When Emil came home from school, he had the latest edition of the school paper, the one with Mariah's latest interview in it. He had read it on the way home.
Mariah and Pippa had been expecting Emil, so they met him at the front door. Emil handed the school paper to Mariah. He knew she was excited to read her article.
Pippa and Mariah sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and began to read the article.
It was fun to see what she had written in print.
I've always wanted to interview a real human person, Mariah told them, as the dolls finished reading the article.
"What made you think to interview The Writer?" Emil asked.
"Well, for one thing," Mariah replied, "it was convenient, since The Writer lives here with us, but also, I really wanted to ask her how she learned to do all the things she needs to know to write the stories."
"It says," Emil read, "that she wanted to be an artist when she was a child, but that the only thing she was good at doing was knowing what didn’t look real, which was most of what she drew, so she was discouraged.”
"Yes," Mariah agreed. "Then when she was in seventh grade, she decided she wanted to write stories."
"So that was when she started to write stories! That was a long time ago!" Pippa exclaimed.
"It’s said in the article, though" Emil said, "that she couldn't think of anything to write."
"Oh, that's right," Pippa remembered. "In the article, it says that even when she was in high school she couldn’t think of what to write, so she gave up writing, except when she had an assignment. It was easy to write when someone else gave her a topic."
"She did like to read, though," Mariah explained, "and I’ve always thought that if you want to learn how to write, you need to do a lot of reading."
"She said she was always interested in learning new things," Emil said. "That may have something to do with why she liked reading. She liked science and math and music and dance." Pippa opened the paper back up to find where it said that.
"Foreign languages, too," Mariah pointed out. "She told me that learning another language is a little like going to live in another country. It isn’t just about the words and how they’re put together; you get to learn about what life is like in the country where that language is spoken."
"You also get to read their stories," she added.
"But this is where it gets interesting," Mariah pointed out. "After she got married and had a family, they moved around a lot because of her husband’s work."
"Each time they moved to a new place," she explained, "no one was hiring for the job she had in the last place, so she had to do something new."
"I see she taught school for a while," Pippa said, opening the paper up again, so she could show them where it said that.
"I think the most interesting job she had," Emil suggested, "was when she became a journalist. She says the magazine gave her something to investigate and then write about. Writing became easy, because she didn’t have to think up the subject. Maybe," he continued, "that’s why writing is so much easier for me when I’m answering a question on a test or the teacher asks us to pick a planet and write about it."
"But see?" Pippa said, as she brought his attention back to the article. "She said when she worked for the magazine, she had to work closely with the art person."
"The art director (dih-REK-ter)," she corrected herself. "She learned how to select artwork and photos, and how to do something called..." she found the place in the article, "a layout, whatever that is."
Mariah knew what a layout was from working on the school paper. "That’s how you put the text…the writing…on the page with the photos or drawings." She took the paper from Pippa and showed the other dolls the front page. "You arrange everything so it looks good and makes someone want to read it."
"They use a computer program," Mariah explained, "they to put all the parts together. She had to use the computer to edit the words if they didn't fit the layout."
"All that explains how The Writer can write, select the photos for the stories and do the layouts for the books," Pippa said, "but how did she start writing about us?"
"That’s the best part!" Mariah told her. "You see, The Writer's grandchildren needed clothes for their dolls, but they lived a long way away, so she bought the same kind of dolls her grandchildren were getting. That way, she would have a doll she could use as a model, so the clothes would fit. Later she bought Veronika from someone who needed to find her a new home."
"She was very surprised," Mariah explained, "to find out that she could hear Veronika talk to her. She was very surprised to see Veronika move around the house and do things."
"Also," she said, "and Billy could tell you more about this, about that time, The Writer got a phone with a really good camera. That meant that she didn’t have to run and get her camera when she saw Veronika at the sewing machine. She just took out her phone and got pretty good photos."
"She took a lot of photos," Mariah explained, "and now she didn’t have to pay for film and developing, so it didn’t matter if she took 50 shots to pick from. She could take lots of photos and pick the ones that looked right."
"Maybe that," Emil observed, "goes back to when she was a little girl, I think, when she looked at her drawings and realized they didn’t look real."
Mariah and Pippa thought about that and decided there could be a connection.
"So then," Emil told them, "Veronika realized The Writer could hear her talk and see when she did things, so she asked her to get her a friend who was like her, like the friends she had lived with in her first home. Mandy came to live with them. The Writer learned that Mandy was good at science."
"I saw the photos Billy took for the paper," Emil said, "but where did the one of the little girl come from?"
Mariah knew which photo Emil meant. "That’s The Writer," she said. "It’s her photo from kindergarten."
"It looks very old," Emil said, as the dolls opened up the paper again and looked at the photo.
The other dolls thought it did, sort of.
"Will Veronika look the way The Writer looks now when she gets old?" Pippa asked.
Mariah laughed. "No," she said. "Dolls don’t change in that way. We can get damaged, but we don’t grow up and grow old the way real human people do. Veronika will always look like Veronika.”
“And Pippa will always look like Pippa,” Emil added.
Pippa decided that wasn’t a bad thing.
Veronika: Götz Classic Kidz Vroni
Mandy: Götz Happy Kidz Katie 2015
Mariah: Götz Happy Kidz Mariah, "Chosen" from My Doll Best Friend
Emil: Götz Happy Kidz Emilia
"The Doll's Storybook" is not affiliated with Gotz Dolls USA Inc. or Götz Puppenmanufaktur International GmbH.
Watch for the next story each Friday afternoon at 1:00 PM Pacific Time.
Copyright © 2023, 2024 by Peggy Stuart
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