Basin Life

Homespun ‘Cowboy’ Tale

Coulee City authors release third children’s book!

By Matthew Weaver ~ Senior staff writer

Coulee City ~ Several Columbia Basin children don’t have scrapbooks of their time growing up. When they want to revisit their childhood, they’re just going to have to pull down the children’s books their mother wrote about them. “I’m just excited that when I’m a grandmother, I will be able to pass down this legacy of literacy and make sure they realize what Grandma did, and my children will have that,” Corinne Isaak said, “I’m not a scrapbooker, so I’ve told people this is my scrapbook. So if my kids don’t have a scrapbook when they’re 18, they can go back and pick up these books and say, ‘OK, this is what we have.’’’ In 2001, Isaak asked her good friend Karen Cooper if she was willing to participate in a project Isaak wanted to do. Cooper agreed, and the two approached resident artist Don Nutt to ask if he would be willing to illustrate a children’s book about Isaak’s “very unique” middle child, Monique. For nine months, the trio put their heads and talents together, ultimately creating “Unique Monique ~ MokiTime,” conducting research at the same time. As they completed the project, they went to a

Spokane location of Nordstrom, where staff thought the book was so good they suggested sending it to the corporate office in Seattle, which in turn took the book nationwide. “Obviously three country neighbors doing a project, you just don’t really know where it’s going to go,” Isaak said. She, Cooper and Nutt traveled across the country to promote the book. That was kind of a huge boost for our business, to start out on that note,” she said. An educational publisher took the book on for a three~year contract, and released a second book, “Marvelous Maddie ~ Seasons in Mokiville.”

Mokiville is the imaginary town setting for the family farm, based on A La Country Boulevard. For their third, recently released book, “Cowboy Mac ~ Rounds Up His Boot!” Isaak said the group decided to do it on their own again, after the publishing contract ended, just to be able to regain a little bit of control. “When you have a publisher, you just basically are at their mercy,” she said. So they began working on “Mac” in January. Nordstrom again took the book on. This time on a regional basis, and Isaak said it has been garnering “tons” of local support. “Probably the coolest think has been that it’s very homespun,” she said. “We’re three friends out in the middle of Timbucktu, and we’ve been able to take the city and market to people in areas very different from our culture.”

Originally an English teacher, although she now stays at home with her children, Isaak said she has enjoyed attending author’s events at schools, for assemblies and classroom visits. “(We) take the kids from scratch paper to publishing, and every little piece of doodle art and everything, we kept it all and we use it as an educational piece,” she explained, “So kids realize authors are real people and they take ideas from their real~life experiences and they put it into print. I think they kind of like the fact we’re just kind of normal people.” Just as “Monique” and “Maddie,” were based on Isaak’s children, so is “Mac,” based on her son Maquire, while Miss Gabi, based on her niece Gabrielle, brings in a “cowgirl adventure portion” to the story.

The real Maguire and Gabrielle were only separated by 18 days, and have been as close as fraternal twins, Isaak said, the reason she chose the two characters. It became very obvious from the time they were starting to walk and talk that they had a special bond, to the point where they created their own little language,” she said, “They could communicate to each other but the rest of us couldn’t understand what they were saying.” Isaak accentuated the educational aspect of each book. “It really focuses on something that kids can walk away (with) educationally,” she said. “I wanted the books to be a book that parents could sit down and read to their kids that was wholesome, that you could feel the family values and could feel the warmth, come from the book. And then I wanted them to have really good characters, not that my kids are these amazing characters, but it’s really easy to take a real person and put them into character form because you have you subject right before you. They do things and say things that you can characterize into your storylines.” The books have proven popular as has writing so the characters involved. The address of the farm in the stories is a real address for Isaak’s family farm, Isaak said people usually write to Moki or to Maddie, and they have received card, letters and pictures from all the over the country.

“I probably haven’t gone a week in the last six years where I don’t have people asking me, How did you get your book published, I’ve written a children’s book, I want to get started,” she added, “My comment to them is it’s a very difficult process. If someone had laid out the blueprints for me of how it was going to be, I don’t think you’d necessarily say, ‘Oh, I’m going to jump into that.’ But we’ve kind of gotten over some of the hurdles and been able to go forward.” The next step is to expand into other items, including two dolls in development, Isaak said. As for plans for future books, Isaak said she has one more daughter, Mimi, whose siblings believe book should be called “Screaming Mimi and her Bad Hair Day.” “But she is somewhat opposed to the title, “Isaak said with a laugh. “When she was two, she didn’t understand the title. Now that she’s four, she wants it not to be that title. I have more societal and social pressure to write one more book that I do inside me. My neighbors come to me and say. ‘You would cause emotional damage if you didn’t do this for the child,’ so I am going to make sure that happens for her, in one way or another.”

Since starting the books, Isaak and company had discussed the ability of giving back to something. Isaak recalled giving a reading in an oncology unit at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, where she decided if she could ever do something for them, she would. She came across a Seattle organization, Soulumination, which goes into hospitals and does s of families with children in crisis. The creators of the books plan to give one dollar for every paperback book sold to Soulumination, and also plan to offer a for an Eastern Washington family. “This is going to be kind of our motto in 2008,” Isaak said. “It came from President Truman’s sign on his desk; it said ‘The buck stops here. I’m from Missouri.’ Our motto is, ‘The buck starts here, we’re from Mokiville.’’’ For more information, access the authors’ Website at www.mokitime.com.