By Shaina Kaufman
West Hills Press
West Hills MS
1st Place
Division MS, News Writing
Personality Profile
Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen has written 16 books, both novels and picture books.
Who is Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen, you ask? Bodeen, aka S.A. Bodeen, the author of Shipwreck Island, Babu’s Song, and 14 more books, was the featured author for this year’s West Hills Reads program sponsored by the West Bloomfield Public Library. She visited West Hills earlier this month.
Students enjoyed presentations by Ms. Bodeen and learned many aspects of how a book goes from an idea to a finished novel.
Students learned it takes a lot to publish a book. After a publisher agrees to publish a book from an outline and synopsis of the book, the real work begins. You write, and rewrite.
S.A. Bodeen typically writes a thousand words a day, which means that she writes the first rough draft of her average novel in a little over a month. After that, she revises, A LOT. It takes two years or so after she first sends it to the publisher to actually publish a finished book.
Besides writing children’s picture books, Ms. Bodeen says she enjoys writing for older students. She says her darkest themed book is Detour, which is about a teenage author who gets kidnapped. Ms. Bodeen believes that the book that was her hardest to write was write was The Fallout, which is the sequel to her favorite book that she’s written, The Compound.
Unlike many authors, she says that she does not get writer’s block. But similar to most authors, she is currently working on a few books.
As a child, she grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin located near a town called Humbird, “so small it didn’t have a number on its population sign.” She went to college, where she got an education degree, and after graduation she and her husband joined the Peace Corps. They went to Tanzania, a country in Africa where people speaks Swahili. In fact, she still knows a little Swahili.
From some of the things she experienced in Tanzania, she was able to write her first book, which is a picture book called Elisabeti’s Doll. This helped launch her career as an author.
After she wrote several picture books, she really wanted to write a novel, so she came up with an idea for a book, The Compound. This novel’s inspiration came from her experiences as a kid, when she had nuclear-attack drills, and her love of Stephen King’s books.
The Compound took her a long time to write, and several revisions to make perfect. While she was writing The Compound, she almost decided to quit writing. Thankfully, she was able to persevere, and now The Compound is a bestseller and has been translated into Chinese, German, Dutch and Italian.
She has moved every few years, because of her husband’s employment. When her children were young, they moved to a very special place, a former naval base on Midway Island. It is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and supply planes flew there once a month, and they could hold only a certain amount of pounds.
On Midway Island, her two daughters, who are now 22 and 24, had to be homeschooled. Midway Island was a very interesting place to live. There were lots of animals and birds, including a bird called the Gooney Bird, which is her favorite animal on Midway.
When she’s not writing, Ms. Bodeen likes to bake, read, work out at the gym, go outside, and binge-watch Netflix. She loves the show Stranger Things.
Being a bestselling Young Adult author, Ms. Bodeen gets the opportunity to visit schools a lot, especially in the fall and spring. Last year alone, she visited 52 schools in nine states and Vietnam.
Not only was a lot learned from the author visit, the West Hills Reads program was very successful. Students read over 1,000 books and West Hills generously donated over $5,000 to the Peace Corps-Let Girls Learn initiative which enables girls in other countries have an opportunity for an education.