"After years of doing workshops in schools and really getting excited about what I could see come out on the page, I came home from a workshop, and in my briefcase was a note that said, 'when we were writing, I could feel the juice in my mind,'" says Sheree Fitch. Her new book, Writing Maniac: How I grew up to be a writer (and you can, too!), was inspired by this and other student comments she's received over years of doing workshops in the schools.

"There's not that much out there for kids - in terms of books geared right to them," she says. "I had so many requests by teachers, asking, 'can you take a hands-on oral workshop and make it interesting to young people?'"

Sheree talked to her editor, Mary Macchiusi, at Pembroke Publishers. "Pembroke is a small educational press but I think they're doing some of the best books in the country. I feel I was extremely lucky and fortunate to have a publisher who said, 'I'm not going to push you, it is a challenging book, let's get it right.' I wrote thousands and thousands of pages before I got those ones."

"It was Mary's idea to tell the stories behind the stories." She wanted to reproduce the feel of Sheree's workshops. "It took three years to write this book, to get it to sound as chatty and personal as [the workshops are] in person. Talk about a challenge, to tell about bits of your life and there it is for anybody to see."

"Books are really collaborative. Between the publisher and the editor I have, plus the design person I never met, they did so much. We got feedback along the way from teachers and students too."

"It's intergenerational," Sheree explains. "All the exercises are ones I've used to teach adults about the writing process. It's a book to get kids excited about writing, and not necessarily the ones who already like writing either. There's lots of open-endedness, so teachers will be able to use it any way they want."

Writing Maniac gives lots of reading suggestions. "I talk about how other works influence me, and it's about somebody who writes and how they engage in the process. I like to think it opens up the whole connection between writing and reading and ultimately, voice."

"Bottom line is, it's a user-friendly, kid-friendly book to inspire kids' creativity and the juice in their minds."

Writing Maniac is available from Pembroke Publishers (1-800-997-9807; www.pembrokepublishers.com).