How Many Days to America? by Eve Bunting

They rejected it, but the undeterred Eve then sent it to an educational publisher, who accepted it in 1971. “I was the only kid in boarding school who loved to do other kids’ homework for them.” Eve sent one of her stories to Jack and Jill, a children’s magazine. When her children were in junior and senior high school, Eve joined a writing class at her local college because she wondered what she would do with the rest of her life. The Buntings remained in San Francisco for about a year and eventually Ed got a job in Los Angeles with Kaiser Permanente. We had no house and three kids, but I had faith in Ed and faith in God, not necessarily in that order,” Eve said. “People were leaving.” The Buntings packed up their three kids and came to America. “Ed was really ambitious and there was a cap on how ambitious you could be in Ireland then,” Eve recalled. Even though they were Protestant, Eve and Ed had many Catholic friends and didn’t like the atmosphere. In 1958, “The troubles were really bad,” Eve said. They later settled in Belfast and had a daughter Christine and two sons Sloan and Glen. “My grade advisor told me not to pursue English because I wasn’t good enough.” Eve left school after two years, not because of her grade advisor, but because she met Ed Bunting, then an upper classman and now her husband of 51 years and a retired hospital administrator.

From boarding school Eve went to Queen’s University, Belfast where she studied English and other languages. She got home only for vacations and occasional long weekends and missed her parents.

“He’d fill up a tea chest,” she said, and bring it home.Īt age seven, Eve left home for boarding school in Belfast because her parents wanted more than what the small elementary school in town could provide. He was a big, rough, tough cattle-dealing man, and his friends would never have believed he loved poetry.” And while Yeats was her dad’s favorite Irish poet, he read long epic poetry to Eve, who distinctly remembers Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” and Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.” “I thought all stories were written like poems,” she said.Īfter reading one of these epics, Sloan Bolton would look at his daughter and ask, “Now, darlin’, do you understand it?” Eve says her father scoured the countryside and went to farm auctions to buy up all the books.

Both of her parents were great readers.Įve remembers sitting in her father’s lap and being read to. From her earliest years in Maghera, a small town in County Derry, books and stories filled her life. It was only natural that the young Eve Bolton would grow up to be a writer, and a very prolific one who would produce more than 200 books for children.

How Many Days to America? by Eve Bunting