True Grit
L exington author Heather Lang left town recently on a ten-day research trip to the island nation of Madagascar. Her mission: to visit the field station run by primatologist and conservationist Patricia Wright, a world expert on lemurs. Wright’s work features in one of Lang’s current projects, a collective biography of twelve animal conservationists working around the world.
Lang, 56, is the award-winning writer of picture-book biographies of trail-blazing women whose passion and tenacity propelled them to achievements in many fields in the face of great obstacles. African American Olympic gold medalist Alice Coachman, pioneering aeronaut Ruth Law and marine biologist Eugenie Clark are among those whose stories she has brought to life for young readers, in collaboration with distinguished illustrators.
From Reading to Writing
A lawyer by training, Lang discovered a passion for children’s books and book-writing when her own children were small. “As a mom of triplets plus one – all with different reading preferences,” said Lang, “Cary Library was a destination!” Inspired by those hours of reading in the Children’s Library, Lang started writing her own stories when the triplets, now in their mid-twenties, were in kindergarten, using odd moments snatched while waiting to pick up the children from school, or after they had gone to bed.
Lang’s early experiments in writing were fictional picture books. “It was very hard to get published, and I got very frustrated,” she said. Now, when she gives author talks in schools, she takes the pile of publishers’ rejections she accumulated in those days, “to show kids how much failure I had to experience before I finally did get published.”
As her children were about to enter middle school, Lang seriously weighed her options: keep writing and getting rejected, or go back to the law? The thought came to her: “What if I wrote a true story about a brave woman from history who never gave up on her dreams, that might inspire me to keep going?” A keen athlete and sports fan from childhood, Lang found an ideal overlooked heroine in Alice Coachman, the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal.
“I fell in love with the research part,” said Lang, who has a lawyerly respect for fact-checking and gathering evidence, and meticulously cites sources at the end of all her books. Coachman, an outstanding athlete who grew up in Albany, Georgia, oppressed by poverty, racism and sexism, and against all odds won the high jump competition at the 1948 London Olympics, proved not only an intriguing subject, but also a role model for Lang.
Lang kept a favorite quotation from Coachman on her desk: “When the going gets tough and you feel like throwing your hands in the air, listen to that voice that tells you, ‘Keep going. Hang in there.’ Guts and determination will pull you through.” “Every time I got one of those rejection letters, I looked at the quote and kept going,” she said.
Queen of the Track: Alice Coachman, High-Jump Champion, was published in 2012, with pastel illustrations by Floyd Cooper that capture the heat and dirt-roads of rural Georgia, the gloom of post-war London, and the moment when Alice received her gold medal from King George VI in front of a packed stadium, along with a royal handshake that would have been inconceivable in the segregated South.
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The Upside of Fear
Queen of the Track launched Lang on a search for other overlooked women of achievement who could serve as strong female role models. Mainly, she said, she has been drawn to subjects by a strong sense of connection with her own passions for sports and the natural world. Her two daughters’ love of horses led her to the story of Lucille Mulhall, a Wild West performer and rodeo star in the early 1900s, published in 2015 as The Original Cowgirl, and curiosity and even fear have played a part in suggesting other subjects.
Watching the movie Jaws left her with a terror of sharks, Lang admitted. She challenged herself to overcome that fear by immersing herself in the work of pioneering marine biologist Eugenie Clark (1922 – 2015), the first scientist to study sharks in their natural environment, who faced discrimination both as a woman in science, and as a Japanese American.
When Lang interviewed “The Shark Lady” at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota, FL., Clark, aged 91, was looking forward to a research trip to the Solomon Islands, that would include several dives. The meeting inspired Lang to get certified to scuba dive, an experience that took her well beyond her comfort zone. Although, unlike Clark, she never actually swam with sharks, she learned enough to know that their reputation as voracious predators was undeserved, and to promote Clark’s core message, that sharks are “magnificent and misunderstood” in her 2016 book, Swimming with Sharks.
Lang faced down other fears in the Amazon rainforest. While researching The Leaf Detective, she spent a week there with Margaret Lowman, known as “Canopy Meg” for her groundbreaking work in forest canopy ecology. “I’m still a bit afraid of spiders, especially big hairy ones,” admitted Lang. A headlamp-lit night walk in the thrumming forest, on high alert for tarantulas emerging from holes in the ground and scorpions dangling from trees, was both thrilling and unnerving, she said.
“Experiencing the rainforest with Meg as my guide is something I will never forget,” Lang wrote in an endnote to The Leaf Detective. From Lowman, she said, she learned “a new appreciation for the interconnectedness of our world,” and the vital importance of preserving trees and forests.
Alissa Lauzon, Head of Youth Services at Cary Library, sees an important role for picture-book biographies of less well-known people. “They are great for broadening the conversation, making it more inclusive,” she wrote in an email. Authors like Lang help us expand our thinking to include the accomplishments of those whose stories have been hidden, ignored, or forgotten, she said. They can also be sources of inspiration and encouragement to readers of all ages. “These stories help kids (and adults) broaden their views of the world and see the kinds of impacts that actions, both large and small, can have when made by individuals who are following their passion, their dreams, or fighting for what they believe is right,” said Lauzon.
Nature and Nurture, Comic-book Style
Conservation and the natural world. One is a collective biography of twelve animal conservationists intended for fourth-to seventh-graders. On a lighter note, she is collaborating with an old friend, the Wellesley-based children’s author and illustrator Jamie Harper, on “a fun, informational picture book series about animal heroes in the wild.”
Harper is known for her Baby Bundt board book series, a picture-book series featuring feisty flamingo teacher Miss Mingo, and for her illustrations of chapter books by other authors. In a recent phone conversation, Harper said she and Lang met long before Lang started writing – their husbands were friends from business school. When Lang caught the writing bug, Harper was an early supporter, inviting her friend to a writers’ critique group and later helping her make valuable contacts in the publishing world.
“What we do is very isolating,” said Harper. So when Lang suggested working on a joint project, she was intrigued. “I really like things to have a humorous, light component,” she said, and Lang’s vision for a comic-book style series on animal heroes seemed worth exploring. The first idea was for a book highlighting the many ingenious ways animal mothers protect and care for their young, titled Supermoms! The pair met weekly to work on the project, Harper developing sample art on an iPad, using a completely new process from her usual drawing techniques, and Lang producing a simple main text.
Typically, authors and illustrators work completely separately, said Harper, and collaborating intensively on the marriage of text and image has been a new and sometimes challenging experience for them both. “We’ve had a lot of laughs, and there have been some hard times too, trying to solve problems,” said Lang. “We’re both very Type A,” said Harper, adding: “I feel like Heather keeps me on track, she pushes me in a good way.”
After starting out as an experimental project, with help from Harper’s agent, the Animal Heroes series caught the attention of three major publishers and was bought at auction by Candlewick Press. Supermoms! is slated to appear on March 7, 2023. At the time of writing, Harper had just delivered the final text and sketches for the first dummy of the second book in the series, Superdads! to the publishers. “There aren’t as many dads in the picture in the animal world,” noted Lang, “but there are some unsung heroes!”