Connie Schultz Releases Debut Children’s Book: Q&A

It started with a tweet.

After blocking a series of social media trolls, Connie Schultz posted an idea for a children's book title: Tom the Troll Has Been Blocked. It quickly brought the attention of Penguin Random House editor Casey McIntyre, who encouraged Schultz to pursue the project.

Now, that project, named Lola and the Troll, has arrived in book form. It's a big moment for Schultz, who is an avid children’s book collector and reader — and it builds on her other book releases, including the acclaimed 2020 novel The Daughters of Erietown.

It also arrives in a busy year, as she continues to work on her second novel and hits the campaign trail with her husband, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, who is up for reelection for his fourth term this November.

We caught up with Schultz to hear more about the inspiration behind Lola and the Troll, and some of her other works-in-progress.

Cleveland Magazine: What made you want to write for children?

Connie Schultz: I love children's books. I mean, I revere them, the good ones. I have been collecting them, long before I had eight grandchildren. My children grew up, and I was still buying them because I love them. I always have a couple on the coffee table. And I wrote a children's book. I couldn’t believe it. [Casey McIntyre] was convinced I had a story in me about this little girl and a troll. And eventually we renamed it Lola and The Troll. That's how it came about.

CM: What are some of your favorite children’s books from your collection?

CS: Paperback Princess is one of my favorites. I love Brave Irene. All of the Eric Carle ones, because my kids loved them so much. Oh, and Boynton Books — Moo, Baa, La La La! by Sandra Boynton. But there was also that Sesame Street book, The Monster at the End of this Book. I'm gonna admit it: I read it, [my daughter] Caitlin wanted it so often, I had to hide it under the couch cushions. Isn't that just terrible? The thing is, with every page, we’re gonna do the whole sound effects, because I always did all the sound effects at bedtime. Sometimes I just was a little tired; Caitlin just adored that book, and now my grandchildren love it.

CM: You do a lot of different types of writing; what was it like for you to dive into writing for children?

CS: I was a little intimidated by it at first because I knew I had to say a lot in a few words. What helped me is Casey was thinking of me as a novelist when she said, ‘It's not going to be like writing your next novel, Connie. It's got to be a maximum of 1,000 words.’ And I said, ‘Great, because my columns are about 800 words. So I'm used to hitting that deadline.’ 

CM: Lola is based on your granddaughter, right?

CS: Yes. My daughter's daughter. Her name is Ela Molina. I started thinking about it, and I thought, all right, I think I'm gonna go with Ela, because I see her less, she's in Rhode Island. So I wanted to do something special for Ela. Ela is biracial, and I wanted Lola to reflect that. Sandy Rodriguez is Latina, which I requested that we did that — I just wanted it to be true; I wanted it to be a true book. And Sandy Rodriguez is spectacular. I had so many illustrators to pick from and she was the one I wanted and then I crossed my fingers.

CM: You mentioned you’re working on another novel. What can you share about that?

CS: It's a cross-generational novel, about a grandmother and her granddaughter who's in her late 20s. It involves a lot of photography and a grandmother's promise, that she almost immediately regrets, to tell the whole story behind 10 pictures that her granddaughter can pick — after her granddaughter makes the mistake of thinking, ‘You have all these walls of photos, your life just turned out so well.’ The grandmother thinks she's doing the right thing, and then she comes to regret it because some of the pictures her granddaughter’s picking, there's quite the story behind them.

CM: That sounds really good, I’m excited to read it.

CS: I'm excited to finish it, eventually.

CM: Going back to Lola and the Troll, and the theme of bullying — could you speak a little more about why you wanted to address that, especially with kids?

CS: I care a great deal about what children hear about themselves, including sometimes in their own families. [In the book], I make it a troll out on the sidewalk, but I witnessed it so often as a reporter, witnessed it in extended family sometimes, not our kids — but the harm that harsh words can have. There's a reason my generation was raised with that old, ‘sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me’ — the whole reason we were taught to say this is because names do indeed hurt us. 

Just a couple of weeks ago, Sherrod and I were at church and they always have stories for the children, they bring them up to the front. The pastor has all these little kids — ’How many of you know somebody who's mean?’ and they all raise their hands. And I said to Sherrod, ‘See, that's it.’ The world can feel really mean to kids and what I care about, especially in the story, is Lola keeps trying to change things about herself based on the insults, and that’s just no way to go. Our job is to help children see how wonderful they are, just as they are, and to not let other peoples’ meanness and mean-spiritedness and their bullying make them want to change essential parts of themselves.

Obviously it has a light touch to it; she finds her superpower in being kind. I'm not at all suggesting that kindness is always the response, certainly not on Twitter. But there is something to be said to all young children, that when you are kind, you are using one of the biggest, greatest powers you have — and that's including a message for bullies: If you could be kind, it's amazing what you can get done.

CM: Absolutely. Now, you have Lola, you're working on another novel — are you working on any other projects? What else are you up to right now?

CS: Well, I've got my Substack, called Hopefully Yours, so I'm working regularly on that. And I'm teaching opinion writing at Denison [University, in Granville]. And you may have heard I have a husband who's running for reelection, so it's a pretty busy life right now.

The novel is going to be front and center for me [soon]. I certainly look forward to reading to a lot of children. In the next couple of months, I'm going to be a lot of bookstores and libraries and visiting different schools, and I'm really looking forward to that. I just find spending time with children — first of all, you can't be distracted when you’re with children. You've got to focus on the time you're with them, and it takes you away from everything else. You're making up voices as you read, you're listening to their questions and their observations and you're just hanging out with them. I find it so revitalizing to be in their company. 

But also, you never know where the next column is coming from. I'm on Substack by choice. I left USA Today, after my editor left. I thought, Substack’s a good place to land because my husband is running for reelection. And this time, I’m merging all of my lives, so I don’t have to be worried at all about conflicts.

CM: You’re doing readings all around; is there anywhere that people should pick up a copy of Lola and The Troll? Are you doing signed copies anywhere?

CS: I am doing a lot of different signed copies. You can get Lola almost anywhere, but I'm doing Loganberry Books, I'm going to be signing a bunch of books in advance at Mac’s Backs, I'm going to be at Barnes and Noble in Mentor signing books as well.

By the way, I will say, readers finding out about it online and bookstores around the country, what they did, is why The Daughters of Erietown made the New York Times bestseller list. That's the only reason it did. Bookstores were heroic for writers during the pandemic, for many of them, because I came out in June 2020. I was their first author online, when we did these virtual things. It’s kind of hard to imagine that we didn't all know how to use Zoom before 2020.