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Mary Gordon Kerr holds her two books, What Lies Beneath the Whirlpool of Time and The Mystery of the 13th Coin. Both of her books are illustrated by muralist, Jeff Welch.

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Mary Gordon Kerr is shown here with Miss Sue Hopkins’ (center) class. She collaborated with the Mount Pleasant Academy students to write What Lies Beneath the Whirlpool of Time.

The St. Simons Island native with a degree in journalism saw right away how a book could captivate young students.

When she took the picture book written by her sister and illustrated by herself to her son Harrison’s class, a light bulb went off.

As a parent, she wanted to be involved with her child’s learning. A huge plus was Harrison’s second grade teacher at Mount Pleasant Academy, Sue Hopkins.

Much to Kerr’s delight, her son was already interested in books.

So, she thought, why not get the students involved in plotting out her book?

It was really up to [Hopkins] who values unconventional learning.

“She has a passion for learning. [Hopkins] encourages them and pushes them, for example, by using harder vocabulary words,” Kerr said.

 Kerr wrote the first chapter of The Mystery of the 13th Coin about a boy named Trip and his best friend, Sam, who find a silver coin in the weeds of an old, abandoned South Carolina plantation.

With the help from their friend Emily, adventures abound, including a travel back into time.

Kerr welcomed the ideas of the students to complete the chapters. She would regularly meet with students to discuss where the story should go.

Input varied.

For example, one student liked to make everyone laugh and loved the idea of a hula-hooping dog.

Kerr incorporated the idea by putting a tattoo of the whimsical hoola pup on the arm of a pirate.

Although she never told them to, students drew pictures of what they thought should happen next.

Kerr has a whole binder of the students’ pictures.

When she could not find the perfect publisher, Kerr collected her graphic arts background and established High Tide Publishing, LLC here in Mount Pleasant.

The finished result was The Mystery of the 13th Coin written by the second graders in the 2005-2006 school year.

In her recent book,  What Lies Beneath the Whirlpool of Time, her son, Will, was a part of the project that took part in the 2007-2008 school year at Mount Pleasant Academy.

As with the her first book, the story starts with a character finding something unusual.

“I like to keep it open-ended where we can go with the story,” Kerr said.

She was committed to the idea of completing the book, taking one chapter at a time — “if you put your mind to it, you can do it,” she said.

In What Lies Beneath the Whirlpool of Time, Robert Sweeney is intrigued when he finds a mysterious bottle floating in the surf of Sullivan’s Island.

When he brings the bottle on his class field trip to the Charleston Maritime Museum, he discovers that there is indeed something unusual about the bottle.

Using Kerr’s tactic of traveling back in time, Robert travels back to Civil War times and interacts with a slave boy and the crew from “The Hunley.”

Kerr said that in this book, there is more involved than the plot. Issues of a bully and the idea of a slave perhaps should make readers question what would happen if one could change history.

“I want to peak their interest in history. In third grade at a lot of schools, the students are studying the Civil War,”  Kerr said.  “Something like this could spark their interest even more.”

This year Kerr has her daughter, Molly in Ms. Hopkins’ class.

It would not be a surprise to see a fantasy addition in the near future.

If you want to go

Kerr will be at Barnes and Noble in Mount Pleasant from 1-3 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26 to sign copies of her second children’s novel, What Lies Beneath the Whirlpool of Time. She will be joined by students from the Mount Pleasant Academy class who participated in weekly brainstorming sessions as part of the crafting of the story during the 2007-2008 school year. The students will also be signing copies of the book.

(Helen Ravenel can be reached at helen@moultrienews.com. )