Writing Roots Go Back to Third Grade for Children’s Author Archambault
By Sharon Dunham (1990)

Ever since he was in the third grade, nationally-recognized children’s author, John Archambault, knew he wanted to be a writer. That was the year he read E. B. White’s children’s classic Charlotte’s Web, a story about an insecure pig named Wilbur who struck up a budding friendship with a supportive spider called Charlotte. Archambault pictured himself as Wilbur, and his teacher, Mrs. Williams, stepping in as an inspirational Charlotte. That teacher was the first one who told him—“you can be a writer. If not you, then who?”

The combination of Charlotte’s Web and Mrs. Williams have stayed with Archambault through the years, hovering somewhere in the back of his memory, until now, he says. He began talking about that experience to groups for the first time last week. On a speaking tour in Cut Bank on Monday and in Shelby on Tuesday, Archambault described those impressionable years.

“I look back on my third grade year and I realize that anything we imagine is possible if we become who we think we can become,” he told third, fourth and fifth graders at Buena Vista Spanish Immersion School in Eugene, Oregon. “If someone catches a glimpse of us and holds up a possible self and we run to get that—that’s what I try to model.”

Actually, Archambault says he had more than one “Charlotte” in his life. His grandmother, Rose, a Montana native, who read aloud to him when he was young, imparted a love of words to him. Mrs. Williams gave him the dream that he could be a writer and Bill Martin, Jr., who has teamed up with him to produce books, gave him the opportunity to write.

Archambault now has 13 trade books carried in bookstores around the country, with all but one still in print. He’s also teamed up with Martin to produce 30 young readers’ books that are geared at making reading fun for youngsters. Archambault also writes musical accompaniment and lyrics for children’s tapes.

A Sierra Madre, California native, Archambault worked as a high school summer intern copywriter for the Pasadena Star News, and was later hired as a writer. He said he enjoyed seeing his name in print and really caught the fever to write at that point. He earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California-Riverside in 1981. From there he went on to write a poem called the “Ghost Eye Tree” that his new friend Martin envisioned as a children’s book.“It was based on a real tree in my neighborhood,” described Archambault. “It was a huge old oak tree held up by a rusty iron pole that leaned over. Its roots split the sidewalk. It was a very spooky old tree.” Two other widely read children’s books that Archambault has written are Barn Dance and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.

Archambault travels a great deal these days, speaking to children’s groups all over the country. He said those trips feed his inner world. “The myth of the writer sitting there isolated is not true,” he reflects. “I wouldn’t want to live that lonely, isolated, depressed life. I get a lot of ideas on the plane. It’s something about being still, but in motion, like driving a car when you get into that quiet reflection. I use a Dictaphone now. I used to write poems and songs while I drove and that was dangerous.” He says he disciplines himself to write, while still retaining the imagination and dream world that inspire his stories. “You have to have a still, quiet place to go—where you can let the dreams bubble to the surface,” he says. “You don’t have to force it. It’s not about sitting there clenching the pencil.”

Archambault’s natural aptitude for writing surfaced in the third grade during a reading incentive project when he chose to rewrite and invent endings for books he read. Instead of turning in brief one-page reports, he submitted six and seven page reports, all with different endings. He won the reading competition, but remembers feeling guilty that he really hadn’t read all the books he claimed since he’d usually stop part way through and write his own ending. “I felt so guilty the second half of the year,” he says. “But the more I did it, the more I felt a certain power in doing it.”

At the end of the school year, Mrs. Williams took him to the library, pointed to the top shelf that held the books written by authors whose last names began with “A,” and said, “Those are the “A’s” up there. Archambault could be up there someday. If not you, then who?”

It turns out now that Mrs. Williams must have had a premonition—“Archambault” has taken its place with the “A’s” on the bookshelf. And in those same libraries and book stores in the “W” section, Charlotte’s Web waits to inspire a whole new generation of “Wilburs” to become everything they can be, too.

If not them, then who?