Obituary: Audrey Baird's poetry painted stormy skies in children's minds

With a rhythm pulsing in simplicity, Audrey Baird made images blossom in a child's mind of the stormy world all around.

Baird, a St. Paul native and author of poetry for young readers whose Once Upon a Time magazine encouraged others to pursue their passion for creating children's literature, died May 29. She was 78 and died of complications from a fall a few weeks earlier.

Daughter Tracy Gripentrog said Tuesday that as she grew up in Mendota Heights with her brother and sister "we spent every weekend at the library. There was always a new story that she had to read to us. … Even on camping trips, always, always, always, stories were being read to us."

In an interview with an online trade newsletter a few years ago, Baird said her quarterly magazine existed to assure those trying to break into children's literature that "someone is out there feeling as they do, who understands, who's been through whatever they're experiencing and can hold out a hand, and maybe a cup of pretend camomile tea."

In many ways during its 19-year run until 2009, Once Upon a Time was a nurturer of fledgling children's writers and illustrators. Among her pearls of wisdom from the quarterly publication: "You cannot be a writer without first being a reader. This is carved in stone! Mind me! Don't argue, just do it. It's called preparation."

Veteran writers with numerous published titles also turned to Once Upon a Time, she continued, such as when she received a letter from one author fighting a dry spell.

"The writer … drew the shades, was overeating brownies, and had all but given up," Baird said. "Then our magazine came, and she saw she wasn't alone. She snapped up the shades, fed the rest of the brownies to the goat and started sending out [manuscripts] again."

Barbara Seuling, another magazine contributor who has written more than 60 books and teaches in New York City and Vermont, said she had "many a student who came to me and discovered the magazine and felt so inspired by it."

As for her own writing, Baird had numerous poems and short stories published in magazines such as Cricket, Highlights for Children and Turtle. She then won reviewers' hearts with "Storm Coming!" a collection of meteorologically inspired poems published by Boyds Mills Press in 2001.

In an online review that year, prolific children's author and occasional literary critic Judy Delton, of St. Paul, wrote, "If you didn't like rainy weather, you will now. You will embrace not only rain, but thunder, lightening, rainbows, puddles, fog, galoshes, wind, drizzle and clouds."

Delton, who died in 2002, added that she was "amazed at Audrey's freshness. Take lines like 'Churning clouds with heavy eyebrows brush the hills at daybreak.' … What an original, appropriate metaphor."

"Storm Coming!" was a Best Children's Books of the Year 2002 selection by Bank Street College of Education, which prints a yearly guide for teachers, librarians and parents.

"Baird's collection gets past cute, conveying the sense that poetry is a special language," noted a Chicago Tribune review of "Cold Snap!"

"She always loved storms and rain," Gripentrog said of her mother. "Riding in the car in the rain, that was one of her favorite things to do. … Sometimes we'd go out for a ride because it was raining."

Fraustino said Baird "had a lovely ear for rhythms and a talent for turning a fresh image in her poetry. She also understood a child's perspective on the world."

Baird is preceded in death by her husband, Gordon. Along with Gripentrog, Baird is survived by a son, David Baird, and a daughter, Wendy Nelson. Services have been held.