Welcome to SCBWI-MI's Book Birthday Blog!

Where we celebrate new books from Michigan's authors, illustrators and translators.

Congratulations to Mary Morgan on the release of Shark Tale at Mammoth Cave

You call our national parks "America's best idea" and have personally visited 60 parks. What sparked the idea to write children's books based on each national park and do you have a favorite park?

I have always had a desire to write books for children, so when the timing was right for me to get started, I took the advice from a speaker at a writers’ conference: write what you like where there isn’t a lot of competition: mysteries for children set in national parks. I love working with kids, I love mysteries, and I love national parks. Put together, they are a winning combination. National Parks are a hot topic and destination for vacations, so it has been easy to pick good ones. I have nine titles in my National Park series, as well as The Runaway Lawnmower for 3 – 5-year-olds in English and Spanish.

I would have to say Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of Hawaii is my favorite. We have visited it three times, but most recently, we were there in April of 2018 when Kilauea was building up steam. We drove twenty-nine miles to the summit several days to observe it day and night as orange lava was filling the caldera. Two days after we got home, it erupted with ash that went thirty-thousand feet into the air and spilled lava that covered 700 homes.

According to your website, you conduct park ranger interviews for each book. Aside from interviews, what does your research process include?

Before I can write a book, I have to visit the park, experience the trails, climb to the top of a lighthouse, look over a cliff, take a boat tour, walk in a swamp filled with alligators, look into a caldera, descend 250’ underground, or stand at the bottom of a monument and look up at its beauty before I can come up with an adventure. Sometimes, we have had misadventures, happen upon things that could be a setting or part of a plot that I take pictures of or jot down, so I don’t forget them. I watch the behavior of real kids and listen to them talk so that my dialogue fits what is characteristic of that age. I interview rangers, asking for the inside scoop and the worst crime that happens in their park. I get their maps and brochures, read what is on their website, and especially pick up a copy of the Junior Ranger book to incorporate the assignments into my story. This lets my readers know what is in a park and what they can do when they go to visit with their families.

Your books have multiple layers, including back matter. What do you typically include as back matter?

Because I like my readers to learn new things, I do a lot of research and put it in an appendix in the back of the book called Bekka’s FYI (For Your Information). Bekka has a travel trivia book that goes with her on vacations. En route to a park, she informs her family of important details like what the park is famous for, landmarks, large animals, etc., so they know what to look for. That requires me to do my homework and look up these facts, plus find camping recipes like hobo dinners, s’mores, and snow ice cream. The National Park Service grants permission to use maps and photos, giving credit where credit is due. I do a lot of googling of important people associated with a particular park and add it. I put in historical tidbits of information that I think readers would benefit from knowing.

What are your marketing plans for the book?

Having a marketing plan these days is a bit uncertain. Along with writing books, authors have to be creative in how books are marketed and sold into the hands of their readers. For eleven years, I had a publisher, located in Haslett, who had my books on Amazon, with a national distributor, in a number of stores around Michigan, and we sold at many craft shows and festivals. My publisher died just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, and his family closed his company Buttonwood Press. My husband and I have since started our own company, Buttonwood Books, using the same illustrator, editor, and printing company which my publisher did. My National Park books are geared for children ages seven to eleven or twelve, so they sell best when I can present them face to face with children. I go into many schools around Michigan during March since it is Reading Month. I have digital order forms which are sent home prior to my visit, I get the list from my contact person 2 days prior to me going, and I take the books with me autographed and personalized to that particular child. I exhibit at teacher and librarian conferences, as well as go to home school conventions as a speaker and exhibitor. I have found homeschooling families travel extensively to national parks to study its history and geography, which I also tuck into each one of my books. Because our children are grown, we have the freedom to travel to events, taking as long as is needed to make it all happen.

What's next for you?

What’s next. I believe my next book will be set on The Lewis and Clark Trail. I have been to several of the locations where they have National Park settings located, including the Boathouse along the Mississippi River near St. Louis, crossing the Missouri River, riding an old paddlewheel steamwheeler up the Columbia River where they paddled their boats, and then spent a day at Fort Clatsop at Astoria, Oregon where the Columbia empties at the Pacific Ocean and Lewis and Clark spent 2 winters. I have lots of other possibilities that I would love to see be a part of a book in the future.

A little bit about the book . . .

Eleven-year-old twins, Ben and Bekka Cooper, receive an invitation to join their uncle, Paul Price, on the mystery trip of a lifetime. Uncle Paul is a geologist in search of a rare find like dinosaur bones. The invitation contained the clue: Join me where you can see for miles or nothing at all.

Ben and Bekka are always up for a new adventure so jumped at the chance to do something like a mystery trip. Much to their surprise it led to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky where they have adventures and misadventures on a Trog Tour, geared for kids 8-12. Meeting new friends, they form the MACA (Mammoth Cave) Geology Club to discover who sabotaged their cave tour and why.

Later on, during a deep-cave exploration with rangers and geologists in a section of Mammoth Cave, they encounter danger and a discovery in a sinkhole that no one ever expected. With keen eyes and quick thinking, the MACA Geology Club outsmarts a would-be thief of never-before-seen shark fossils hidden at the entrance of a sinkhole.

Publisher: Buttonwood Books, LLC

A little bit about the author . . .

I live in Lansing, MI, but have a passion for traveling. Growing up in a family of nine, I got to see a good portion of our country during summertime vacations. Then when my husband and I had our family, we carried on the tradition. We have been to all fifty states and visited sixty national parks. We have two children who provided vacation antics to put into my books, and now we have two grandchildren who enjoy going on mystery trips with us in lieu of getting big Christmas gifts. They love the suspense we create prior to our trips and are amazed at the wonder and variety of activities you can do in a national park.

Website: https://www.nationalparkmysteries.com/