Published in the Asbury Park Press 03/22/08

Since childhood, words have been the fuel that keeps Harriet May Savitz's life running. Only her love for her family equals her love for writing, says the Bradley Beach resident.

At 74, that remains true for Savitz, who has a new children's book coming out, essays published in new collections and still writes every day, often about family. Her personal essays appear in three new "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books. In all, her work has been published in 20 books in that series.

Savitz is the author or co-author of 20 books, many for children. Her work appears in magazines, including Guideposts and Mature Years, and in newspapers, including the Asbury Park Press and the Boomer Times in Florida.

"The Story Blanket," a children's book co-authored with writer and longtime friend Ferida Wolff of Cherry Hill, comes out in October in the United States, England and Japan. Last year, a paperback version was published of their 2005 hardcover children's book "Is A Worry Worrying You?"

"She's an incredibly honest writer, a brave writer," Wolff says. "We have different approaches to writing for children. When she gets an idea, she goes at it full tilt. I tend to be a little laid back. So it's a good match. We laugh a lot."

Savitz, who teaches writing at the Carmen Biase Senior Center in Bradley Beach, tells students: "Write! Write, write, write. The only way to write is to write, then reading it over and correcting it."

Make the characters come alive, and be honest, adds the slender Savitz, dressed in a red sweater and gray sweat pants, long white hair framing her face. "You can't fool the reader," Savitz says in her direct way. "They'll always know when you're lying."  About two hours a day, Savitz writes at her computer. She also writes longhand. But writing is "always in her head."

"She's the most cerebral woman you'll ever meet," says her daughter, Beth Laliberte of Wall. "She's a wise, sensitive woman."  Savitz describes herself differently.

"I am a hermit, a monk. I am reclusive. I could not go out for a week or two. I think that as a writer you really have to get in touch with yourself," she says. "You can't do  that with other people around.  

"I do need people. I need to connect. I'm very close to my family, to my friends. But you need to be solitary. Solitude — that's the word.  "It's a price that I've paid. Now, it's too late for me to change," she says. "I'm on  such a (writing) schedule that I don't think I could change if I wanted to. I'd be afraid I would lose what I have in writing and never get it back. The ideas ... the magic. You never know where it comes from."  

That self-description doesn't quite sum up Savitz, whose solitary ways disappear in the face of a cause, such as ensuring equal access for those with disabilities or protecting the environment.  

"She was a big activist when I was growing up. I always describe her as being all raw nerve endings," Laliberte says. "She takes up the world's problems and makes them her own. When I needed the car keys once, and she was protesting a trash-to-steam plant in Pennsylvania, I had to picket first.  

"My career and my life were shaped by what I experienced growing up," adds her daughter, who was 10 when she began volunteering with sports teams for the disabled because her mother had become involved through friends and wrote books about issues facing the disabled.  

"I grew up with being thrown out the restaurant back doors because they wouldn't let us be there with the handicapped. These were the days before the government had accessibility laws. I became a physical therapist because I was involved in coaching wheelchair sports teams in college."  

"I'm not an extremist in any sense," Savitz says. "I just think you should place your body where your mind is."  But most days now, Savitz is found in the small white house where she's lived for 20 years. The wooden rolltop desk that her late husband, Ephraim, bought for her stands in a corner of the small front room. Nearby is her computer. One dog, three cats, two box turtles and many plants share her home.

Her life still centers on words and family. "Being a mother was the key to me. Now, it's being a grandmother," says Savitz, who admits one change in her writing about family: "Now, they have editorial approval."  "My whole life has been documented," Laliberte says, laughing. "'Oh Beth. You got your own phone,' my friends would say because it was in the paper."

Two years later, she awoke with an essay in her mind. That personal essay was published in the Asbury Park Press.  "Every day for two weeks, I was getting up with another essay in my mind. ... That was my road back," she says.

For Savitz, who first wrote at age 9 — a poem — life without words would be pointless.  "I never could keep a job. My mother used to call the places I worked at, and I had left for lunch and never came back. It would be a nice spring day, and I didn't want to go back," she says, laughing. "Once I started to write, that's all I wanted to do. Everything I've lived, I wrote about. I'm trying to figure it out with words."

She was in her 20s, newly married, when her mother died. Her mom had saved her writing. It was "a defining moment."  Savitz took a writing class and sold her first article. She took a fiction-writing class, and soon, she and the instructor were writing poetry and books together for children.  

A few years later, Savitz began writing books by herself about people with disabilities.  "Run, Don't Walk," about how a boy who uses a wheelchair helps a newly disabled girl, became an ABC Afterschool Special on television in 1981.

Savitz has more books in the works.  

Copyright (c) Asbury Park Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Gannett Co., Inc. by NewsBank, inc.

For more information, visit www.harrietmaysavitz.com on the Web.