Paul Kleiner

Hello Mr. Pinkwater. I am writing to let you know that, after a long spiral, my aspiring writing career has come full circle. When I was about 11, I purchased Four Fantastic Novels at a Barnes and Noble because A: my dad liked your books and B: I thought you looked kind of funny in the sunglasses. I read the four novels back to back in a few days. Thereafter, I would read them every six months or so, until they really sunk into my mind. For the next several years, I would read sci fi and horror, mostly Philip K. Dick and Lovecraft. My brain was filled with horrible creatures and dangerous inventions. I read some history too. At 16 I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder during my second hospitalization. It is a mix of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. My world was darker. Fast forward five years. I'm now 21 and attending a summer program at Oxford in England, taking a creative writing course. For summer reading, I had to go through dozens of short stories about class consciousness, divorce, and so on, all very subtle and to me, very boring. I was given a one sentence prompt about a train pulling into a station, and the station having tomatoes stacked in crates. I had to write the first page of a story that follows that sentence. Rather than focus on the train, I focused on the tomatoes, and introduced the Tomato-Men, a secret international agency dedicated to concealing the existence of, fighting, and understanding evil tomatoes which control the minds of humans. They dispatch the tomatoes with a special syringe, causing them to shoot up into space, from whence they came. As I developed it, it occurred to me that this reads like my impression of a Daniel Pinkwater story. The next day my friend, who is an aspiring illustrator and creative collaborator, asked my if I wanted to write a collection of short stories for her to edit and illustrate. I said yes, and then I asked if they could be for young adults. My life has been dark enough. I've taken some serious knocks. My sister has too, and my mom, and my dad, and the few relatives I have left who are alive. I don't really know if the world needs more dark writing. But it does lighthearted, good natured, fun writing. It needs more stories like Borgel. What it doesn't need is an author trying to copy someone else. But for me, your work is a starting point, a rough base that I can venture off from. I apologize for any weak writing here – I have lots of work to do today, and after watching a dark movie for school and preparing to write an essay about the Holocaust, my mind drifted to Borgel for refuge. Thank you, Mr. Pinkwater, for writing young adult fiction so respectable and fun that five years down the road it is probably my biggest creative influence. (again, sorry if there are punctuation errors – I really ought to have gone back to my essay fifteen minutes ago!)