Children’s author does her own drawing
By Ty Walker, The Mountain Times
Children’s author Leslie Stockdale wrote her first self-published book 15 years ago. This past summer she released her fourth book of children’s fiction, "George The Moose.”
It’s the first time she has drawn the illustrations herself. It’s also the first time she has written a book based on someone else’s imagination.
“I couldn’t find an illustrator and I am not an artist, so, after 15 years, I taught myself how to draw animals, and sort of people, and I got the illustrations done,” Leslie said.
There are 14 color illustrations in the 28-page book about George’s adventures with a family in the Pacific Northwest. The book is targeted to young elementary school readers in grades 1 through 3. Animals and the environment are common themes found in her work.
“It’s a children’s story so it’s a page to read, a picture to look at,” Leslie said.
In her previous three books, she created and wrote her own original story ideas and someone else did the illustrations. In her latest work, Leslie does the writing and drawing, but the story was inspired by a stranger’s dream.
It was 15 years ago that this man pitched a story idea that became the impetus behind “George The Moose.” He had read a newspaper writeup about Lucie’s first book, “Clover, the Plover, and Muffin, the Puffin, and the Oil Spill,” which had just been published.
It took all those years later to make up her mind and give the story about a moose the green light.
George is a baby moose that a family returning from a camping trip finds abandoned near a creekside in the woods. They can’t bear to leave him to die and so rescue him and raise him as their own in the Mount Hood area, a setting Leslie knows well, having lived in the Welches and Rhododendron communities the past 40 years.
It was a long time coming, but well worth the wait. Fifteen years, that is, between the time a complete stranger approached Leslie to write a story based on a dream he had, and her accepting the challenge.
The stranger, unknown to Leslie at the time, had read a story in The Mountain Times about her first self-published storybook. He insisted that she bring the details of his dream to life with her words suited for an audience with big imaginations:children.
“This wasn’t my original story,” Leslie said. “A total stranger, Randy Hohler, approached me about writing it 15 years ago when I wrote my first book. He saw a story about me in the paper.
“He said he had this dream. I took down all the details. He said you have to write this story. He insisted. It took a couple of conversations and he finally got me to agree to it.”
They met occasionally to go over the story and develop it, and he loved it. She couldn’t find an illustrator so she decided to teach herself how to draw.
Leslie said it took a lot of time to learn how to draw an animal. She already has a couple of new stories in the making, one featuring sasquatch, the other a unicorn. She plans to write and illustrate the stories, making them her own creations.
“Writing, it is very fun,” Leslie said. “I’m really interested in scary stories – not bloody scary stories – adventures. The only kind of story I seem to write is a children’s story.”
You never know where inspiration will come from. She got the idea for her first book 15 years ago, watching her toddler daughter ramble through a puddle of muddy water.
Leslie Stockdale’s latest book, “George The Moose,” is available at lulu.com.
Here’s how she describes herself on the online bookseller’s page:
A wife of one, a mother of five, and a grandma of 10, a backyard farmer with 20 chickens and two beehives. I love nature. Love the planet. Love the Lord!