"BUG" gets some press coverage

After a new book gets published, it is sometimes hard for me to pay attention to my next project because I am so curious about whether people will like the latest release. Book reviews and newspaper stories are always a distraction. The following story was recently published in the Whig Standard, the daily newspaper for the city of Kingston -- where I lived until last year.

Frank B. Edwards is back in the game with his new book, Bug,
a fun story about small-town life and shoes.

Greg Burliuk, Whig-Standard Staff Writer
October 5, 2007 -- copyright

Bug and Frogger have finally been reunited even though it took a lot longer than local author Frank B. Edwards originally anticipated. When Edwards wrote the children’s chapter book Frogger in 2000, the plans were to release a companion book called Bug a year or so later. But life often gets in the way of a good plan.

“In 2000, our distributor stopped paying us,” Edwards says.

“And, in 2002, they went bankrupt.”

That same year, Edwards also went through a divorce.

“When I sent a draft of Bug to my editor she said it was too dark so I set it aside for a while,” says the author, now living in a house he built in the Desert Lake area north of Verona.

The version of Bug that has just been published has little trace of that darkness. It’s a humourous tale of a 12-yearold girl, Bug Hapensak, who’s just about had it with her father Walter’s goofy get-rich schemes. The latest one is the riskiest yet. Walter decides to move from the city, buy an ancient truck, and fill it with 1,000 mismatched running shoes, then go to a small town and sell them for $5 a shoe. They arrive in the small town of Tichburg and set up shop at the fair taking place that weekend. And that’s when the fun begins.

The earlier book, Frogger, covers the same period of time but from the point of view of 11-year-old Frogger Archibald, a native of Tichburg, who’s got his own problems. Some of the events in both books intertwine.

“I was reading a novel called The Poisonwood Bible and that book had four or five different narrators in it,” says Edwards referring to the 1998 bestseller by Barbara Kingsolver about a missionary family who in 1959 move from Georgia to what was then the Belgian Congo. “So I got the idea of telling a story in two books, one from the country kid’s perspective and the other from the city kid’s. And they could cross paths.”

Edwards didn’t have to look far for a setting to to set both books. Tichburg is based on Newburgh where he and his family lived from 1979 to 1994. During most of that time he was working as an editor and writer and Harrowsmith and Equinox magazines. In 1985, he founded Pokeweed Press with illustrator John Bianchi to create children’s books, and since then, they have published more than 40 books with sales of more than two million copies.

Edwards loved being a dad in Newburgh, immersing himself in all the activities of the village including becoming a baseball coach. “I coached for three years and we never won a game,” he says. “But our team won all the individual trophies and we were the friendliest team. Baseball was what drove Newburgh. I also played in a mixed league on Thursday nights. It was how you got to know everyone.”

The author took the geography of Newburgh and re-arranged it to his liking to create Tichburg. Newburgh doesn’t have an annual fair but nearby Centreville does and Edwards simply moved it to Tichburg.

“When Frogger was published, there was a featured review in Quilland Quire by Sarah Ellis who said her one complaint was that the world of Frogger seemed unrealistic,” Edwards says. “[It said] it was unlikely that kids could wander around safe in this day and age. But that was Newburgh when I lived there.”

Edwards got the idea about selling mismatched sneakers – the engine that drives Bug – years after leaving Newburgh when he bumped into a former neighbour.

“He said he’d gotten a truck full of sneakers and dumped them in the Canadian Tire parking lot in Napanee and sold them,” he says.“And I thought that was just the plot device I needed.”

When he’s not writing children’s books, Edwards is an educational consultant, doing things like designing a student orientation program for the War Museum in Ottawa and creating student lesson plans for the Archives of Ontario. He has also written local histories such as "Cultivating The Wilderness: The Parrott Family of Lennox and Addington County"; and "A House Worthy of God: St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Napanee." Researching the Parrott family history, he discovered one of its members had been a spy for the British during the American Revolution. Edwards is planning to write a historical novel about the spy’s two nephews, who came to live with him after their own father was murdered.

And, of course, there are more Bug and Frogger adventures planned.