High on Writing:
Ghigna’s Creativity Soars in His ‘Tree House’ Office
By Keysha Drexel
Journal editor
Once upon a time, a writer and his new bride strolled the tree-lined streets of a neighborhood where they hoped to someday make their home.
An English Tudor home on West Linwood Drive in Homewood captured their imaginations, and the writer knew it would be the perfect place to raise a family and pen books and poems.
“It is a storybook house in a storybook neighborhood. I knew I could write here,” said award-winning poet and children’s author Charles Ghigna.
And write he did.
During the 38 years he has lived in the 1927 red brick house with his wife, Debra, Ghigna has penned more than 5,000 poems and 60 books for Random House, Disney’s Hyperion Books, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, Abrams, Boyds Mills, Charlesbridge, Capstone and other publishers.
His books have been featured on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” PBS and NPR. His poems appear in hundreds of textbooks, anthologies and magazines, and after hundreds of visits to schools to share his love of poetry and stories with children, the 66-year-old is known to most as “Father Goose.”
But despite his nickname, Father Goose said his favorite part about his house–and his job–is that they give him a chance to act like a kid.
Shortly after he moved into his home, Ghigna got the idea to convert attic space into a writer’s haven.
“The walls and ceilings in the attic were covered with this cardboard-type wallpaper, so I started scraping it away and discovered that underneath all of that was these beautiful, knotty-pine boards,” Ghigna said. “It felt like a little cabin in the sky, the perfect tree house.”
So every morning for nearly four decades, Ghigna has climbed the attic steps to his “tree house” and looked out over the top of the elms and oaks and sweet gums to draw inspiration for his poems and stories.
“I get away with thinking like an 8-year-old, of climbing up to my tree house and looking out the window and wondering what kind of adventure I can get into next,” he said. “It’s not work at all–it’s play.”
Ghigna said he’s been playing around with words and stories since he was a young child growing up in Fort Myers, Fla.
Born in Long Island, N.Y., Ghigna moved with his family to Florida when he was 5 years old. That’s where he first began writing poems and getting attention for his work.
A story about a talking freckle earned Ghigna his first taste of notoriety when he was in the third grade.
“I think I always wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know it. I wrote a silly story in the third grade about a talking freckle on a boy’s face. My teacher made a big deal about it. My parents used to make me stand in front of the couch and read it to their friends when they came to visit,” he said. “The story caught on and kept getting longer and longer with each retelling.”
Ghigna was invited to read his story about the talking freckle on a local TV station, but his first taste at being a famous author was bittersweet.
“When I got back to school, some of the kids made fun of me,” he said. “Back then, it wasn’t considered cool for boys to be writers. I didn’t let anyone see my writing for a while and concentrated on playing baseball.”
Ghigna played baseball all throughout school. He even went to a spring training camp and tried out with the Pittsburgh Pirates.
But just because he wasn’t sharing his writing at the time doesn’t mean the young author had put away his pen.
“I still kept notebooks and journals. I had fallen in love with language, and I couldn’t just completely stop writing. Like for most writers, I think, it was a compulsion–I had to write,” he said.
While he was in college at Edison College, Florida State University and Florida Atlantic University, Ghigna had poems published in literary magazines, and his first books of poetry were published by university and small presses.
“I was writing for adults back then and even had pieces published in Harper’s Magazine, but my wife told me I needed to lighten up,” he said. “So just before my son, Chip, was born in 1988, I began writing poems for children.”
While he worked on his children’s poems, Ghigna earned a living as a teacher.
He taught high school English at Cypress Lake Senior High School in Florida from 1967-1973, creative writing at Edison College in 1972 and served as poet-in-residence at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham from 1974-1993.
“I thought I was in heaven because as a teacher, I got to go to work every day with the goal to inspire my students and share my love of language with them,” he said. “I would teach all day and come home and write poems at night.”
The poems were published in children’s magazines like Cricket, Highlights for Children and Children’s Digest and caught the eye of an editor at Disney’s Hyperion Books for Children.
Ghigna signed a four-book contract with Hyperion Books in 1992 and left his teaching job the following year. He has been writing full time ever since.
While finding enough subject matter to make it as a full-time writer for almost 40 years might seem daunting to some, Ghigna said he’s never been short on inspiration.
“I keep pads and pens all over the house. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with an idea. I don’t think I’ve ever had writer’s block,” he said.
Ghigna said he gets a lot of the ideas for his stories from his immediate environment.
“My inspiration comes from nature, children, pets, animals, family friends and from the real and imagined visions I see along my daily two-mile hike up and down the hills of Homewood,” he said. “Other inspirations include mostly the little things, the quiet moments. I listen and observe. I celebrate life. I practice gratitude.”
Much of the inspiration for his early works came from his children, Julie and Chip, Ghigna said.
“My children still inspire me. I have my son’s artwork all over my tree house office, and seeing his creativity helps me to be creative,” he said.
And now that he’s the grandfather of two, Ghigna said he has even more sources of inspiration for his work.
“The inspiration for my children’s stories and poems now comes mainly from Charlotte Rose and Christopher,” he said. “Their names are proudly printed on the dedication pages of my last 15 books.”
Charlotte Rose calls her grandpa “Goose” and delights in rearranging the multitude of goose figurines Ghigna has been given over the years by his young fans.
Throughout his career, Ghigna has introduced countless children to the wonder of words but said the most rewarding part of his career as an author has been watching his grandchildren discover a love of language.
“Seeing my son read a book I wrote to Charlotte Rose is the biggest blessing in the world,” he said. “I had big dreams about being a writer, but my living dreams have turned out better than anything I could have imagined.”
Ghigna said his grandchildren help keep him connected to that sense of wonder that is vital to his work.
“When I’m with my grandchildren, I get to look at everything with fresh eyes and see the world anew,” he said. “That’s the key to all of it.”
Ghigna said he can’t imagine a better place to tap into that childlike sense of wonder than his tree house office.
“I believe our surroundings, our sense of place and being, have a tremendous impact on who we are,” he said. “I spend endless hours here in my tree house each day, yet can’t wait to wake up each morning and climb those stairs again. It’s where the magic happens.”
Lately, the tree house has been a hive of activity as Ghigna prepares for the launch for a new four-book series for toddlers this fall. He also has a board book about cats due out next year and is working on another four-book series for kids about the weather.
“My wife and I have also been writing stories for a new audio company, and I recently finished and submitted a new teen novel,” he said.
For more information about Ghigna and his work, visit www.charlesghigna.com or check out his Father Goose blog at charlesghigna.blogspot.com.
