She Was Nice to Mice (and Still Is)

Actor and author Ally Sheedy to visit Garrison
On Saturday (Jan. 17), the Desmond-Fish Public Library in Garrison will host a creative writing workshop for children and teens ages 8 to 13 led by Ally Sheedy. Philipstown resident Emily Lansbury will interview the actor and author before she is presented with the Alice Curtis Desmond Award for Excellence in Children's Literature.
Sheedy is best known for her roles in The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire, both released in 1985. But a decade earlier, when she was 12, she wrote a children's book, She Was Nice to Mice, a memoir of a literary mouse in the court of Queen Elizabeth I that was published by McGraw-Hill and two years later in paperback by Dell. She also published a collection of poetry in 1991, Yesterday I Saw the Sun.

Sheedy says her Garrison library visit is designed to encourage reading. "I am a big reader," she says. "It's about different ways to look at the world, and you get that from reading a lot of books."
She also admits to being "a history obsessive," which is what inspired She Was Nice to Mice. As a child, she watched Anne of the Thousand Days, a 1969 film starring Richard Burton as King Henry VIII and Geneviève Bujold as Anne Boleyn, his second wife.
Because of that movie, "I got obsessed with the Tudors; I got obsessed with Elizabeth I," Sheedy recalls. "I wanted to be in that world all the time. I read everything I could find," including A Little Princess, a 1905 novel by Frances Hodgson, and the Mary Poppins series by P.L. Travers, which led to a further focus on British novelists and British history.

About 15 years ago, she began to help her mother, Charlotte, at her literary agency. "Because I read so much, I started reading manuscripts and writing up editorial reports," she says. "That led to working with some writers one-on-one, to look at their structure and story arc and see if there's a way to get their manuscripts into the best possible shape for submission to publishers.
"I'm better at writing an analysis of somebody else's writing than I am at coming up with my own ideas. For some reason, I'm really suited to taking apart stories. Maybe it has something to do with taking apart scripts."

Sheedy says her favorite book is The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, by Peter Frankopan, and that she enjoys podcasts such as The Rest is History. "I love to read nonfiction," she says. "I thought there were — even at this age [she's 63] — gaps in my education about world history. I've been on this search to fill those holes."
When asked if the students at the workshop will have seen her iconic films, she says: "I don't think that they're going to know. We'll skip right over that and just talk about writing. I did write a book when I was 12, so — you never know."
The Desmond-Fish library is located at 472 Route 403 in Garrison. To register for the free event, which begins at 2 p.m., see dub.sh/DF-ally-sheedy. She Was Nice to Mice is out of print, but the library has 10 copies to lend.