Marci Stillerman's Biography

Congress Street is haunted
By sweet sad melodies,
A woven tale in music,
Unfinished rhapsodies.

I started my writing life with those words, published in Franklin P. Adams' A Line of Type or Two column of the Chicago Tribune, when I was nine. It was a poem about Frank Ritter, a blind violinist who, day after day in all seasons offered his music to those who passed his corner on Congress and Michigan Avenues.

As soon as I learned to read, I decided to be a writer. When I was 10, my father bought me a Royal Typewriter and I took off. Jottings became stories and poems, and laboriously typed pages overflowed all the drawers and spaces of my bedroom.

Reading and writing were my childhood passions. I didn't play with dolls, roller skate, ride my bike. I had few friends. My German immigrant parents didn't know what to make of their daughter, just a year younger than her brother, a regular kid.

But when my father died at the height of the Depression, things changed for me. We moved to a small apartment and I no longer had my own bedroom, space for my typewriter, or a private school where teachers overlooked deficiencies in arithmetic and science while encouraging me to write.

At Hyde Park High, it was important to be popular, get good grades, and aim for college. Writing didn't count for much. Except for the school paper, The Weekly, and Story Scribblers Club, I stopped being a writer and concentrated on making friends and studying very hard. A scholarship at the University of Chicago and a nighttime job at Time Magazine enabled me to earn an MA in English Literature, while living at home though I'd dreamed of Northwestern University and a degree in Journalism.

My first job was assistant to the personnel manager of Marshall Field's. The days and nights of my life were full but always in my heart I knew someday I'd write.

And then there was the war, the Holocaust with its sad losses, marriage, the birth of my wonderful children, the deaths within two months of my young husband and my mother. Then three lost years in which I struggled with loss and the anxiety of raising three small children alone. Will I ever write? I asked myself.

"Now you can write," my new husband told me. Jack was a busy dentist. He knew my dream, had seen some of my childhood stories and poems. "I want to publish these," he said. I refused, thinking that if I ever become a writer, they would embarrass me.

A new life that included four teenagers, a large apartment, travel, and the job I insisted on keeping, demanded all my time and energy. When the children are in college, I promised myself, there'll be plenty of time to write.

But not until one frigid winter day in 1986 did that time finally come. It was 20 degrees below zero. Struggling against the arctic wind on our walk home from our offices, Jack and I decided it was time to retire and leave Chicago. Two of the children had come to live' in Los Angeles. Over Irish coffees in the first bar we found, we made our decision.

In May of 1986, we had an apartment in Los Angeles and had started learning to use the wonderful new machine, the computer. Jack, who had edited dental journals and done some of his own writing through the years, joined me in the decision to start a second life as freelance writers. I took courses in writing for children at UCLA and started submitting stories to children's magazines. To offset the discouragement of rejections, I sold stories to the pulp magazines that had published me in college. I began earning money for my efforts, but no byline. I quit as soon as one of my children's stories was accepted by Jack and Jill.

Nine Spoons was published in 1989, won the Sydney Taylor Award and was selected by US News and World Report as their First Pick for children's literature. It's in its seventh printing and is on reading lists for many schools throughout the country. I look at it as my small contribution to the world of children's literature, a cautionary tale to tell children about the Holocaust, one of the darkest times in the history of the modern world.

Every day of my life since then to now, I spend at least two hours writing.
I'm a writer---my dream has come true. I plan to write every day of the rest of my life like
The prolific old writer named Sven
Said I hope I'll know the time when
My words, now abundant
Become redundant,
To permanently lay down my pen.
                                 E. Lear

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