How did you come about the poems that character Maxey Lee James wrote in the book “Ida Mae”?
The poems that Maxey Lee wrote were poems that I’d written years before and kept in my poetry journal. Some of them I’d written when I was dealing with difficult issues. It was a challenge to adapt them to something a young boy would write. I have a gifted daughter who had won awards in poetry as young as the second grade. I tried to have Maxey Lee accepted as a child prodigy; readers loved him, so I guess I succeeded.
