Married writers Jerry and Eileen Spinelli don’t collaborate. But they help each other write all the same, and their readers are better off because of it.
by Jane C. McFann
Jerry and Eileen Spinelli met, quite literally, over writing. At the time, they worked for the same company but were barely acquainted. One day while waiting at a trolley stop, Eileen took three binders of poetry and dropped them into Jerry’s lap.
“Those were the days when I wanted to be Edna St. Vincent Millay,” Eileen explains today with a laugh. A surprised Jerry began to read. “Very nice. This is nice,” he managed to say.
“Perhaps I was unfair to her since I saw her as Eileen in the circulation department,” Jerry says. “After all, how good of a poet could she be? That compromised my judgment; I only saw half of what was there, and my compliments were half empty. Still, if I’d had my wits, I would have fallen off the bench over her right then.”
A connection was forged that day, one strong enough that today the Spinellis are married, and both of them are highly successful writers of books for audiences ranging from young children through older adolescents. Jerry won a Newbery Medal for Maniac Magee and has written other books ranging from the lighthearted Who Ran My Underwear Up the Flagpole? to the beautifully grim Milkweed.
Eileen has written the renowned Lizzie Logan series as well as award-winning picture books and poems. Each writes individually, but they share the results of their efforts. “We are supportive of one another and supportive of our dreams together,” Jerry explains. It’s a partnership that benefits Jerry, Eileen, and their many readers, too.
Their lives together are worked around different approaches to writing. Jerry writes every morning from 10:00 to noon barring family emergencies or other commitments such as attending conferences. Sometimes he also writes at night, but that time is optional. “It’s easy to put writing down and hard to pick it up,” he says.
Eileen, on the other hand, does not have a specific writing schedule and is more inclined to wait for inspiration. Her favorite writing pieces are picture books, which allow her to “tap into human issues. I am drawn to a focus on language and images, and I have never been disappointed,” she says.
One of the advantages—or dangers—of being married to another writer is having a live-in critic. Honesty characterizes the Spinellis’ interactions. “We made a pact to be honest,” Jerry says about their roles as the other’s first reader.
They react differently to that honesty. “I tend to ball up the paper and throw it away,” Eileen says.
“I tend to get more argumentative and defend my writing,” Jerry says, smiling, as Eileen nods in agreement. “Sometimes it gets very quiet around here,” she says.
But each also knows that the other does not have the last word. Instead, their own gut feelings about their writing are the final arbiters.
“Sometimes the problem is that I love everything she writes,” Jerry explains. “Then I have to try to find something I don’t like. If I spend a year giving her nothing but flattery, I’ll lose my credibility.”
Because Jerry is likely to write longer books, Eileen reads them chapter by chapter. In fact, she was the one who started him on his book Milkweed, a poignant account of children surviving during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw.
She had told him about an article she’d read about a father who saved his daughter by giving her a pill that made her seem to be dead and then smuggling her out of the ghetto in a coffin. Although he didn’t use the incident in the novel, the idea was his starting point, and she shared her enthusiasm for the work—and her admiration of his skillful writing—as it developed.
Jerry’s inspiration in Eileen’s work often comes from a different direction. Sometimes she’ll show him a poem that she has written, thinking that it was meant to be nothing more. Jerry, however, will be so moved by what he reads that he will insist to her, “This is so good that it needs to be its own picture book.”
That sort of genuine admiration shines through whenever the Spinellis talk about each other’s work. They make it obvious that writing is a special way to make a living.
Reading educators and others who care about the written word could be forgiven if they imagined that life were lived on a more rarefied and lofty plane in the home of two writers than it is by the rest of us. But it’s not so, say the Spinellis. “We are only writers 20% of the time,” insists Jerry. Eileen agrees, saying, “I do the laundry, clean the house—we have real lives.”
But no matter how real the everyday lives of these two writers may be, the intertwining of those lives that started at a trolley stop years ago left them better off as writers—and their many readers are better off because of it, too.
Jane C. McFann of Newark, Delaware, USA, is the author of several young adult novels.
Better halves. (August 2005). Reading Today, 23(1), 23.
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