Authors and Illustrators

Featured Author: Hazel Hutchins

Bibliography at Orca

TJ and the Cats: TJ may not like cats, but that doesn’t stop a taxi from showing up at his door bearing his grandmother’s four felines. Killer, Cleo, Kink and Maximillian the Emperor—Max for short—invade TJ’s life and replace dinosaurs as the topic for his school project.

TJ and the Haunted House: TJ does not believe in ghosts, so when he agrees to create a haunted house in his own home as a fundraiser, he does not anticipate problems, at least not until it turns out that a ghost may inhabit the spare room.

TJ and the Rockets: His best friend Seymour is determined to come up with the latest greatest invention and TJ’s gran expects TJ to build a rocket. The kittens, T-Rex and Alaska, are eager to get involved.

TJ and the Sports Fanatic: When Seymour announces that he has signed them both up for a football team, TJ fears the worst. Neither of them is huge or mean or able to tackle, catch, throw, run or kick a ball down a field, but Seymour is determined to be a star.

TJ and the Quiz Kids: When master fact-gatherers TJ and Seymour are asked to join the school Quiz Kids team, TJ thinks Seymour should take the stage at the upcoming contest against the high-pressure Fairview School team.

Interview

Why do you write, and why children's books? I write because some elf with a weird sense of humour crept into my crib when I was a baby and said "if you don't write you will be a very crabby person" and I'm not fond of crabby people and I don't want to be one! I write for kids because its way more fun than writing for adults. And besides, kids are smarter because they haven't had years and years of "junk" clogging up their brains.

What kind of research do you do before you write? I stick my fingers in my ears, squeeze my fists and listen to the sound of my muscles working. Are you trying it? Yup - you just got sucked into doing author research, exactly the kind I did for "TJ and the Sports Fanatic". Except I hope you aren't jamming your fingers in your ears....it's the fists that are getting squeezed not your head... but according to the research books the sound you hear really is the sound of your muscles working. Amazing!

And I'll spare you what happened when I was writing about a juggler and my kids suggested I forget about using juggling balls and try doing my research using eggs.

Do you put your family and friends in your books? "You put me in this book!" I can remember my son Wil calling those words in outrage from down the hall. I was as outraged as he was. What was he doing showing up in one of my stories? I hadn't meant to put him there! The nerve of some kids! After that day, I began to realize that many of my characters do, indeed, begin from tiny snippits of the people in my life. Once set in motion in a story, however, I try to let them grow and become themselves—their imaginary selves that is!

As for the characters of TJ and Seymour, if they have a slight resemblance to my son Ben and his friend Taylor, it's their fault not mine!

What was your favorite children's book when you were a child? Actually I'd rather tell you what my least favorite story was as a child. There is an old fairy tale where a poor man and and his poor wife get three wishes and, to make a long story short, the man wishes for a sausage to eat and the woman wishes that the sausage were stuck to the man's nose and then their last wish has to be to get the sausange off his nose. Now I'm sure its more complicated than that and I'm positive there is supposed to be a very nice moral there somewhere but I thought it was the stupidest story I ever heard. Don't you think it's the stupidest story you ever heard? I could think of any number of good sensible wishes that could be made and at the time I was only ten years old. (See what I mean about "junk" clogging up your brain as you get older.)

Happily this led to my first book The Three and Many Wishes of Jason Reid and you will have to read it to find out how brilliant I was as a child and what my amazing idea was.

What are you working on now? That is a totally intriguing question because the truth is I never quite know what's going on in the back of my head. I'll sit down to write about penguins.... penguins are "big" right now, penguins sell books and movies and greeting cards, penguins make money! But when I look down at my paper I see that what I've actually written is:

Thisisthewaymyfriendamandatalks. Alltogether. Nospaces. Onebreath. Ilikemyfriendalotbutsometimesitshardtounderstandher.

What is your favorite (or funniest) childhood memory? In spite of all the stories about cats in the TJ series, there is one small incident I haven't been able to use.

When I was a child we had a kitten who found a secret stash of old, smelly cat food. For weeks and weeks this dear, tiny, sweet kitten had the largest and smelliest farts around.

Biography

I was born and raised on farms in southern Alberta, Canada, with two older sisters and one older brother. My family was kind and loving, but as the youngest by several years I spent quite a bit of time on my own. For those times I invented two imaginary friends with the unlikely names of Juty and Barrette. They were very good company, always played the exact games I wanted to play and never, ever went away in a huff.

I loved living on the prairies. I also loved books. From the time I was little my mom read to us every night and my dad recited dramatic poetry. My favorite stories, when I grew old enough to read on my own, were books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House on the Prairie, etc.), Just So, Mary stories (lots of magic involved) and The Dana Sisters (mysteries similar to Nancy Drew but better in my estimation). I was about ten years old when I realized I wanted to be an author.

After that, although I had many other hobbies and interests, I also spent a good deal of time writing stories. I wrote quietly and secretly, never telling anyone my plans.

The first stories I tried to have published, sent out secretly when I was in high school, were promptly rejected. So were the next batch. And the next. I didn't give up, however. I went ahead with other things, further education and numerous jobs, but I continued to write. I finally learned to do two things—write with great care and write about what truly intrigued me. My stories began to sell!

Today there are over thirty "Hazel Hutchins" titles published in Canada, the U.S., Britain and beyond. I left the prairies but was lucky enough to live with a wonderful husband in another beautiful part of Canada - a town in the Rocky Mountains. I have three great children (teenage and older!) a cat and a dog. I love to ski, hike, canoe, bike, birdwatch, read books and ... first and always ... write stories.

E-mail: hjhutch@telusplanet.net
Web site: www.telusplanet.net/public/hjhutch/home