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By Katrina Margolis
Hometown Weekly Reporter
Anne Sawan has been writing for years, but it’s just recently that she has had her first book published. On Thursday, May 18, Sawan visited the Wheelock School to read her book to students and to explain the process of having a real-life book published. “What Can Your Grandma Do?” is the story of a boy named Jeremy. When his school has a grandparent talent show, he is worried because he doesn’t think that his grandmother has any talents.
“The idea for this book came from a friend who was becoming a grandma,” Sawan explained. The students at Wheelock were working on their own writing, and had a multitude of question for the newly published author.
Sawan’s book was published through a contest. “What happened was I wrote this story, and I put it away with a bunch of other stories I have. One day I saw there was a contest looking for picture books about grandparents, so I thought, ‘I should take that story out that I wrote a while back,’” she explained. “I took it out and looked it over and made a couple of changes. And I sent it in to the contest, and didn’t hear, and I kind of forgot about the contest … I started to get e-mails from Holland, and I didn’t really pay attention to the e-mails. Then I got a phone call, and there was another woman on the line who said, ‘You won the contest!’” Sawan wrote the book about four years ago, and it was published about a year after she won the contest.
Revision was a big topic for the class, who were working on their own writing and learning about the process of editing. “When I saw the contest, it had certain rules about length, so I had to go back and take some things out, and that’s one of the hardest things—when you have to go back and really think about what is important in your book and what you actually really need.”
The friend of Sawan’s who was becoming a grandmother was a younger grandmother. “I went to the store to look for a book for her, and all the grandma books were about people who didn’t look like people I knew who were grandparents,” she said. “They were all sitting around and they didn’t seem very active. And this friend of mine does the Pan Mass Challenge and she runs, so she’s very active, and I thought we need a book about grandmas who are doing stuff.”
The book has been published in five different languages, including Dutch and Chinese, and is available on Amazon.
