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Big Momma Makes the World.

Article Excerpt
by Phyllis Root, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, published by Candlewick Press

If this world is in need of a little straightening up, don't blame Big Momma. She created it, and she did a darn good job. In this exuberant creation story, Big Momma is a straight-talking, no-nonsense creator with a baby to mind and a job to do. The story follows the plot of Genesis, with the creation taking six days and the seventh being a well-deserved rest. Each day is a magnificent adventure. When Big Momma creates the creatures of the earth in one Big Bang, we see them explode out of a huge ball of orange and yellow light. Root's words beg to be read aloud, like one of the stories Big Momma swaps with her human creations on the front porch; Oxenbury, renowned for her child-size pictures of small, everyday events, conveys the mystery of creation in large, energetic, joyful illustrations.

I'M VERY HONORED and grateful to be here tonight accepting this award for Big Momma Makes the World. It's particularly wonderful because Big Momma was not written with the hope of publication. I wrote the story, I thought at the time, simply for the joy of playing with language.

When the story was done, I read it to several writer friends who listened and nodded--then looked at their watches and said, "Time to go." Thinking, perhaps, that the story was either not very good or that it might have crossed some line by portraying God as a single mother, I put the story in my desk drawer, and there it stayed for a year.

Some time later, I was talking with my editor and friend Amy Ehrlich, who was extremely busy with work and travel. Wanting to help her in some small way, I pulled Big Momma out of my desk drawer and faxed it to Amy with a scribbled note along the lines of, "See? Even God took a day off. So can you."

Amy called me back almost at once and said, "I think we might want to publish this."

I had just gotten back from several school visits, where I had been told, politely but clearly, not to talk about or read from one of my books, a folktale in which a woman outfiddles the devil. This was my first experience with censorship, and it shook me.

So when Amy...