SATA
ENTRY TYPE:
WORK TITLE: WILL IT BE OKAY?
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://dragonwagon.com/
CITY: Portland
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: SATA 315
Home: Saxtons River. VT.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 25, 1952, in New York, NY; daughter of Maurice (a writer, journalist, and biographer) and Charlotte (a publisher, children’s book writer, and editor) Zolotow; married Crispin Dragonwagon (real name, Mark Parsons; an archaeologist), March 20, 1969 (divorced August 10, 1973); married Ned Shank (an architectural marketing consultant, innkeeper, writer and artist), October 20, 1978 (died November 30, 2000); married Mark Graff (2019).
EDUCATION:Educated in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, and Stockbridge, MA.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, chef, lecturer, public speaker, poet, journalist, and educator. Participant in artist-in-the-schools programs in Eureka Springs, AR, 1976-80, and Atlanta, GA, 1982-83; workshop presenter and/or lecturer at numerous conferences; developer and teacher of Fearless Writing workshops, 1990—. California Almond Board, spokesperson, 1993; Dairy Hollow House (bed-and-breakfast inn), Eureka Springs, co-owner and operator, until 1998; Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, Eureka Springs, cofounder, 1998, became Communication Arts Institute, 2005.
AVOCATIONS:Gardening, reading, cooking, movies of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, antiques, historic preservation, white-water canoeing, environmentalism, fitness, theater.
MEMBER:Author’s Guild, Authors League, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Poets & Writers, International Association of Culinary Professionals, Archimedes Investment Management (president, 1999-2000), Eureka Group.
AWARDS:Outstanding Science Trade Book for Children selection, National Science Teachers Association/Children’s Book Council (CBC), 1976, for Wind Rose; Notable Book citation, American Library Association, 1982, for To Take a Dare; Ossabaw Foundation fellow, 1982; Choice Book citation, National Council of Teachers of English, 1984, for Jemima Remembers; Parents’ Choice Award and Social Sciences Book of the Year, both 1984, both for Always, Always; Notable Book citation, New York Times, 1985, for The Year It Rained; Coretta Scott King Award, 1987, for Half a Moon and One Whole Star; Notable Children’s Trade Book in Social Studies, National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)/CBC, and Best Books citation, Wisconsin Children’s Center, both 1987, both for Diana, Maybe; Ragdale Foundation fellow, 1990; Golden Kite Award, Society of Children’s Book Writers, 1990, and Recommended Reading List for Children and Young Adults selection, National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1990-91, all for Home Place; Notable Children’s Trade Book in Social Studies, NCSS/CBC, 1990, for both Home Place and Winter Holding Spring; Porter Fund Award for Literary Excellence, Arkansas Literary Society, 1991; James Beard Award nomination and Julia Child Award nomination, both 1992, both for Dairy Hollow House Soup and Bread; Women on the Move award, Wyndham Hotels, 1997, for ideas for businesswomen travelers.
POLITICS: “Non-affiliated activist for environmental causes and social justice.” RELIGION: “Spiritual, not religious.”WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Aphra, Cosmopolitan, Fine Cooking, Ingenue, Ladies’ Home Journal, Lear’s, McCall’s, Mode, New Age, New York Times, New York Times Book Review, Nimrod, North American Review, Organic Gardening, and Seventeen.
Wind Rose was adapted as a motion picture, Phoenix Films, 1983.
SIDELIGHTS
The daughter of two noted authors, Crescent Dragonwagon has made writing a way of life since childhood. Dragonwagon is the author of award-winning cookbooks and adult fiction novel as well as dozens of books for children, among them Half a Moon and One Whole Star, I Hate My Brother Harry, and Home Place. Her young-adult novel To Take a Dare earned her a teen readership when it was published in 1982. As Dragonwagon once commented of her childhood growing up in a family of writers, “It seemed evident to me that when things happen to you in life, you write about them, and eventually they become books.”
Born in 1952, the daughter of noted children’s author and editor Charlotte Zolotow and journalist and biographer Maurice Zolotow, Dragonwagon was familiar with the publishing process and, undeterred by potential rejection, she submitted her first manuscript to a publisher as a teenager. Rainy Day Together appeared on bookstore shelves in 1969, the same year the sixteen-year-old author got married for the first time. Although the marriage eventually ended, the writing habit did not: “Most of life since has been focused in my writing,” she later commented: “Strong feelings and experiences, interesting people, overheard bits of conversation, almost everything that strikes me has a way of turning up in my work, sometimes surprising me greatly.”
Dragonwagon described an early book for children, Wind Rose, as “typical of my writing process, beginning with an incident which sparked the idea.” With no children of her own, she used her personal experiences of being in love and “attached them to the actual conception and birth of this child and wrote the book,” which consists of a poem in which a mother explains to her child how and why she was conceived. The result is “a rather special children’s book about conception and birth,” according to reviewer Linda Wolfe in the New York Times Book Review, and a Publishers Weekly contributor characterized it as “one of the most attractive and beautiful introductions to the subject of birth.” Wind Rose is unique among books about where babies come from because it aims “to show the feeling side—why people have babies (under ideal circumstances) as opposed to simply how,” as Melinda Schroeder noted in School Library Journal. “Gentle and joyous,” it “celebrates the wonder of creation on a level young children will appreciate and find reassuring.”
Many of Dragonwagon’s other children’s books have earned praise for taking a personal and gentle approach to their subject. Diana, Maybe, in which a little girl dreams of meeting her half-sister, has a “sensitive quality” that depicts the child’s feelings “in a natural way,” according to Lorraine Douglas in School Library Journal. Jane Saliers observed in the same periodical that “children will recognize their own collisions between dream and reality” in Margaret Ziegler Is Horse-Crazy. Depicting a little girl’s disillusionment when she discovers that horseback riding is not all she had imagined, the book is “a skillfully conveyed story of dreams, disappointment, and recovered pride,” as Saliers wrote in School Library Journal.
In All the Awake Animals Are Almost Asleep, a picture book illustrated by David McPhail, Dragonwagon touches on bedtime as an opportunity for emotional bonding between parent and child, as well as a test of wills. “Alliteration and animals add up to a child asleep,” noted a Kirkus Reviews critic, although sleep does not come easily for a young boy who is not yet ready to enter Dreamland. In a rhyming text, the boy’s mother describes a menagerie of animals, from Antelope to Zebra, that have ended their busy day and are drifting slowly into slumber. While the Kirkus Reviews contributor found McPhail’s line-and-watercolor images to be “lovely in evoking diverse, sleeping fauna and simplified landscapes,” School Library Journal critic Yelena Alekseyeva-Popova dubbed All the Awake Animals Are Almost Asleep a “cozy alphabet/bedtime hybrid.”
Dragonwagon is sometimes inspired to write by her experiences of a distinctive time or place. In The Itch Book, for example, she details a day in Arkansas that is so hot that even the animals itch. “Composed in poetic prose replete with descriptive phrasing, this glimpse into an Ozark day is modern American folklore at its best,” as Cathy Woodward commented in School Library Journal. Dragonwagon’s sketch of local life is “a great book to share with children,” the critic added.
Home Place conjures up a special image; while backpacking in a rural area, a family comes upon the abandoned ruins of an old house and wonders about the people who once lived there. With its imagined scenes of a loving family, “this mood piece captures that quiet, reflective feeling a country hike can prompt,” according to Denise Wilms in a review for Booklist. Earning Dragonwagon a Golden Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers, Home Place was also praised by a Publishers Weekly critic for its ability to imaginatively “limn … a forgotten family’s day-to-day existence” with “striking craft.”
In And Then it Rained/And Then the Sun Came Out, a flip-book featuring part of a whole story in each half of the book, Dragonwagon describes what happens when a rainstorm drives people indoors. At first, they are happy to do inside things, such as reading, listening to music, and dancing, and a cooling rain is often a welcome relief from hot weather. When a young boy becomes restless and wishes the rain would stop, his father tells him that the sun follows the rain just as rain always follows the sun. With a flip of the book, the rain has stopped and the sun is shining, the cycle of weather primed to start once again. A Kirkus Reviews critic described And Then it Rained/And Then the Sun Came Out as “good wet (or dry) fun for storytime,” and Sue Morgan wrote in School Library Journal that Dragonwagon’s “fresh concept will intrigue children.”
While most of Dragonwagon’s books for young people focus on somewhat serious topics, others are just plain fun. An off-track bat finds his way into a busy hotel and is saved from flying dinner forks by a quick-thinking young girl in Bat in the Dining Room. In Alligators and Others All Year Long: A Book of Months readers take a trip through the calendar along with a cavalcade of animals enjoying the special treats nature scatters throughout the twelve months of the year. From January, when cats sharpen their skates and hit the ice, through March, when lumbering moose lightheartedly frolic amid jaunty yellow daffodils, to December, when a tree is decorated and gifts are exchanged among the animals gathered together, Dragonwagon’s book was described by Booklist contributor Deborah Abbott as an “ebullient celebration of the year” that “joyfully capture[s] highlights” of seasons and holidays in its “short, sprightly verses.” Praising in particular the work of illustrators José Aruego and Ariane Dewey, a Publishers Weekly reviewer described Alligators and Others All Year Long as “bursting with splendid color and winsome animal characters” and ending “with a clever surprise and a sweet song.” The successful collaboration among Aruego and Dewey and author Dragonwagon is mirrored in the equally upbeat Alligator Arrived with Apples: A Potluck Alphabet Feast.
Charlie, the young main character of Is This a Sack of Potatoes?, is full of mischief and does not want to go to sleep. Instead, he hides beneath the covers as his mother pats the lump he makes under the bedclothes and wonders out loud what it could be: a sack of potatoes, a ton of tomatoes, a peck of pears, or a cave of bears? Charlie’s answer is always “No,” until he finally pops out and reassures his perplexed mother. Praising the illustrations by Catherine Stock, Shelle Rosenfeld predicted in Booklist that “many children will like this sweet rendering of a familiar parent-child game.”
Written with the aid and encouragement of Y.A. novelist Paul Zindel, Dragonwagon’s young-adult novel To Take a Dare looks frankly at adolescent drinking, drug abuse, and sex. “Sure to scandalize many parents at the same time that it hooks a large audience of worldly wise teens,” according to Joyce Milton in the New York Times Book Review, the story here is narrated by sixteen-year-old Chrysta. After running away from home, Chrysta develops a painful venereal disease that leaves her permanently sterile; she is also threatened with rape by her boss and with death by the twelve-year-old street kid she has mistakenly befriended. After living on the road for three years, she gets a job as a cook in a small resort town. There she finds friends who are there during hard times as well as beginning a caring relationship with a young man. Her experiences “teach her she has a lot of strength, love, and other good qualities in spite of her unhappy childhood,” as Karen Ritter noted in School Library Journal. A Publishers Weekly critic concluded of To Take a Dare that Chrysta’s story “is strong stuff but it is a voice that should be heard.”
(open new)
In 2022, Dragonwagon decided to give one of her early picture books, Will It Be Okay?, a second life. Originally published in 1977, the book went out of print in 1991. She came to this decision during the Covid-19 pandemic when she and her husband read a picture book each night on Facebook, sharing their love of children’s books with others during a difficult time. The first book she read was Will It Be Okay?, “because it’s my most reassuring book,” Dragonwagon said in a Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR interview with Samantha Balaban. “I’ve always had a healthy respect for the feelings that children have,” Dragonwagon added, “so in the story the little girl asks the questions and her mother answers them in a way that is not condescending. It’s funny. Sometimes it has some wisdom in it.”
The basic story deals with a young girl who asks her mother repeatedly “Will it be okay?” when she has a bee sting, a thunderstorm strikes scares her, if she has strong feelings, or loses a loved one. The answers returned are positive and reassuring, explaining and comforting for the young girl. Dragonwagon was only in her mid-twenties when she originally published the book, and has noted that she felt more like the child in the book than the adult. Turning 70 in 2022, she had decades more experience writing children’s books, and decided to change a few lines in the original book, but was also anxious to give the book new illustrations. As she told Balaban in the NPR interview, the originals were done by Ben Shecter, and while she liked the manner in which he “captured the fear of the little girl,” she felt that the illustrations did not necessarily show the girl’s strength. For the new edition, she brought on the author and illustrator Jessica Love, who purposely did not look at the original illustrations, but took the book on as a new project, working only from the text and using just three colors, three colors: black, red, and yellow. These she blended to create other tones. “When I saw Jessica’s pictures, I just thought ‘Wow!’,” Dragonwagon told Balaban. “It’s just so delightful, goofy, and powerful. … She exactly gets the emotions across.”
Reviewers lauded the revised edition. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted; “With empathy, the creators imagine a parent with an uncanny ability to hear a child’s concerns, to hold the emotions that accompany them.” Similarly, a Kirkus Reviews critic felt that this “tender tale is a balm for worried children in troubled times and a model of comfort for caregivers to offer them.”
(close new)
Reflecting on her diverse writing career, Dragonwagon once explained that “I have always seen myself as a writer first. Not a children’s book writer as such, or a novelist, or a poet, or a magazine writer, or a cookbook author—though I have done each of these types of writing. Writing is the lens through which I focus on the world and the things in it which trouble me, or interest me, or give me pleasure. The particular subject or feeling I am looking at through the lens determines what form the finished piece of writing will take.” The only exception to this rule, she noted, is in the case of longer works where “the characters soon take over and do it their way, from their perspective—which may be very different from mine.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 15, 1985, review of The Year It Rained; August, 1990, Denise Wilms, review of Home Place, p. 2171; March 1, 1993, Julie Corsaro, review of Annie Flies the Birthday Bike, p. 1234; October 15, 1993, Deborah Abbott, review of Alligators and Others All Year Long: A Book of Months, p. 445; June 1, 1997, Ilene Cooper, review of Brass Button, p. 86; October 1, 1997, J. Corsaro, review of Bat in the Dining Room, p. 335; December 15, 2002, Shelle Rosenfeld, review of Is This a Sack of Potatoes?, p. 766; June 1, 2003, Carolyn Phelan, review of And Then It Rained/And Then the Sun Came Out, p. 1784; November 1, 2012, Kara Dean, review of All the Awake Animals Are Almost Asleep, p. 75.
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), June 28, 1986, Tim Wynne-Jones, review of The Year It Rained.
Horn Book, March-April, 1985, review of Jemima Remembers, p. 175; November-December, 1990, Hanna B. Zeiger, review of Home Place, p. 725; January-February, 2013, Joanna Rudge Long, review of All the Awake Animals Are Almost Asleep, p. 62.
Instructor, May, 1984, Allan Yeager, review of Coconut, p. 87.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2003, review of And Then It Rained/And Then the Sun Came Out, p. 606; September 1, 2012, review of All the Awake Animals Are Almost Asleep; August 15, 2022, review of Will It Be Okay?.
Library Journal, August, 1986, Ruth Diebold, review of Dairy Hollow House Cookbook, p. 149; November 15, 2002, Judith Sutton, review of Passionate Vegetarian, p. 94.
New Statesman & Society, July 7, 1989, Nicci Gerrard, review of The Year It Rained, p. 38.
New York Times Book Review, May 23, 1976, Linda Wolfe, review of Wind Rose, p. 16; April 25, 1982, Joyce Milton, review of To Take a Dare, p. 49; November 10, 1985, Natalie Babbitt, review of The Year It Rained, p. 35; October 26, 1986, Rollene W. Saal, review of Half a Moon and One Whole Star, p. 48; May 10, 1987, review of Diana, Maybe, p. 26.
Publishers Weekly, January 19, 1976, review of Wind Rose, p. 102; October 2, 1981, Jean F. Mercier, review of If You Call My Name, p. 111; March 19, 1982, review of To Take a Dare, p. 71; May 11, 1984, review of Coconut, p. 272; June 29, 1984, review of Always, Always, p. 105; May 30, 1986, review of Half a Moon and One Whole Star, p. 64; July 18, 1986, review of Dairy Hollow House Cookbook, p. 77; September 11, 1987, review of Alligator Arrived with Apples: A Potluck Alphabet, p. 94; August 31, 1990, review of Home Place, p. 65; August 23, 1993, review of Alligators and Others All Year Long, p. 72; May 5, 1997, review of Brass Button, p. 209; February 15, 1999, review of This Is the Bread I Baked for Ned, p. 109; October 7, 2002, review of Passionate Vegetarian, p. 69; September 3, 2012, review of All the Awake Animals Are Almost Asleep, p. 66; July 11, 2022, review of Will It Be Okay?, p. 77.
School Library Journal, April, 1976, Melinda Schroeder, review of Wind Rose, p. 60; April, 1981, Patricia Dooley, review of If You Call My Name, p. 106; May, 1982, Karen Ritter, review of To Take a Dare, p. 68; November, 1983, Helen E. Williams, review of Katie in the Morning, p. 61; May, 1984, Dana Whitney Pinizzotto, review of Coconut, p. 64; May, 1984, Connie Weber, review of Always, Always, p. 63; February, 1985, Reva S. Kern, review of Jemima Remembers, p. 63; November, 1985, Trev Jones, review of The Year It Rained, p. 95; December, 1985, Roger Sutton, review of The Year It Rained, p. 43; March, 1987, Laura McCutcheon, review of Dear Miss Moshki, p. 25; November, 1987, Jane Saliers, review of Alligator Arrived with Apples, p. 88; January, 1988, Lorraine Douglas, review of Diana, Maybe, p. 64; June-July, 1988, Jane Saliers, review of Margaret Ziegler Is Horse-Crazy, p. 90; December, 1989, Ruth Semrau, review of This Is the Bread I Baked for Ned, p. 78; March, 1990, Nancy A. Gifford, review of I Hate My Sister Maggie, p. 190; June, 1990, Cathy Woodward, review of The Itch Book, and Joanne Aswell, review of Winter Holding Spring, both p. 99; February, 1991, Carey Ayers, review of Home Place, p. 725; July, 1993, Nancy Seiner, review of Annie Flies the Birthday Bike, p. 59; January, 1994, review of Alligators and Others All Year Long, p. 106; June, 1997, Virginia Golodetz, review of Brass Button, p. 86; September, 1997, Martha Rosen, review of Bat in the Dining Room, p. 179; November 1, 2002, Rosalyn Pierini, review of Is This a Sack of Potatoes?, p. 122; May 1, 2003, Sue Morgan, review of And Then It Rained/And Then the Sun Came Out, p. 112; October, 2012, Yelena Alekseyeva-Popova, review of All the Awake Animals Are Almost Asleep, p. 94.
ONLINE
Crescent Dragonwagon website, http://www.dragonwagon.com (January 10, 2023).
HG Literary website,https://www.hgliterary.com/ (January 10, 2023), author profile.
Passionate Vegetarian website, http://www.passionatevegetarian.com/ (July 25, 2007), “Crescent Dragonwagon.”
Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (December 4, 2022), Samantha Balaban, “Kids Want to Know: ‘Will It Be Okay?’ — This Book Answers That Question.”
Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow website, http://www.writerscolony.org/ (July 25, 2007).
No bio
QUOTE: "because it's my most reassuring book," "I've always had a healthy respect for the feelings that children have," "so in the story the little girl asks the questions and her mother answers them in a way that is not condescending. It's funny. Sometimes it has some wisdom in it." "When I saw Jessica's pictures, I just thought 'Wow!'," "It's just so delightful, goofy, and powerful. ... She exactly gets the emotions across."
Kids want to know: 'Will It Be Okay?' — this book answers that question
December 4, 20227:48 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
Samantha Balaban
SAMANTHA BALABAN
7-Minute Listen
Download
Transcript
"Will it be okay?" "Yes, it will." At left, a page from the 1977 edition of Crescent Dragonwagon's Will it Be Okay? illustrated by Ben Shecter, and, at right, the same page from the 2022 edition, illustrated by Jessica Love.
Ben Shecter / HarperCollins / Jessica Love / Cameron + Company
There are a lot of "what ifs" when you're a kid: "What if a bee stings me?" "What if I forget my lines in the school play?" "What if people don't like me?"
At the heart of all these questions is a desire to know: "Will it be okay?"
That's the title of a 1977 book written by Crescent Dragonwagon — a story told entirely in dialogue between a mother and her child.
"I've always had a healthy respect for the feelings that children have," says Dragonwagon, "so in the story the little girl asks the questions and her mother answers them in a way that is not condescending. It's funny. Sometimes it has some wisdom in it."
Dragonwagon was in her mid-20s when she first published Will It Be Okay?— a time when she says she was much more the child in the story than the adult. Now 70, Crescent Dragonwagon has written more than two dozen children's books, as well as novels, cookbooks and poetry.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Dragonwagon says she felt like she needed something to do. She and her husband started reading children's books out loud every night.
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"The first book that I chose to read was Will It Be Okay? because it's my most reassuring book," Dragonwagon says.
Will It Be Okay?
Jessica Love / Cameron + Company
But the book had been out of print since 1991. She decided to give it a new life. She re-wrote parts of it (taking out, for example, a line about a "Thanksgiving play" and swapping in "school play" instead). And she made one other big change: all new illustrations.
The 1977 illustrations by artist Ben Shecter were soft and sentimental. Dragonwagon says she liked the way he captured the fear of the little girl — but felt the illustrations didn't really show her strength.
For the new book, Dragonwagon turned to Jessica Love, the critically acclaimed author and illustrator of Julián Is a Mermaid.
"I made it three lines, maybe four, before I felt absolutely certain that if someone took this job from me, I would have to hunt them down and get it back," says Love.
Love says she intentionally did not look at the earlier version of the book — she knew she wanted her illustrations to have the feeling of a print: punchy and graphic. She did the illustrations by hand with thick lines of Sumi ink.
"I kind of dry it out so that the line doesn't look wet," she says. "It looks a little draggier ... almost like a pencil."
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She limited herself to three colors: black, red, and yellow — which she mixed together to create a variety of pinks and peaches.
"I wanted the artwork to have a similar structure to it, and restraint to it," says Love. "In the way that the text is limited to these questions and then answers."
The mother and her daughter both have big, curly black hair, pink cheeks and expressive eyes. They dance and spin across the pages — they look like best friends.
"When I saw Jessica's pictures, I just thought 'Wow!' " says Dragonwagon. "It's just so delightful, goofy, and powerful. ... She exactly gets the emotions across." The child's absolute horror when she forgets her lines in the play. Her feeling of triumph when she makes up new ones.
Will It Be Okay? written by Crescent Dragonwagon and illustrated by Jessica Love.
Jessica Love / Cameron + Company
Though Dragonwagon and Love did not collaborate directly on this children's book, Dragonwagon did look Love up online.
"When I first started in children's books, they attempted very vigorously to keep the artist and the writer separate," she explains. "However, in the age of the internet it's not so easy to keep people apart."
Mostly they just exchanged a few emails about how thrilled they each were to be working with each other. They didn't speak face-to-face until this interview, but say it felt like working with a kindred spirit.
"It's that thing that happens when you read someone's writing that speaks just like it's being whispered into your ear," says Jessica Love. She especially connected, she says, with the way the mother speaks to the child.
"It's the quintessence of the way I longed to be spoken to as a child," she says. "You can feel it when you're talking to a little kid and they sense that they're being taken seriously."
"What if someone doesn't like me?" the child asks in the book.
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"You feel lonely and sad," the mom answers. "You walk and walk until you come to a small pond. You kneel in the grass by the edge of this pond and you see something move. You put out your hand and a tiny frog no bigger than your thumbnail hops into it. Very carefully you lift your hand up to your ear and the frog whispers, 'Other people like you, other people love you.' "
One of the things that Love says she found the most helpful in Dragonwagon's writing was the practical advice: get up, take a walk, move your body, rub an onion back and forth on your bee sting. "It gives you a scaffolding, a framework, to harness the galloping horse that is your frightened child brain," she says.
Will It Be Okay? written by Crescent Dragonwagon and illustrated by Ben Shecter
Ben Shecter / HarperCollins
Because, of course, the child in the book is working herself up to asking the biggest, scariest question of them all: "But what if you die?"
Dragonwagon says she doesn't want to hide the truth from kids — life is full of upsetting things! Instead, she hopes this book helps kids, and adults, get through it.
"My feeling is that feelings want to be felt," she says.
And so the mother answers the child: "My loving doesn't die. It stays with you, as warm as two pairs of mittens, one pair on top of the other. When you remember you and me, you say: What can I do with so much love? I will have to give some away."
Dragonwagon says she doesn't know how she came up with the answer to this question when she was in her 20s. But now, decades later, and after having lost her parents, friends, and two husbands, she is certain that it is true.
"There's not a day that I don't think of them," she says. "But truly their loving doesn't die."
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"So it will be okay?"
"Yes, my love. It will."
Crescent Dragonwagon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Born Ellen Zolotow
November 25, 1952 (age 70)
New York City, US
Occupation Writer
Genre Fiction/Nonfiction
Relatives Charlotte Zolotow (mother)
Maurice Zolotow (father)
Crescent Dragonwagon (née Ellen Zolotow, November 25, 1952, New York City) is a multigenre writer. She has written fifty books, including two novels, seven cookbooks and culinary memoirs, more than twenty children's books, a biography, and a collection of poetry. In addition, she has written for magazines including The New York Times Book Review, Lear's, Cosmopolitan, McCall's, and The Horn Book.[1]
Dragonwagon and her late husband, Ned Shank, owned Dairy Hollow House, a country inn and restaurant in the Ozark Mountain community of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Dragonwagon later co-founded the non-profit Writer's Colony at Dairy Hollow, and was active in the cultural and literary life of Arkansas throughout the 31 years she lived in the state full-time.[2] After Shank's death in 2000,[3] Dragonwagon moved to her family's summer home in Vermont.
Since the 2014 death of her subsequent partner, filmmaker-activist David R. Koff,[4] with whom she lived in Vermont for a decade, she has divided her time among New York, Vermont, and Arkansas.
Dragonwagon is the daughter of the writers Charlotte and Maurice Zolotow.[5] She serves as literary executor to both her parents.
Contents
1 Awards
2 Books
2.1 Biography
2.2 Cookbooks
2.3 Children's books
2.4 Novels
3 See also
4 References
5 External links
Awards
Dragonwagon's tenth children's book, Half a Moon and One Whole Star, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney and published in 1986, was the winner of a Coretta Scott King Award, as well as a Reading Rainbow Selection. In 1991 she won Arkansas' Porter Prize.
In 1993, Dragonwagon won the Name of the Year award.[6] In 2010, the Dragonwagon Regional was named after her.[7]
In 2003, Dragonwagon's cookbook Passionate Vegetarian won the James Beard book award in the category "Vegetarian/Healthy Focus".[8]
Books
Biography
Dragonwagon, Crescent (1977). Stevie Wonder. ISBN 0-8256-3908-5.
Cookbooks
Dragonwagon, Crescent (1972). The Commune Cookbook. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-21152-8.
Dragonwagon, Crescent (1972). The Bean Book. Workman Pub. ISBN 0-911104-16-X.
Dairy Hollow House Cookbook, 1992
Dragonwagon, Crescent (1992). Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread: A Country Inn Cookbook. ISBN 0-89480-751-X., nominated for both the James Beard and IACP Awards
Passionate Vegetarian (2002), Winner, James Beard Award
The Cornbread Gospels (2007)
Bean by Bean: A Cookbook (2011)
Putting Up Stuff for the Cold Time: Canning, Preserving & Pickling for Those New to the Art or Not (1973)
Children's books
Rainy Day Together (Harper & Row, 1971), as by Ellen Parsons, children's picture book illustrated by Lillian Hoban
When Light Turns into Night (1975) ISBN 0-06-021740-5
Wind Rose (1976) ISBN 0-06-021741-3 (with Ronald Himler)
Will It Be Okay? (1977) ISBN 0-06-021738-3
Your Owl Friend (1977) ISBN 0-06-021731-6, picture book illus. Ruth Lercher Bornstein
If You Call My Name (1981) ISBN 0-06-021744-8, picture book illus. David Palladini
"Katie in the Morning" (1983) ISBN 0-06-021729-4, picture book illus. Betsy A. Day
I Hate My Brother Harry (1983)
Always, Always (1984) ISBN 0-02-733080-X
Coconut (1984) ISBN 0-06-021759-6, picture book illus. Nancy Tafuri
Alligator Arrived With Apples: A Potluck Alphabet Feast (1985) ISBN 0-7857-0010-2
Half a Moon and One Whole Star (1986) ISBN 0-689-71415-7, picture book illus. Jerry Pinkney
This Is the Bread I Baked for Ned (1989) ISBN 0-689-82353-3
Home Place (1990) ISBN 978-0-027331-905, picture book illus. Jerry Pinkney
Winter Holding Spring (1990) ISBN 0-02-733122-9
Alligators and Others All Year Long (1993)
Annie Flies the Birthday Bike (1993)
Brass Button (1997)
Bat in the Dining Room (1997)
And Then It Rained / And Then the Sun Came Out (2002)
Sack of Potatoes (2002)
All the Awake Animals Are Almost Asleep (2012)
Novels
The Year It Rained (1985) ISBN 0-02-733110-5
To Take A Dare (1982) (co-authored with the late Paul Zindel)
Crescent Dragonwagon
AUTHOR
Represented by Victoria Wells Arms
Crescent Dragonwagon, represented by Victoria Wells Arms, is the much-published author of fifty books in five genres, numerous magazine articles, and three blogs. She is the developer and leader of the Fearless Writing™ family of on- and off-line classes, courses and events, which have helped hundreds of writers (including the late Julia Child, who took Fearless when she was over 80, preparatory to beginning her memoir, My Life in France). Born in New York, Crescent is the daughter of show-business biographer Maurice Zolotow and children’s book writer/editor Charlotte Zolotow, for whom she serves as literary executor. She has written eight culinary memoirs, including the James Beard Award-winning Passionate Vegetarian, the best-selling Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread Cookbook and Bean by Bean, as well as 28 children’s books including All the Animals are Almost Asleep and the Coretta Scott King Award-winning Half a Moon and One Whole Star. Her Until Just Moistened: A Not-Quite One-Woman Show, with Crumbs, was selected and produced by the New Play Festival, and earned her an Artist 360 grant. She now lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the 1908 home she shares with her husband, cyber-defender Mark Graff, and their cat, Felani. She walks five miles a day year round, and reads almost constantly.
QUOTE: tender tale is a balm for worried children in troubled times and a model of comfort for caregivers to offer them."
Dragonwagon, Crescent WILL IT BE OKAY? Cameron Kids (Children's None) $18.99 9, 6 ISBN: 978-1-951836-50-4
An updated version of Dragonwagon's 1977 release, originally illustrated by Ben Shecter, with new artwork by Love.
Written entirely in dialogue between a parent and a child, the text addresses childhood fears ranging from the small ("But what if there is thunder and lightning?") to the profound ("But what if you die?"). The latter worry arises toward the end of the book, after the child has received matter-of-fact, loving reassurance about many other fears ("You sit at your window and watch the rain beating down over the houses "). The parent does not seem visibly ill, which suggests that this is a general query about mortality rather than a pressing concern. Throughout, Love's illustrations brim with vitality and emotion, evoking a style akin to some of Trina Schart Hyman's earlier work in the characters' design, with spare backgrounds that offer expressive, decorative embellishments to help set mood and tone. This tender tale is a balm for worried children in troubled times and a model of comfort for caregivers to offer them. The main characters have light skin, dark eyes, and curly, black hair. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
More than OK. Much more. (Picture book. 3-8)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Dragonwagon, Crescent: WILL IT BE OKAY?" Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A713722684/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6be44692. Accessed 16 Dec. 2022.
QUOTE: "With empathy, the creators imagine a parent with an uncanny ability to hear a child's concerns, to hold the emotions that accompany them."
Will It Be Okay?
Crescent Dragonwagon, illus. by Jessica Love.
Cameron Kids, $18.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-951836-50-4
An unflappable and inventive parent reassures a worried child in Dragonwagon's (And Then It Rained... and Then the Sun Came Out...) double character study, previously published in 1977 and now illustrated by Love (I Love You Because I Love You). "Will it be okay?" asks the child in an initial scene. "Yes, it will," answers the parent. "But what if there is thunder and lightning?" asks the paleskinned child, whose curly hair is piled high, huge eyes wide, hands clasped with concern. As the two kneel on a sofa, looking out at the storm, the parent, whose skin tone and curls mirror the child's, introduces a reframe: "the loud thunder is calling you, saying: Look, look.' The world is receiving a deep long drink!" About forgetting one's lines: "You make up new ones." The questions lead at last to one of deepest dread: "But what if you die?" The child, seated on the adult's chest, gazes into their face. "My loving doesn't die," the caretaker says. "When you remember me, you say: What can I do with so much love? I will have to give some away." With empathy, the creators imagine a parent with an uncanny ability to hear a child's concerns, to hold the emotions that accompany them, and to think and talk about them. Ages 4-8. Author's agent: Victoria Wells Arms, Wells Arms Literary/HG Literary. Illustrator's agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff. DeFiore & Co. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Will It Be Okay?" Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 29, 11 July 2022, p. 77. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A711579466/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9975a9ee. Accessed 16 Dec. 2022.