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      <div id="issueDate">August 5, 2009</div>

      
      
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        <h4><a href="/2009/08_1/features/01/">Student Counsel</a></h4>
        <h5>A graduate student in school psychology helps kids who might not  otherwise have an ear in one of Boston&rsquo;s  oldest, toughest public schools</h5>
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  <h4><a href="/2009/08_1/features/04/">Animals Aging Well</a></h4>
  <h5>For the nation&rsquo;s 40 million elderly pets,  advances in veterinary care ensure the twilight years can be good ones </h5>
  <h4><a href="/2009/08_1/features/05/">Flights of Fancy</a></h4>
  <h5>Mark Karlins&rsquo; latest children&rsquo;s book tells the story  of a boy who wants to pursue his dreams&mdash;with a little help from Einstein</h5>
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          <h4><a href="/2009/08_1/corner/01/">A Drop in Pressure </a></h4>
          <h5>With two young children at home and  her training in front of her, a pediatrics resident is torn apart&mdash;until she  decides to go part-time</h5>
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<h1>Flights of Fancy</h1>
<h2>Mark Karlins&rsquo; latest children&rsquo;s book tells the story  of a boy who wants to pursue his dreams&mdash;with a little help from Einstein</h2>
<h3>By Taylor McNeil</h3>

<p>It&rsquo;s not often someone finishes a  book and quickly picks it up again&mdash;and again. But in author Mark Karlins&rsquo; case,  it happens all the time. His audience is usually made up of four and five year  olds, and in a child&rsquo;s world, repeated readings are a sign of affection for a  story. What parent, after having read a picture book aloud for the gazillionth  time, hasn&rsquo;t heard the plea, &ldquo;Read it again&rdquo;?</p>
<div class="imageFullBox">
<img src="../../images/fe5-2.jpg" />
  <p>Coming up with ideas for stories  isn&rsquo;t a problem&mdash;&ldquo;sometimes there are so many ideas, the issue is how to sort  through and choose one,&rdquo; says Mark Karlins. Photo: Alonso Nichols</p>
</div>
<p>That&rsquo;s no doubt the case with  Karlins&rsquo; latest children&rsquo;s picture book, <em>Starring  Lorenzo and Einstein Too</em> (Dial Books, 2009), the story of Lorenzo  Fortunato, a budding young scientist struggling to fit in with his family of  vaudeville performers. Karlins, a longtime lecturer in English in the School of  Arts and Sciences, tells the story with special empathy for his hero, who longs  to be accepted for his talents, which just don&rsquo;t happen to include juggling.</p>
<p>Karlins&rsquo; interest in children&rsquo;s  books began, naturally enough, with his first child. &ldquo;I fell in love with  authors such as Maurice Sendak and William Steig,&rdquo; he says.</p>
<p>He had already written several  volumes of poetry, then dipped into fairy tales, but found himself drawn to  writing picture books. In the beginning, his drafts were 10 to 12 pages  long&mdash;far more text than would fit in a picture book. But he learned the rhythm  of the genre and published his first, <em>A Christmas  Fable</em> (Atheneum), in 1990, and since then has published four more, including <em>Music Over Manhattan</em> (Doubleday),  which was a bestseller in late 1998 on Amazon.</p>
<p>Writing children&rsquo;s books is like  writing poetry: it&rsquo;s a condensed form, honed and lyrical, conveying feeling and  tone as much as action, with an economy of verbiage. &ldquo;It took me a long time to  really figure out what a picture book is,&rdquo; Karlins says. &ldquo;It has a very tight  structure.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In manuscripts that are as few as  two or three typed pages, characters have to be developed, a sense of time and  place have to be established and a storyline built from beginning to end. &ldquo;A lot  of personality is conveyed through dialogue, but also the language in the  narrative conveys a lot very quickly,&rdquo; Karlins says. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s always a  struggle.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Usually he works through 15 to 20  drafts before he&rsquo;s satisfied. &ldquo;I often create really terrible first drafts just  to get the material out there, and [then] I go back and edit it,&rdquo; he says. </p>
<p>He also knows the value of hearing  his stories read aloud as works in progress, so he reads drafts to his wife.  &ldquo;There&rsquo;s something about reading it out loud,&rdquo; Karlins says. &ldquo;You get a public  witness, and somehow getting that witness and making it public changes the feel  of it.&rdquo; </p>
<h4>Albert Joins the Crew</h4>
<p>Coming up with ideas for stories  isn&rsquo;t a problem&mdash;&ldquo;sometimes there are so many ideas, the issue is how to sort  through and choose one,&rdquo; Karlins says. For <em>Starring  Lorenzo and Einstein Too</em>, he says that his interest in theatrical families,  and in particular vaudeville, was a starting point. </p>
<p>He also needed some tension, and  his stories often feature a protagonist who doesn&rsquo;t quite mesh with his  surroundings. In this case, Lorenzo doesn&rsquo;t fit in with his performing parents  and siblings. He sneaks off to an abandoned pigeon coop on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building to work on a secret science  project: a rocket ship.</p>
<p>That Albert Einstein plays a key  role in Lorenzo&rsquo;s tale&mdash;he makes the boy realize it&rsquo;s okay to be himself and  like science instead of performing, and accompanies him on his ride through  space&mdash;is one of those unpredictable twists that come up in creative writing. </p>
<p>&ldquo;To be perfectly honest, I&rsquo;m not  quite sure how Einstein crept into the story,&rdquo; Karlins says. &ldquo;I was writing one  day, and Einstein appeared in the theater where the family was performing. He&rsquo;s  such a loveable character, everyone's favorite scientist, and I decided to see  what it would be like to keep him in the story.&rdquo;</p>
<h4>A Little Audience</h4>
<div class="imageHalfBox"> <img src="../../images/fe5-1.jpg" /></div>
<p>Being a children&rsquo;s author isn&rsquo;t  usually terribly lucrative: given that some 30,000 books are published for  young readers each year, few have a chance of really standing out. But Karlins  got lucky his last go-round. Children&rsquo;s author Daniel Pinkwater has a monthly  segment about his favorite new books on NPR&rsquo;s <em>Weekend Edition Saturday</em> with Scott Simon, and in late 1998,  Pinkwater praised <em>Music Over Manhattan</em>. </p>
<p>What <em>Publishers Weekly</em> subsequently called &ldquo;the Pinkwater effect&rdquo; kicked  in, and sales took off. &ldquo;Before this, it was something like the 34,000th  best-selling book in the country on Amazon,&rdquo; Karlins says, &ldquo;and then, after  Pinkwater&rsquo;s review, it was the second best-selling book in the country,  trailing only Stephen King&rsquo;s <em>Bag of Bones</em>.&rdquo;  According to a <em>Publishers Weekly</em> article a few months later, the book&rsquo;s print run had already doubled to  30,000.&nbsp; </p>
<p>With the new book recently published,  Karlins continues to think about his young audience. He&rsquo;s starting to do school  visits&mdash;kindergarten through third grade&mdash;to read his books and teach some basic  science, illustrating points made in <em>Lorenzo</em>.  &ldquo;Before I even started going to schools, I gave a reading at a bookstore, and  there were a lot of kids there,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;That actually helped me a lot. I  suddenly realized: this is my audience, these little kids. It&rsquo;s really fun.&rdquo;</p>
<p><em>Taylor  McNeil can be reached at <a href="mailto:taylor.mcneil@tufts.edu">taylor.mcneil@tufts.edu</a></em></p>
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