Columnist Susan Snyder: Storyteller feeds need to read

Friday, June 13, 2003 | 5:14 a.m.

Marie J. Rosas isn't after a Newbery Medal.

Her book, "Stories for Kids Only," isn't designed to be a contender for the American Library Association's top children's literature award. She figures it's a winner if it raises a little money to help feed homeless people and helps foster a love of reading in children.

The North Las Vegas great-grandmother believes a full belly and the ability to read are advantages no one should take for granted.

Rosas, 70, saw people struggle for both while growing up in Chicago as the oldest of 11 children. Sitting in the home she shares with one of her daughters, Rosas told of how her formal education ended at age 8 and her father labored as a machinist to make ends meet for a family of 13.

"I taught myself to read. I sounded out the letters because that's how you learn," she said.

"An aunt bought me a copy of 'Grimm's Fairy Tales,' and I read that. I always wondered why my cousins had so many things and my brothers and sisters and I didn't have so much," Rosas said. "But my parents did the best they could. They fed us well."

Rosas said it was up to her to feed her mind.

"Imagination is a wonderful thing. You can see stories in your head," she said. "That's what I did as a child. I read those stories, and I could see them. That's what kids need to be able to do."

Rosas, a widow for two years, moved to the Las Vegas Valley with her husband in 1986. She started writing down her thoughts in poems, essays and stories a couple of years later. A box full of rejection letters document her first publishing attempts.

She enrolled in a writing correspondence course eight years ago, hoping to improve her skills. It helped, but she said she regrets not having the formal education she knows would have benefited her more.

"I could've been more help to people," said the mother of four, grandmother of eight and great-grandmother of seven. "I wanted to be a psychologist or maybe one of those people who dig up bones. I love words. I like looking into stuff."

She writes on a computer her son helped her buy six years ago. She taught herself to use it. She had the instruction manual. She could read. That's all it takes to learn, she said.

In 2000, Rosas paid a self-publishing company to print her first book of poems. A second book of essays and poems was printed in 2001.

Her collection of children's stories, released in May, is based on tales drawn from her family's experiences and published with $1,500 she scraped together. It was printed by 1st Books Library and is available at 1stbooks.com.

Rosas promises to donate 25 percent of the sales to the Las Vegas Rescue Mission.

"I've got a roof over my head, a closet full of clothes and a full stomach," she said. "I don't care if they want to work or not. If people are hungry, we have to feed them."

Her book has some typos and no pictures. But Rosas knows children make their own pictures if given the words -- even when they struggle to sound them out.

"The world children seek is make- believe, where they are in control, and they can learn good and bad," she writes in her book. "Reading is this world."