The Thing To Remember About Stargazing: A Lesson in Learning to Rewrite/Revise/Recycle

Guest Post by Matt Forrest Esenwine

This is a story about four books and a poem, and how interconnected the publishing life can be.

Folks are always asking me how long it takes to write a book My answer is always the same, and is the most boring answer possible:  as long as it takes! But it’s true – and my newest picture book, The Thing to Remember about Stargazing (Tilbury House, 2023) is a prime example of not only how long it can take, but the unexpected steps one sometimes needs to take in order to see your work through to publication.

Stargazing, you see, was never written to be a book, and didn’t even have the same title. It took a lot of thought, insight, and flexibility – not to mention a great deal of revision – to turn a poem titled “The Beginner’s Guide to Stargazing” into a picture book.

The poem had been originally written back in 2013 for Paul Janeczko’s anthology The Proper Way to Meet a Hedgehog and Other How-to Poems (Candlewick, 2019). Alas, Paul passed away, and I never learned why he didn’t select it.

In 2018, I was chatting with a mutual author/poet friend of ours, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, and she suggested that perhaps I could try fleshing the poem out a bit and turning it into a picture book manuscript. Not wanting to hold onto it for an indefinite amount of time, hoping it would be published somewhere, someday, I opted to go the picture book route. So I revised, edited, tweaked, and polished and eventually had a manuscript I could begin submitting.

One editor to whom I sent the manuscript was my Once Upon Another Time (Beaming Books, 2021) editor, Naomi Krueger.

Although she liked the manuscript she didn’t feel it was right for the publisher; however, she told me she had been wanting to publish a book introducing kids to concepts like empathy, compassion, and kindness, and asked if I would have any interest in writing a completely different picture book – in a similar style – which could be titled A Beginner’s Guide to Being Human. I would need to change the title of my stargazing manuscript, of course. Not a problem!

I immediately re-titled my manuscript to The Thing to Remember about Stargazing and set about writing A Beginner’s Guide to Being Human (which came out Oct. 2022 from Beaming Books) while continuing to submit the stargazing manuscript. Eventually, in summer 2021, editor Jon Eaton at Tilbury House asked if it was still available and we signed the contract!

Looking back at all of this, I can’t help but take note of all the “firsts” for me:  I had never turned a poem into a picture book manuscript, I had never been asked by an editor if I would be interested in writing a book, and had never written a creative nonfiction book (Beginner’s Guide) before.

But because of my willingness to pivot, adjusting my plans and recycling my work, I can now say I have two published picture books I had never planned on writing, neither of which would exist were it not for a poem that never made it into the anthology for which I’d originally written it! If that’s not the definition of an unanswered prayer, I don’t know what is.

And by the way, it took twenty-five rejections (and two different titles) before The Thing to Remember about Stargazing was sold – that’s one more rejection than it took for my Once Upon Another Time, which I co-wrote with my friend Charles (“Father Goose”^®) Ghigna. That makes 49 rejections for just TWO books! So when you hear someone say it takes perseverance, persistence, and patience to become published, just remember it also requires pliability. Stay true to yourself, true to your work; but be willing to Rewrite/Revise/Recycle if and when you need to!