Author celebrates surprise book award

Ask author Laura Amy Schlitz what it feels like to win the Newbery Medal, and you'll get a succinct but emotion-laden answer.

"I'm drunk with joy," Schlitz said gleefully in a recent telephone interview from her home near Baltimore.

Schlitz's joy was sparked in the early morning of Jan. 14, when she learned that her "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!" (Candlewick Press, $19.99) had just won the 2008 Newbery Medal for the best-written children's book.

Schlitz's book had been one of the two dozen or so discussed by librarians and other children's book experts as a possibility for a Newbery Medal or Newbery Honor (runner-up), but it still was something of a surprise winner.

"I only allowed myself to fantasize about the silver [Newbery Honor], and even then I had to be stern with myself," said Schlitz, a librarian at the private Park School near Baltimore.

So, when the call came from the awards committee, Schlitz, who had woken early with a stomachache, found herself in "absolute disbelief." The rest of the day remains a blur for Schlitz, whose school presented her with a plastic tiara, which she wore for the rest of the day atop her long gray hair.

The following morning, she made her national television debut on the "Today Show," which traditionally spotlights the winning authors and illustrators the day after the awards are announced.

In truth, Schlitz's book, illustrated with colorful panache by Robert Byrd, is an unusual choice for the Newbery Medal, which usually is given to novels. But a few other kinds of books have been medal winners, including a couple of books of poetry: "Joyful Noise" by Paul Fleischman and "A Visit to William Blake's Inn" by Nancy Willard.

In choosing Schlitz's book, Newbery committee chair Nina Lindsay spotlighted the fact that it adds a "new dimension" of "performance" to books for young readers.

Schlitz, 52, got the idea for the book from her students, who use performance as one way to master material about various subjects, including the Middle Ages. To ensure that each student could have a meaty role, Schlitz decided to create 21 monologues and dialogues, each of them a character sketch about a particular medieval personage, from Edgar, the falconer's son, to Mariot and Maud, the glassblower's daughters.

Schlitz also worked to make sure that the characters would be interesting to her young readers. As she notes in her foreword: "When I was a student, I had two ideas about history, and one of them was that history was about dead men who had done dull things. ... But I also read historical novels. And I adored them. ... Novels taught me that history is dramatic. I wanted my students to know that, too."

Schlitz succeeds, crafting a book that is by turns funny, gross, sad and silly. Some of the monologues and dialogues are prose, others are poetry. Some are laugh-out-loud hilarious, like this plea made by Lowdy, child of the varlet, or animal keeper, whose home is plagued by fleas: "I itch in the cathedral When I pray upon my knees: God, You saved us from damnation; Now save us from the fleas!"

Schlitz comes naturally to drama. As a child, she dreamed of being an actress. After graduating from Goucher College (she created her own major in aesthetics), she worked in various kinds of theater jobs before deciding that she wasn't quite talented enough to make a living by acting.

Fortunately, Schlitz also is an inveterate writer, who has written constantly since childhood. She completed "Good Masters!" in 2000 and sent it to 11 publishers; it was rejected by four before Candlewick picked it up.

A Candlewick editor worked with Schlitz to tighten the book, but problems with illustrators delayed publication until last year. Meanwhile, two other Schlitz books were published in 2006: "The Hero Schliemann," a biography of a German archaeologist who searched for the lost city of Troy, and a novel titled "A Drowned Maiden's Hair." Late last year, Candlewick published another book by Schlitz, "Bearskinner," a retelling of a Grimm Brothers story.

Schlitz has completed another book, which is scheduled for publication in a year or two. She's now hard at work on a new novel.

Meanwhile, it doesn't seem as if winning the Newbery will mean a major life change -- at least so far, Schlitz added.

"But I am planning on writing a lot of thank-you notes," she said.