Dawn Prochovnic

Featuring author Dawn Prochovnic 
Zoom interview by John Repplinger, May 8th, 2024

Dawn Babb Prochovnic is a dandelion lover, potty humorist, ASL, literacy, and library enthusiast, and award-winning author. She is an early literacy consultant and the founder of SmallTalk Learning, devoting her life’s work to initiatives that support literacy and the literary arts including early literacy enrichment programs, school/library author visits, creative writing workshops, manuscript critiques, professional development consultations, conference appearances, and her educational blog. Dawn received the 2023 Walt Morey Award in recognition of significant contributions that have enriched Oregon’s young readers and was named an Oregon Library Supporter of the Year in 2015 for her work advocating for strong school libraries. Her publication credits include 19 picture books (e.g. Lucy's Blooms, Where Does a Pirate Go Potty?, Where Does a Cowgirl Go Potty?, the Story Time With Signs & Rhymes series), and a contribution to the award-winning anthology, Oregon Reads Aloud. Dawn travels regularly and makes her home in both Portland and Sunriver, Oregon.

Dawn, thanks so much for taking the time to do this interview and for letting us get to know you. Before we delve into the interview, I have a fun icebreaker question. You may have answered some would-you-rather questions–they’re always fun! Would you rather have a contagious smile like the Cheshire Cat or have a contagious laugh like a hyena? And why?

Although it’s a close call, I’d have to go with the contagious laugh. Experiencing laughter is one of my favorite things in the world. A few years ago, I even wrote a blog post about setting intentions for bringing more laughter into my life. 
I don’t relish the idea of being compared to a hyena, but it’s fairly mild in consideration of the range of feedback one can receive over two decades in the book publishing industry! I think I can take it.

As I was doing research for this interview, I discovered that you have a long history with ASL. Nine of your twenty books include sign language such as The Big Blue Bowl: Sign Language for Food and the Story Time with Signs & Rhymes series. How did you first get involved with sign language, and how did your experiences translate to books? (Pardon the pun.)

Bring it on, I love puns! And, this long history brings long answers to your questions.

I learned my first words in American Sign Language from Linda Bove, watching Sesame Street as a young child. In elementary school, I volunteered to assist students in what was then referred to as the “special needs classroom,” and many of those students used sign language to communicate. Many years later, I taught my daughter, now in her twenties, how to use sign language handshapes to communicate before she could talk. 

Early communication with my daughter brought wonder, joy, and relief from frustration; I wanted to share our positive experience with others. My Master’s degree is in Organizational Communication, and I was a corporate trainer before I was a parent. I shifted my attention from teaching grown-ups how to communicate around the boardroom table to teaching parents and caregivers how to communicate with their preverbal infants and toddlers, founding my training and consulting company, SmallTalk Learning, in the year 2000. 

One of the most effective ways I’ve found to help people learn and remember particular signs is to teach them catchy songs they can sing and sign while they interact with their babies. I wrote all kinds of ditties for this purpose, modeled after familiar children’s songs and rhymes, such as “Old MacDonald” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” 

I observed that preschoolers and elementary school children were also interested in learning sign language, and I wanted to expand my reach beyond that which I could manage in my own classes. I decided the best way to do that would be to publish a handful of my songs in the form of picture book stories. Thus began the long and winding road for revising (and revising and revising) my stories and searching (and searching and searching) for a publisher that was interested in bringing my vision to fruition. I collaborated with ABDO Publishing Group on 16 books in the Story Time with Signs & Rhymes series, published from 2009 to 2012. 

You are involved with SmallTalk Learning, an organization that encourages the use of sign language to communicate with children before they begin to talk. Can you tell us a bit about SmallTalk Learning? How does the mission of SmallTalk Learning intersect with your interest in early literacy?

Over the years, I gradually shifted much of my instructional outreach from working directly with parents to providing professional development programs to youth librarians, early childhood educators, and professional caregivers, teaching others about the early literacy and behavior management benefits and practical techniques for incorporating sign language into story time offerings and group learning environments. As those who have participated in my programs will attest, I’m very passionate about the meaningful and lasting impact of early literacy.    

We met at the Oregon Library Association’s Authors Fair in Salem Oregon a few weeks ago. Can you describe what that experience was like for you as an author? What other professional festivals, conferences, or meetings have you participated in, and how might they compare? 

Yes, it was great to meet you! I had a fantastic time at the recent OLA event, and I was so grateful for the opportunity to be included. I’m a vocal advocate for school and public libraries and librarians; they play such an extremely important role in our communities. I felt enriched and energized after engaging with Oregon librarians, and I also enjoyed catching up with many of my Oregon author pals. I have been to dozens (probably hundreds) of professional festivals, conferences, and meetings over the past 20 years. Career highlights include signing my books for a line of librarians that snaked around the exhibition hall from my publisher’s booth at ALA in Seattle, and meeting a young reader who confessed that he hid my books in his school library so he could always have access to them, since no other readers could find them. 

Every author has their own way of drafting ideas and developing them into the final book. Can you talk a little about your writing process? 

My writing process is different for every book. My most recently completed manuscript started by brainstorming a robust wordbank of nouns, verbs and adjectives pertaining to cats. My next scheduled book, Mama’s Home!, Familius, (2026), initially came to me while I was watching my son, now a senior in college, engage in imaginative play at our local children’s museum. I wrote the first draft of that story on a scrap of paper in my pocket. It went through many subsequent revisions before finding a publishing home. The initial seed for Lucy’s Blooms came from memories that surfaced when I gazed at a little glass bird that sits on my desk, a gift from my beloved Gram. My son’s imaginative play also inspired Where Does a Pirate Go Potty? One day, he raced around the house with a pirate patch on his eye and a diaper on his bum, repeatedly asking, “Where does a pirate go potty?” I worked on that story off and on for over a decade; it was finally published when he was in high school. The companion book, Where Does a Cowgirl Go Potty? came from a self-assigned creative writing exercise that eventually landed me a two-book contract with a publisher that had a knack for publishing western-themed books. For those interested in a deeper dive into this topic, I have a series on my blog called, The Writing Life, where I share a variety of creative practices that contribute to my writing process.

Your “potty books,” Where Does a Pirate Go Potty and Where Does a Cowgirl Go Potty, published by West Margin Press uses humorous fiction that touches on important issues such as water sanitation. As you were developing these books, did you intentionally incorporate these issues or did it come naturally with the storyline?

I can be pretty obsessive about research for my books, and these two titles are no exception. I dug into a myriad of adjacent topics while I was writing these stories, (e.g. the history of toileting practices; the backstory behind “talk like a pirate day”; coastal and western habitats; facts about animal excrement; and yes, research on more serious topics, such as water sanitation). Much of my research typically winds up resurfacing in the enrichment materials I develop for each of my books, easily accessed via the resources tab on my website. These resources include reader’s theater scripts; cowgirl and pirate name generators; detailed story time lesson plans; curriculum-aligned educators’ guides; Pinterest boards filled with themed collections of music, craft activities, and novelty items; and carefully curated YouTube playlists on fascinating topics such as “Animal Poop Science” and “Potty Habits” of the animals featured in the books–well worth a watch! (https://www.youtube.com/@dprochovnic) 

As the main characters looked for proper places to “drop their loads,” you had to come up with different expressions that are in line with the characters. How did you come up with these lines? Did you bounce ideas off of friends and family? What kind of research did you do on pirate and cowgirl phrases?

I spent many an hour searching the internet and sifting through resources in my nearby public library on a quest for Pirate and Cowgirl “lingo.” My favorite online resources are now included in some of the Pinterest boards I mentioned. I read all of my manuscripts out loud during the writing and revision process. For these two stories, I also had young readers, friends of my young children at the time, read my stories aloud so I could listen. One of my favorite aspects of these two titles is randomly receiving audio or video recordings from the parents of young readers, “in character,” saying one or more of the phrases in the books out loud. I find that absolutely hilarious, and very rewarding.

Most writers have a few ideas that don’t flesh out for various reasons such as the storyline not quite working the way you wanted, or your enthusiasm shifted, a great idea got overshadowed by other projects, or a lack of interest by publishers. Can you give an example of a book idea that didn’t work out for you? Do you have any advice for writers that might be struggling with similar obstacles? 

I have MANY works-in-progress that I’ve set aside for some reason or another. Some of these ideas are not much more than titles or themes that I’ve jotted down in a journal. Others are projects that I’ve started and lost steam somewhere along the way and/or haven’t quite figured out how to resolve areas that aren’t working. Several are fully developed stories that I’m still committed to and love, but just haven’t found the right publishing home yet. 

My best advice to writers is to get yourself a writing buddy and exchange creative writing goals and goal reports with your buddy on a regular basis. My longtime critique partner, Sara T. Behrman, whose picture book debut came out in April and whom you recently interviewed, and I have been exchanging creative writing goals with each other for nearly 20 years. I credit our shared discipline with that practice for helping keep me on track when I’m feeling unmotivated, frustrated, or otherwise experiencing a creative struggle. I rarely complete all of my weekly goals, but having them in front of me, knowing that I will be reporting my progress to someone week after week, helps me stay on track. 

I love your book trailers on your website (Lucy’s Blooms is my favorite). You wrote the lyrics, provided scripts to reenact the books (book guides), plus designed and produced the videos. Prior to making these videos, what experience did you have with writing songs and making videos? 

Thank you so much! I really love how the book trailers turned out, too! Other than making up the silly songs for my classes that I referenced previously, my first foray into songwriting was creating the lyrics for a love song, a gift to my husband for our 30th wedding anniversary. I commissioned a local musician (Moses Barrett of the Junebugs) to put my lyrics to music and record the song. If you are curious, you can give it a listen:
https://www.dawnprochovnic.com/2018/08/the-song-writing-part-of-writing-life.html.

I love the companion songs for all three of my latest books, but I agree, the song for Lucy’s Blooms is particularly special. Maiah Wynne, the musician who helped me refine the lyrics and composed and recorded the music, is incredibly talented and wonderful to work with. Another amazing musician, Annie Lynn, worked with me on my Pirate song. She writes and records commissioned songs for children’s book authors and publishers, as well as for schools and other educational organizations. In fact, I just learned that Children’s Book Week now has an official song, composed and performed by none other than Annie Lynn! 

Writing song lyrics feels like a natural extension of my creative writing practice. I played the drums when I was in middle school, and I often think in drum beats when I’m writing and refining my stories, particularly my rhythmic and lyrical picture books. I would love to learn more about song-writing, and I plan to participate in some creative experiences geared for songwriters in the future. 

As for the video-side of things, illustrator Jacob Souva handled all of the visual elements for the book trailers for Pirate and Cowgirl. For Lucy’s Blooms, I incorporated the book illustrations by Alice Brereton into my very rudimentary animated video, using tools such as Canva, Keynote, and iMovie.

For authors who might want to create a book trailer themselves, could you explain how you produced your videos? Do you have any tips? And do you ever feel concerned about providing too much of your story online so that people won’t buy your books? 

I had intended to create a detailed blog post describing the steps I took, resources I used, and lessons I learned making the book trailer for Lucy’s Blooms, but alas, I moved onto other creative endeavors before that got accomplished, and the details are pretty fuzzy by now. Check back after my next book comes out– I aim to be more disciplined documenting the details on the next go-round! 

As for potential concerns about providing too much of my story content online, in my experience, providing meaningful and accessible online content is one of the best ways for potential readers to find out about my work. I think most readers understand that the best way to support the people who create the books they love is to buy, borrow, and tell others about those books. And keep us supplied in chocolate.

Are you working on any projects or books that you would like to mention? 

I have quite a few projects in the works right now. The books in my Story Time with Signs & Rhymes series have recently gone out of print, and my agent and I will soon be shopping for a new publisher who would like to introduce some or all of the titles in a refreshed board book/novelty format, ideally illustrated by a book creator who is Deaf; I have a really fun companion story to Where Does a Pirate and Where Does a Cowgirl Go Potty? that I’m hoping will find its way to publication; I have a very tender and heartfelt story that’s out on submission, and I’m doing major revisions and fine-tunes on several different works-in-progress so that they can be ready to go on submission as well. Soon I’ll be giving some of my attention to my forthcoming book, Mama’s Home! as it goes through the process of being edited, illustrated, and launched into the world. Readers can follow my work via my blog, www.dawnprochovnic.com and on social media channels such as Instagram, @DawnProchovnic. 

Thank you so much for taking an interest in my work and for asking such great questions! I really enjoyed this interview.

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