Oct. 8, 2014

By Vesna Brajkovic

A UW-Whitewater class, and one family trip, led one alumna to write her first children’s picture book.

Pam Saxelby, a 1978 UW-W graduate, wrote the book “Max and Bear” after witnessing the connection between her one-year-old grandson and his favorite companion, a blue bear Angel Dear blankey, on a trip.

“He talks to the thing, he walks around with it, he carries it in his mouth like a dog,” Saxelby said. “And that fascinated me. I know that my all my kids had something they really loved when they were young that was their comfort and their special friend. That’s what inspired me to write this.”

Her first encounter with the children’s writing came at UW-W when she took a children’s literature class as an undergraduate. Saxelby said she has been interested in writing her own book ever since.

“For the time, it was a pretty advanced and a forward-thinking lit class,” Saxelby said. “I learned a lot about something that seemed really simple, but is not. It takes a lot of thought, and effort, and creativity.”

The story explores this special companionship between children and their favorite toys, and is dedicated and based on her grandson’s experience with his own blue bear blankey. Someone had given his parents the blue bear blankey, and, when he was old enough to have it, they became inseparable.

Max won’t be two until November, so Saxelby said he can’t fully understand that he has an entire book dedicated to him.

“He looks at the cover of the book and you can tell he’s trying to figure it out,” Saxelby said. “He calls his bear ‘dada bear’ and he’ll walk past the book, and yell ‘DADA BEAR!’ His mom has read it to him and he knows it’s his bear, for sure. But I don’t think he knows that’s it about him just yet. But I think when he’s about two and a half or three, then he’ll get even more excited.”

Sales have gone “pretty well,” Saxelby said. She has sold a couple hundred books, and said it seems to have a large following of the young moms she taught preschool with for 20 years.

Saxelby has three grown children and her oldest is the mother of Max.

She plans on writing a second children’s book based on Max’s new baby sister, Josie.

Coming up with the initial idea for a children’s book took more than five years. But once she started writing “Max and Bear,” she said it took her a day and a half to put the first rough draft together.

“I was scared to show people the first draft, because what if they told me it sucks?” Saxelby said. “But nobody did and it was great. I sent it out to my family immediately, and then to the people I taught preschool with for a number of years. And honestly, I had asked three to four of my young-mom friends to read it to their children. All the responses were positive so I said, ‘Ok, I’ll jump. I’ll take the risk.’”

After writing the children’s book, which wasn’t easy according to Saxelby, the illustration process began.

Stephen Adams illustrated the book and Saxelby was very involved in the process, which she described as interesting and fun. She had to describe the scene she envisioned in a clear but concise way, so it took around five revisions to perfect it in a way that complemented her writing, Saxelby said.

“The best kids books, especially picture books, have the fewest amount of words,” Saxelby said. “The whole point is to use less words and still get the idea across. So, that’s what was challenging because I had to think about how I could convey the story in a way that the kids could see it in their minds with the words alone, and the pictures complementing it.”

Working under the self-publisher, Archer Publishing, her book was released in June 2014.

It is sold at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

“By choosing to self publish, you will be able to maintain control of your work’s copyright and content as well as launch your book on your own timetable,” Archer Publishing’s mission statement reads. “At the same time, you can benefit from the skills that make traditional publishing houses like Simon & Schuster so successful.”

Saxelby currently lives in Libertyville, Illinois, but grew up in Burlington and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She received her bachelor’s degree in education from UW-W. Her parenting blog, “How Not To Raise F*@ked Up Adults: A Running Commentary On How To Not Mess Up Your Children Too Much!” has over 17 thousand hits.