Ida B talks to trees. But that's not all. They answer her. Yet, somehow, Katherine Hannigan in her debut novel, Ida B... and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World (Greenwillow), makes the situation completely plausible. By the second chapter, her heroine is in the family's apple orchard, greeting the trees by name, and readers think nothing of it.
Initially, Hannigan says, she pictured the setting of the novel more clearly than she pictured her heroine. The author, who grew up in western New York State and began the novel after moving to Iowa to be a professor of art and design, also sees a connection between her relocation and her inspiration for the setting of Ida B. She moved from a city of 50,000 people with lots of concrete to a town of about 1,300, surrounded by fields. "A river goes through the town, bald eagles fly over the river. I go running and it's just so beautiful," she says. "That changed how I saw myself, what I thought was possible. I could imagine Ida B in this lifestyle because I was in it."
When Ida B's mother is diagnosed with cancer, the girl's world shatters, especially when her parents decide to sell a portion of their land. Yet she keeps her sense of humor in the face of adversity. When her mother's hair falls out, Ida B collects it and places it into her "Bag of Assorted Things for Not Yet Determined Plans." As Hannigan puts it, "Ida B names the hard things. If she gives it a name, it becomes bearable. Mark Twain says something about how 'laughter offsets the sorrow.' This is Ida B's way of coping."
The novel Ida B began in a spiral notebook. The author had been writing stories even before she moved to Iowa. Then in the winter of 2002, she attended a lecture by Kate DiCamillo, author of the Newbery-winning The Tale of Despereaux. "The importance of that occasion for me was not so much what Kate said, but that all these people were transformed by what she'd written." Hannigan thought, "If this is what a book can do, it's time to do it."
She came home and started what would become Ida B. She didn't show it to anyone. That summer, she noticed in a Minneapolis paper (her Iowa town borders the Minnesota state line) that DiCamillo was giving a writing workshop, so she enrolled. Hannigan got to sit down one-on-one with DiCamillo, who had read a chapter from Ida B, and who said: "This is extraordinary. When you finish it, I will help you."
Hannigan committed to writing two to four hours a day, which she fit in around her teaching schedule. When she finished the novel, Hannigan sent it to DiCamillo, who passed it along to fellow Minnesota writer Allison McGhee, who in turn passed it on to her sister, agent Holly McGhee. Holly called just a few days later to say she'd love to represent the book. "It was wonderful but so frightening because [Ida B] was just this thing I did for myself," says Hannigan. "Each level of [sending it out] was a new level of vulnerability. I knew that, after Holly, it was going to people who read books all the time. It felt like the book could become less and less mine."
But that didn't turn out to be true, according to Hannigan. Steve Geck of Greenwillow Books right away expressed interest in the project, and respected the author's wish to print the book on recycled paper. "He is an amazing person," Hannigan says. "The editing process never became about anything other than the story."
Hannigan is hard at work on another middle-grade novel set in the Midwest. She has left academia to be a full-time writer, and she also reads or writes every day about sustainability. She is currently putting together a Web site for HarperCollins on the topic. "People used to call it ecology," she explains, "but I like to think of sustainability as an awareness that all living creatures are connected, and what we do or don't do affects everything else."
For Hannigan, the most surprising thing that has come of Ida B's publication is that, in many ways, the experience has altered how she sees herself. "I have seen myself most of my life as a strange bird," she confesses. "I function pretty well in the world, but the way I spend my time and what I like to do, I've considered myself a geek or a freak, off the beaten path. This thing I wrote for myself ended up being as meaningful to other people as it was to me, and the fact that it's popular is a big surprise to me—that it's not something that separates me from others but connects me with others."
