Several of Napoli’s books take root in fairy tales. I was off and away immediately-and two years later I sent my manuscript to a publisher. She fell in love with Mary Magdalene and asked me who she really was. “My daughter Eva went to see the musical Jesus Christ Superstar when she was ten. Generally, Napoli begins a story with a character, such as Mary Magdalene. “So when I write stories, I do it out loud.” She says that winning the Anne Izard’s Storyteller’s Choice Award for Mama Miti “made me feel like my grandmother was sharing it.” Napoli learned storytelling from her grandmother, sitting at her feet and listening. “When my children were small it made a lot of sense,” she quips. Her tales are crafted in the laundry room of her home. “My writing has to fit into the cracks of ,” she says. Writing is hard work.” Hard work made harder by the fact that Napoli has five children (now grown) and is a full professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. I think it gives the impression that art just comes out of your head, full blown and polished, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. Life is her inspiration, although she says, “I don’t like the word ‘inspiration’ with respect to art. A personal tragedy lured her to write at the age of 28, but now she writes because she has to.
Napoli is the author of more than 50 picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels and young adult novels, but admits to a 14-year apprenticeship before her first book was published. But books gave me so many different places and times and adventures.” Now, when she begins a new project she considers the young girl she used to be and tries to give her readers “a place and a time they can go to for the first time.” “My family was poor and we didn’t travel and I didn’t have all that many experiences my world was pretty small. “A lot of the joy of my childhood came from reading,” she says. Reading was Napoli’s escape from the misery of her family. Walter Farley’s The Black Stallionwas a special favorite because of the love between boy and horse, and the story’s pure, clean adventure in a world neither pure nor clean.
As a child, Donna Jo Napoli loved climbing trees and reading books with her legs dangling in the air.
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