five more voices
~ five writers, each issue ~
generations of West Virginia creative writing
You're invited
to feel proud!
For an
intro,
click the "About"
tab
Anna Smucker
Scroll to the bottom for writing activities using four of
Anna's books.
This page was created by Colleen Anderson and Kate Long, with help from Anna!​
"I have a story
to tell too"
Click on the picture to watch video of Anna Smucker reading Golden Delicious, a Cinderella Apple Story.
stories
young
readers
will
love
creating
Anna Smucker started creating books when she was five years old, before she could read. “I didn’t know the alphabet yet, but I’d make my own little books.” She stapled papers together and drew pictures on each page ... a turkey ... a tree, and gave them to her parents and grandparents as presents. “My writing was just zig-zags. But I knew what the zigzags meant.”
She kept those books, little scissors, crayons and a stapler in a piano bench. “I could lift the lid and find my materials there for my writing.”​
“I started loving books early, thanks to hearing so many books read aloud to me and knowing how wonderful books were.”
Little Anna spent a lot of her childhood at her grandparents and aunt and uncle’s house that was right across the street from a library. Her aunt checked out stacks of books and brought them back across the street to read to little Anna. “That made me want to be a reader,” Anna said, “and reading made me want to be a writer.”
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After college, she taught in public schools and became a children’s librarian. When she got married and had kids of her own, “we lived not too far from the library. I’d trudge up the hill with my bookbag filled with new books, and our children would just about tackle me when I would come in the house, because they were so excited to see what books I brought home.”
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But she never tried to actually write books until one day, she met another West Virginia writer.
Then she met Cynthia.
“I was working as a children’s librarian in Clarksburg,” she remembers, “and we got to go to
the state library conference. And there was Cynthia Rylant!”
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Cynthia Rylant - a beloved children’s writer who grew up in Raleigh County - told the librarians about her early years when she lived with her grandparents in their isolated mountain home, while her mother earned a nursing degree, so she could support them.
​​Cynthia read to the librarians from When I Was Young in the Mountains, her autobiographical book based on the years she lived with her grandparents. As Anna listened, a light bulb went on in her head. “It was such a beautiful book,” she said. It hit her that ordinary West Virginia experiences make great books. “I realized I have a story to tell too.
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“I went back to the children’s section of my library in Clarksburg and saw that there were no books that described the way I grew up in a factory town. There were books about growing up on a farm, growing up in a city, and there was a book about growing up in coal country, but no books that described what I knew, growing up.”
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She started thinking about her years growing up in a steel mill town. “Cynthia Rylant gave me a model of what I might do with my own memories,” she said. “Just hearing her made me feel that I had my own story to tell."
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Soon afterward, she and her family went to spend Christmas at her parents’ home in Weirton. The newspapers and TV were full of stories about steel mills closing down in the Pittsburgh area. “We were afraid Weirton Steel was going to close down too.”
​
During the drive back home, “my kids were usually fighting in the back seat, but that night,
they were asleep.” Her husband was driving. On impulse, Anna pulled a sheet of paper out of her purse “and I just started writing. That’s where No Star Nights started.”​​​​​​
Here is Anna's first draft she wrote in the car.
She still has that piece of paper with scribbles all over it. “No Star Nights” is written in the margin. The book was published four years later, with soft hazy illustrations that bring the text to life.
​
“When I was little,” the book begins, “we couldn't see the stars in
the nightime sky because the furnaces of the mill burned the
darkness into a red glow. But we would lie on the hill and look up
at the sky anyway and wait for orange light that seemed to
breathe in and out to spread across it. And we would know that
the golden spark-spitting steel was being poured out of giant
buckets into molds to cool."
​​More than 100 years before Anna wrote about the night sky and the steel mills, Wheeling’s Rebecca Harding Davis began her book, Life in the Iron Mills, with a description about the way smoke from the iron mills changed the night sky.
​
In Rebecca's time, in the 1800s, the sky was dirty grey because the iron mills were churning out smoke. In Anna’s steel-mill time, 100 years later, the steel mills didn't put out as
much smoke, but fire in the steel furnaces turned the sky a pulsing orange. “In both times, hers and mine, you couldn’t see the stars,” Anna said.
Don't get discouraged.
​
Anna started writing, pulling up childhood memories, but she still wasn’t sure how to find a publisher.
She looked at books she had loved, to see who published them. Then Kentucky writer George Ella Lyon gave her the address of her editor, a real gift. Anna sent her No Star Nights manuscript to him.
Not long afterward, “I was at the library, and there was a phone call for me. It was Richard Jackson, the editor for Cynthia Rylant, George Ella Lyon, and so many writers, and he was very interested in No Star Nights. ‘But there’s one artist I want to do the illustrations,” he said. “We both have to wait to see what that illustrator says.'
“I was so excited. I went to a high school reunion in Weirton and told everybody that I’d written a story about us that was going to be published!” We came back to Clarksburg, and there in our mailbox was a rejection! The illustrator couldn’t do the book, so Anna had no contract. “But here I had told everybody!”
She was discouraged. “I put that story away for about three months. Then I thought, well, I just need to send it out again. I did, then another editor, Frances Foster, at Alfred A. Knopf, called me, and she was interested in it.
Frances Foster wanted the story to be a bit longer, so Anna added material and sent the revised story back by mail. A couple of months later, Frances Foster called her with good news. “This is exactly what I was hoping you could come up with,” she said. Steve Johnson and his wife Lou Fancher “did terrific illustrations. So it all worked out!”
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After No Star Nights was published in 1989, it won the 1990 International Reading Association’s Children’s Book Award and an American Library Association Notable Book award.
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That experience taught Anna not to get discouraged and to expect bumps along the way. If you get rejected, send it out again, she advises.
​
Forty years later, she had nine published books and readers all over the country. "You never know what's going to happen," she said.
one of Anna's idea files
Write about what interests you
“I have so many ideas for books,” she said. “I get ideas while I’m reading magazines,
looking at the news, looking around when I’m outside. I put them in my idea files.
I have three bulging files full of ideas! Sometimes I’ll actually write several pages and
think, ‘Wow, this could be a good book.’ And sometimes, it’s just an idea that doesn’t end
up working as a book.”
​
Her books take readers many places. No Star Nights is set in a steel mill town in the 1950s.
To Keep the South Manitou Light takes readers to the shores of Lake Michigan in the 1870s.
She wrote about the invention of the pretzel in Italy and the life of a sixth century saint in Ireland.
​
In some ways, writing books is like train traveling, Anna says. “I was always fascinated by trains, because the train was very close to our house. I’ve always lived within the sound of train whistles. “It’s like you can be on a train, going anywhere. That’s kind of the way it is with being a writer. You don’t know where your story’s going, but it’s going somewhere, hopefully.”
In 2006, she got interested in a true story about a very special golden apple that grew in Clay County, West Virginia. In 1905, Anderson Mullins, a Clay County farmer, discovered that some marvelous-tasting apples were growing on a tree on his hillside farm. He sent some to the famous Stark Brothers Nursery in Missouri. One of the Stark brothers, Paul Stark, loved the taste so much, he jumped on a train and rode to West Virginia to find the farm where those golden apples had grown!
Here’s Paul, arriving at the Clay County farm:
"Paul wasn’t used to hills as steep as those in Clay County, West Virginia. Sweating and gasping for breath, he climbed and climbed. At first, he found only some scraggly old trees. But then he saw it – a tree with rich green leaves, its branches bent to the ground with the weight
of a great crop of gorgeous, glowing, golden apples.
​
Paul couldn’t help himself. It was as if his hand reached
out by itself and plucked one. He was biting into it when
a farmer came striding down the hill toward him.
‘My name’s Paul Stark,’ Paul told the farmer. ‘That’s
some apple!’
​
‘Name’s Mullins,’ the farmer said. ‘I sent you some.’
Albert Whitman & Co published Golden Delicious: A Cinderella Apple Story in 2008.
In 2005, Wayne State University Press published To Keep the South Manitou Light, a novel for middle-grade students and young adults, set in Michigan on South Manitou Island. “I love that island, where the lighthouse is,” Anna said. “My family and I have camped there.”
​
“One July day, we went up the winding steps of the lighthouse. We were standing out on the lighthouse’s lower balcony and the park ranger was telling us how, during November ice storms, the lighthouse keeper had to be so brave in the middle of the night, with wind and sleet and snow pushing against him.
​
“I was thinking, what if I were twelve years old? What if something happened to the lighthouse keeper, and I had to do that?"
Her questions led her to write a loving, suspenseful adventure story. Its protagonist, Jessie, disobeys her mother and lies about it, but nonetheless, ends up a heroine. The Michigan Historical Society honored the book with its 2006 Award of Merit.
In 2017, Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece came together after Anna and Marc Harshman discovered they were both thinking about writing the story of the famous house built over a waterfall. Their manuscript went through three drafts and got many rejections, but they didn’t give up. They told the story of the way that house was built, and Roaring Book Press published it, and Amazon named it a
Book of the Month for Children.
In 2019, Anna published her book of poetry, Rowing Home.
Advice: Read aloud!
​
Today, Anna's stories are read aloud to children all over the country, at bedtime,
in classes. She loves knowing that. If nobody had read to her, she says, none of
her books would exist. “This is the truth,” she said. “I’m a reader and a writer
because people read aloud to me when I was a child."
​
“If you want your kids to love books, read to them when they’re young,” she says.
Textbooks aren’t enough. “There’s no substitute for stories! A child never fell in
love with a workbook!”
​
Talk about the stories with children as you read to them, she advises. Ask them questions that stir up their imagination and their own stories. “Show your own excitement about the stories and what’s in the books. Let them see you reading. Having role models of people who love to read makes children want to be readers themselves!”
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“Sadly, too many teachers today, with so many demands placed on their time, " she reflected. "They don’t feel like they have the time to read aloud. But even 15 minutes a day. at the end of the school day or right after recess after lunch, that short time spent reading aloud could be enough to inspire children to love books, to love learning.”
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What keeps Anna going?
Anna expects to keep on writing indefinitely. "Why not?" she said. "You can write at any age. And there’s so much to be interested in. If I wake up in the middle of the night, sometimes I get up and make some notes for a poem or story on a scrap of paper. It's something you can do any time."
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“I have at least 15 other stories I think are finished, that just haven’t been made into books yet,” she said in spring 2025. She has her bulging “Ideas” folders where she keeps rough drafts, ideas, magazine or newspaper articles that might inspire a story. “You never know which one will become a book,” she said.
​
She loves it when children and adults come up to her after a presentation or workshop to tell her about stories they’ve written. ​She hopes to inspire other West Virginians who want to write, the way Cynthia Rylant inspired her.
“I remember meeting a teacher who told me No Star Nights inspired her to write her own story about growing up in coal country, telling about the tipples, the piles of coal and the trains going by.“ She told me, ‘Your book inspired me to do that!’”
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That made Anna feel great. “I felt that teacher was like me, with Cynthia Rylant. She heard me read, then she thought, ‘I have a story to tell too!’”
This page is a joint project by writer Colleen Anderson and editor, Kate Long. Colleen Anderson is a writer, graphic
artist and songwriter who often gives workshops for children. Her writing has appeared in multiple national
publications. She has produced three collections of original songs, a children’s book, and a poetry chapbook. She has
used Anna’s books for years in her workshops for children. Read more about Colleen at colleenanderson.com.
Writing activity ideas using
four of Anna Smucker's books
Click on the "DocX W" icons to download the activities.
No Star Nights paints a picture of Weirton, a steel mill town, from the point of view of a little girl growing up there.
Outside the Window is a charming tale about a little boy and some little birds who were wondering about each other.
To Keep the South Manitou Light, historical fiction for middle grades, in a fast-moving story, a mother and daughter struggle to keep a lighthouse shining.
Golden Delicious, a Cinderella Apple Story, tells the story of the birth of the Golden Delicious apple in West Virginia.