May 2000

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

How "Hey, Little Ant" Became a Book

Phil Hoose is an author, songwriter, and member of the Children's Music Network board of directors. His sixth book, about young people in US history, will appear this fall. This article first appeared in a longer form in Pass It On! The Journal of the Children's Music Network

Hey, Little Ant was born on a sticky summer afternoon in Portland, Maine. My daughter Hannah, then nine, watched with me from the porch as her two-year-old sister Ruby chased the ants that scurried through the cracks in our driveway and stomped them flat. She didn't look angry. She seemed bored, and squishing ants must have beaten whatever else there was to do that hour. After awhile I went over to her and said, "How would you like to be one of those ants?" She said something like, "I wouldn't care," but the question seemed to have taken the fun out of it. She stopped pretty soon, maybe when she thought I wasn't looking.

That summer Hannah and I were writing songs together for our family band. When I told her I had an idea, we went inside to the dining-room table and grabbed some paper. The idea was to script a conversation--a negotiation--between a child about to squish an ant and the ant about to get squished. The child would raise a foot and the ant would talk back, making its case not to die. I had an old tune rattling around in my head and we started writing. Words came fast. Neither of us can remember who wrote what. We agreed it would be wrong to say whether we thought the child should squish the ant or not, or to write an outcome. This was too important: We figured that everyone should have a chance to decide for themselves, like Ruby.

An early chance to perform "Hey, Little Ant" came at the Children's Music Network's 1992 national gathering in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. We went on at the beginning of the round robin on Saturday night. I got down on the floor, and Hannah raised her foot over my head. We began singing. The response was very encouraging. In fact, all weekend long we found ourselves in conversations about ants. Everyone wanted to tell us their personal policy about squishing bugs, and it turned out nearly everyone has one. Some of these conversations took the form of confessionals. With some adults there was a sort of pleading tone, like, "Hey, can you back off--we're infested!"

Clearly the song raised questions: Is flattening an ant really an act of murder? Do the things we have in common with tiny living creatures really weigh as much as all the obvious differences? Do we have any obligation not to kill them when we notice them? Do we have a right to kill them when they bother us?

For the next year or two Hannah and I performed "Hey, Little Ant" dozens of times, at schools, festivals, and other venues. We invited discussion after each performance. Children raised their hands and asked, "What if it's a mosquito trying to suck your blood?" "What if it's a bee?" "What if it's a thousand ants going after a glob of honey on the floor?" Hannah and I became amateur shrinks, reflecting the questions back into the audience. "Well," we would beam, "what do you think?"

In those years Hannah and I were hard-core "Calvin and Hobbes" groupies. We admired the way Bill Watterson drew shifting perspectives, with Godzilla-sized Calvin sometimes looming over ankle-high metropolitan areas, and insects sometimes achieving skyscraper height. We began to envision our ant and child as Watterson would draw them, and to form the idea that "Hey, Little Ant" would work as a children's picture book. But none of our sketches came out right: We needed an illustrator.

I wrote a proposal for a children's picture book of "Hey, Little Ant" and asked a literary agent I work with to pitch the idea to editors. I was confident of success; the response to the song showed that we had hit upon a universal theme and convinced me that there was a big audience. Parents, caregivers, and teachers would welcome a tool to help them discuss the ethics of killing with young children. After all, squishing ants is the first chance most people have to recognize their power to kill and their freedom not to.

But the proposal was turned down again and again. Some editors were convinced that Ant could never work on a page--it was merely a performance piece. More could not get past the idea that we ended with a question. Children, they said, need stories resolved. I wrote back to them, "What about The Cat in the Hat? orThe Butter Battle Book? No one replied. My agent gave up after two years of pitching.

This began to take its toll on me. I had never before saved rejection letters, but I found myself angrily building an "Ant" file. I sought help from colleagues, and from one of them I received the name of an editor at Tricycle Press. I sent the editor, Nicole Geiger, the proposal. Weeks later she replied with a long, thoughtful rejection letter conceding that "Ant" caused "quite a hot debate" around her office. Once again, the problem seemed to be the unresolved ending. I dashed off a reply: "There is a fine tradition in children's literature," I wrote, "for ending books by asking truly important questions of young readers." I insisted that big questions should be answered by readers rather than authors. I glumly tossed the letter into a mailbox, thinking that at least I'd been true to myself. A month later, Nicole called. She had sent our proposal to a reader for a second opinion. The reader had loved it. Nicole wondered, Was "Hey, Little Ant" still available?

One day in the spring of 1998, nearly six years after the day Ruby stomped around the driveway, a small box awaited us on the front porch when we got home from a trip. Inside were 10 copies of Hey, Little Ant, its shiny pages filled with huge, playful watercolors. The sight of that book is the most thrilling moment I've had as a writer, probably because Hannah and I did it together. Since then, Ant has been commercially successful; it's had three hardcover printings, a Scholastic Book Club edition, a magazine reprint, and a French translation. Hannah and I have had fun promoting it together. Best of all, Ant lives.

Hannah and I believed to our souls in Ant. I didn't give up. I've long believed that adults who write proposals seeking support for important projects should remember how they asked for things when they were young. Usually when children want something and they are told no, they don't walk away. They ask, Why? and then listen carefully for a weakness in the defense. Then they adjust and try again. Hey, Little Ant became a book because those of us who believed in it most were childlike in our approach and antlike in our persistence.