Daily Cosmonaut #5: Ramona Quimby

When I was a kid only three authors existed in my mind: Danielle Steele, John Grisham, and Beverly Cleary. There were thousands of books at the library but the only books in our house were by one of these three authors. John Grisham seemed incomprehensible. Danielle Steele seemed boring. But Beverly Cleary spoke to my experience.

Her characters behaved like I did and often even inspired my actions. Ramona’s literalism was matched only by my own. When she was told that the first bite of every apple was the best, she proceeded to only eat the first bite out of each one. In my mind, or perhaps in the book’s illustration, she was sitting on a mountain of apples with one bite taken out of each. This was a completely relatable scene that ran suitably parallel to many of my capers.

When travel writer Laura O. Foster proposed that we publish Walking With Ramona: Exploring Beverly Cleary’s Portland, my first thought was that we could not have published such a book even three or four years ago. Our audience wouldn’t have understood it in our parade of releases. It would have felt out of place. And a major part of that reason is that our staff had become passive for so long; agreeing to publish books that were offered to us rather than taking a proactive view of what our ideal list would look like. We were so busy doing the work that we had to get ahead enough of ourselves to think about what we were doing. And in many senses,  with enough explanation, Beverly Cleary’s work is perfectly sympatico with Microcosm’s. She celebrates the bad characters, the misbehavior, the hilarious messes and hijinks, and the way that not all bad guys have a TV-style moment of realization that changes their moral compass, and there isn’t always a bow tie and happy ending. In short, it’s good because it’s real.

Beverly Cleary turns 100 this year, the book comes out in November, and it’s a rare moment of redemption to connect my adult self to the mischievous kid that I was in 1982.