Local Writers for Tweens Tackle Racism and 2012 

When someone buys a copy of Middleworld at the Norwich Bookstore and wants it signed, owner Penny McConnel often calls up the authors, who live right down the street. “We offer a very personal signing service,” says Pamela Craik Voelkel with a chuckle.

Jon Voelkel and Pamela Craik Voelkel — who go by the byline “J & P Voelkel” — have entertained countless Vermont middle schoolers with a live presentation tied to their novel, which culminates in a surprise visit from a “Maya king.” (It’s actually a teacher wearing a costume created by the couple’s niece, with a towering headdress.) Now, the book they’ve been quietly promoting since 2007 — with help from Vermont booksellers and librarians, notes Pamela — has scored them an appearance on the “Today” show.

The coauthors have put down firm roots in Norwich, where they’ve been raising their three kids — now 17, 13 and 7 — for the past seven years. But their own origins, like the action of their book, are far-flung. Pamela is a UK native, while Jon is an American whose missionary parents raised him in South and Central America. They met while working at a London advertising agency and later founded their own, Craik Jones Watson Mitchell Voelkel Ltd.

After 15 years in London, the couple decided to settle down “halfway between our two families,” says Pamela. (Jon has relatives in Arizona.) In Vermont, Jon was “supposed to be writing a book on marketing, but it was just too boring,” he recalls. “I used to tell bedtime stories to the kids every night. My son had a favorite story about a monkey girl, and I thought, That would be such a great book.”

Middleworld was born from Jon’s memories of “things I went through when I was a kid, dragged by my parents through the jungle,” says the author, who confesses to having been, like protagonist Max Murphy, a less-than-ideal adventure traveler.

“He wrote the bones of it,” Pamela recalls, “and it was like a James Bond story or something — all guns and car chases. There were no female characters!” That changed when she started reworking the manuscript. Now, says Pamela, their collaboration means that “we talk about the plot endlessly between the two of us, and I do most of the writing.”

The couple also became Maya aficionados: “The more we researched the Maya, the more fascinated we got with them,” Jon explains. Soon they were taking their own children down to Central America, and Jon was studying up on Maya glyphs, which he calls “almost a visual language.” He replicated some in the novel’s black-and-white illustrations.

Middleworld was first published in 2007 by Smith & Sons, an imprint of Manchester, N.H.-based theater publisher Smith and Kraus. “It was their son who read the manuscript and told them they should publish it,” Pamela remembers. The novel sold 10,000 copies in hardcover, says Jon, but the publisher “didn’t have resources to take it further.”

An agent contacted the Voelkels, and that connection led to the publication of a revised paperback edition of Middleworld last April by Egmont USA. The couple just finished an East Coast tour, hitting destinations such as New Orleans, D.C. and Cape Cod, and will embark on another circuit in September. This summer they’ll visit camp kids at Vergennes’ Basin Harbor Club at an event coordinated by Shelburne’s Flying Pig Bookstore.

The second Jaguar Stones book is finished and should appear by the end of the year, says Pamela. The books have something of a time hook: Marketing materials for Middleworld tout its “tie-in to the 2012 phenomenon.”

Indeed, ancient Maya culture is all over modern pop culture these days — if not for the right reasons. When the couple give their school presentation, says Jon Voelkel, “one of the No. 1 questions we get” is whether the world really has a 2012 expiration date. “We found that a lot of children are really worried about it,” says Pamela.

While the approaching end of a 400-year baktun — or Maya calendar cycle — does figure in the novel, the couple are adamant on the point that “the Maya had no expectation that the calendar would end in 2012,” says Jon. “A lot of this is due to a mistake that archaeologists made about 50 years ago.” He notes that the Maya had “no tradition of a cataclysmic ending of the world” and believed in “the cyclical nature of time, going on in perpetuity.”

The Voelkels seem to have succeeded in their efforts to get kids to see the Maya as innovators rather than doomsayers. Some young fans “email us really complicated Maya questions,” says Jon. “They just become absolutely passionate about the Maya.”

As for the couple’s own children, “we’ve taken them to 30 different Maya sites,” says Pamela. The Voelkel kids have kayaked underground rivers and tracked howler monkeys in the rainforest — as the couple related recently in an installment of AOL Travel’s “You Took Your Children Where?”

“We get them to eat all sorts of interesting things,” says Jon, whose own official bio asserts that he “survived monkey stew” as a child.

Are the Voelkel kids better travelers than Max Murphy, a couch potato who can barely force himself to swallow a tamale? Their early excursions have certainly “encouraged them to be more adventurous,” says Pamela.

Middleworld could have that effect on its young readers, too.