'Patti Pelican and The Gulf Oil Spill' a hopeful, kid-friendly look at tragedy

The following article was originally published by Laurie Wiegler on Examiner.com, June 22, 2016. It has been lightly edited.

When Lynda Wurster Deniger saw the horrific sight April 20, 2010 coming from the TV set, she was devastated. "I would just sit there and bawl," she says of that day and the days that followed, the 87 days it took to cap the Macondo well off the southern coast of Louisiana.

But as a writer and former newspaper reporter, she wanted to turn her anguish into something that could help people. Her popular children's book, Salty Seas & His Heroic Friends, would prove the ideal launching-off point for the book she would write, buttressed again by the beautiful illustrations from Paulette Ferguson.

The children's book with the character of Captain Charley and friends Patti Pelican, Dottie Dolphin and Sammy Seagull introduced shrimping at sea, but it would be the second book, inspired by tragedy, that would be the writer's real challenge. And it was one she and her illustrator pulled off beautifully.

"I had Captain Charlie and Salty actually being involved in the boom and trying to help with the cleanup," Deniger says.

She began traveling around to Louisiana schools and sharing the story with school kids - not just reading to them, but "entertaining," she says. The sixtysomething light sees it as her mission to make sure the kids of today don't forget or in the case of the really young ones, miss learning about the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

"I don't mention BP in the book," she says, but acknowledges that the blown-up well on the cover is a pretty loud clue. She brings it up because someone said it'd be nice if BP could've helped in some way. Buying the books for the kids? Deniger sells them at the schools very inexpensively, and they come with a recording of her reading the book.

Asked if it was tough to put a positive spin on a tragic tale, she is not defensive. She explains that she went out to a rescue center to see how the brown pelicans were being washed. The oil-soaked birds' images that flooded the television airwaves for weeks were something else altogether up close.

"I called a man at the rescue center in Venice (La.) and asked if he'd be open to my coming down there," she says. "He said sure. I toured the facility, and took pictures, many of which would be used to make the illustrations (by Ferguson)."

The writer says she's not touring as much now, that interest is waning. People forget and move on, even as another oil spill, approximately 88,000 gallons from Shell Oil out on Timbalier Island, makes news. That gusher was snuffed quickly, hardly made national news, and certainly didn't inspire a book.

But the fact is: the state's national bird, the beloved brown pelican, is endangered. Thousands and thousands perished, and before they did so, suffered with oil-coated bodies. What Deniger is doing could be described as heroic, but she's not one to boast.

No, her mission is to make the kids understand.

"I take a bottle of water and dirty oil I got from my mechanic, and mix it together to show the kids," she says. I ask, 'What do you think is gonna happen? And they go 'Wow!', because oil and water don't mix."

To buy the book, please visit Amazon or check with your local booksellers.

Cover art: Used with permission. Illustrator: Paulette Ferguson