Former Cedar Rapids mayor turns love of words into children’s book

It's one thing to run a city. It's another to write a book, as Lee Clancey can now attest.

Clancey, the former mayor of Cedar Rapids, has written 'A Bale of Turtles,' a children's book about 'nouns of assembly,' as in a bale of turtles.

Writing a book and being a mayor, Clancey says, have one thing in common. They're both labors of love.

'Being mayor was the favorite part of my career, despite the pushback, the heartache,' she says, referring to the tumultuous election of 2001 that unseated her and others on the incumbent council. 'It was wonderful going into work every day and leveraging a title to do things for a community. I still feel so grateful for having had the opportunity.'

Clancey served as mayor from 1996 to 2002, winning three two-year terms in the commission form of government, when being mayor was a full-time job, with a full-time salary and staff. She then was president of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce from 2005 to 2008.

Now 66 and retired, she is largely out of the public eye. She and husband, Jay, are downsizing for a move to Blair House. They spend time, too, at their home in California, close by their three adult sons, all living in the Los Angeles area and working in the production side of the entertainment industry, and their two grandchildren.

Read More: Review - 'A Bale of Turtles' 

It was a major adjustment, Clancey says, to step away from the high-profile roles she'd had in the community.

But, she says, 'we have to make space for younger people to be involved. I'm not distressed about my lack of involvement any more. It really is time for new ideas and fresh faces. My expectations of myself had to change. I had to change.'

And so the next chapter in Clancey's life became a children's book, one she'd been thinking about writing for some time.

'I've always been fascinated with words,' she says, with a particular fascination for 'nouns of assembly' — those words that apply to groups of animals. Some are well-known, like a gaggle of geese or a murder of crows. Others not so much.

'I can't remember exactly when I first learned about nouns of assembly, but I just thought they were the coolest things, and I started to keep a list of all of them,' she says.

Inspired by the arrival of her grandchildren, Clancey wrote the rhyming text for a children's book about those nouns. She turned to her sister, Mary Rothermel, 60, a Seattle artist, for the illustrations.

The result is 'A Bale of Turtles' (Archway Publishing, 38 pages, $24.95 hardcover, $16.95 soft cover). The book is available in an e-edition, too, at the Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites.

'With the advent of social media, I think words are getting lost, vocabulary is getting lost,' Clancey says. 'I think it's important, especially for young people, to have a broad vocabulary in order to be successful in their lives.

'Part of this book was written in hopes of extending people's vocabularies. There hasn't been one single adult who's seen the book who hasn't said, 'I didn't know that!''

Depending on how sales of this book go, Clancey would like to team with her sister for another book on the animals of Africa.

'Can you imagine a book that has a crash of rhinoceroses, a tower of giraffes, a memory of elephants?' she asks. 'I've already started the text.'