Children’s book author Ame Dyckman, of Lawrence, published her latest book, Wolfie the Bunny, Feb. 17, 2015. (Photo by Aliza Alperin-Sheriff.)
By Aliza Alperin-Sheriff
Lawrence resident and picture book author Ame Dyckman almost seems like a picture book character herself. She is bubbly and enthusiastic with short hair that is often dyed unusual colors like blue or purple.
“Every day I can’t believe I get to do this. It’s seriously a dream come true,” Dyckman said about being a children’s book author.
Her newest book, Wolfie the Bunny, about a wolf that is adopted into a family of bunnies, was published on Feb. 17 and made the April 5 New York Times Best Sellers list.
Dyckman always dreamed of being an author, but she didn’t think it was feasible.
“People tell you that you will starve,” she said.
So she put aside her dream, studied communications in college and went to work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where she provided support for political philosopher Michael Walzer.
After Dyckman had her daughter, who is now 11 years old and a student at Lawrence Intermediate School, she realized that the “best, most fun thing” was reading to her.
Then, suddenly, different forces converged at the right time to give Dyckman a chance to focus on writing. Her daughter was starting school, her husband, Alarick, got a promotion and Walzer retired.
Her daughter was particularly instrumental in encouraging her to write seriously.
“She said, ‘Go for it Mom. You can do it,’” Dyckman said. “It’s funny to be getting career advice from a five year old,”
Dyckman said that her writing career had a rocky start.
“My first story was terrible,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I had the passion, but no skill set.”
In order to improve, Dyckman joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and she all but moved into the Lawrence branch of the Mercer County Library.
“I maxed out my card and my daughter’s card and I read and read and read. Slowly my writing improved,” she said.
Once she got started, things took off quickly. Dyckman started writing seriously in 2008 and by summer 2009 she landed an agent.
“I was enormously lucky,” she said, explaining that some people try for years and years before getting published.
She met her agent, Scott Treimel, at an agent pitch session at a big writing conference. During pitch sessions, authors have only 1-2 minutes to pitch their manuscript to an agent.
“It’s like giving a book report, but you’re twice as nervous,” Dyckman said.
The manuscript she pitched that day eventually became her first book, Boy and Bot.
Dyckman’s genre is picture books for very young children, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Kids are the most fun, most enthusiastic readers,” she said.
Dyckman tried her hand at writing a chapter book with her writing partner, Adam Lehrhaupt, who is also a picture book author. The experience was fun, Dyckman said, but the book did not get picked up—though that doesn’t mean she might not try it again in the future.
Most of the time she and Lehrhaupt don’t actually write together. Instead they critique and edit each other’s work.
Dyckman explained that even though picture books are short, they take a long time to write. Boy and Bot, which is only about 240 words, took about nine months to write from the original concept to a complete draft.
“Sometimes I spend four days on one sentence I just can’t get right,” she said. “It’s incredibly labor intensive for such a small amount of text. In picture books every word has to be perfect.”
Dyckman writes about things she likes, such as robots and tea parties, but said others often see messages in her books that she didn’t realize she was illustrating. For Dyckman, Boy and Bot is a story about friendship, but the book received a lot of attention for being a story about difference because it features two characters (a little boy and his big metal robot) that are very different, but are friends anyway.
“I didn’t realize I was writing a diversity or difference story,” Dyckman said. “It’s funny how grown up themes pop out of a 300-word book for five year olds,”
Sometimes she spends so much time in the mindset of a five year old that sometimes it’s difficult being an adult.
“This week was tax week and I never felt so grown up in my life. It’s awful,” she said.
However, she can’t keep her creativity locked up for long. On April 15, she woke up around five in the morning, wrote a poem, posted it on Twitter, went back to sleep and woke up with no recollection of any of it.
“My poor brain was so shut off from anything creative,” she said.
In addition to writing, Dyckman speaks to children about books, reading and writing. She recently visited Slackwood Elementary School, which is a Title I school (a school that receives additional funding because a certain percentage of the students come from low-income families).
“It’s really gratifying to talk to kids about reading, knowing that maybe some of the kids don’t have books at home,” she said. “It was an amazingly welcoming school. Everyone there had a love of reading.”
Dyckman also meets with schools via Skype, which allows her to connect with schools from a wider geographic area, including a recent Skype session with a school in Germany. For World Read Aloud Day in early March, she and Lehrhaupt got together to Skype with as many schools as they could fit into one day.
Dyckman and her husband moved to Lawrence from California in 2000 when Alarick, a chemist, got a job at Bristol-Myers Squibb.
“I adore Lawrenceville,” she said. “I love to play in Princeton. I love being near the city, but still far enough away to say, ‘Hey look, there’s a cow.”
Dyckman said that the response so far to Wolfie has been amazing. Amazon ran out of stock, and the book earned a mention on the Indie Next List, a bulletin for independent booksellers about up and coming books.
However, the response that Dyckman likes the most are from the kids who read her books.
“Nothing beats a little kid running up to you and hugging you and saying ‘I love your book,’ usually with a big sticky kiss on the cheek or something,” she said.
For more information, go online to amedyckman.com.
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