to singer and director Jack Langstaff, creator of the
Revels, who was a fan of Cooper’s books. “You should be writing
for the Revels!” she recalls him telling her.
For the next two decades, Cooper did, contributing lyrics,
short plays, and poems. “Whatever Jack happened to want,
wherever he had a hole in the program, I would try to fill it,”
she says. “He wanted a verse, so I wrote this poem. He liked it,
it went into the program, and it stayed there ever since.”
Cooper’s chapter book, The Magician’s Boy, is adapted from a
play that she wrote for Langstaff’s show, and The Shortest Day is
adapted from a poem that she composed for it.
Cooper says her daughter, Kate Glennon, who serves as her
manager, suggested that the poem would also work as a picture
book. Liz Bicknell, Candlewick’s executive editorial director
and associate publisher, agreed.
“I first read Susan’s poem on Dec. 17, 2014, a few days before
that year’s shortest day,” Bicknell says. “I was already looking
forward to the equinox, when light and optimism return, so to
be connected to generations of humans feeling the same way,
hoping for peace, this year and every year, was a magical moment.”
Bicknell says that at the time she acquired the manuscript,
she was working with Caldecott Honor artist Carson Ellis on
another book. She asked Ellis if she’d be willing to illustrate
Cooper’s poem. “Carson was already a fan of Susan’s work, and
she was excited to do it,” she recalls.
Cooper says she has not yet met Ellis, who lives in Portland,
Ore., but is thrilled with the way she visualized the poem, using
a muted palette to depict how humans have interacted with—
and depended upon—the sun since the beginning of time. “I
was blown away by the narrative that her paintings gave to the
poem,” she adds. “How lucky can you get, to work with two
very different but equally amazing artists?”
Cooper says she will have some choices to make after the busy-
ness of two books in one month subsides. She has a novel written;
she has adjudged it is
no good.
“Have you ever
written a book and
then decided it just
didn’t work?” she
asks. “Mine is titled
Soldiers. I wrote it,
and then I decided to
give up on the whole
thing.” The admis-
sion should give
solace to every other
writer with a novel or
two in a drawer.
“Now,” she adds,
“I’m trying to decide
between whether I should work on an idea I have for a fantasy
or whether I should do another picture book. I’m between
things, and it’s not a comfortable spot.”
Not that Cooper doesn’t have plenty to keep her busy.
Widowed since 2003, when her second husband (and frequent
collaborator), actor Hume Cronyn, passed away, she moved to
Massachusetts from Connecticut—to a home in a salt marsh
where she has a view of the Atlantic and, she says, can imagine
seeing England, where she was born in 1935. She has two
children, four grandchildren, and six step-grandkids.
But despite her long career, her list of honors and accomplish-
ments, and a bookcase full of volumes with the name Cooper on
the spine, at 84, the British expat still yearns to be productive,
to keep finding and telling stories.
“If you don’t write for at least a couple of hours every day,
you’re not writing, and the proof to me is that I’m not diving
at the desk when I get up in the morning—I’m dithering,”
Cooper says. “I long to be back at the business of just
working. You finish breakfast and you go to the desk and you
stay there until you’re so hungry you absolutely must stop
to have lunch.” ■