A family story unfolds

In an age when families are sometimes hard-pressed to share a sit-down meal together, the thought of jointly pursuing any kind of long-term project may seem unrealistic.

A family project that takes place over a number of months may not be easy, but it certainly can foster togetherness and creativity, says John Galligan of Madison, Wis.

He speaks from experience. Mr. Galligan; his wife, Jinko Naganuma; and their two young sons, Joe and Sam, tackled an unusual family activity - writing and illustrating a children's book about a boy who concocts some kooky foods.

The original inspiration for " 'Oh Brother!' Said the Mother of Tony Pepperoni" came when the family was making pizza one day and the boys fashioned a face on the cheese and called it Tony Pepperoni. That started lots of brainstorming about rhyming foods, which went on for several months. The ideas crystallized during a father-sons camp out.

Galligan, a teacher of creative writing, literature, and composition at Madison Area Technical College, acknowledges that he planted the seed for the book and worked at nurturing it to fruition.

"It's not like they had to be talked into it," he says of sons Joe and Sam. "They see me writing all the time, and they see my wife, who loves to draw and create things. It wasn't a hard sell."

Even so, keeping two young boys on task wasn't always easy, and Galligan suspects if they'd been left alone they would have quit.

Some gentle persuasion and negotiating were necessary to see the project through, although it may have been easier in this home than in many others, since Galligan and his wife de-emphasize television and computer games.

"Once they got the idea that working on the book was as much fun as anything else they might be doing, there was no problem," he says.

And after the boys grasped that the book needed a beginning, a middle, and an end, they understood the stages and were driven to finish.

A conducive, homey atmosphere and an informal schedule helped. The parents worked to establish times when everybody could sit down together. This occurred about twice a week. They found that earlier in the day worked better, with weekend mornings generally being most productive because of the long, uninterrupted stretch of time ahead of them.

The story, which took several months to write as a team, required coming up with rhyming dishes such as custard with mustard, nectarines with jelly beans, and fried eggs with frog legs, to substitute for boring ol' macaroni and cheese that the fictional Tony Pepperoni had tired of.

This creative process involved sharing ideas, drafting and revising, and giving and taking feedback - in other words, practicing the art of teamwork.

Only after the story was complete did work on the illustrations begin. This was the job of the boys and their mother.

To enhance the atmosphere for creating the drawings to illustrate the book, the parents put on some music, served up apples, crackers, and pretzels, and made sure all the supplies were ready on the dining-room table before each session began.

The act of writing and illustrating a 24-page book proved educational, but often challenging. In fact, Galligan acknowledges that it was a lot harder than his family had imagined.

For one thing, it required the parents to fully value the ideas and talents of children who were 4 and 7 last year when the family's literary journey began.

Galligan was at the center of the creative process and the discussion leader in brainstorming sessions - but he and his wife were not the final decisionmakers. Everyone in the family had an equal voice.

"My kids wouldn't give me final authority, and any time I tried to pull rank I would hear howls of protest, so we did things by consensus," he says.

"It's hard for adults to be patient and sit back and let a child's aesthetic sense take over," Galligan notes. "It's hard not to control everything."

He found he was uncomfortable letting 4-year-old Sam draw pictures for the book, since they compromised his adult vision of the finished work.

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