When most people take up a book to read or a pen to write, words themselves are just that—words.

However to Ellicott City author Jerdine Nolen, words constitute much more. 

“I just love what words do for us and how they can make us laugh or smile or move us,” Nolen explains.

As a child, Nolen carried around journals and wrote down her favorite words. When she got older, she’d read words in the stories from the Bible and plays by Shakespeare and become overwhelmed by their beauty.

“My dad was a minister, and we loved reading the Bible out loud…When you hear it spoken, it’s absolutely beautiful,” Nolen notes. “Shakespeare is another one. To hear that language and to hear the way the language is constructed…I think I fell in love with words.”

In fact, Nolen, who came from a humble background as the granddaughter of sharecroppers, has used words to mold her career as a teacher and award-winning children’s author.

“My mother used to say that I was a lot like John Henry—he was born with a hammer in his hand, and I was born with a pencil in mine,” she says.

Nolen, who teaches high school English locally, went from writing plays and poems in elementary school to authoring a handful of children’s picture books including "Raising Dragons," "Harvey Potter's Balloon Farm," "Thunder Rose," "Plantzilla," and "Christmas in the Time of Billy Lee."

Meanwhile, Nolen’s first novel, “Eliza’s Freedom Road: An Underground Railroad Diary,” has recently been released, and an official book launch event is set to take place in Baltimore at the end of January.

The book tells the story of Eliza, a girl born into slavery who decides to escape her indentured fate and flee toward freedom. In it, uses fables along the way to tie the novel together. 

She says the inspiration for the novel came through a desire to put together a collection of allegories like those found in folklore and religious texts. So she began to research stories and oral traditions and found many common themes throughout.

“I’m known for telling folk tales,” she explained. “We had a collection of fairytales in our house called ‘Mostly magic’ and I think I dog-eared every one of those pages and slept with that book under my pillow.”

The Illinois native recently sat down for an interview about her career at her home in Ellicott City, which she shares with her two children. Regal in appearance with mocha-colored skin and a placid face, Nolen, who is in her 50s, speaks with an easy cadence when it comes to her number one passion: words.

Q: Why do you think you developed such a passion for words and writing when you were young?

A: Often when I speak to young people I tell them I’m from the olden days… I say we had colors but we only had eight of them and we had to work for our fun… Video games hadn’t been invented yet…The whole gist of it was you had to create your play. You didn’t have toys given to you. The toys we made up and the games we made…I think coming from that kind of context, coming from that kind of world, we were constantly thinking of how we were going to entertain ourselves, and language was a huge part of my life.

Q: You said that you didn’t know you could attain a career as a writer. How did that change for you?

A: I didn’t know I could support myself as a writer, I didn’t know I was a writer—I thought everyone wrote journals, everyone wrote plays, everyone wrote poems or songs when the mood struck them… When I became a teacher I would put on a play every year with my students. Something would come up in the classroom and we’d use it as a context for our play… I would tailor make this thing…I was in my apartment one evening working on a play and a friend came over; she saw my stacks of journals and she said, ‘Oh Jerdine, I didn’t know you were a writer.’ I said in all seriousness to her, ‘Really, I didn’t know it either.’ I really didn’t know it…It was like the world opened up, and I started to pursue writing more seriously.

Q: Take me through how this novel came into fruition.

A: My editor had said, ‘Why don’t you do a collection of folk tales.’...I started to construct these stories. I kept hearing the storyteller’s voice…When you read a book, it has its own voice. Somehow it comes up with the cadence and syntax. I kept hearing this character telling the stories, and then I realized it was a young girl.

Q: The character Eliza is a natural storyteller who loves telling tales. Did you model her after yourself?

A: People often ask me if I pattern my characters after me; I don’t do it purposefully. It’s as if you’re putting a puzzle together, and it seemed that for the kind of world she lived in, and for the kind of thing she needed to do in the book to make the story, she needed to have that kind of context to work in.

Q: While the book’s setting starts off in Virginia, a good part of the novel is set within the Underground Railroad in Maryland. Is that significant?

Well yeah…To put it in Maryland specifically because what Maryland represented in the Underground Railroad; as I began to research, I was floored by how much or how many places even in Ellicott City were part of the Underground Railroad…Also with Maryland being such a central place, and given the history of the Eastern Shore and the great orator Frederick Douglas. I remember reading his narrative and something really struck a chord with me and I repeat this constantly especially when I’m around young people—Frederick Douglas said that it wasn’t until he learned to read and write that he began to think about how to make himself free…It wasn’t until he could read and write that he began to think. Can you imagine that? How much reading and writing impacts our thinking or is our thinking.

Q: In the book, Eliza’s mother passed down stories to Eliza, using a quilt as a storytelling device. Do you share stories with your own children?

A: When my kids were little, it was always, ‘Let me tell you about the time..’ That’s what her mother says to her in the novel…That was the key phrase my parents used when we knew a story was going to happen…Most of the stories I write—I invented…These were stories I would read to my kids.

Q: Do you feel successful and proud of yourself as a writer?

A: Absolutely…The modicum of success I feel is to create something.

 Nolen will speak about her newest book Saturday, January 22, from  2 – 4 p.m. at the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center, 39 West Lexington Street.

The event is co-sponsored by the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, Girl Scouts of Central Maryland, and WomanTalk Live. The event includes a meet-and-greet and book signing. Copies of “Eliza’s Freedom Road: An Underground Railroad Diary,” are also available for purchase. Admission is free.

For more information, visit: www.MDWomensHeritageCenter.org or call 410-767-0675.