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Trish (Patricia) Windschill Marx '70
Roams the World for Good Stories
  Trish Marx '70
Plays a
New Tune in
Her Latest Book:
Steel Drumming
at the Apollo
From New York Youth Bands to China's Forbidden City, to World War II battle sites and the Everglades, Trish (Patricia) Windschill Marx '70 (English) ferrets out and tells extraordinary true stories to engage young readers. She has won awards from Parents Magazine, Book Links, and the Bank Street College of Educationand teaches Writing for Children at Marymount Manhattan College. She also edits books for an educational publisher. Her advice for aspiring writers? Read all the time, keep journals, and follow your ideas. Modeling her own counsel, she'll follow a story anywhere.
Check out her newest book, released January 2008, and you'll come to know seven high school buddies in the Hamilton Hill Steel Drum Band from Schenectady, New York, as they battle their way, performance after performance, for a chance to be named the Super Top Dog Band. It's not exactly what Trish expected she'd be doing when she graduated from the College of St. Catherine. But when photographer colleague Ellen Senisi mentioned that her son was in the band, Trish's interest was piqued, and she was on the road for a new story. This January, she'll be introducing the book at various events in Schnenectady, New York City, and the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
Trish is seen above at the former city of Caunus in Turkey, along the Mediterranean Sea. Caunus was settled in the 10th Century B.C. by native Anatolians, but was conquered by the Romans in 129 B.C. In the background are Roman ruins, most likely the stadium.
The Roads Less Taken Leading to Books
Many of Marx's books began as little-known incidents that she ran across by chance and then tracked down roads less traveled, enjoying the research along the way. Her first book entailed the childhood memories of vastly different WWII survivors -- a ten-year-old Jewish boy who lived through Kristelnach and escaped to England but whose parents did not; a French teenager who secretly joined the French Resistance and worried about possible consequences to her unknowing family; a six-year-old English girl exiled from her family to a country village; an eleven-year-old daughter of one of Hitler's generals who fled from the Russians; a six-year-old boy imprisoned by the Japanese in the Philippines; a seven-year-old Japanese city girl who had to scrounge for food in the country for her younger siblings. Not your usual WWII stories.
Though Marx sometimes writes of painful experiences, her focus is always on the hope -- on the ways that people go on, protect what they care about, and eventually heal.
“We all need stories in our lives, and when I write a book, I want to tell a good story.”
It All Began with a Traveling Trunk to CSC
“I chose St. Kate’s in part because my Aunt Marion, my father's sister, had attended college there some thirty or so years before I did,” explains Windschill Marx. Marion Windschill had packed her belongings in an old traveling trunk and traveled from a small farming town to the big city for St. Catherine's. “My dad had great respect for the school and my childhood was peppered with many references to it.” So the College was always there in the background of Trish’s mind.
Like her aunt, Trish grew up in a small farming town of about 10, 000, nestled around Lake Okabena (a Dakota word meaning “nesting place of herons”), with a love for wandering and adventure. “Every year when the lake was free of ice and the ground mushy with mud, my friend Karen, our sisters, and I would pack a lunch, put on our oldest shoes, and we would spend one whole day walking around it. We usually lost our shoes, sucked into the earth by the mud.” With this sense of adventure, Trish followed her aunt's footsteps and packed the same trunk to go the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul.
Trish had always been an avid reader, but at St. Catherine's she engaged with literature on a deeper level: "My Shakespeare classes with Catherine Lupori were great in that they taught me how much I didn't know. I loved the way she took each bit of dialogue and broke it down until a larger concept flew out and wham! an earthy or elegant truism about life had settled indelibly on our consciousness."
Though she studied literature, that wasn't her major. "St. Kates partnered with other area schools, and I majored in Journalism at St. Thomas with Father Whalen -- a fast moving, dynamic teacher who didn't know the word 'coddle.'" After college, she earned a Master's Degree in Journalism from the University of Minnesota.
"St Kate's gave me a long stretch of time - four years - to watch and listen and feel life, and the possibilities life holds. It surrounded me with strong women and interesting role models. I felt I was waiting during those years, but a good waiting. It strengthened my Catholic faith, and it sheltered me at a time when I was not yet ready to go head first into the world."
Before leaving St. Kate's, Trish got a more personal push toward being an author: "My roommate, Patti Cole (still my wonderful friend, even though we are miles apart) gave me a book. It was a real book, with a hard cover and a beautiful jacket. I opened it up; it was blank. WOW! She told me I should fill the pages up, and then go on to write another book, and another. Well, twenty years, three children, and a master’s degree later, I did. I signed my first book contract on my 40th birthday!" Ten books later, she is still finding adventure in the blank pages and all the stories yet to be told.
| Books by Trish Marx
- Steel Drumming at the Apollo: The Road to Super Top Dog, photographs by Ellen Senisi, Lee & Low, 2008
- Jeanette Rankin: First Lady of Congress, Margaret K. McElderry, 2006
- Everglades Forever: Restoring America's Great Wetland, photographs Cindy Karp, Lee & Low, 2004
- Reaching for the Sun: Kids in Cuba, photographs by Cindy Karp, Millbrook, 2003
- Touching the Sky: The Flying Adventures of Wilbur and Orville Wright,authored with Louise Borden, illustrated by Peter Fiore, Margaret K. McElderry, 2003
- One Boy from Kosovo, illustrated by Cindy Karp, HarperCollins, 2000
- And Justice for All: The Legal Rights of Young People,authored with Sandra Joseph Nunez, Millbrook, 1997
- I Heal: The Story of the Children of Chernobyl in Cuba,authored with Dorita Beh-Eger, photographs by Cindy Karp, Lerner Publications, 1996
- Hanna's Cold Winter, illustrated by Barbara Knutson, Carolrhoda Books, 1993
- Echoes of World War II, Lerner Publications, 1991; first published as Echoes of the Second World War, Maconald (England), 1989
Books in Progress
Elephants and Golden Thrones: Inside China's Forbidden City, Abrams
Sharing a Homeland: Jewish and Palestine Children,Lee & Low
FRIENDPOWER-- about third-grade classrooms in China and in New York
A book about kindergarten classes in China and the United States.
Her first novel -- set in the Midwest and involving a traveling trunk
Trish Windschill Marx stands in an area just outside the Forbidden City in China. Below is an Easter Egg she received at an Easter Mass, placed on a street drain cover.
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 Her Book Topics Range As Far As Her Interests
One cannot put the topics of Trish's books into any categorical box, except they are all nonfiction for children and have all been well-reviewed. She has tromped through the mud with school kids trying to save the Everglades (bringing back memories of our own special hometown lake), hung out with fame-seeking highschool bands, and hiked the battlegrounds of WWII. She has followed the first woman in Congress and the first men in the air. She has stayed with families in the Mideast and in a Eastern Europe refugee camp. She has hiked past ruins in Turkey, Cuba, and China while meeting their young people with cell phones and computers.
 “Because I have a background in journalism, I was most interested in learning and writing about our world today. That is why I write about children in other countries or children who have gone through tough times and survived, or about important places that belong to all of us, such as the Everglades or the Forbidden City in China. When I write, I think of what Richard Peck, who writes wonderful novels for young adults, said: 'We write by the light of every book we have ever read.' So all of my past reading goes into each book I write.”
Her Writing Habits
What are her writing days like? "I work full time as an editor, but I have also been putting in many hours a week to research and write three books in the past two years. I work most days, especially if I have a deadline. Then I work around the clock - otherwise, I try to be more civilized about it and keep evenings free. However, those quiet hours, from 10:00 pm on, are really good for writing!"
 "I have always taken the trips after I have sold the book proposal and gotten travel/expense money from the publisher. It rarely covers everything, but it certainly helps make this possible. . . .I usually go with just the photographer on the trips for my books. We can spend 18 hours a day working. The photographer, Cindy Karp, and I stayed the night in the Kosovar refugee camp when we did One Boy from Kosov... I traveled through Paris to Zurich to Sophia and then taxied and bused my way across the mountains to Skopje, Macedonia. We stayed in a tent in Brazda with an Albanian family, and twenty other people we didn’t know (and they didn’t know each other either), learning about what it was like to be a refugee.
"I thought I would not be able to sleep, in this strange place with these people I had just met, but in fact, it was the best night’s sleep I ever had. It was peaceful, with murmurs and sighs and quiet goodnights floating around the tent."
Windschill Marx has three children of her own, who are now pursuing their own careers -- a son who is in banking in London, a daughter who is a lawyer in Chicago, and another daughter who graduated from Trinty College in Dublin, and though she is presently in banking, she's thinking of following her mother with a Master's Degree in Journalism. She's already developed "a tough reader's eye," says her mother.
 For some projects, Trish works with co-authors or photographers, and that offers comraderie and support but special challenges too. "You really have to know the person you are working with - and there has to be a tremendous amount of respect for the other person's role. Also, you can be friends, but that is not the object - the object is to work together to get out the best book possible. You have to not be afraid to stick up for yourself."
Back to the Trunk
Though she has traveled the world, Windschill Marx has stayed connected to her close friends from St. Catherine's and savors a deep appreciation for all that she gained here.
"Things come full circle in odd ways," says Windschill Marx. "When my oldest daughter was in her early teens, my father unearthed the old trunk that his sister has taken to St. Kate's with her. There, carved on the wood frame, was 'Marion Windschill, The College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minn.' Molly and my father sanded and cleaned and varnished that trunk and added Molly's name to it, along side Marion's. Watching them inspired me to write a novel about a family, living in a small town in Minnesota in the 50s and 60s."
Of course, there is a trunk in the story, and that trunk goes off to college.
"I loved the peacefulness of the St. Kate's campus. It was a unique place and in the tumultuous 70s, it provided an enclave of serenity for growth and learning, and it still does."
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