Frank B. Edwards

Readings

Frank presents hour-long talks that explore how ideas become stories and can be turned into books. He emphasizes that a writer’s most valuable tool is his or her imagination and that everyone has a story to tell, no matter where they live. The presentations are illustrated with a slide show and are entertaining, fast-paced and effective.

Readings are adaptable to any age. Older students are often most interested in learning how Frank turned his school-age love of story writing into a full time editorial career.

Special Equipment:

Screen (for slide show), microphone if audience is larger than 100.

Book Sales:

Copies of books can be brought to be sold and autographed. Discounted to $5.00 (tax included).

Workshops

The one-hour workshop is designed to help students create extraordinary stories out of ordinary subjects. Typically, students are guided through a story-building process in which a school situation (recess, gym period, lunch time) familiar to all students is turned from a mundane event into an interesting story. Frank breaks an event into story components (characters, settings, conflicts, themes, etc.), records student-created lists of possibilities and then guides them through an exercise of plotting out a number of story lines.

Special Equipment:

Blackboard or chart paper.

Book Sales:

Copies of books can be brought to be sold and autographed. Discounted to $5.00 (tax included).

Biography

Frank B. Edwards grew up in rural Whitby, Ontario before subdivisions and shopping malls overran the fields, orchards and woods in which he and his friends roamed. In the 1970s, he studied journalism at Carleton University and, after graduation, worked as a senior magazine editor at the Canadian Geographic, Harrowsmith and Equinox. Later, he moved from magazines into book publishing. While managing Camden House Books (a division of Harrowsmith and Equinox magazines), he published a variety of non-fiction from natural history and astronomy titles to gardening and cook books. It was at this time that he also became interested in children’s books. In 1986, he and illustrator John Bianchi launched Bungalo Books and, later, Pokeweed Press.

A father of three, Frank raised his family in an eastern Ontario village and, later, in Kingston. His first juvenile novel, Frogger, a nominee for Ontario’s Silver Birch Award, is based on his experiences living in small rural
communities. Now that his children are grown up (a health care worker, an actor and a university student), Frank has moved to a cozy house beside a wilderness park near Westport, Ontario where he can focus on his writing. His recent projects include scripts for Roll Play (a new preschool television show on Treehouse TV), the design and scripting of the Canada War Museum’s student orientation program, lesson plans and on-line exhibits for the Archives of Ontario, and an illustrated juvenile biography of Robert Munsch for Fitzhenry Whiteside (2008). His second juvenile novel, Bug, was published in fall 2007.

“Perhaps no one has their finger on the pulse of the pre-reader market better than the writer-illustrator team
of Frank B. Edwards and John Bianchi.” — Steve Pitt, Canadian Book Review Annual, 1999

“. . . the versatile and prolific Frank Edwards, co-founder of Bungalo Books, (is) my nominee
for the most “can-do” figure in Canadian children’s publishing ...” — Sarah Ellis, Quill and Quire, April 2000

OTHER PRESENTATIONS:
Frank is available for workshops aimed at adult writers and will customize a program to an audience. A popular presentation for new writers has been Writing Children's Books: The Romance and Reality.
He also has delivered keynote addresses to teachers at literacy conferences about his life and work as a children’s author and PD sessions on linking words and illustrations together, and the importance of school author visits.