A retired Brandywine Heights teacher authored a book about childhood obesity and bullying.
Known to many of her former students as Mrs. Allmendinger, also known as Mrs. A, Mary Ann Hayes taught English at the Brandywine Heights High School.
Taking a breath, Hayes thought for a moment and said, “It’s sort of ironic that I’ve taught high school and college level students my whole life and here I am writing a children’s book, but I kept hearing about childhood obesity, adolescent obesity, and I kept hearing about bullying and neither one of those was anything new to me.”
“Just Plump Penelope”Hayes said starting with the second book that Penelope’s story to a large degree is her story. As an overweight child, she had been bullied all the way through school including 12th grade.
Hayes has a couple of other books she is planning to work on once she has her series of Just Plump Penelope up and running. Penelope’s story is Hayes first attempt to break into publishing.
“These are stories that need to be out there for parents and grandparents to sit and read to their children,” said Hayes. “For maybe school teachers, librarians, guidance councilors to use when they work with kids to try to teach them why bullying isn’t right and to talk to children about weight issues that they might have.”
Hayes said the focus is on the bullying of obese children, but in later books, once Penelope hits third grade, you’ll start to see other types of bullying creeping in for other reasons.
“I feel very strongly about the issue. I think that obesity is sort of the last frontier for political correctness,” said Hayes.
Hayes said you could already see what is ahead for Penelope as early as her birth. A nurse who weighed Penelope before she went home remarked, ‘You weigh more than my Thanksgiving turkey did and you’re certainly going to be a very sturdy little girl.’ Hayes said when Penelope goes to kindergarten is when she will actually begin to experience the bullying to a small degree by classmates of an older brother. Even a bus driver makes a remark about her size. Penelope who had been very excited about her first day of school, comes home upset and in tears.
“I think even of more concern is that the mother almost from the beginning when she hears that she’s given birth to this 14-pound child keeps asking everybody, ‘Is Penelope fat?’ and I can remember when I suddenly had that spurt and started to gain weight, people would say, ‘Oh, she’s just plump. Mary Ann’s not fat; she’s just plump,” said Hayes. “The other common thing was, ‘She’ll outgrow it.’ That’s where Just Plump Penelope came from.”
Hayes said writing Penelope’s story was cathartic. Once she started writing the story it just came out. Her biggest worry is selling the 500 copies she and her team, Suzanne Oswald, illustrator, and Jennifer Lynn Conrad Fink, graphic designer, had printed. She said it was the most feasible amount from a business perspective. Hayes said she has had feedback from a number of people who said this is a story that needs to be told and people need to hear it. Just Plump Penelope will be a series of five books. Hayes also said her concern wasn’t so much for herself as it was for Oswald and Fink.
“We’re all working pro-bono, but we are a team and I think we all believe in what we are doing,” said Hayes.
The Crafting of a book Oswald, who had retired in 2014 from teaching drawing and illustration at Brandywine High School, had Hayes, Mrs. A, as her English teacher prior to becoming a teacher herself.
“I never illustrated a book on my own,” said Oswald. “I always told my students illustrating was hard, darn hard.”
Oswald said that when you have a specific piece of literature and imagery that is so concise and precise, it’s your responsibility to convey what is written in a manner that fits with what the author envisioned.
“You have to put her words into imagery and if it doesn’t fit or she doesn’t like it and there are things you just don’t know like a baby on a baby scale. What’s that look like? What kind of a scale. I didn’t want to use a digital. I had to go online. You have to look up all those objects and things and what does a big baby look like. It’s a lot of research,” said Oswald.
The first thing Hayes saw was the storyboarding, which showed her how many illustrations there were going to be. It only gave her a vague idea, but she knew she had gone to the right person.
“There was no doubt in my mind. When I saw the actual illustrations for the first time, I think I started to cry. Even when I saw the very first illustration in the book, which was Penelope’s mom holding her in the hospital and the father’s hand resting on her shoulder, I teared up because it was exactly what I had pictured inside my head,” said Hayes.
The hardest thing for Oswald was making the baby look the way she felt a plump baby would look.
“I wanted a warmth to her that made you love her and I wanted to put as much heart into the illustrations as she [Hayes] put into the writing,” said Oswald.
Graphic design and layout is as important as the story and its illustrations. Fink, who had Hayes and Oswald as her teachers, joined Oswald at craft fairs so when Hayes had approached Oswald for illustrating her book, Oswald approached Fink for the design and layout.
Fink, a graphic designer, works with paper-oriented crafts such as calligraphy, and fraktur art and although Fink had done other presswork, she had never published something as complicated as a full children’s book.
“Just keeping straight how to scan everything and keep the artwork. Sue even learned doing the illustrations, for the cover especially, you need to have the bleed area because it wraps around the book boards. We had to maneuver a little bit in Photoshop to make it all work,” said Fink.
Fink used Adobe InDesign for the layout and Photoshop to touch up and color correct when necessary in order for everything to match properly.
“I tried a couple things because I wasn’t sure about the look she was going for so I played with watercolors, color pencils, and pastels and we ended up opting for watercolors,” said Oswald.
Although the illustrations are largely watercolor, Oswald did apply ball point pen on top to pop something or have a crisp edge, acrylics to pop a highlight, and even some colored pencil for fine detail here and there.
Oswald faces the challenge of switching from teacher to producer now that she created original works of art used to illustrate Just Plump Penelope. Oswald will be considering options of marketing the original artwork used in Hayes’ book.
Self-Publishing and Promotion of a Book
With the book complete in text, illustration, design and layout, it would seem natural to think that uploading the book to an online publisher would be easy.
Create Space, a division of Amazon, is a resource for self-publishers. It is a print-on-demand service. Although a little bit of a discount is available for quantities, people can order just one copy of a book.
“It’s a children’s book so you want something nice and visually appealing so we decided that something around the 8×10 size would be good,” said Fink.
After consulting with a company representative and with everything all laid out, Fink submitted the files only to have it returned with an issue. Another call to the company went ignored so Fink delved further into its customer service information only to find out that landscape books are bound like a calendar. You would have to flip the pages upwards.
“Layout is really an important part of the book,” said Oswald. “It’s part of the aesthetics of the book and we wanted that horizontal.”
The team started to research local publishers who could accommodate what they wanted to do. There were challenges with the book’s size with many of the pint-on-demand presses. Just Plump Penelope needed to go to a full bindery.
Fink, Hayes, and Oswald turned to Seaber Turner Associates in Blandon. According to its website, the company specializes in assisting self-publishers. For more information about Seaber Turner Associates, go to http://www.seaberturner.com.
“We met with him and they were able to accommodate exactly what we wanted to do and they led us through the process,” said Fink.
“I think the publishing world has changed,” said Hayes. “You need an agent to get published. The problem is that you can’t get an agent unless you publish something. Self-publishing seemed to be the way to get our foot in the door.”
Hayes and her team are hoping that once their creation is out there, someone will see it and ask what is the rest of their plan and maybe offer to publish the books. Fink had compared the completion of their project to giving birth. After nine months of meetings and planning, Just Plump Penelope will make her debut at the York Book Expo. From there, Hayes will be doing a book signing at a Christmas Bazar at St. Paul’s UCC in Fleetwood along with Dori Hoch, Fleetwood, author of the “Bunny Brothers” and “Pearl of Richmond Township.” Hayes will also be doing a signing at the Starving Artists show at Brandywine Heights High School, Nov. 5, Christmas in Nazareth, and as many craft shows and bazaars, schools, local book stores, and public libraries as she could to personally to do readings.
Hayes said this has been a tremendous learning process and shared her big dream.
“I was talking to a friend of mine who has her own chocolate business in Ephrata and she said to me, ‘Did you think about sending a copy of your book and a letter to Ellen Degeneres?’ Then after she said that, I got to thinking and I thought well what about Rachael Ray? Because she herself has had some issues with weight and she’s into food so she’s getting a copy of the book and a letter,” said Hayes. “We’re just trying to reach out.”
For more information, go to www.mahayeswrites.com.