As a student at Wichita State, Anne Welsbacher ’79 wrote theater reviews, then stopped.
“I didn’t want to be on that side of the fence,” she says. So, she tucked away her reporter’s notepad, thinking she’d try her hand at writing works that others would review. Then she took a playwriting class taught by Bela Kiralyfalvi. It didn’t go well.
“I wrote a very bad, one-act play, which I still keep for laughs,” she explains.
But writing has never been far from her mind. She’s written a number of books for children, specifically “reluctant readers,” 15- to 17-year-old boys reading at or below a fourth-grade level, something she says she fell into quite by accident.
“I edited a book on monster trucks, which I had never heard of,” she notes.
That began the cycle of learning about a topic, then teaching it to children — and herself. “I thought I didn’t like sharks,” she says. “I thought I didn’t like crocodiles. But as I learned about these things, I came to respect them. Except Komodo dragons. I don’t know that the world would be worse off without Komodo dragons.”
Today, Welsbacher, author of plays such as Terra Incognita and The Road To Rouen, lives in Santa Monica, Calif., where she writes books and edits a publication for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
