Cambria Gordon on the Lost Art of Penmanship
In Conversation with Mitchell Kaplan on The Literary Life Podcast
On today’s episode of The Literary Life, Mitchell Kaplan talks to Cambria Gordon about her new book, The Poetry of Secrets, out now from Scholastic Press.
From the episode:
Cambria Gordon: I have to say that I think my penmanship is my favorite thing about that piece of writing because my handwriting was so good. And of course, they don’t really teach that anymore. It’s a lost art. But I think I was a writer my whole life and and I didn’t know it. I was always making up stories. I was a huge reader, and I always had a book with me. I read every single Nancy Drew, and I loved when I traveled with my parents, I was lucky enough to go to Europe and I would finish a book and we’d have to find an English bookstore or a bookstore in a foreign country that had English translation books because I just always needed something.
And I always liked stories where kids were orphans or they were they were trapped in a factory and they had to work and they they needed to escape from something and life was so hard. I always responded to those kind of stories. My earlier career was in advertising. So that I was a copywriter in that format is very quippy, very short sentences, clever openings, clever conclusions, great headlines. That was my training, and then when I moved on into prose a lot of my earlier work had that kind of vibe. Certainly my global warming book for kids was almost a transition book between the copywriting feeling and prose.
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This episode of The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan was recorded in Florida. Subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you find your podcasts!
Cambria Gordon is the coauthor of the award-winning The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming, winner of the National Green Earth Book Award. She has written for Los Angeles Times Magazine, Boys’ Life, Parent Guide News, and The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. She lives in LA with her husband and youngest son, and as close as possible to her two adult children, without annoying them.
