Julie Hedlund Talks About Song After Song: The Musical Life of Julie Andrews

A podcast interview with Julie Hedlund on The Growing Readers Podcast, a production of The Children’s Book Review.

Discover Julie Hedlund’s inspiring writing journey of her latest masterpiece, Song After Song: The Musical Life of Julie Andrews, on The Growing Readers Podcast.

Song After Song was created after a chance comment from Julie Andrews’ daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, and involved extensive research, including visiting London, where Andrews lived as a child. The final product is poignant and will leave you feeling inspired to use your gifts to impact the world.

Throughout the conversation, Hedlund encourages us to embrace our unique paths and be true to ourselves without comparing our journey with others. Listen now and be inspired!

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Transcription:

Bianca Schulze

Hi, Julie Hedlund. Welcome to The Growing Readers Podcast.

Julie Hedlund

Hi, Bianca. Thank you so much for having me. I’m so happy to be here.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, it’s a pleasure and also an absolute thrill to have you on the show today to talk about your latest picture book, Song After Song: The Musical Life of Julie Andrews. Can’t even imagine how many times I’ve watched The Sound of Music. And so even just saying Julie Andrew’s name, it makes me want to just start singing. But before we dig into the book, let’s get to know a little bit about you and what makes you tick when it comes to writing. So, let’s start with: what’s one thing you do in your day-to-day practices that you feel would be either the most surprising or the most relatable to listeners?

Julie Hedlund

That’s a great question, and I think what might be the most relatable? Hopefully, I know this is not true for everybody, but I actually don’t have a specific writing practice. I am much more of a catches-catch-can kind of person, but I’m always writing in my head. There isn’t a day that goes by where I’m not noodling on something that I’m working on, or I get an idea and write it down and start making notes on it or something like that.

But in terms of just sitting in front of the computer and working on a specific manuscript, that happens, obviously, but just either when I have a deadline or when I’m overcome with an idea of something that I could fix, or I have a critique or something along those lines, and it’s not the best way. I really wish I had a very specific writing practice, but I’ve found that it just doesn’t fit with my personality, and the minute I make a rule, I’m going to break it. So, it’s better to just kind of let things flow. I don’t recommend it, but maybe it’s relatable for other people out there who struggle to find time to write.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, well, the listeners can’t see me, but I’m nodding along because I’m like, yeah, I relate to this a lot. So then, if you are writing a lot in your head and you’re really only sitting down when you’re overcome by an idea, or you’ve just gotten feedback on a manuscript or something like that, what’s the feeling that you get when you’re overcome by the idea? You’ve figured out an answer to a question? Or is it just like you just can’t stop thinking about it?

Julie Hedlund

That’s exactly it. And I won’t say I never force myself to sit down and write as a discipline, but it’s usually like something clicks, and I have to sit down right away and go through it and put it in there, or at least go in and make some notes about the idea or the direction I want to go in. And I often find that because I’m typically whirring things around in my head, that it actually requires less laptop time because I have sort of maneuvered things in my head. People always talk about, well, what counts as writing. And for me, if I only counted the time that I was sitting in front of my computer with a manuscript open, it would be pretty small.

Bianca Schulze

Well, there is that saying that you need to be a reader first before you’re a writer. So, do you consider yourself a reader, and do you even agree with that?

Julie Hedlund

I do agree with it because if you want to learn anything, the best way is to go to the experts. Who are you going to hire to teach you how to play the piano? You’re not going to hire somebody who’s just learning how to play the piano, right? And that’s what books are. I mean, first of all, I couldn’t live, I couldn’t breathe without books.

And I’ve been a reader. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to read. I mean, I know it existed, but in the summer, when I was a kid, I would read three books a day. Just sit and read and read. And for picture books, one of the things that’s good is that they are fairly short, so you can do quite a bit of reading. Although when you dig into them, and you start really reflecting on them, and you’re using them as mentor texts, it’s a good idea to slow down and maybe spend some time, more time with each one. But yes, I absolutely 1000% believe that you have to be a reader before you’re a writer.

I’m sure you can relate to this, too, that I’m lucky because I’m constantly immersed in writing, in the sphere of writing, even if I’m not writing. So, for instance, you’re doing this podcast interview with me, so we’re talking about writing; even if neither of us is writing right now, but I’m sure we’re learning from each other. And the same is true for me with 12 x 12 and the webinars and Picture Book Summit, and the other things that I do. So, I’m kind of constantly it’s like osmosis.

Bianca Schulze

Well, since you touched on twelve x twelve and Picture Book Summit, do you want to just share in case we have some listeners who don’t know what those are? Do you want to share a little bit about them?

Julie Hedlund

I would love to, especially since for Picture Book Summit this year, which is October 7, it just so happens that Julie Andrews is one of our keynote speakers. She and her daughter Emma, who’s one of the co-founders of the Picture Book Summit, are doing a joint session on writing partnerships because they write a lot of children’s books and, especially picture books together, and they have one coming out a week after mine, another one. It’s called the Enchanted Symphony. So, yeah, she’s going to be one of our keynotes.

So, backing up—for a second Picture Book Summit is an annual online conference. This will be, I think, our 9th year. And it’s all one day, one packed, fun, amazing day, where attendees, at least I know I do; I feel like my feet aren’t even touching the ground after that day is over. You’re so revved up.

So, we always have what we call our superstar speakers. Julie Andrews was one this year. We also have the Steads Aaron and Philip and Nikki Grimes. And then, if your listeners enjoy this conversation about Song After Song, I’m going to be co-presenting a workshop with Angela Dalton, who earlier this year had a book come out called To Boldly Go, a biography of Nichelle Nichols of Star Trek Fame. The title of our workshop is called 8 Ways to Ruin a Picture Book Biography. We’re sharing all the mistakes we made so that you don’t have to.

And then twelve x twelve is an annual writing challenge where members attempt to write one picture book draft, very drafty. It doesn’t have to be finished—one picture book draft a month for each of the twelve months. But there’s so much more to it than that. We have monthly webinars. We have a forum where people can post their work for feedback. We have all kinds of education topics in the forum. And mostly, what I love about 12 x 12 is that it’s a writing and illustrating—because we do have lots of illustrators—it’s a community, and it really helps you get through both the highs and the lows and everything in between. We have a Facebook group that is very active.

This is actually the twelfth year of twelve x twelve. So that’s a lot of immersion for me in picture book creation. And I’m lucky. I’m so lucky.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, I imagine, too, though. This is also why you noodle a lot of ideas around in your head, because I’m sure between the annual Picture Book Summit, which I’ve done, by the way, and anybody listening, I am not getting paid to say this, but I love Picture Book Summit, and they always have the greatest lineup of authors, illustrators, sometimes editors. Anyway, I got a lot out of it when I did Picture Book Summit, and I really probably should have done twelve x twelve, too, so sorry.

Julie Hedlund

There’s always next year. That’s the thing. We only take registration in January and February because it is meant to be a year thing. We gel as a community, so we don’t want people coming and going. But there’s always another January that’s just around the corner.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, exactly. So, then, you’re so busy with all of this, and so it would make sense that you need to make the most of your time when you are writing for yourself.

Julie Hedlund

Yes. And it is challenging because, obviously, the 12 x 12 and Picture Book Summit and other initiatives like that are really how I earn my living. But the writing is the passion and the purpose. But I feel fortunate because, through 12 x 12, I get to see a lot of other people through the publishing process and all these amazing books that they publish, too.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah. So, it feels like they’re almost a little piece of the vision you had when you first started twelve x twelve, which you obviously started because of your passion for writing.

Julie Hedlund

Yeah, absolutely.

Bianca Schulze

You’re the writer of multiple picture books, but you’re definitely not a one-trick pony in that your books cover humor, you’ve got a lyrical verse, and now you’ve got this biography. So, what would you say is your guiding force in creating books for children? And if you had to connect your very different books, is there one theme you feel can be found across them all?

Julie Hedlund

Yes. I’ve been thinking about this because it is tempting to be paranoid sometimes that I don’t seem to have an author brand, but when I look back across my work, obviously, there’s a lot of nature, even in nature, and animals, even in the biography. Julie’s love of nature Features pretty prominently, but I feel that the one thread that’s in there is always belonging, even in a troop, as a group of monkeys, which was my first book that was published way back in 2013. I think it’s these groups of animals and kind of how they interact with each other, but then also, we’re part of this planet. We need to make space for each other, which is kind of the theme at the end.

And in Over Bear, Under Where? there are very strong themes of being left out initially, maybe being prejudged, and then ultimately being included. And certainly, with Julie she had a lot of struggles given her very unorthodox childhood and trying to find her place within her own family, but also her place in the world.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah. Well, what or who were your biggest childhood influences, and how do they show up in your writing?

Julie Hedlund

That’s a good one, too. First of all, speaking of The Sound of Music.

Bianca Schulze

I’m trying not to sing right now.

Julie Hedlund

I know it’s an occupational hazard for me, believe me. I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t get one of those songs stuck in my head right now, especially with the book coming out. But I watched The Sound of Music every year. It was a family tradition over Easter. I used to play pretend Sound of Music. I had the old LP, and I would jump on my bed singing you are 16. Nobody wants to hear me sing, believe me.

So definitely movies like The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, but also like The Wizard of Know, the ones that came on once a year, those TV shows that movies and TV shows that were so special. Kids can’t understand this, know, but like Charlie Brown, it’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown you could watch once a year, and if you missed it, that was I think that there’s something that draws me to these stories that you love so much that you have this anticipation around them. And I try to bring that sense of love.

I was a huge Dr. Seuss fan growing up; you know, that’s where the rhyming and the kind of oddball humor, I think, comes from. And also, I grew up in northern Michigan. I was outside all the time and a huge animal lover, and a lot of those things are still true and still inform my work. Yeah, I have two picture books on submission right now, both of which feature animal main characters. So, I think if I had to pick a favorite, that would be it—like humorous animal stories, but I don’t know. You just write what you’re passionate about, I guess.

Bianca Schulze

What you have a connection to.

So, let’s dig into Song After Song. You shared in your author’s note that a moment and a comment by your friend Emma led you to writing this picture book biography. So, would you be willing to share with our listeners what you included in your author’s note?

Julie Hedlund

Absolutely. Let me just open it. So, I don’t know if you want me to read the whole thing, but the beginning paragraph, I talk about my connection to Julie Andrews movies and how I grew up with Sound of Music and Mary Poppins and all of that and being devastated when I learned that she’d lost her singing voice after a throat surgery. I remember this was before I was even writing for children and just feeling instantly like I cannot imagine the world being deprived now forever of her voice. But then that wasn’t it because she and Emma, her daughter and my dear friend, went on to write children’s books together.

And so, here’s what I write in the author’s note:

Luckily, Julie began using her voice in a new way, writing children’s books. I did the same, and my path crossed that of Julie’s daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, with whom Julie had written more than two dozen books. Emma and I formed a fast friendship that has deepened into something close to sisterhood. Sitting on her patio one evening, I wondered aloud about the likelihood of a girl from a small town in northern Michigan becoming great friends with a girl who grew up between New York and Los Angeles. As the daughter of a megastar, Emma said, quote, we were raised with the same values, unquote. That simple comment led me to look at Julie’s own childhood more closely. And when I told Emma I wanted to use my voice to tell her mom’s story to today’s children, she gave me her blessing, as did Julie Andrews herself.

So, yeah, it really was that I thought about that comment. We obviously continued to talk about it, like the similarities between our upbringings, but it really struck me how much people really are the same, and the connections between us are not superficial at all, that they go very deep all the way down to our roots.

Bianca Schulze

Well, so you had this moment. Obviously, you had to do some research. So, what did that look like? I mean, obviously, you had access to Julie Andrews’ family, but I imagine your research went beyond that.

Julie Hedlund

Very much so. And I tried very hard not to rely on Emma too much. I have to say she was amazing through this process. I couldn’t imagine. And the book would absolutely not be anywhere near as good as it is without her input. But I wanted to make sure that there was enough separation, that the story was in my voice, my angle. And I felt like it was a perfect balance between me obviously loving her mother as a performer and me loving Emma as a friend, but also having enough distance to have some objectivity to kind of look at the bigger picture because they would have been more than capable of writing this book. The two of them are children’s authors, so I knew I really had to pull my weight, as you say.

Actually, one of the things that Julie says a lot—don’t let your side down and meaning you’ve got to hold up your end of the bargain would be the idiom here. So, I started by reading her memoir, Home, which is the memoir of her early years. I listened to dozens and dozens of interviews where she talks about her childhood. And I went to London to do a research trip. I went to the theater where she sang in front of the Queen Royal Palladium Theater. I went to her home village. I walked around there. I went to the Sussex Historical Society and looked at pictures. And then, in London, I went to the underground station where she and her mom and stepfather sheltered during World War II. I went to the Imperial War Museum to do more research about what life in London was like in World War II.

So yes, and what I really looked to Emma for once I had drafts written was, that I wanted emotional truth, and I wanted it to be emotionally authentic. And that’s a tricky thing when you’re writing nonfiction because you have to be really careful not to impose your like. This was very difficult for me to find this balance, which is why it took me ten years between first starting to write and having the book published. But you want to put yourself into it, but you can’t impose what you think about the person onto them or what you want them to have thought or felt. So, it was tricky in that regard, especially because she grew up in War-torn England; children did not have agency really at all at that point in time in history, especially not in England.

So, to make this story appeal to modern children, primarily in the United States, without crossing those boundaries. So, for instance, I could not say that she dreamed of being a famous singer because she did not. Things like that.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah. So, with all of this research that you did, and I’m just curious, what was the most surprising thing that you uncovered that you just didn’t imagine?

Julie Hedlund

Yeah, especially with onsite research; I think one of the things that really that kind of research does more than anything is get you connected emotionally to a character if you see where they walked and they lived. And so, one of the things that really surprised me was I had read in her memoir about how they had this apartment, and it was in Mornington Crescent, which is the neighborhood, and that they would go to the underground station to shelter when the air raids happened.

And she described the cigarette factory, which is not a cigarette factory anymore, but the lion, the building is still there, and it still looks a lot like she described it in the memoir. And I found the exact apartment. So, I was looking in the window of the basement room where she would have been. But the thing that really hit me was how far it was from the metro or from the underground. Sorry. And I thought she was five years old, and those little legs had to go that far. When she writes about it, it’s like, oh, we just went to the underground station to shelter there. But being there and seeing how far that was and how terrifying it must have been because the air raid sirens would be going off, possibly even hearing bombs dropping because London was very heavily bombed.

And I just thought, oh, my, for a little girl five years old. So, there is a scene in my book where they go and shelter in the underground station, but it’s not so much that, did I have to see it. Could I have just put that in there? Absolutely. But I think a lot of the emotional—the empathy for a character, for who you’re writing about, whether it’s fictional or nonfiction, comes from that kind of digging deep if that makes sense.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let’s talk about the lovely illustrations. Now, I don’t know, there’s just like a really elegant, but also sort of warm just feeling about them. So, talk to me about your illustrator and how you feel about the illustrations.

Julie Hedlund

I could not imagine this book illustrated by anybody else. One of my very favorite things, I have the book right here, and I know people, your listeners, won’t see it, but the silhouettes in the curtains on the COVID, and this is the advanced reader copy. But if your listeners end up having a copy of this book in hardcover. Please make sure you lift the dust jacket off because there’s a really amazing surprise under there that I don’t want to reveal.

But she makes use of these silhouettes; that’s my favorite part that becomes foreshadowing here when Julie is leaving her father to go to London, and it’s sort of this wispy, cloud silhouette of her with her. And it has a little nod to Mary Poppins here with the know and going up into the air and the way she represents her know, these notes and birds and know her father kind of coming. It’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful. And the color palette, like you said, it’s very warm, which I think was necessary for this book because there is some hardship in it. She’s just a little girl, and she went through a lot, but the color palette and the sensitivity with which Ilaria Urbinati illustrated this book is just phenomenal.

Bianca Schulze

So, do you have a favorite part? And it can be your text, Julie; don’t be bashful. Do you have a favorite passage in it? I have a favorite passage, so I just want to see what yours is first.

Julie Hedlund

Okay.  I’ll tell you what my favorite is. The spread after this one is actually my favorite from an illustration point of view. The one where she’s standing on the stage at the Royal Palladium Theater, this huge stage, and the queen is up here. But the passage that comes right before that is my favorite in terms of the writing. It’s on the evening of the performance Julie gathered her courage, stepped into the spotlight, and lifted her voice. Her string of pearl song cascaded over the crowd like the rhythm of a river, the whistle of the wind, the sweetest symphony of birdsong, all underscored by her father’s love.

Bianca Schulze

So, I’m really glad that that’s the passage you read because, for me, that was it, too. And the last parts of that were also used in the opening pages, if I’m correct. And so, when I read the opening page, I was like, oh, this is going to be a beautiful story. And then when you reused that again right there, I just connected it for me, and I loved it. It was so beautifully done.

Julie Hedlund

Thank you. And yes, it does kind of circle back to the first lines of the book. And it’s definitely, although it’s not the end of the book, it’s the emotional climax of the book, for sure.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Julie, I was hoping we could have a little fun here. Hopefully, this is for fun. So, there are some Sound of Music lyrics, and I’m going to read the first few lines of Do-Re-Mi. I’m not going to sing them, and then I’m going to add in a made-up line, and you’re going to finish it.

Julie Hedlund

Oh, boy.

Bianca Schulze

But since I’m putting you on the spot, it doesn’t have to rhyme. It just needs to be the first thing that comes to your mind. Okay. Okay.

Julie Hedlund

This will be fun. Let’s see.

Bianca Schulze

All right. Okay, here goes. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. When you read, you begin with ABC. When you sing, you begin with do re me. When you write, you begin with.

Julie Hedlund

All of me.

Bianca Schulze

Oh, my gosh. I love that.

Julie Hedlund

Right. I kind of feel like that may not be the world’s greatest rhyme, but I do believe that’s true.

Bianca Schulze

Yes. I only came up with you begin with a cup of hot tea.

Julie Hedlund

Well, and I do have a cup of hot tea right here. But, no, I do think that’s what you have to do, right? You have to bring your whole self to it.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I didn’t imagine that answer. You nailed it.

Julie Hedlund

Thank you. I had to think about it for a minute, but yeah. And, of course, I had to make it rhyme. I mean, I do have some published work and rhyme, and I love rhyming, so I feel it would have been a cop-out if I hadn’t made it rhyme.

Bianca Schulze

Well, what impact do you hope that Song After Song will have on its readers?

Julie Hedlund

Well, given that the audience is children who may not be as familiar, difficult as it is for us to imagine, they may not be as familiar with Julie Andrews as we were and are as we were growing up and as we are now. And what I hope people take away is that when you find your gifts, however, those gifts are discovered, that you realize that you can use them to make the world a better place. You don’t have to be famous. You don’t have to be an artist, even. There are a lot of gifts that kids will have and do have.

But the main admiration that I have for Julie now after writing this book is how hard she worked. She never took anything for granted, and because she was so young, this is not necessarily going to be the case for every child. They were not necessarily going to discover their gifts when they’re eight years old. But given that she was so young, she really had to find a way to incorporate that gift into herself and then be able to express it in a way that she felt was doing good in the world. I’m not sure if that makes sense.

The other thing I like about her story is that the gifts that you’re given may not be the ones necessarily that you thought you were going to have. If you think you’re going to be a baseball player and you end up not going pro in baseball, for example, but there are still a lot of things that can be done with that gift, and that will uncover other gifts. And then you will do what you can to move those through the world in a way that makes it a better place for everyone. Cheesy as it sounds, I don’t know.

Bianca Schulze

I think sometimes the best things are cheesy.

Julie Hedlund

The other thing, this is a bit more tangential, but I feel like in the Age of Influencers and the Kardashians and this sort of Insta-celebrity culture that we live in, it’s really good to take a step back and think about the human behind that. But also, what is that contribution ultimately, and is it a positive one? And if something seems like it’s too good to be true, maybe it is. And the fact that you have somebody here who’s really worked hard through her entire life and never quit, she’s still going. Versus I can Photoshop this picture of myself and stick it up on Instagram and get a million followers.

Maybe that’s a little bit too mature of a message for young kids. But again, going back to this idea of osmosis, maybe that will come out as they read more and, hopefully, many more biographies of people who work hard and achieve great things.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, and I think what you just said is a big reason I love picture book biographies is because there are so many different kinds of people from different backgrounds with different interests, and they show possibility. They show you what can be. They typically show you that you can rise from adversity. And not everybody goes through adversity, but I often find that those who have been more successful actually have had struggles that they’ve learned from. That’s why I love the picture book biography genre is I just think it shows kids possibility, even if it’s something they’ve never imagined for themselves and never will. I find them so incredibly inspiring. So, yeah, I think what you said is great.

Julie Hedlund

Honestly, I’m not a big fan of adult biographies. They’re too bogged down for me, I guess Julie’s autobiographies being the exception, and I don’t typically have the amount of fascination for a person that would make me want to read, like, a 500-page biography. Actually, there is one other exception, which is Leonardo DA Vinci.

But I love the picture book biography because I have learned so much. I’ve learned so much that’s so fascinating and, things that I never knew and people that I never knew of, and then even people that you do know. Like, I don’t want to steal her thunder, but in Angela Dalton’s biography of Nichols, this is in the back. You know, here she was, an actress on Star Trek, and she ended up helping to reform NASA after the show was, I mean, because she was using her platform, her celebrity. When you think about that, it’s like so she was very key in diversifying NASA.

And so, again, even if you are on a particular path, there’s always ways to be thinking about, and I’m sure you do this all the time, like, what do you want to use your platform? How do you want to use your gifts? What messages are you trying to send? And we do that in everything, not just in writing or podcasting, but it’s important, and hopefully, that’s what I love about picture book biographies. You get kind of like the most amazing know. Very digestible but also extremely thought-provoking.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah. So, here’s a question for you. Do you know if Julie Andrews has read Song After Song?

Julie Hedlund

I do know, and she has, and she told me that she thinks it’s.

Bianca Schulze

Really.

Julie Hedlund

Mean right there. What else do I need?

Bianca Schulze

Your little girl self is probably doing backflips.

Julie Hedlund

Seriously? Yeah.

Bianca Schulze

And singing, I am 16 going on 17.

Julie Hedlund

No, she just saw it recently because I gave Emma a copy of the Advanced Readers—I gave her one of my copies of the Arc, and I just felt it from the top of my head to the tips of my know.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah. Well, Julie, what is the one most important point that you want the growing readers listeners to take away from our chat today?

Julie Hedlund

One of the themes, I think, that you and I have kept coming back to is that there are many ways of doing what you love in the world. And we didn’t necessarily touch on this, but it’s not helpful to compare yourself to other people’s journeys and the paths that they’re on, rather to pay attention to our own. Right. So, if you’re on a hike, if you are kind of getting distracted by this thing over there, before you know it, you’re going to be off your own trail and lost. And

I heard myself almost apologizing in the beginning for not having a writing routine that would be considered typical, and you said you really related to that. And I imagine that our paths and the way that we work are different. They’re different. But again, embracing your gifts in the ways that work for you so that you can go on and do the amazing things that you do every day and learning from them and improving as you go along or maybe even shifting a bit it’s all good. It’s all valid. Even though I didn’t include this specifically in the book,

I make kind of a nod to it, but I think that it’s very symbolic and probably not coincidental in some ways that when Julie lost her singing voice in terms of being able to perform as the singer, that she went on to use her voice in very different ways. She didn’t just stop working. She did more acting. That was how we got the Princess Diaries, and she did more writing. And that’s how we’ve got so many of these wonderful picture books and middle-grade books, and she directed shows, and who knows if she would have done those things if that hadn’t happened? I think for me, that’s always good.

And so, I think for all of us, we don’t know necessarily what life is going to put in our path, but it’s inspiring to learn from people who maybe face an obstacle but who then use that, not just go around it, but use it to actually then continue to do great things. And I feel like for each person, for you, it’s going to be different than it is for me, but being able to see that other people have gone through things and have continued to do amazing work and be amazing humans, and it will look different from everybody.

And like I said, it doesn’t have to be huge fame, or it could be how raising your kids to the point that they’re flying and are rooted in their values and so on. And speaking of teachers, my goodness, look at all the hardship that’s been thrown at teachers in the past few years and what they’ve overcome to continue to connect with these kids who are also going through this very difficult time. It’s like nobody knew, but we just have to—I think what Julie would say is—persevere.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Julie, I think it’s fun that just in general, your name is Julie, and you’re talking about Julie.

Julie Hedlund

I like to call myself the other Julie.

Bianca Schulze

The other Julie. The other Julie. So, other Julie, thank you so, so much for just shining a spotlight on such a fabulous human being that Julie Andrews is for me, as an adult reader; it was such a nice reminder that I think we do often like you said, take celebrities at their face value. We think we know them. I didn’t I didn’t know anything about Julie Andrews of her. I just love that you wrote this book that you shared. I think kids are really going to connect with it. I loved the lyrical parts of your writing, and we talked about how beautiful the illustrations are. So, all in all, I think this is a great picture book biography, and I’m really grateful for your time today. Thank you.

Julie Hedlund

I’m so grateful to you for having me, and I really love what you do. And thank you for bringing authors and illustrators out to the community like you do. It’s really incredible.

Bianca Schulze

It’s my passion, for sure. Thank you.

Julie Hedlund

You can tell. Absolutely tell. Thank you.

Bianca Schulze

You’re welcome. Thank you.

Julie Hedlund

Bye.

About the Book

Publisher’s Book Summary: This picture book biography explores the early life of film star, theater performer, singer, and published author of children’s books Julie Andrews, and how she found her voice and her love of music.

“A beautiful and lyrical celebration of my mother’s legacy that hits all the right notes.”

Emma Walton Hamilton

Long before she starred in movies like The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, and The Princess Diaries, Julie Andrews was a little girl struggling with her parents’ divorce and the ravages of World War II. To comfort her and fill her time during the London Blitz, her stepfather taught her to sing, and Julie found her voice—one of the most extraordinary singing voices of all time.

Lyrically told by Julie Hedlund and lushly illustrated by Ilaria Urbinati, this is the story of how Julie Andrews became one of the world’s most beloved performers.

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Show Notes

Julie Hedlund is the award-winning children’s picture book author of Over, Bear! Under, Where? She spends much of her time inside her imagination, and when not writing or reading, she enjoys playing in the mountains near her home in Boulder, Colorado. She lives with her two teenage children and their high-maintenance hound dog.

Resources:

You can find out more about Julie at ⁠https://juliehedlund.com/⁠.

Follow her on Twitter ⁠@juliefhedlund⁠.

12×12 Challenge: ⁠https://www.12x12challenge.com/⁠.

Picture Book Summit: ⁠https://picturebooksummit.com/⁠

Discussion Topics:

Julie Hedlund talks about:

• Her writing process and the importance of being a reader before becoming a writer.
• Her involvement in writing communities like 12 x 12 and Picture Book Summit, where Julie Andrews is a keynote speaker this year.
• How a comment from Julie Andrews’ daughter led to writing a picture book biography about Julie Andrews
• Extensive research for the book, including reading Julie’s memoir, doing onsite research in London, and listening to interviews.
• The book’s emotional climax and how readers can take away the message that they can use their gifts to improve the world.
• The benefits of reading from biographies of people who work hard and achieve great things, just like Julie Andrews.
• Embracing individual paths and not comparing oneself to others.

Thank you for listening to the Growing Readers Podcast episode: Julie Hedlund Talks About Song After Song: The Musical Life of Julie Andrews. For the latest episodes from The Growing Readers Podcast, Follow Now on Spotify.