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A sense of adventure

by Don Kazak

Elephants can swim. That may not sound so remarkable, but how many us have ever seen one do it?

Nancy Farmer has.

The Menlo Park resident and successful children's author was working in Mozambique as an entomologist many years ago, a job she had no formal training for (more on that later).

She was working to control water weeds and monitor the water quality in a new lake created by a dam when the area flooded, creating little islands in area -- each with batches of marooned animals, trapped by the flooding.

"The first place we tried to tie up (their boat), all the snakes for miles around had been driven onto this island, and the trees were hanging with them like fruit," she said. "Needless to say, we didn't tie up there."

She found out that elephants, marooned on another little island, can indeed swim. "They got into the water and floated down, with their trunks up, and they would sort of dog paddle," she said. The elephants made it to higher ground.

The baboons, alas, didn't. "The baboons were so afraid of water, they starved," she said.

Spending 17 years in Africa working at a job for which she had no academic training ultimately paid off for Farmer.

The author of five children's and young adult books -- the next one, "The House of the Scorpion," due out in September -- and three picture books for kids, Farmer has set several of her books in Africa, a place she knows well.

Her book "The Ear, The Eye and the Arm" won a 1995 Newberry award, the highest honor for children's authors. Although released for ages 9-12, it also has adult appeal.

"The Ear" is science fiction for young adults, set in Zimbabwe in the year 2194. It's a tale of three children from a prominent family who set on a forbidden journey and disappear. The family subsequently calls in Africa's three most prominent detectives (the Ear, the Eye and the Arm) to solve the mystery.

She followed "The Ear" with "A Girl Named Disaster," the story of a young girl who tries to flee Zimbabwe via canoe because she is being forced into a marriage with a cruel man. It was a National Book Award finalist.

Farmer has also written "The Warm Place" and "Do You Know Me."

How Farmer came to be an award-winning children's author is kind of an adventure tale by itself.

An Arizona native, Farmer, now 62, graduated from Reed College in Oregon with a degree in English literature.

She then went into the Peace Corps, studied Hindi, and was sent to India. She was supposed to teach English to Hindi-speaking students. Instead, she taught chemistry to students who didn't speak Hindi.

After she returned to the states, she took some classes in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley --why not, she had been teaching it -- and then got hired by a noted entomologist at the school because of her lack of knowledge on the subject. Why was she hired? "Because he didn't want anyone to talk back to him," she said. "I was trained on the job."

As an entomologist, she worked for the state teaching highway crews when to spray to control insects on highway medians. "It's a bigger problem than you might think," she said. Because of arid areas in the state, insects use the median strip landscaping of highways to get through the desert. "They can chomp their way up the landscaping and get into all sorts of places they're not supposed to," she said.

Then she decided to go Africa, even though she knew so little about the continent that she packed a supply of needles, thread and aspirin before going to South Africa because she thought it was a primitive place and wouldn't be able to get those things there.

She arrived with a list of African entomologists, and with typical Član, walked into the office of the first one on the list, asked for a job, and was hired. "I'm very good at talking my way into jobs," she joked.

That eventually led to the job in Mozambique, and from there she went to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she met her husband, Harold, who was teaching in a university there. He now teaches at Foothill Community College.

Farmer first started writing in 1982. "I just suddenly sat down and started writing one day," she said, without taking any writing classes. "I just did it."

She sold stories while living in Africa and also tried to sell them in the United States, but met with less success.

"I got letters back that were very encouraging, but they told me to get a new typewriter ribbon because they could hardly read them," she said. "I just practiced until I won a contest in the U.S, called "Writers of the Future," and I got first prize for that and it brought me back to the U.S."

Writing books in Africa "was a piece of cake because there weren't that many people writing books," she said. "I would take it to the editor and they would pay me cash on the barrelhead and 10 percent royalties and they would take everything, so it was really easy. But when I got here, there was more competition."

But Farmer kept writing. She sent a partial manuscript off to a competition for grants by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and worked at Stanford as a technician in a science department. It was a job she hated because the chemicals the department used caused her fingernails to drop off.

"I decided to quit the job before I lost the use of my hands," she said.

The day she quit -- well, you can guess. She got home and there was a letter from the NEA in her mailbox telling her she had won a $20,000 grant, the first grant the endowment had ever given a children's author.

"So that gave me a grubstake and I was able to keep on writing, and from then on I've been a full-time writer," she said.

But she still had to get published and didn't have an editor or a publisher.

She received a list of editors to submit her works and picked the one who was local -- Richard Jackson, then of Orchard Books.

"He bought the book, and I've been publishing with him ever since," she said. "I've been very lucky because I have a good editor. By luck I blundered into him. He's also willing to take chances and try something new."

Now settled comfortably in her writing career -- 10 years after sending her first manuscript to Jackson -- Farmer writes from the modest apartment she and her husband live in. They have one son, away in the Navy but soon to return after serving on a ship off Pakistan.

Her work habits are simple. When her husband is away at work each day, she writes.

For aspiring writers, Farmer's experiences may be a little dismaying. She doesn't outline plots. "I don't know what I will write when I sit down," she said. "I just know the beginning and the end. I don't make an outline. I just wing it."

But writing is something that that needs to be done every day. "You have to do it every day," she said, "even if it's just a couple of words a day."

She never gets frustrated and she never gets writer's block. "I've learned to sit down and trust my muse," she said. "I find if I sit down and expect it to work, it does."

Farmer is also not big on rewriting, which many other writers sweat blood over. "The first draft is pretty close to the final draft," she said.

There's also been an interesting pattern to her work. "I started out with children's books when my son was little, and they got older as he got older," she said. She also has two unpublished adult books she is still working on, both science fiction.

A science fan, Farmer reads constantly but doesn't tackle fiction when she is working. "I read a lot of science," she said. "Now, I'm reading the history of the Vikings."

There may be some fictional Norsemen in her writing future.

It's a long way from the shores of that lake in Mozambique, but Farmer has used her life experiences to trigger the fantasy writing worlds she has so successfully created over the last decade.

For someone who started writing almost out of the blue, it has been a remarkable time for her, with no signs evident of slowing down or running out of ideas. After all, she does trust her muse.

E-mail Don Kazak at dkazak@paweekly.com