By Jason Klaiber
Staff Writer
New York Times bestselling author Sarah Albee, who has written roughly 150 books for children and teenagers in her career, stopped by Pine Grove Middle School for a talk last week.
Albee’s presentation, which took place in Pine Grove’s Community Café in front of a crowd of children and parents, marked the school’s first author visit as well as its premiere evening event.
Toward the beginning of her talk, Albee read her interactive book “Elmo Says…”, a variation of the children’s game Simon Says.
This play-along book connects back to Albee’s time spent in the 1980s and 1990s at the Children’s Television Workshop, the production group responsible for the educational program “Sesame Street.”
“That’s where I realized I wanted to write for kids,” Albee said.
A year removed from her graduation at Harvard University, she worked for the show in the realm of music, international programming and recording studio sessions with the Muppets while also writing books featuring these characters.
“It was everything I loved to do,” Albee said. “It was really fun to be at ‘Sesame Street.’”
Afterward she focused her energy toward freelance work for newspapers and other shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Dora the Explorer.”
“That was kind of my bread and butter while my kids were really little,” Albee, who lives with her family in Connecticut, said. “It wasn’t until my kids were old enough to not need me as much that I could start writing my true love, which was nonfiction.”
In her career, Albee has gravitated toward writing books from an “offbeat” historical perspective, tracing civilization through such things as insects and sanitation.
Inspired in part by the film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as well as the writings of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle, Albee delved into a mysterious historical timeline laced with arsenic and cyanide for her 2017 book “Poison: Deadly Deeds, Perilous Professions, and Murderous Medicines.”
Albee has also written about humans who look like the dogs they own and the outrageous fashion choices people have made through the centuries.
The author said she summons ideas for books on a daily basis and trains like a professional athlete to better her writing. At one point, while writing serial novels for middle schoolers under a pseudonym, she would crank out 20,000-word books in six weeks’ time.
“It was kind of like boot camp for writing,” Albee said. “I learned to write quickly. I’m a better writer this year than I was last year because I do it every day.”
Most of her writing shies away from being too in-depth or tedious, instead opting for fairly short sentences and doses of humor to appeal to her young audience.
“Kids like to laugh,” Albee said. “I work really hard on the voice in my books and keeping it lighthearted. There’s a lot of doom and gloom in history, and they’re going to learn it, so I like to sort of show them that there are some wonderful, fabulous stories in history that can be told too.”
Albee surfs the internet to find and license the pictures for her books.
“I wouldn’t want a publisher to find pictures, because it’s a really important part of the book,” she said. “It’s nice to have a visual sensibility.”
Encouraged by her teachers and professors to practice her writing and become an author, Albee now passes on advice of her own: to read and analyze books.
“If there’s something you love, read it for fun but then go back and look under the hood,” she said.
For the event, River’s End Bookstore in Oswego displayed a selection of Albee’s books in the school’s front hall, where Albee signed books for those in attendance after her talk.
Through the week, the author also visited the elementary schools in the East Syracuse-Minoa Central School District.
Albee’s next work, a 16-foot, fold-out book, will be released in October.
