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Working on digital projects can be a bonding experience for families

By Jonathan B. Cox
Staff Writer

By Megan Garvey STAFF WRITER CARY Ann Fearrington is reading from her book "Christmas Lights." It is 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning at Barnes & Noble in Cary. "My name is Ann Fearrington and I have written a book for you," she says, glancing from child to child, as if she wrote the book exclusively for each of them. With each turn of the page, Fearrington brings an object for the children to match to the illustrations, a set of Christmas lights, a teddy bear, a toy car. Reading her own words, she tells the story of a family ride through the countryside of North Carolina to the bright lights of Raleigh to look at Christmas lights. Soon little hands rise in the air. "Me, Me," "I'll help." Moms and dads look on as their children follow the short story and point to the bright colors on every page. "You forget how big Christmas is until you have kids," says Paul Arrington, who brought his son, Zane,2, to the reading. "This book hits home for us because every Christmas we do the same thing. We get in the car and we look at the lights and our kids love it." And the children,the older ones, the 4-and 5-year-olds, understand the story in the book, too. "It's good,"says Nicholle Cogavin,4, who is there with her father, Paul. "I like the picture of the trees. The red one." To Fearrington such praise is high indeed. "Christmas Lights," which was released in mid-October and is already on its second printing, was a long time in the making. More than a decade in conception and creation, the picture book with simple text came out to rave reviews and large orders from bookstores across the country. Sunday, Fearrington will read from her book and talk to children at the Wake County Library at Cameron Village. It's a fitting setting since Cameron Village (along with the Moravian sdtars of Winston-Salem) is on the cover of her book, one of many illustrations taken from familiar scenes in Raleigh. The illustrations themselves seem to shine off the page. They are iridescent. Making the lights seem to glow like that is a large part of the reason it took so long to finish the book. Fearrington studied Rembrandt's paintings on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She used acrylics, colored pencil. and oil pastels to create liminescence. She went over the canvases time and again. And finally they were done. Almost magically it seemed, they became a book. Next weekend the original paintings for the book go on display at the N.C. Museum of Art and stay up until after Christmas as part of the museum's annual holiday display. It's all a bit overwhelming, if you consider that the artist never thought she would be taken seriously. A bright beginning For 10 years or so while her three sons were little and she was staying home to raise them, Ann Fearrington volunteered at school libraries: Lacy Elementary, Martin Middle, right up to the library at Broughton High. She helped to shelve the books, and in the monotonous task something became obvious. "I began to understand what books children loved and I talked to children about what they liked," says Fearrington. "I was shelving the same books over and over again and from that I knew a geat deal about popular books. I really want to write a children's book." She just needed a story to tell. It came from the most crass of all Christmas displays: Al Copeland's extravaganza in Metairie, LA. Copeland, founder of Popeye's chicken, fought his neighbors all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court for the right to go over the top and display the Christmas lights he wanted. It seems funny that a quiet little book about a family taking a drive to see holiday lights got started so ostentatiously. But it makes sense, really, if you listen to the story. "My sister had moved to New Orleans and I convinced my husband to keep the babies and let me visit Jessica," says Fearrington. This was about 12 or 13 years ago. When I got to New Orleans, my sister told me, 'I've got something very interesting we are going to do tonight.' We piled in the car and headed off into a New Orleans suburb. As we drove on, I could see that the traffic was picking up and I could see over the horizon a glow in the sky and then there were policemen directing traffic. There were people walking on the sidewalks and staring at a whole block of Christmas lights." Fearrington got out and wandered. Soon she was basking in the glow of half a million light bulbs. A much smaller light went off inside her head. When she was growing us in Winston-Salem in the 1950's, her family would jump in the car and cruise the displays of Christmas lights neighbors had fashioned. She thought it was a Winston-Salem thing. When she moved to Raleigh and folks did the same, she thought it was a North Carolina thing. In Louisiana, a decade ago, she changed her mind. "I realized it was a national thing,"says Fearrington, "So I said, 'OK, now that would be an interesting children's book." A national sensation Fearrington's vision may have gone national, but the pictures stayed local. The paintings are of Raleigh, Winston-Salem, and across North Carolina: her neighbor's houses on Lake Boone Trail, the train at Pullen Park. The steam plant on Capital Boulevard, the Hardee's on Falls of the Neuse Road in Raleigh and Fourth Street in Winston-Salem, Apartment balconies on Hillsborough Street, a house in Granville County, and roads in Surry and Stokes Counties. Not surprisingly, the book has done very well here. "It's a magical book for children," said Nancy Olson of Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, Fearrington signed copies of her book a few weeks ago, and nearly 600 copies have been purchased. "It's a bookseller's dream." Of course, if you aren't from North Carolina you wouldn't really think about exactly where each illustration is set. The book could, in many ways, be set anywhere. That's what Fearrington's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, is focusing on. The book is for children everywhere, Fearrington's publicist says. After a year of working on the text and another year of creating nine illustrations, in the fall of 1992 Fearrington sent her work out in the mail to the company that had published some of her favorite children's books. She didn't expect much of anything to come from it. "I dropped it in the mail and I was already thinking to myself, 'When they reject it, I'll send it to somebody else.' I was already planning ahead a few publishers down the road." But the rejection never came. "Four days later I got a call from Houghton Mifflin," says Fearrington. "I just about fainted." "We are all excited about the book," said Amy Flynn, Fearrington's editor at Houghton Mifflin. "What we like about the book is that it is a different view of Christmas than almost anything else out there. Christmas lights are more than commercial; they are about a feeling of joy about the season." It started with finger paint If you want to know what Ann Fearrington is like just think back to kindergarten. When the teacher announced it was time to play with finger paints there were a couple of tacks you could take: have no interest in getting your hands all messy, have fun while the paint period lasted and move on to building blocks peacefully, or be dragged kicking and screaming from the construction paper. Ann was the little girl covered in the paints from head to toe, into it up to her eyeballs, the one that had to be dragged away from her creation. But to call herself an artist? "The idea of making a living as an artist was preposterous. You understand that, don't you?' she says. Which doesn't mean she stopped creating art. She graduated from finger paints to serious art instruction when she was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1960's. George Bireline, a Guggenheim fellow, taught her studio art class. She can remember him pacing up and down the easels, demanding each student to announce his major. "He came to me and I said, 'I'm an English major,' And he said. 'You're a wordmonger. What's a wordmonger doing in my art class?" She taught English and Latin. She worked as a landscape designer. And always she made her own art. She just wasn't sure what to think of the results. "I knew that what I did was different from anything else I saw and I didn't know if that was a good thing. Instead of getting more and more sophisticated, I stopped at some strange level," she says looking at her painting in a bound copy of the book. "They don't look like they were done by a child, but they have something of a childlike look to them." In the end she says she found children's literature was the perfect fit. No one asked her to choose one discipline over another. No one cared if the work was fiction or nonfiction. Children just like a good tale and pretty pictures. Even now as she works on her next book, in her studio - a space next to her washing machine and dryer, space she had to steal from hanging shirts and an ironing board. Fearrington says it's all hard to believe. "It is phenomenal. It still doesn't seem real. It doesn't seem that I did it. Even when the box of bound books came from the publisher, it seemed as though the work was done by someone else."

James B. Hunt Literacy Award
Presented by the North Carolina Reading Association
Click the above image for the full-size picture


Program Excellence Literacy Award (LITTLE GREEN BOOK)

	source: Summit Echoes, fall 1996 "On Christmas night the air is cold and still." So begins Christmas Lights, the children's picture book Ann Fearrington '60 has created for Houghton Mifflin's fall list. The book celebrates and documents the joyous American custom of gathering family and friends into the car and cruising off to see Christmas light displays. North Carolinians will recognize many of the scenes inspired from sights in Winston-Salem, Raleigh, and Surry and Stokes counties. As Christmas Lights opens, a full moon lights the narrow road for one family beginning their annual tour. Together, both children and parents marvel at familiar places magically transformed, and return home to the welcoming glow of their own special tree. The author and illustrator is a native of Winston-Salem. Ann Peyton Fearrington graduated from Reynolds High School, attended Randolph-Macon Woman's College and graduated from UNC-CH with a B.A. in English and Secondary Education. She received a Masters Degree in Life Sciences (botany and horticulture) from North Carolina State University. Ann was a middle school teacher of language arts and Latin, and later designed gardens. Today, she is a school library volnteer and writes and illustrates a bimonthly children's travel feature for the Raleigh News & Observer. She lives in Raleigh, NC with her husband Vance E. Cox,Jr, and their three sons, Joseph, Jonathan, and James. In October of this year, Christmas Lights will appear in bookstores across the country. Ann will visit Summit in the fall of 1996 to share her writing experiences and her illustrations with the students. Diary of a Midnight Artist by Ann Fearrington '60 12:20, December 26, 1995 Where is that tube of Titanium white?!... There it is, in the red tin box. I settle contentedly into the next few hours of dotting tiny lights on a landscape. I am painting the last Christmas Lights illustration. On my mind are the children and parents who will hold this very painting on their laps, read the story, and, hopefully, share both laughter and wonder. Maybe the family has just come home from their own annual "lights cruise." The children are tucked into bed to hear and see one last Christmas story at the end of a Christmas Day. A tingle runs up my spine, down my arm, and right into the fingertips that hold the brush. What an amazing experience! What an honor to be a part of this! The eerie quiet of our usually noisy household (we have three teenage boys) rings in my ears. Like the colors on my palette, thoughts flow and mix as I work - thoughts of all those people who made this possible - my parents, husband, family and friends. Everyone of them believed I could do it. They invested in me. They have taken on every aspect of the day-to-day business of life during the ten months I've been painting the illustrations. I can't help but wonder what my elementary school teachers would say about Christmas Lights. In 1949 when I showed up in Miss Martha Christian's kindergarten, she and her sister Miss Leta Christian were already Summit School legends. They still are. These two teachers made my transition from home to school a joy. There was so much wonderful play, painting and singing - so many stories, gardens and adventures. Clink! clink! The swirling brush taps the water glass and breaks the silence. Time for cadmium yellow and goldenrod, perfect colors for Christmas lights glowing behind a giant, sheltering oak tree. The tree brings to mind those long walks at Summit- when we collected all kinds of interesting things and stopped at the monument to study each one. It was on just such a walk that I learned the difference between an oak and a maple, and what acorns are really all about. We collected the big, funny-looking seeds, plucked the caps off, peeled away the glossy brown shell, and naturally, asked if we could eat them! There was time to study and wonder, to ask questions, and find the answers, to play with friends and, the most treasured part of all, to be so very independent. I glance across the studio at another painting for Christmas Lights. The older child gives her brother a gentle nudge toward the Christmas tree (topped, of course, with a Moravian star). I hope no one knows how much study it took to get the child's gesture right. Renoir, Potter, Rembrandt, Sendak, Copley, Caldecott, Wyeth, Greenaway, Vermeer...I remember the first time I met the man. It was at Summit in Mrs. Julia McLean's second grade room. Who would believe it?...a second grade art appreciation class! Mrs. McLean had found a wonderful book about classical American and European artists and their art. Decades before stickers were popular, this book featured one sticker for each artist. I remember exactly what Mrs. McLean said about the light streaming in the window as the Dutch lady grasped her silver pitcher. I licked, then glued the sticker into my book and Vermeer's "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher" became mine. In my mind's eye I have carried her with me ever since. I think about the five years I was a teacher - the work, the hours, the energy. A school of excellence does not occur by accident. When such a school exists, parents, alumni/ae, faculty, and administration all give their best. What a remarkable school Summit has been for so many, many years! 2:35 a.m., December 26,1995 Finished! Ahhhhhhh, I stretch my aching arms toward the skylights, long since gone dark. Sleep will come quickly now. I'll just click off the studio lights and tiptoe to bed. What a good night!...long, but good...I am pleased with that oak tree... Thank you, Summit School.

Children's Book Week:

Connecting with North Carolina Authors

If you are unable to schedule an author visit for your students, try the next-best thing. Visiting a web site or scheduling a teleconference are some options for "virtual" North Carolina author visits. Ann Fearrington sponsors StudioAnn.com, a site with not only the standard biographical material and contact information, but also content for students and teachers. This author of Christmas Lights and The Little Green Book has included Arts and Crafts projects for children, as well as information about the authors who inspired her to write. Click on the NC Christmas Lights Connection for a wonderfully reflective piece in which Ms. Fearrington tells the story of the local history behind her illustrations in this book.

All images and text copyright Ann Fearrington, 2000