My Story
NICE TO MEET YOU
I'm Barbara Leary
I've been writing since I learned to read--I was the kid hiding in a tree with a notebook and pencil, making up stories about fairies and monsters and little girls with big dreams. So building a career on a love of writing came naturally to me, and I spent a few years in magazine publishing before moving into corporate communications. On the job, I was a confident writer. But writing a speech for the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar corporation was somehow less scary than sharing my own stories, so they rarely saw the light of day.
A writing workshop led by a Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist was the turning point. Participants were accepted into the workshop on the strength of their writing samples, so I sucked in my breath and sent in a short story. In our first class, the instructor gave a talk on craft, then read my story aloud to the class. "And that," she said when she'd finished, "is how it's done." A champagne cork popped inside me, and I felt the fizz of excitement--could I really do this? Turns out I could, and my stories began to find an audience, though it took me a while to turn my dreams into books I could hold in my hands.
The inspiration for my first picture book arrived in the world in June 2013, followed by her sisters in May 2015 and September 2017. My granddaughters and I read books and invented stories together, and I began to consider turning our wild little yarns into picture books. Then my son and daughter-in-law moved their growing family to a new neighborhood, and Eleanor, my oldest granddaughter, was heartbroken to leave behind a tree she had grown to love. I got it into my head to honor her feelings with a storybook, and I began working on my first children's book, The Climbing Tree.
My new passion project was interrupted by something else that had gotten into my head--a brain tumor that grew to the size of a lime before I landed in the emergency room. All is well now, more than five years later, but that near-death experience gave me the swift kick I needed to finish The Climbing Tree, which ended up winning first place in the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards in the category of picture books / early readers. Having written a book for Eleanor, I wanted to write one for Virginia and Caroline too, so the next year I wrote and published Virginia Loves Dogs and Caroline and the Not-Mamma.
Beyond children's literature, I enjoy experimenting with different genres: short stories, flash fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. I still write for corporate clients, but that work takes a back seat now to my own writing and to serving as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, where I teach graduate-level writing courses.
Through Finch and Squirrel, I'm able to bring together my love of children, writing, and teaching to help other storytellers coax their ideas out of their heads and into the hands of young readers.
In the photo above, Eleanor and I talk to her first-grade class about how we worked together on The Climbing Tree.
