Candace Fleming - About the Author
Amelia Earhart may have been lost in 1937, but she's been on Candace Fleming's radar for decades. The young Candy remembers her mother's eyes filling with tears when she told her daughter about hearing the news on the radio. "'Amelia Earhart is lost," were the word's the then-13-year-old heard crackle across the airwaves. "She could not believe it. She lived in this little town on Lake Michigan. She stood on a stretch of sand on the lakeshore and looked at that sky--she felt if she looked long enough, she would see Amelia Earhart winging her way home."
"Forty years later, her sadness was still palpable," recalls the daughter. She wondered about the person who so inspired her mother.
To people everywhere, Amelia Earhart was larger than life, an image that was augmented and perpetuated by both Earhart and her eventual husband, George Putnam.
Candace Fleming considered calling her biography of Amelia Earhart, Flier, Flier, Pants on Fire. She thought she knew who Amelia Earhart was but learned that when it comes to Amelia Earhart, there is much more than meets the eye. What do most people know about her? "Just the fact that she did not show up," says Candace. "I really think we are starting to see past the myth building, see the strong woman rather than the famous flier." Candace Fleming has reclaimed a different legacy for Earhart that seems even more unlikely when one considers her 1930s setting: "Amelia Earhart is a role model for women and what they could do--women could go to Purdue and be engineering majors."
Amelia Lost is more than the life story of a famous woman. It is also an account of the monumental effort undertaken when Earhart's plane did not make its scheduled landing on tiny Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. Rick Gillespie of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), was able to supply the parallel story of Amelia's last flight complete with accounts from two separate incidents where young people--one in Wyoming and the other in Florida--were able to pick up signals from the downed plane. "Kids really did have a part in this story," notes the author.
And kids really like reading and, in some ways, witnessing the biographies that Candace crafts so carefully. She looks back to a lecture she attended at Northern Illinois University and how that affected the way she thought about history and how it is taught and presented. "I remember the lecturer saying that the reader of the 21st century is a new kind of reader--they are hardwired in a different way." As a child, young Candy looked at the pictures first and was disappointed if the captions only told what the picture was. "I wanted something more."
Young readers have found that something more in her biographies of Lincoln, Barnum and Eleanor Roosevelt. Candace Fleming understands the role visual literacy plays in a satisfying book experience and plans her storytelling accordingly.
Perhaps the 1930s exercise a special fascination for Fleming. When asked whom would she choose if she could invite anyone from one of her biographies to an intimate dinner, she skipped Mary Todd Lincoln ("For an intimate dinner? No--she's be fascinating, but No.") and P.T. Barnum, and went straight for Eleanor Roosevelt. The author has lost count of the number of older people who share with her stories of personal encounters with Mrs. Roosevelt. "It no longer surprises me." She adds, "I could write a second book . . . ."
Like many authors, Candace Fleming has a hard time picking one story to tell about a special library moment from her childhood. She decided to share one from her childhood in Illinois. Mrs. Snyder was the youth services librarian and Candace was in fourth grade. "She always paid attention to what we were reading. I brought a book to check out that appealed to me because of the cover--there were four women in chiffon skirts in a convertible Cadillac. It was not a children's book," she remembers. "Mrs. Snyder did not let me check it out but she asked me why I picked this particular book. I thought it looked like they [the women on the cover] were going on an adventure and having fun together." Mrs. Snyder agreed with young Candace's antipathy for Nancy Drew--"She always had to be saved and they were badly written"--and led her to the Judy Bolton mysteries. "I spent the whole summer reading," reminisces the author. Judy was made of tougher fiber--"She would actually tackle people, and she would save her boyfriend."
Years later, young people are rediscovering another courageous young woman who changed the world but, in the end, the world could not save and could not rescue her. Eleanor Roosevelt kept a poem by her friend Amelia in a special place. The poem concludes with "Each time we make a choice, we pay/With courage to behold the restless day./And count it fair."
-- Interviewed by Ellen Myrick, November 2011
