One of my favorite authors recently celebrated her 94th birthday. This is such happy news! I’ve loved Beverly Cleary’s Henry Huggins and Ramona series since I read them as a child, but even more so since I rediscovered them as a mom reading them to my own kids. They’re so pure, clean, and FUNNY.

School Library Journal posted a nice interview with Mrs. Cleary on her birthday,which was April 11. You can read the whole story here.

When asked, “What’s your legacy to children’s literature?”, Cleary answered:

I’ve done what I started to do—to write books that children would want to read, books that would let them enjoy reading. I want them to discover that reading is more than something they have to do in school. Ramona and the others are just the sort of kids who lived in my neighborhood in Portland, OR. Everything in the Ramona and Henry books could have happened in Portland and probably did.

She also talks a little about the new movie, “Ramona and Beezus,” that’s due out in July. We saw the previews for this movie when we went to see “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” (which is not nearly as funny as the books, by the way. Too much crude humor.) I think I might have squealed in the dark theater, “RAMONA’S GOING TO BE IN A MOVIE!!” I think I might have embarrassed my kids and spilled a little popcorn. But it was exciting.

The preview for Ramona was actually more exciting than the whole Wimpy Kid movie. It will star Selena Gomez as Beezus. I like Selena Gomez because I can finally tell her apart from Demi Lovato, and my daughters think I’m cool when I can roll their names off my tongue. Try saying Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato fast three times and you’ll see what it’s like to be the mother of tween girls today.

But back to Beverly!

I’m crazy about Beverly Cleary! Ask anyone! I have her beloved memoir, On My Own Two Feet, on my shelf of hallowed books, alongside my Grandfather’s 1956 edition of Kipling short stories, Alcott’s Little Women, The Bronte sisters’ Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, and Allen Say’s The Ink-Keeper’s Apprentice. These are the books that give me courage to write.

If you have never read Cleary’s My Own Two Feet, you absolutely must, if you love children’s books. Along with that, you’ll have to get a copy of A Girl From Yamhill as well. Both chronicle her growing up years and how all of her personal life experiences fed into her becoming one of the world’s most beloved children’s writers, whose books are ALL still in print after 60 years. Yes, I love this woman’s work.

When we visited Portland last fall, I almost couldn’t wait a second before taking my kids to the Portland city library. There was a stop on the subway (the “MAX”) for Yamhill district. I remember holding my map with shaking hands, as we approached the streets where young Beverly might have walked to check out books from the library. “This is it!” I told them. “We’re getting closer to Beverly Cleary’s library! The place where she checked out books when she was your age!!”

My kids wanted to go shopping at the mall and buy plastic trinkets, and to the zoo to see monkeys, but I had to take them to see Beverly’s library, which is also Allen Say’s library to me, since he lives somewhere in Portland. When we got inside, we discovered an actual room with the words, “Beverly Cleary Children’s Library” posted over the door. It was a beauiful place, with a giant tree towering over stacks and stacks of glorious children’s books. I think I might have shed a tear or two.

In My Own Two Feet, Beverly describes the point in her life when she was finally ready to start writing children’s books. It was a dream she’d carried around inside for years, but she was too busy being a student, a librarian, and then a wife to that wonderful Clarence Cleary. Finally, it was time. They were settled in a cute little house in southern California. But she struggled with writer’s block. After visiting her parents in Portland, she shares:

I told myself that if I was ever going to write a children’s book, now was the time to do it. But when I sat down at my typewriter and stared at the paper I had rolled into it, the typewriter seemed hostile, and the paper remained blank. The longer I stared, the blanker it seemed. After years of aspiring, I found I had nothing to say. Maybe it had all been a foolish dream.

Her husband kept encouraging her. While he went to work, she stayed home to try and write. They went through a difficult miscarriage, and Beverly got depressed for a while. So they moved to a different house, and this time they discovered a ream of typing paper in the linen closet, left by the former owner.

Here’s how she describes what happened next:

I remarked to Clarence. “I guess I’ll have to write a book.” My ambition, refusing to die, was beginning to bloom again.
“Why don’t you?” asked Clarence.
“We never have any sharp pencils” was my flippant answer.
The next day he brought home a pencil sharpener.

Isn’t that cute? Oh, I just love Clarence Cleary for buying Beverly a pencil sharpener and for encouraging her to stick with her dreams. She wrote some stories about a boy named Henry Huggins and his dog, Ribsy (though she originally named him “Spareribs”). She gave him a friend named Beezus and, on a whim, decided to give Beezus a sister. She named her Ramona after hearing a neighbor call out to another whose name was Ramona.

Ramona Quimby.

Cleary sent her stories to New York, and Elisabeth Hamilton of Morrow helped her turn them into a novel. Sixty years later, we’re still reading it, as well as all the ones that came after.

I adore Beverly Cleary, and am thrilled God has given her such a long, happy life. I wish her many more happy years to come. She’s an inspiration to all of us who stare at the blank page and wonder if we have something worthwhile to say.