Sis Boulos Deans

Personal

Born November 4, 1955, in Portland, ME; daughter of James (an electrician) and Velma (a nurse; maiden name, Pellitier) Boulos; married John Deans (a farrier), October 7, 1978; children: Jessica Emily, Rachel Marie, Emma Lee. Education: University of Maine—Orono, A.S., 1976; graduated from the Maine Medical Center School of Surgical Technology, 1985. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Camping, photography, sports.

Addresses

Home—260 Gray Rd., Gorham, ME 04038.

Career

Writer. Mercy Hospital, Portland, ME, surgical technician, 1985—. Worked for nine years as an animal medical technician for veterinarians; also worked variously as a lifeguard, a waitress, and a writing instructor.

Member

Association of Surgical Technologists, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Pejepscot Historical Society.

Awards, Honors

Maine Chapbook Award, 1995, for Decisions and Other Stories; Lupine Honor Book, Maine State Library Association, 2001, Editor's Choices, Booklist, Best Book, School Library Journal, and Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People, CBC-NCSS, all for Racing the Past.

Writings

FOR JUVENILES

Brick Walls, illustrated by Nantz Comyns-Toohey, Windswept House Publishers (Mount Desert, ME), 1996.

His Proper Post: A Biography of Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Belle Grove (Kearny, NJ), 1996.

Racing the Past, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2001.

Every Day and All the Time, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2003.

Racing the Past was also published in England and translated into German as Ricky rennt.

FOR CHILDREN

Chick-a-dee-dee-dee: A Very Special Bird, illustrated by Nantz Comyns, Gannett Books (Portland, ME), 1987.

Emily Bee and the Kingdom of Flowers, illustrated by Nantz Comyns, Gannett Books (Portland, ME), 1988.

The Legend of Blazing Bear, illustrated by Nantz Comyns, Windswept House Publishers (Mount Desert, ME), 1992.

FOR ADULTS

Decisions and Other Stories, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance (Brunswick, ME), 1995.

Also author of adult short fiction, poetry, and plays, published in periodicals, including Tableau, Maine Scholar, and Portland Review of the Arts.

Sidelights

Maine writer Sis Boulos Deans is the author of several middle-grade novels and nonfiction works, picture books, and stories and plays for adult readers. Her 2001 novel, Racing the Past, garnered awards and critical acclaim as a hard-eyed view of one boy's attempt to find meaning in his life in the wake of death in the family. With her 2003 work, Every Day and All the Time, she again deals with a death in the family, focusing this time on a young girl's attempts to cope. Both novels handle difficult issues, including alcohol abuse and loss.

Deans, a surgical technician by training, is a busy woman. "I'm hyper, work well under pressure, and require little sleep," she once commented. Her home is always a center of activity. She shares a farm in Maine with her husband, their three daughters, two horses, two dogs, a cat, a rabbit, and three chickens. "My husband and children share my love for camping, and vacations for us usually involve sleeping in a tent," Deans further noted. "My girls swim competitively and are also active in other sports, church, and school activities, so I'm usually en route to a pool or a ball field." In addition to being a wife, mother, and writer, Deans works three days and a night on call in the operating room at Portland, Maine's Mercy Hospital as a surgical technician. "My specialty is orthopedics," Deans commented, "my favorite cases are total knee and hip replacements. People usually ask how I manage to balance such a hectic life and still write. My answer: 'I write when normal people are sleeping.' Which is true—it's the only time our house is quiet."

Born and Bred in Maine

Deans was born in Portland, Maine, in 1955, the daughter of an electrician father and a nurse mother. An avid reader and writer as a youth, she attended the University of Maine, graduating in 1976. She then worked for a number of years as a medical technician for veterinarians, but ultimately followed in her mother's medical footsteps by studying at the Maine Medical Center School of Surgical Technology. Graduating in 1985, she went to work as a surgical technician for Mercy Hospital. Meanwhile, she had married and begun raising her family of three daughters.

Deans also indulged her lifelong love of writing by penning short stories, some of which were published in local periodicals. She did not start writing children's books until her eldest daughter was four. Deans once recalled the inspiration for her first picture book: "After seeing one of my short stories published in a magazine that she was too young to read, she said, 'Momma, you write for everyone but me.' My guilt kicked in, and I immediately called Nantz Comyns, a good friend and an artist I'd known since college. 'Nantz,' I said, 'I'm going to write a kid's book and you're going to illustrate it.'"

From Picture Books to Novels and Biography

Once Deans completed the text about a black-capped chickadee who lives in the forest of Maine's Acadia National Park and is in search of what makes him unique, Comyns added illustrations. Satisfied with the finished product, the author and illustrator were not content to simply put it in the mail to a publisher. Instead, Deans went in person to the offices of Gannet Books in Portland, Maine, and asked to speak with an editor. "Perhaps shocked by her gumption," noted Phil Bartlett in the Gorham Times Online, "the editor agreed to review the manuscript and the pair had a contract by afternoon." The result was Deans's debut picture book, Chick-adee-dee-dee: A Very Special Bird, published in 1987.

Since then, Deans and Comyns have worked on several books together. Emily Bee and the Kingdom of Flowers was published by Gannet the following year. Their third book, The Legend of Blazing Bear, was the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance best-selling children's book for 1992. In that book, an Abenaki father, Blazing Bear, gently teaches his son, Fleeting Deer, through storytelling, with an emphasis on his nation's culture and customs. The son, impatient to leave behind hunting games of little boys and go on an actual hunt, is counseled by his father to have patience. To this end, Blazing Bear tells his son about his own vision quest and how he managed to overcome his jealousy of his older brother. Jeanette K. Cakouros, writing in the Maine Sunday Telegram, declared that Blazing Bear is "more than a story-book," citing the book's added glossary of American Indian words and terms, a chart of Maine's Kennebec and Abenaki Indians, a map showing the locations and place names of the tribes, a bibliography for further reading, and, of course, colorful artwork. Lisa Mitten, however, writing in School Library Journal, found this title a "slight coming-of-age story." Though Mitten thought the text was "clearly written," she also felt the story was "meandering" and featured "cutesy 'Indian' names." Commenting on her collaborative efforts, Deans once explained, "Nantz and I have an excellent working relationship, and our successful collaborations have been, and continue to be, rewarding and fun."

In 1996, Deans published her first children's novel, Brick Walls. In this story, Leona, also known as Leo, and her sister are sent to a Catholic boarding school by their mother, who wants to get the children away from their alcoholic father. The brick walls of the school are nothing, however, compared to the walls Leo puts up around her emotions in this coming-of-age story. This first novel announced the themes a problem novel which Deans has pursued in later fiction.

That same year, Deans published her first biography for middle grade and young adult readers. Deans was once again prompted into action by a request from a young reader. In this case, her nephew complained that he could find no books on the Civil War hero General Joshua Chamberlain. A graduate of and professor as well as president at Maine's Bowdoin College, Chamberlain is best remembered as the Civil War general who commanded at Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg. At Bowdoin, Chamberlain was also a modernizer, founding a Scientific Division while president of the college. This nephew, interested in the man but unable to find a biography for his age group, implored his aunt to write one for him, and she took on the task, little realizing that it would consume three years of her life in research and writing. While visiting Gettysburg for the book, she was aided in her searches for a local site by a hand-drawn map given to her by a man at a local bookshop where she stopped asking for directions. Later, after finishing her project, she sent a copy to this helpful man, who turned out to be a publisher of books specifically about the Civil War; he took on Deans' book, publishing it in 1996 as His Proper Post: A Biography of Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

Returns to Fiction

As Bartlett noted, "After publishing her book about Chamberlain, Deans returned to writing fiction with a new appreciation for the detail and accountability required in nonfiction." The result was the novel Racing the Past, a book which, like her earlier Brick Walls, deals in part with the problem of alcoholism. "The lonely stoicism of the long-distance runner is physical fact as well as metaphor" in Racing the Past, a "powerful" novel, declared Booklist's Hazel Rochman. Eleven-year-old Ricky is confused and disoriented after the death not only of his father, but also of a neighbor who was something of a stand-in grandmother to him. Bugsie, the school bully, makes Ricky's trips to school on the bus miserable. At first Ricky stops taking the bus and starts walking the three and a half miles to school simply to avoid the jeers of "white trash" thrown at him, and the fights that sometimes follow. In a way he agrees with Bugsie: the best thing his dad has done in his life is die in the drunk-driving accident. Ricky is worried that he will turn out like his father, or like his uncles, who are in prison. Even after the death of his father, the memories of his physical abuse remain. But then Ricky discovers long-distance running. Soon Ricky avoids taking the bus to improve his running speed, and eventually he can beat the bus home. By the time the story ends, Ricky has learned to stand up to Bugsie, brought the attention of the track coach to his running skills, and even found a degree of self-understanding.

Reviewing this novel in School Library Journal, Todd Morning felt that though "not all of the disparate threads" of the story "come together," still Deans does a "good job of capturing the often rough, cruel, and foul-mouthed world of early adolescents." A Publishers Weekly reviewer similarly called Racing the Past a "hard-hitting novel" about one youth's attempts "to find self-respect and a sense of purpose." The same critic concluded that "Deans's persuasive and informed sympathy encourages readers to cheer Ricky for his perseverance and his triumphs." A Horn Book contributor also added praise, noting that "the reader will be cheering for [Ricky's] determined and admirable character." And for Rachel Pinder, writing in England's Coventry Evening Telegraph, the book had a "positive and satisfying ending."

Deans returns to similar themes in her 2003 novel, Every Day and All the Time, a novel of loss and recovery and a "delicately crafted and very emotional book for teens who have suffered the death of someone they love," according to a reviewer on the San Diego State University Children's Literature Program Web site. The book features twelve-year-old Emily Racine, who, six months previously lost her beloved older brother, Jon, in a car accident. She was in the car at the time, returning from a swim meet, with her writer father at the wheel. She was injured badly enough to keep her from practicing her ballet for months. And during this half year, the family has begun to disintegrate alarmingly. Her mother, a physician, has found solace in her work and has partly withdrawn from the family, while her father spends more and more time in his office producing "more empty liquor bottles than completed writings," as Crystal Faris observed in School Library Journal. Emily finds a retreat in the basement of the family home, where she and Jon spent so many childhood hours. Attempting to resume her study of dance, she is hampered by her injuries, which still give her pain. Still, this basement is dear for her; it is as if Jon's spirit is still alive there. She still talks to him, still feels him there, still misses him every hour of every day.

However, when her parents decide to sell the house and move away from evil memories, Emily fears that she is about to lose her brother once more. When prospective buyers show up to view the house, Emily decides something must be done to sabotage the selling effort. She concocts stories and pranks to keep buyers at bay. Such efforts, "from lies culled from the stories of others to the simpler jelly on the banister—are amusing," according to a critic for Kirkus Reviews, and manage to "lighten the load of grief for readers," as Faris noted. Slowly, however, Emily begins to work her way through her grief. She is aided in these efforts by an understanding housekeeper, a therapist that she visits, and a nursing-home resident whom she befriends for a class assignment. These adults help her to see that letting go of the past is not a betrayal to Jon, but a reaffirmation of his importance in her life. Finally, Emily also realizes that her dreams of being a ballerina have been destroyed in the accident. Yet she is able, at book's end, to dedicate a final dance performance to her brother's memory.

Booklist's Kay Weisman praised Deans for the manner in which she "realistically shepherds her characters through their grief." Weisman went on to advise, "Give this to middle-graders in the mood for a satisfying four-hankie cry." Similarly, a contributor for Kirkus Reviews pointed to the "likable heroine" in this "poignant story." For Faris, the focus in Deans's novel "is on Emily's road to healing."

If you enjoy the works of Sis Boulos Deans

If you enjoy the works of Sis Boulos Deans, you might want to check out the following books:

Kevin Henkes, Olive's Ocean, 2003.

Polly Horvath, The Canning Season, 2003.

Janet Taylor Lisle, The Crying Rocks, 2003.

"For me, writing is like breathing—something that comes naturally and is a necessity of life," Deans once commented. "Since childhood, I've been motivated by a creative desire to capture with words the world around me. Dialogue is one of my favorite vehicles, and humor is usually in the driver's seat."

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2001, Hazel Rochman, review of Racing the Past, p. 1880; November 15, 2001, Hazel Rochman, review of Racing the Past, p. 567; January 1, 2002, review of Racing the Past, p. 766; September 1, 2003, Kay Weisman, review of Every Day and All the Time, p. 119.

Coventry Evening Telegraph (Coventry, England), March 10, 2003, Rachel Pinder, review of Racing the Past, p. 29.

Horn Book, July-August, 2001, review of Racing the Past, p. 449.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2003, review of Every Day and All the Time, p. 1071.

Maine Sunday Telegram, September 20, 1992, Jeanette K. Cakouros, review of The Legend of Blazing Bear.

Publishers Weekly, June 11, 2001, review of Racing the Past, p. 86.

School Library Journal, February, 1993, Lisa Mitten, review of The Legend of Blazing Bear, p. 92; June, 2001, Todd Morning, review of Racing the Past, p. 148; October, 2003, Jennifer Ralston, review of Racing the Past, p, 98; December, 2003, Crystal Faris, review of Every Day and All the Time, p. 148.

ONLINE

Gorham Times Online,http://gorhamtimes.com/sis_deans.htm/ (February 25, 2004), Phil Bartlett, "Sis Deans."

Henry Holt Web site,http://www.henryholtchildrensbooks.com/ (February 23, 2004).

San Diego State University Children's Literature Program Web site,http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/english/childlit/home/r-dean.html (February 23, 2004), review of Every Day and All the Time.*