For Robert Munsch of Guelph, Ontario, adult comment is fine, but the people he really listens to are children because they help him write his books. Since 1979, North America’s most prolific modern-day children’s author has written more than 20 books. With sales exceeding 21 million copies, he is the most popular writer of children’s books in the English-speaking world. In 1994 his Love You Forever topped the New York Times bestseller list _ more than eight million copies have been sold. Some of his books have been produced as CD-ROMs and some for the home video market.
 

Robert Munsch has found his niche in writing books for children.  To date, his works have sold in excess of 21 million volumes making him one of Canada's best-known authors - and most prolific.  [Photo, courtesy Annick Press Ltd.]

Munsch’s success lies in his deep and sensitive understanding of children and in his patience in creating oral versions of his stories and retelling them to groups of children sometimes for two or three years to test their response and participation before he ever writes his books. In fact, most of his oral creations are never printed because his young listeners have not given him the reaction he is looking for. “I figured out once that the stories the children kept requesting came to two per cent of my total output,” laughs Munsch.

His storytelling began in 1972 when, as a student teacher at a nursery school near Boston, Massachusetts, one night he created a song story about Mortimer, a boy who did not want to go to bed, to entertain his young charges next day. It went over so well the children kept asking for it, and when he told it to his sister’s children Munsch, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1945, was the fourth of nine children they taught it to other children in the neighbourhood.

He was encouraged to write the story but didn’t. He did, however, continue to make up tales, thinking of them not so much as stories but as “little machines that kept kids happy and occupied.” In 1974, when he joined the University of Guelph’s laboratory nursery school, he was again urged to put his stories into writing.

”At first I made the mistake of attempting to change my stories into what I considered good writing. They were terrible. Finally I tried keeping the text as close as possible to the oral version and that worked,” he explained in a 1986 article.

By then he had written and published a dozen stories with Toronto’s Annick Press whose owners, Anne Millyard and Rick Wilks, decided to take a chance because “his approach was so crazy, but it was also fresh.” That was in 1979. Since then one or two titles have appeared annually, many of them dealing humorously with the everyday situations preschool children experience: the dark, loneliness, putting on a snowsuit, mud puddles, going to the bathroom, and learning that families come in all shapes and sizes, including interracial adoption.

The last one is close to home, for Munsch’s own life includes the adoption of three children after his wife’s two unsuccessful pregnancies.

Before his marriage in 1972, Munsch had spent several years in a Jesuit seminary and taken an M.A. degree in pre-school education, but he says he isn’t a “preachy” writer. Nevertheless, he believes conflict and confrontation - especially with adults - is an unavoidable component of children’s lives. Munsch also designs his stories so that they mean different things to different people. As he succinctly wrote in 1986, “I spend time getting them to do that, so that the correct answer to ‘What does a Munsch story mean?’ is ‘To whom?’ ”

That same year he published his most successful but controversial story, Love You Forever. This parable is about the relationship between a mother and son as both grow old. Annick felt it was for adults and turned it down, but Firefly Books of the U.S. cautiously printed a mere 50,000. By 1994, some eight million had been sold!

Munsch believes that Love You Forever has appeal on two levels. For kids it’s a humorous look at family life; for adults it tends to be more a personal reflection on love that endures and on aging. Whatever the reason, “... this book,” as Munsch says, “has a nice effect on people and families and I really like that.”

Mel James