Fort author shares inspiration; releases fourth, final ‘Meena’ book

By Kim McDarison 

Parents and educators of children, ages 8-12, are likely familiar with a host of fictional characters. 

There’s “Clementine,” “Junie B. Jones,” “Judy Moody,” and “Ramona,” Fort Atkinson-based author of children’s books, Karla Manternach said, and thanks to Manternach, beginning in 2019, when the first in a four-book series was published by Simon and Schuster, there’s “Meena.”  

Manternach said the final book in the series, “Team Meena,” was influenced by a host of experiences, including softball teams organized by the Fort Atkinson Parks and Recreation Department, where both of her daughters played in their youth, and where she attended, while writing Team Meena, an “evaluation day” held in the Fort Atkinson Municipal Building gym to gather inspiration and research. 

Team Meena was released in hardcover late last month, Manternach said, and while the book closes the chapter on the exploits of 9-year-old Meena, Manternach said it’s not her last book. 

She has already completed a book for middle school-aged readers which has been sent to her agent and she is working on a second manuscript. 

So who is Meena? And how, and why, did she spring from the imagination of Manternach? 

Seated Friday in her Fort Atkinson home, Manternach recounted a multifaceted journey that ultimately led to Meena and her continuing career as a writer. 

Life in Anamosa, Iowa 

Manternach grew up in the small community of Anamosa, Iowa, with a population of about 5,000 people. While she described the community as surrounded by farmland, she didn’t think of herself as living a rural lifestyle. 

“I wasn’t a farm kid,” she said. 

Idle time in those youthful years was spent with her three siblings, and especially a younger brother, with whom she engaged in “imaginative play,” she said. 

“As a kid, I liked to play outside. We had a big yard and when ‘Star Wars’ came out, we played Star Wars most of the time. We would play the parts of the characters and with action figures when we could get our hands on them,” she added. 

At the time, she recalled, lots of television shows seemed to carry a theme of independence: “There were a lot of shows about runaways and people who were out on the road, like the ‘Incredible Hulk,’ so we pretended we were out on the road, and on our own, and our evil family was always after us. 

“I had lovely parents, by the way.” 

While Manternach’s nuclear family lived in Anamosa, her parents were both from a neighboring town, about 10 miles away, which teemed with members of the extended family.  

“My mom was one of 16 kids and my dad was one of six kids. I was one of about 40 cousins,” she said. 

The extended family had learned to share: “Everything we had was second-hand. Furniture, clothing, we would get boxes of clothing that went from house to house,” Manternach remembered. 

Offering an assessment of herself in those years from her now adult perspective, she said: “I think of myself as a grubby kid. I didn’t like to be clean until middle school. I didn’t want to brush my hair and I remember having battles with my mother about it.”  

Also in middle school, she developed an interest in theater, which, she said, “was like the imaginative play taking on an adult form.”  

Living some six hours from Chicago, she said, even as a child, “I was in love with musicals, but ‘Phantom of the Opera’ was never going to come where I can see it,” and while she said writing might have been her favorite subject in school, she also poured her time into band and choir.

She played piano, clarinet and sang, she noted, and participated in plays in sixth grade. 

In high school, she had to make a choice between continuing in band or choir. She chose band, which meant she could not participate as an actor in musicals. Instead, she performed from the pit with other members of the band. 

Still, she said, her love of musicals continued.   

“I was listening to musicals all the time and my siblings were in the musicals, which was a sore point. I’ve since healed from the experience,” she quipped. 

In the early 1990s, standing tall with 100 of her classmates, Manternach graduated from high school and began a new adventure. 

Service and lobbying 

After high school graduation Manternach said ancient civilizations had captivated her attention, and she entered Dubuque Loras College, a private Catholic institution, where her time was spent immersed in classical studies and theology. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in classical studies and a minor in religious studies, and considered attending grad school, but instead, landed on a plan to take a year off and pursue “something different,” she said. 

She found the next new experience working for a service-oriented organization, which she described as similar to AmeriCorps in its structure and mission. 

She arrived in Baltimore, working in the inner city as a full-time volunteer at an emergency outreach center, she said. 

“We worked with clients in crisis; they needed help with food, rent, gas, electric,” she said.  

While in Baltimore, she was reunited with a friend, Brian Zanin, whom she had met while attending Loras, and the two began to date. 

She also entered grad school in pursuit of her masters degree in theology. She graduated from Washington Theological Union, Washington D.C., in 1998. 

While earning her master’s degree, Manternach said she began working as an intern at a Washington D.C.-based lobbying organization called: “Bread for the World,” which focused on issues associated with food and poverty. 

After Manternach and Zanin each completed grad school, they made plans to return to the Midwest and marry. 

As they considered their return, they had determined that they might like Madison, Wis., but, at the time, neither had a job. An aunt offered an opportunity to the couple to live in her summer home outside of Edgerton, and the couple agreed. 

Isolation and freelancing 

Manternach described the move to Edgerton from Washington D.C. as “a big move culturally.” 

She described her new home as “pretty,” but “isolating.” 

After the move, Zanin began working for Campus Ministries at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and Manternach began freelancing. 

She turned to her contacts in Washington D.C., looking for projects she could undertake from home. She wrote and edited newsletters and devotional publications, and articles about grants received by organizations and how those resources would be applied, she said.  

She also started experimenting with fiction writing, she added. 

Her first attempt was a novel for adults, which told the fictionalized story of a group of young people who arrived in Baltimore as volunteers after college, she said. 

After a year of working on the manuscript, she said: “I was feeling stuck with it, so when I had kids, I stuck it in a drawer.” 

She finished the manuscript after her youngest daughter began kindergarten, she added. 

Finding children’s literature, and Meena 

Manternach said she and her husband have two daughters, ages 20 and 16. The older daughter is in college and the younger is attending Fort Atkinson High School. 

In December of 2001, the couple was expecting their first child and moved to a home in Fort Atkinson. 

In this home, they would raise their children, and Manternach said, as a family, they read children’s literature. 

“I had no interest in writing children’s books until I had children and started reading children’s literature,” Manternach said.  

As she read to her children, and watched them explore the world, and was around other children, she began to see writing children’s books as a fun project, she noted. 

“My own children were so entertaining. Children are hilarious. It is just fun to be around kids, and hear their voices, and be inspired by the things they care about, and the way they see the world. The books we enjoyed the most together and inspired me the most were about grade school girls who were funny and quirky, and not well-behaved,” she said. 

Nurtured from within this growing new lifestyle, Meena was born, Manternach said, adding that her daughters were entering grades 1 and 4 when she wrote the first Meena book. 

Who is Meena? 

Musing over the question: Who is Meena? Manternach said her character is modeled primarily after her eldest daughter. 

“In the first book, the first thing that happens to Meena is she is diagnosed with epilepsy, and that happened to my daughter. While the story is fictionalized, there is some real world stuff in the first one. I knew what it was like to have a kid having seizures because that happened to us,” she said.  

Still, she said, she sees Meena as her own, entirely separate person. 

Meena’s adventures are “made up,” Manternach said, “and yet all of the seeds throughout the stories and characters were definitely reflections of real life.”

With the most recently published book completing the series, Manternach said she would not miss her character, because, she said: “I don’t feel like she’s gone. 

“I was inspired by my oldest daughter, but I got used to seeing things as Meena would; I don’t think that will stop.” 

As an example of how she and Meena might approach the world differently, Manternach said: “Meena finds everything beautiful and interesting. She is likely to pick up trash because she knows she can make it into something cool. I don’t do that at all, but because of having written her, I look at things now. 

“She is just always going to keep me company.”  

Publishing 

Along with writing, Mantenach said, she also needed to learn how to become published. 

When she began thinking about writing a children’s book she visited a Barnes and Noble store to see what was on the shelves. 

Shelf space was limited, she said, and the titles on display included such choices as “The Boxcar Children” and “The Magic Treehouse.” 

She needed a way to compete. 

The answer came in finding an agent, Mantenach said. After finishing her first Meena manuscript she offered it for critique. Her understanding of her market and book-writing concept developed over time, she said. 

“I had to write a book first and then get the attention of somebody who would be willing to represent it so they can sell your book,” she said. 

It took two years before the first Meena book was published, she noted. 

“I had only written one when the agent sent it to Simon and Schuster, and they said they had interest, but also wanted a second, so I wrote that, and then pitched a third, and they bought it, and a fourth, and they bought it. And I didn’t pitch any more after that,” she said, noting that after the first book, the next three in the series were each published about a year apart, in 2020, 2021, and last month, respectively. 

Looking ahead

Mantenach said her next book has been written for an audience, ages 12-14. 

Currently submitted for publishing through her agent, she described it as a “coming-of-age and friendship story.”

She described a second book, now in the manuscript stage as “a reimagining of a classic tale.”  

Once that story is completed, she said, “I don’t know if I’ll continue in fiction, and I’m kind of excited not to know.” 

She is considering shifting her focus to begin writing for adults. 

All four books within the Meena series are available at the Dwight Foster Public Library and on Amazon.com. 

A link to the newest story about Meena offered through Amazon is here: https://www.amazon.com/Team-Meena-Zee-Books/dp/1665903929.