By Lillia Callum-Penso
STAFF WRITER
lpenso@greenvillenews.com

It's Wednesday morning, typically a working day for Valerie Bunch Hollinger and Crystal Ball O'Connor. The two women, who have served on the Greenville County school board, and who as of this spring became children's book publishers, relish these weekly meetings when they can strategize and drink lattes in the heart of Hollinger's upper-floor apartment.

The sharp autumn light illuminates Hollinger's polished kitchen and the shiny cappuccino machine at which she stands, frothing.

"She makes the best coffee," O'Connor says. "That's why I like working here."

That, and the fact that O'Connor's house is currently holding her and her husband, their three kids, her mother and her great-aunt. But you won't hear O'Connor complain. She says it's just fodder for more stories.

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O'Connor's first published story, "Jake and the Migration of the Monarch," began as a moment of wonderment four years ago while she was on vacation at the coast, sitting on a porch. She held her newborn son Jake in her arms, drifting into introspection. Then, the butterflies moved in, fluttering past mother and son in a majestic hail of flapping wings.

"They just kept coming," O'Connor recalls. "So I just started counting them. I knew it would mean something special for Jake."

O'Connor was right, but at the time she wasn't sure how that "something special" would manifest itself.

Since that day at the beach, she has, in a sense, gone on her own migration. She and Hollinger teamed up as writer and illustrator, respectively, and the two went from forming a publishing company, Monarch Publishers, to developing a Web site, to collaborating on creating a curriculum to integrate

the book into classrooms. The women have spent endless amounts of time appealing for spots at teacher conferences and educational talks.

Now, standing in Hollinger's kitchen, that loaded moment seems distant to O'Connor, but it hasn't faded. After she began researching the patterns of monarch migration, the story emerged. At the time, O'Connor was also caring for her aging parents and was often up in the middle of the night; thus, it was the perfect convergence of life and research.

"Seeing it, having such a profound feeling about it and then having the opportunity that was set up in that unique way to sit in my family home and make the tea in the middle of the night and sit up," O'Connor says, "it just happened very naturally.

"It was definitely a unique writing environment that was very, very conducive to having the words come out like I wanted them to.”

In a way, Hollinger and O'Connor have done things in reverse, moving from administrative desks to classroom carpet.

Though Hollinger was certified in secondary education, she ended up getting a master's in social work, and art had been a longtime hobby.

So they enlisted the help of Sharon Kazee, dean of the Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities.

Kazee developed a companion curriculum that pertains to almost all subjects and fits within the parameters of state and federal standards.

duo at an educators' conference and was struck by Hollinger's and O'Connor's unique presentation. She booked them for the store's teacher appreciation day, and they sold 41 copies of the book.

Since that time, Blake says, she has placed an order for their book almost every week.

Hollinger and O'Connor laugh freely. It characterizes their time together, and it might be the reason their book is more than simply a project.

"It has taken over our lives," admits Hollinger, catching O'Connor's gaze as if she just told an inside joke. Then the punch line.

"When Crystal asked me to illustrate, I didn't know I'd be a driver and a singer and a dancer and a performer and the shipping department, too."

It would appear that their unique product and their approach to selling has worked well. They are fast approaching the 2,000 mark. Their three-year plan to sell out their initial printing of 5,500 has been shortened. Now, they anticipate selling out in one year.

O'Connor and Hollinger had planned to spend the morning hammering out the details of their fast-growing number of school appearances, book signings and conference presentations, but they get sidetracked. With their butterfly wings on, they dive into their presentation, a song and dance number that teaches the migratory pattern of monarchs.

"Yes, it is a long way, but we have no need to fear," the two sing as if they were each other's audiences. "Just look for leafy green signs that say butterflies are welcome here."

Then, they break into the "Green Song," "Green, green, green, green ..."

Laughter ensues.

"We have fun," O'Connor says, with full confidence that two adult women dancing and singing about butterflies is nothing but natural. "We would never work this hard if it weren't fun."

Watching the two interact, you can't help but think they don't even need an audience.

"They have this great story that's about so much more than butterflies. It can be about families, it can be about coming home, it can be about reading with your children. ... It's amazing how this book took on such a life of its own."

- Sharon Kazee, Dean of the Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities

O'Connor was director of the Georgia Council on Aging before moving to South Carolina to care for her parents.

The women met on the school board, where Hollinger served two terms. O'Connor will finish her last term at the end of this year. Thus, it is their book that has landed them in the classroom.

"Neither of us had an idea of where this might lead," O'Connor says. "We just naively ..." She pauses, mulling over exactly what has transpired in the past several months.

"We're learning the way we want children to learn," O'Connor continues. "Each time we get to one point, it gives you a new opportunity to get to a deeper understanding."

The two mothers are no strangers to hard work, but since the release of their first book in May, Hollinger and O'Connor's lives have been a whirlwind of facts, figures and day-by-day learning.

To hear them tell it, they started their own publishing company simply because they wanted to be their own bosses. And, in order to fulfill their motto of "Helping children preserve and protect the gift of family, nature and literacy," starting their own company seemed like the only logical option.

"It's so great to wake up in the morning and think, 'Oh, I can work on whatever I want to work on today about this,'" O'Connor says. "There are so many wonderful paths to take with it."

But in keeping with their emphasis on education, they wanted the book to fit into classrooms as well.

Making a book into a teaching tool can be tricky, according to Michelle Martin, an associate professor in children's and adult literature at Clemson University.

"One mistake people who don't come from a writing background make when they are working on writing a children's book is that oftentimes the lessons are so in your face," Martin says.

"Even if it's an educational book or scientific book or something intended to teach, if it's didactic and preachy, then kids know. Kids are savvier than we give them credit for being. They can see through that."

Kazee agrees. She says part of the reason "Jake and the Migration of the Monarch" is such a good book is because it is a teaching tool that grew from a story.

The curriculum uses songs to teach connections between humans and monarchs and large maps to teach migratory patterns and to impart geography. Skits are also used to illustrate the monarch lifecycle, as well as to show how and why they migrate on a certain path.

"They have this great story that's about so much more than butterflies," Kazee says. "It can be about families, it can be about coming home, it can be about reading with your children. What we did was look at what we could do with this book that was creative.

"It's amazing how this book took on such a life of its own."

Whitney Blake, community relations coordinator for Barnes & Noble in Spartanburg, discovered the monarch

"Migrating into a new year" - January 6, 2005
Present, school trustees find new roles as publishers

By Lyn Riddle

It was intended as a simple conversation over coffee.

School board member Valerie Hollinger had asked fellow board member Crystal Ball O’Connor to come see her new downtown condominium.

By the time O’Connor left, they had the beginnings of a publishing company that next month will bring out its first book: Jake and the Migration of the Monarch, written by O’Connor and illustrated by Hollinger.

Like many others looking toward this new year with anticipation for adventures never before realized, Hollinger and O’Connor are about to step into a new world of author/artist appearances, online book sales and managing an inventory of 5,000 books, which they’re going to pick up in the next few weeks in a U-Haul at the Port Authority of Charleston.

“Road trip,” said Hollinger, laughing.

O’Connor laughs, too, as she talks about how she learned about shipping. When they printer told her how many pallets she should expect, she couldn’t imagine the volume. She pelted him with questions, looking for more and more precise information. Finally, she said, “Is it as big as my van?” “Yes,” he answered patiently.

I’m not sure he said one van but something made me think I could fit it in my garage if I had to,” she said.

Humor has eased them through the frenetic maze of graphic artists and printers and shipping agents and copyright law. And their friendship has been steeped in the challenge of launching a business and weathered by the always demanding process of creating art.

They have an ease about them that speaks of a longtime friendship, even though they’ve known each other only a few years. Their strengths and weaknesses complement each other. Where O’Connor is a planner with attention to detail, Hollinger decides quickly and surely.

Different backgrounds

Neither knew much about publishing before they established Monarch Publishers.

Hollinger, 51, was a social worker during the time her husband Wayne was in medical school and before her two children were born. Her mother died when she was six months old. Six months later, she was adopted by her grandfather’s sister and moved from Maryland to Lexington.

Hollinger graduated from Newberry College, where she met her husband, a pulmonolgist and critical care specialist. She was elected to the Greenville County School Board in 1996, and served two terms before deciding not to seek re-election this fall.

O’Connor, 44, headed the Georgia Council on Aging before she and her husband Jim moved back to Greenville to be closer to O’Connor’s parents. She graduated from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, earned a masters from Georgia State and a doctorate from Vanderbilt University. The O’Connors have three children.

O’Connor and Hollinger met when O’Connor was running for school board in 1998. As board members, they disagreed some, agreed more and sometimes found they felt the same way on a certain issue but voted for a different solution.

The idea for the book came to O’Connor when she and her husband took their youngest son, Jake, now 3, to meet his paternal grandparents. One afternoon, O’Connor was holding Jake while sitting on the porch at the beach house. A monarch butterfly flew by, then another and another until she realized she was watching an annual rite of butterflies making their way to Mexico for the winter.

“I realized I was seeing something extraordinary,” she said. When dusk fell, she went inside and wrote down her feelings.

The idea rolled around in her mind. It could be a children’s book. And so she read as many children’s books as she could and read books about how to write them. In the fall of 2001, during one of her three-times-a-week overnight stays with her aging parents, she began writing. Months passed. She’d write and re-write. She’d set it aside. She’d read more children’s books.

Migration story

The story focuses on Jake as a pre-schooler watching the migration with his mother, who sets aside her busy schedule to spend time with her son. The underlying lesson centers on the need to save the butterfly habitat in Mexico but also speaks movingly about the ties that bind generations of butterflies and -- by extension people – together.

She wondered about the ending, which she said was a real mystery for a long time.

“It had to be perfect and it wasn’t” she said. She worked some more.

She sought advice from her father and her children about dialogue and had friends and former teachers read the manuscript. Her father gave her a particularly poignant line, drawn from his own experience as a pilot in World War II. She asked him how she could describe the way the butterflies find their way home.

He said, “I knew how to get into the wind that would take me where I wanted to go.”

What O’Connor accomplished is a book that appeals to children, to be sure, but also to parents and other adults. It is one of those timeless books that would be as good a gift for a graduate as a child too young to read.

She knew Hollinger was the one to illustrate it when she saw Hollinger’s portraits of her children during her first visit to the condominium a year ago.

“Do not agree to do this unless you feel passionate about it,” O’Connor said she told Hollinger.

A day later Hollinger told her, “I would love to illustrate it, and I don’t do anything I don’t feel passionate about.”

Portraiture

Hollinger has been painting since she and her husband moved to Greenville. She took classes at the YWCA, the Greenville County Art Museum and privately. Her first portrait was of her children that she did while on a weeklong ski vacation in Utah.

She prefers pastels and works from pictures. Jim O’Connor provided many of the photographs of his wife and son for the book. Hollinger did 14 paintings and several smaller works for the title page and overleaf over about six months.

The first was the cover, which she took to a school board meeting and quietly placed on O’Connor’s desk.

“My throat closed up and I thought I was going to cry,” O’Connor said. “It was better than the dream I had.”

Hollinger and O’Connor intend to do as many appearances in area schools as they can to teach children about conservation. Their first is Jan. 24 at Bell’s Crossing Elementary.

They’re also writing a skit and developing a Web site with teacher and parent guides.

“We want to help children learn to preserve and protect the gifts of family, nature and literacy,” O’Connor said.

Finding their way home

Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005 - 10:19 am

TRIBUNE-TIMES WRITER

The two black-winged creatures fluttered before the group of 200 and took a deep breath. With a glance between them that said Here goes, the first one began, "My name is Midnight and this is Slinky and we're monarch butterflies. ..."

That was in January at Bell's Crossing Elementary in Simpsonville.

Since then, the two human butterflies, better known as Crystal Ball O'Connor and Valerie Hollinger, have traveled to 40 area schools and places to tell of their thousand-mile journey from school board trustees to children's book creators.

"I blame it all on Crystal," said Hollinger, the Slinky of the duo. "She came to see me one day and said she had this idea she wanted me to consider. ..."

The two women, who had been friends since their first years on the Greenville County school board in the late 1990s, got together to talk.

"I've written something I want you to see," O'Connor told her.

She handed her a manuscript called "Jake and the Migration of the Monarch" and resisted every temptation to say, "It's about the migration of monarch butterflies and the connection of families and the generations that go before us, and let me tell you how I got the idea. ..."

The sky wrapped its arms around the Carolina coast. ...

It was near Labor Day four years ago and O'Connor was holding her newborn son Jake and taking in the salt air and ocean beach from her porch rocker.

No one else was around.

Just then, as if an invisible bag had been slowly emptied over the water, she began to see the appearance of black and orange, first in snatches, then in a great poetic swarm. As the swarm drew closer, O'Connor stared in wonder: She was witnessing a mass migration of monarch butterflies on their way to Mexico. ...

Butterflies flickered in the sky like daytime stars. ...

For no apparent reason, she began counting them 500 ... 600 ... 1,200. ...

"I counted almost 3,000 butterflies that day," she said.

Until then, she had not been conscious of her isolation.

Now, every "Look at that" and "Isn't that amazing?" went unnoticed because O'Connor had no one else to share the moment with ... except Jake.

Nature's grand parade of weightless wonders swirled around them. ...

As if by magic, O'Connor transformed the image of her sleeping son into a smiling, wide-awake 4-year-old.

"Look, momma, ..." he said, bounding off her lap and onto the beach.

She got up and followed as the butterflies came in for a closer look.

Many came close enough to touch but not close enough to touch. ...

Those that flew low came right by the porch, almost close enough to touch. ...

They ran into the parting swarm and tried to see them all at once and all of them one at a time. Soon, Jake was asking questions and O'Connor was responding.

Her wonder was now his wonder. Her experience became his experience, as if it were an unintended family rite of passage.

As the day wore on and the to-do list was naturally put aside, O'Connor too stepped aside and watched the two images on the beach and on the porch in a scene that had not happened and would never happen again and a story was born. ...

"... I've been writing it for the past year or so, and now I'm finished," O'Connor said to Hollinger. "And I came here today because I would like for you to consider illustrating it for me."

She had seen Hollinger's paintings before and knew she was the one to do the artwork for the new book.

Hollinger said she would think it over "but the next day Crystal called and said, 'Have you decided?' So I told her I would do it because it sounded like a wonderful project."

The women got to work on the collaboration and spent the next year and a half getting the book ready.

Hollinger took a year finishing the drawings and the artwork and lining up a graphic artist to do the finished prints; O'Connor poured over rewrite after rewrite and secured a printer in Singapore for the first printing.

During this time, they decided to publish the book themselves and so created their own company called Monarch Publishers and their own Web page www.monarchpublishers.com.

"We wanted to have as much creative freedom as possible," O'Connor said. "Every step of the way we were learning something unexpected."

Nothing, however, was as unexpected as the jolt they received near the end of their journey.

When they came to get the finished prints, they discovered that the graphic artist had left the original art in the car and the sun had melted them. Grease spots had also somehow gotten on them and indelibly stained them.

Hollinger had a choice: to forget the whole thing, or to start over. She decided to give it another try, but O'Connor was shattered.

"At the time I thought, 'This is it it's all ruined and we'll never get it as good as it was,'" she said.

She was right, the new artwork wasn't as good it was maybe a nose better.

"I would have been glad if Valerie had just come close to what she had done before," O'Connor said. "Instead, she had somehow improved on it, which to me was amazing."

In early 2005, everything was ready and a first printing of 5,500 was ordered.

Happy Voices bookstore in Greenville agreed to carry it. Signings and readings were booked, and they chose to donate a portion of their book's revenue to support literacy in South Carolina.

But there was one change the two women made to the story: instead of just leaving it to the public to read or not read, they would take it and their story of how it had all come about into the public schools through their adopted aliases of Midnight and Slinky.

They know how to get into the wind to take them exactly where they want to go. ...

Together, whether at Greenbrier, Simpsonville, Brook Glenn, Pelham Road or any other elementary school in Greenville County, they act out an evolving story and recreate the annual journey of the monarch butterflies.

"This gives us a chance not only at the arts and early literacy, but also to introduce children to conservation early on," O'Connor said. "We're big advocates of both."

Judging from the last four months, however, it seems their story is holding more than just the interest of early-age students.

"We wanted somebody local to show the kids that you don't have to be in New York to do this," said Margaret House, instructional coach at Ellen Woodside.

Sara Doolittle, first grade teacher at Simpsonville Elementary added, "I've been teaching first-, second- and third-graders for 30-something years and it was the best presentation I've ever seen. The way it all came about and the way they wove their personal experiences in with the science of the butterflies was just wonderful."

May you always know how to get into the wind that will take you where you want to go. ...

But the education and the journey of the butterflies are only part of the story.

Somewhere between the science and the skit, Midnight and Slinky end up showing that the flight of the monarchs is not just a recurring natural wonder, but a connection to the spirit and drive of the human family.

"We and the monarchs travel a long distance and at some point have to find our way home again," O'Connor said. "They do it with an invisible built-in map; we do it with the visible and mostly invisible presence of the people who came before us. Each generation is important to the next in many ways, and all of us, like the monarchs, have to be able to use what's been passed down to us through the generations to find our way home."

Jake and the Migrationof the Monarch

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Finding their way home

Jake and the Migration
of the Monarch