Valley Stream resident authors children's book

Connections to home state's coal mining, pollution structure story's theme

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After Rob Fouch read the children’s classic “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle to his 9-year-old son, Tyler, he asked if Tyler would like a story written just for him.

“He was into it, so I started two days later,” said Fouch, a copy editor at Newsday.

He set the story in West Virginia, where he spent his childhood playing with his dog, Boomer, in the forests near his house and “communing with nature,” he said. He used those memories to construct a story of a boy with a special ability to understand animals. “Little & Big” is the story of the boy’s befriending of Big, a creature with magical powers that Fouch based on the mythical Bigfoot. The two set off on an adventure with an environmental theme, trying to preserve Big’s powers as they fade due to humans’ pollution of the wilderness he’s inexorably connected to.

Fouch wrote the book for a year, reading it to his son and watching his reactions, then altering scenes that failed to keep Tyler’s interest. An occasional feature writer for Newsday during his 20 years there, he had writing experience as well as the advantage of feedback from newsroom friends who could offer expertise. He edited the book for another year before self-publishing through the Amazon service CreateSpace.

As the grandson of a coal miner, Fouch felt some ambivalence about the story’s message and how people in his home state would receive it.

“I was worried people would think I was attacking the industry,” Fouch said. “It scares the whatever out of me, seeing what goes on with the weather…On one level it’s terrible, but West Virginia wouldn’t have an economy if it weren’t for coal mining.”

As aware as he was of coal’s benefits back home, its toxic effect has also impacted his family. His brother in Charleston was forced to drink bottled water for two months after the Elk River spill in January, when 7,500 gallons of a chemical foam used to remove impurities from coal leaked from a facility in the Kanawha River Valley, contaminating the drinking water of 300,000 people.

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