Jonah Frangiosa reported this story on assignment for the Vermont Community News Group. The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.
In “Chicken Coop Chaos,” a chicken named Pearl Hen has trouble maintaining the order of her henhouse after Wendell, the rambunctious rooster, moves into her space. The children’s story, according to author Nancy Tavares, aims to convey the importance of patience and understanding and acceptance of others.
“Being able to live together and celebrating your differences,” Tavares said, summarizing the message.
“Chicken Coop Chaos,” released in October, is Tavares’ first published book. For the South Burlington resident and former middle school reading teacher, the story is an ode to the chicken coop her grandparents kept on their dairy farm in Pennsylvania. Amid the anarchy of chickens, rabbits, hens and even a peacock that shared the lively space, Tavares and her sisters would delight in gathering eggs as children, she recalled.
“It was such a hectic clutter,” Tavares says with a chuckle. “The chickens would be clustering around your legs, and I loved that experience. My sister, not so much.”
Tavares, 63, said she hopes the positive reception she has received for “Chicken Coop Chaos” leads to more publishing opportunities for future children’s books with similar themes. The book, which she self-published with the support of BiblioKid Publishing, is intended for readers from ages 4 to 7 and has hit the shelves of eight Vermont bookstores, as well as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Brooke Gansemer, CEO and publisher of BiblioKid, said she would call “Chicken Coop Chaos” an overwhelming success. “This is the best-seller for the month,” she said. “We almost can’t keep it on shelves. We’re very proud of Nancy’s success and think it’s well-deserved.”
Tavares grew up in Fairport Harbor, Ohio, where both her parents worked in education. Her father was a teacher and the principal of her local high school. She also described him as a talented writer with many published works, including a genealogy of the Tavares family lineage and a detailed history of Fairport Harbor. Tavares’ parents read to her and her two sisters from a young age and emphasized the importance of literature.
Every summer in the early 1960s, the family traveled to their house in Montgomery, where they had no television or telephones. She and her sisters would spend their days reading.
Tavares remembered their frequent visits to the Montgomery Town Library and said she can still picture their favorite librarian, Mrs. Depew. The library had a policy that each guest could only check out two books at a time, but Depew let the familiar trio of Tavares bookworms take out as many titles they wished.
“For us, that wasn’t enough,” Tavares said. “Two books? We’d be done in a day!”
Even in elementary school, Tavares said she hoped to someday publish both her writing and artwork. After she went to college at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, her letters home displayed more signs of her inclination toward writing.
“There was a lot of voice in my letters, my parents said,” Tavares said. “They would read those letters, and it was as if I was right there talking to them. My kids would say the same thing, because when they went off to college, I would write to them every week.”
Tavares left Bowling Green before graduating and moved to South Burlington, where she embraced the memories of her family’s Vermont vacations and the beauty of the natural environment. She worked at the University Mall where a very “outgoing, talkative and confident” customer continuously visited her, asking her for a date. After several of his attempts, she accepted the offer to go with Thomas Tavares to a barn dance in Danville. They married in 1981 and raised a daughter and son.
On a neighbor’s recommendation, Nancy Tavares took a job in literacy support at Rick Marcotte Central School, where she worked one-on-one with middle school students for 30 years. Her goal, she said, was to figure out what interested each student and select the “perfect fit” of a book to pique their curiosity.
“It was that light that would turn on in a student that really sparked the enjoyment in teaching,” Tavares said.
She said she intends to do the same with her own writing: spark excitement in a young person’s reading experience.
Tavares also wanted to incorporate the rural Vermont landscape in her book. For nearly a decade, she mulled over the story that would become “Chicken Coop Chaos,” occasionally jotting down pieces that came to her. At one point, she realized she had an entire story in her head and wanted to put it out into the world.
“I got to the point where I thought, ‘I need to do something to move this forward,’” Tavares said.
After taking an online course about creating and publishing a children’s book, Tavares began to refine her work. She cut the number of words by half, following advice she got for acceptable children’s book length, while maintaining the story.
Through a suggestion during the course, she submitted the finished product to BiblioKid, a so-called “hybrid” publisher that provides guidance to authors who pay to put together and distribute their book themselves. For her first book, Tavares stuck to the writing and delegated the illustrations to Sian Moore, a freelance illustrator whom BiblioKid recommended.
Moore drew cartoonish, anthropomorphic chickens living in their furnished coop.
On Oct. 17, more than 60 guests attended the launch party for “Chicken Coop Chaos.” Tavares has yet to do a public reading but plans to visit Rick Marcotte School in South Burlington to read to younger students and describe the creative and publishing process to those in upper grades.
Tavares would like to instill a love for literature in the youngest generations by creating books that she would have read to her own children, who are now out of college. By making her stories available to the public, her reach can stretch far beyond the Tavares family, she said.
“With books,” Tavares said, “I feel like part of me is furthering the education and creating a little bit of fun and enjoyment for parents and kids to share together.”