Alice Cary

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Rosemary Wells

Interview by Alice Cary

Rosemary Wells is one busy lady. Her prolific career as a children’s author has spanned more than 40 years and produced at least 120 books that are cherished by children around the world. However, her latest novel, On the Blue Comet, took a bit longer than most to complete—30 years, to be precise.

Three decades ago, Wells created the book’s hero, Oscar, an 11-year-old who lives in Cairo, Illinois, in the 1930s. She wrote several chapters, only to reach a moment when Oscar comes close to being killed in a bank robbery. That’s when he somehow ends up on a train—and not just any train: a Lionel electric train.

The creator of Max and Ruby turns her talents to a time-travel adventure that doubles as a history lesson.

At that point, Wells was stuck. Very stuck. “I knew that he had jumped onto the train, and I didn’t know how to deal with that. I didn’t know that it was a time-travel book,” she remembers.

That changed three years ago, when a revelation about Oscar came to her in the shower. “It occurred to me, and I immediately went to the computer and rewrote the whole thing. I just wrote it out flat,” Wells says by phone from Connecticut, where she lives, writes, illustrates and makes creative sparks fly.

On the Blue Comet was well worth the wait. This thrilling adventure and takes young readers across the country in the 1930s and ’40s. “It’s about Oscar, it’s about the Midwest, and it’s about how we were during the Depression, and how people lived through it,” Wells explains. “It’s about history and the war coming.”

She adds, "Although I was born during the war, in 1943, I still had enough contact, as most of us did back then, to know the Depression age, and to connect with the first half of the twentieth century pretty easily."

Wells, whose books include the novels Lincoln and His Boys and Red Moon at Sharpsburg, loves to dig deep into history. "There are all kinds of guessing games in the book," she says of On The Blue Comet. "There are, I think, 15 presidents mentioned. I had a lot of fun having an 11-year-old John Kennedy appear."

After Oscar’s mother dies, he and his father immerse themselves in creating elaborate Lionel train layouts. However, when his father loses his job, they are forced to sell their house and beloved trains. Dad heads to California to find work, leaving Oscar in the care of his fussy aunt and prissy cousin. The boy’s salvation comes from a kind stranger he meets, an encounter that eventually leads him to the bank on the day of the robbery. Once launched on his page-turning adventure, Oscar meets many more strangers, including Alfred Hitchcock and a kindhearted young actor nicknamed Dutch.

Of Dutch, Wells exclaims: “Oh my goodness, that’s Ronald Reagan! He was a friend of my father’s and was the head of the actor’s union in Hollywood for a number of years. My father was a playwright, and was his co-chairman, and knew him well.”

Well draws an intriguing comparison between the stage and screen and the creative process she taps into each day: "A writer has to create is an entirely different world from the reality of their own life, and enter it much as an actor has to. It's like being in a completely different world, one that's made up by yourself, and that could end also in madness. There are people who do this and . . . end up completely insane, and it is hoped that doesn't happen. Writers really create entire worlds and then walk into them and illuminate them."

That's pretty heady stuff coming from a children's author who's beloved for bringing to life such characters as Max and Ruby, Noisy Nora, McDuff and Yoko, as well as entire kindergarten classrooms. What draws all her characters and books together? Emotional content, Wells says. “It’s the center of my writing. And this is why it works. I have to make sure that the emotional content is valid, and something that is wholesome and worthwhile, even if noncompliant.”

Noncompliant?

“All my heroes are noncompliant in one way or another,” she responds. “I’m a very noncompliant person, but with very conservative standards. I have the belief system of a typical person born in 1943. As far as kids go, I believe in good citizenship, good behavior, kindness to others, no time spent in front of the television, and all kinds of things like that.”

When creating her cheerful, colorful illustrations, she works with pastels, color pencils, ink, watercolor, gouache—all kinds of different media, she says, except acrylics and oil. However, Wells wasn't about to tackle the more complicated illustrations planned for On the Blue Comet, which were done in full color and wondrous, glowing detail by Bagram Ibatoulline.

"Oh heavens, I can't do that!" Wells says. "Bagram Ibatoulline is a fabulous illustrator. I can't draw stuff like that anymore than you could. I draw Max and Ruby, but just because I'm an illustrator doesn't mean I can do all kinds of illustrations, and this required something very different from what I do."

The artist's directive was to make Oscar's world look like one drawn by Norman Rockwell. "Everybody who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s would wait on Saturday afternoon for the Saturday Evening Post to come and see if Rockwell had a cover,” Wells says. “I would sit looking at the cover for an hour, because it was the age of high-definition, representational art that was done by real artists, not from photographs, and it was wonderful."

Years ago, in an essay called "The Well-Tempered Children's Book," Wells wrote: "I believe that all stories and plays and paintings and songs and dances come from a palpable but unseen space in the cosmos."

Wells notes: "I said those things when I was 30, and now I'm 67 and they're still true." I'm not an original thinking brain, but I do have this window that I can open. So I use that all the time."

Wells looks back fondly on what she calls the “Golden Age of Childhood,” from about 1920 to 1968: “I think there was a time there when children were taught better manners, there was very little sense of entitlement, they were expected to behave themselves and work. They were also greatly loved, and everybody had more time. I think there’s a lack of time now that marks childhood in the Western world.”

Rosemary Wells—the extremely talented, noncompliant and inexhaustible children’s author—sums up her ongoing career with eloquence: “I do my best to contribute to what I consider to be the only legitimate part of American childhood culture left, which is books.”

Rosemary Wells is one busy lady. Her prolific career as a children’s author has spanned more than 40 years and produced at least 120 books that are cherished by children around the world. However, her latest novel, On the Blue Comet, took a bit longer…

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Jeff Kinney

Interview by Alice Cary

One night last summer, author Jeff Kinney was astounded to see that the upcoming book in his Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, The Ugly Truth, was number two on Amazon’s bestseller list.

“I didn’t even know what ‘The Ugly Truth’ was yet,” he remembers. “They’re printing five million of these things, and I hadn’t even decided.”

His series chronicling the adventures of middle school student Greg Heffley is definitely a publishing phenomenon, having sold more than 37 million copies in the U.S. and millions more in 30 countries around the world, inspired a movie and eagerly anticipated sequel (for which he is executive producer) and catapulted this quiet cartoonist to sudden fame.

“It feels like I go off and pretend to be an author, and pretend to make movies, and then come back to my normal life.”

“It’s been a strange life so far,” Kinney says.

And no doubt getting stranger. On November 8, the day before The Ugly Truth goes on sale, Kinney will share the podium with Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice at Barbara Bush’s “Celebration of Reading” in Dallas. Later in the month he’ll watch a Wimpy Kid balloon float by in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.

All of this might not have happened had not a savvy editor, Charles Kochman of Abrams, recognized his talent. While a student at the University of Maryland, Kinney cartooned for the campus newspaper and studied (of all things) computer science and criminal justice. He planned to become a federal law enforcement agent until a hiring freeze squashed that idea. While trying to break into syndicate cartooning, he collected several years’ worth of what he calls “soul-crushing” rejection letters.

The problem was his drawing style: “I could never get a consistent line,” Kinney says. “My hand would never obey what my mind wanted it to do. And still, it’s very hard for me to draw.” That’s why he draws Greg as a middle schooler, although he originally had an adult audience in mind. After Kochman saw Kinney’s work at Comic-Con in 2006, Abrams decided to publish Diary of a Wimpy Kid as a children’s book, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The resulting hoopla feels “make-believe,” Kinney says, adding, “It feels like I go off and pretend to be an author, and pretend to make movies, and then come back to my normal life.”

His normal life takes place on a quiet street in Plainville, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and two sons, ages five and seven. From there Kinney heads off to a day job as executive producer and creative director of a website called Poptropica, and returns to be assistant soccer coach for his son’s team.

Through it all, Kinney remains remarkably grounded, seeming as if he has all the time in the world, despite the fact that a film crew from CNN would soon arrive on the cloudy autumn day when we talked. At times, however, the balancing act is worrisome. “If I were throwing the football with my son and hurt my hand, then that would really send everything upside down,” Kinney says.

Now that he’s finished writing, what is The Ugly Truth?

“If I said that, it would blow the ending,” Kinney says, “but I’ll say that this book is about growing up. The book is sort of a metaphor for my decision on whether or not to move forward. . . . Is Greg going to move on, or is he going to stay in a state of arrested development forever?”

Will there be more Wimpy Kid books?

“I truly haven’t decided that,” Kinney says. “I’m trying to take a few weeks to really think about this. These books look like you could put them together in a day or two, but they take about nine months of really hard work.”

The work takes place in his small upstairs office, usually at night or on weekends. The walls are purposely bare to minimize distraction, and Kinney’s concentration method is decidedly unconventional.

“I sit right here,” he says, pointing to a corner of a small couch. “I usually put a blanket over my head.”

A blanket?

“Sensory deprivation,” he explains. “I’ve tried all sorts of different things . . . to help get my mind into a thinking mode. To make a good book I need maybe 700 ideas, so it’s about four hours a night of just thinking, for about four months. Most of the time I fall asleep.”

Kinney next labels each idea A, B or C, depending on how he judges its worth. He tries to throw out all of the “C” ideas, and then strings the rest together. Finally, he’s ready to draw, necessitating another four months of 8- to 12-hour days, and sometimes 13- and 14-hour days. He listens to books on tape, usually history or historical fiction, or sometimes political books about the CIA and terrorism. “It’s very strange,” he notes of his selections. “It doesn’t really compute with what I’m drawing.”

“I do all of my drawings on that tablet,” he says, pointing to a device that links to his computer. “I just draw like mad. In fact, my eyes still can’t focus even though it’s been about 10 days since I drew my last drawing [for The Ugly Truth].”

The merging of text and drawings comes late in the process, much like a giant puzzle, Kinney says. “A drawing might end up falling halfway on one page and half on the other, so sometimes you’ll change the story itself just to make the drawings fit.”

After a tour to promote the new book, Kinney looks forward to getting back to his daily routine, putting his sons on the school bus each morning, and waiting for them when they get off.

“I’m happiest when I’m leading a normal life,” he says. “That’s what I strive for.”

One night last summer, author Jeff Kinney was astounded to see that the upcoming book in his Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, The Ugly Truth, was number two on Amazon’s bestseller list.

“I didn’t even know what ‘The Ugly Truth’ was yet,” he remembers.…

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

James Howe

Interview by Alice Cary

Best-selling children’s author James Howe had written many books, but suddenly he was stuck. Really stuck. 

Howe was determined to write a book about Addie Carle, one of the main characters in The Misfits, his 2001 novel about four middle school friends. He had already written one sequel, Totally Joe, about a gay seventh-grader in the group. But he had spent two unsuccessful years trying to capture the voice of the strong-willed and extremely outspoken Addie.

“Her voice can be kind of off-putting,” Howe admits during a call to his home in Yonkers, New York. “I had tried so many different approaches, and nothing was working.”

Finally, a letter from an eighth-grade fan put Howe on the right path. The girl wrote: “Addie’s got such a strong personality, but sometimes I think readers don’t actually know what her soft side is.”

Howe realized he had been ignoring Addie’s soft side, and decided to explore what he calls her “inside voice.” He also decided that the best way to explore this part of Addie’s personality would be to write his novel in poetry. This presented yet another hurdle, since Howe had never written a book in poetry. He enjoyed the writing, but soon realized that all of his new poems needed to form a narrative whole.

A letter from a young fan helped Howe discover the softer side of an outspoken character.

“At one point my dining room table was covered with all of these printed-out poems,” Howe remembers. “I was rearranging and physically trying to find where the story was. So it took a good two years to get the shape of the book.”

If all of this sounds like a giant puzzle, Howe isn’t fazed. “I like to draw, and I love to do collage,” he says. “And I used to direct theater. I think there are connections in all of these things. I like taking pieces and making something out of them.”

The result was certainly worth waiting for. Addie on the Inside is immensely readable, with an active and conversational tone.

What did Howe end up learning about Addie, who was, as he puts it, “such a tough nut to crack?”

“I learned that she’s much more tender than I thought she was,” Howe says. “And I learned more about where her outside voice came from, and how connected it is to her own insecurities. I also learned, and this was a surprise, that she did have some desire to be popular and be cool.”

Howe is best known as the author of books for younger children, having gotten his start in 1979 with a beloved series about a vampire bunny named Bunnicula. A struggling actor and director at the time, he began writing for children by accident.

“I was doing what a lot of actors do and staying up too late and watching movies on TV,” Howe recalls. “It was watching all those bad vampire movies in the ’70s that led to the idea of Bunnicula. I can’t say that it’s my proudest moment when I tell young children how I got the idea for still my most popular book.”

He and his wife Deborah co-wrote the first book, but sadly she died of cancer before their book was published. Ever since, Howe has had an intriguing literary and life journey, having now embarked on what he calls “almost a second career” writing for middle school students and young adults.

Howe eventually remarried and became a father to Zoey, now 23. His editor at the time remarked that Howe would probably begin writing board books for his daughter. Instead, Howe felt compelled to head in the opposite direction. “These very powerful feelings that come with being a parent were pushing me to write work that was more personal and deep,” he says, “for older readers.”

Zoey’s eventual complaints about middle school social dynamics prompted him to write The Misfits. Another important event helped trigger Howe’s writing for middle school students. When Zoey was in the fifth grade, he divorced his second wife and came out as a gay man. Howe has now been with his partner for 10 years, and they plan to marry in September.

One of Howe’s immediate reactions upon coming out was anger. “I thought, I cannot believe I have put so much energy and have lived with this inner turmoil for so long and feared all of this rejection,” he says. “I wanted to write a book in which there’s a kid who’s growing up and gay and feels fine about who he is.”

The publication of Totally Joe ended up sparking a few controveries about its gay protagonist. “I was referred to as the openly gay author of The Misfits,” Howe recalls. “After years of being in the closet, that was actually pretty thrilling.”

Howe is especially gratified that The Misfits inspired an annual event called No-Name-Calling Week, which began in 2004.

“It’s gotten big,” Howe says. “There’s a curriculum for it. It’s -really taken off and it makes me feel very good.”

Best-selling children’s author James Howe had written many books, but suddenly he was stuck. Really stuck. 

Howe was determined to write a book about Addie Carle, one of the main characters in The Misfits, his 2001 novel about four middle school friends. He had already…

NonfictionMedicine

Alexandra Robbins

Interview by Alice Cary

Best-selling journalist Alexandra Robbins has gone undercover again, exploring the world of The Nurses: A Year with the Heroes Behind the Hospital Curtain. While investigating a profession she calls a vital and grossly undervalued "secret club," she has unearthed a multitude of no-holds-barred truths and anecdotes revealed in interviews with nurses across the country. Now that Robbins' research and writing are complete, she reflected on the experience, explaining how this latest project surprised and changed her.

You’ve written previous books about geeks, overachievers and sorority sisters. What prompted you to write about nurses?
Nurses had been asking me to write about them for years. They wanted to get their views and stories across in a way that both nurses and the general public would find entertaining. I had initially resisted because I was on the education beat. But once nurses began telling me their stories, I was hooked. I think every nurse in the world has some incredible stories.

You write that “contemporary literature largely neglects” nurses. What’s the reason for that neglect?
My guess is that people make assumptions based on medical TV shows, which get the picture wrong. I don’t think the general public realizes just how much nurses actually do and how vital they are. They’re not just the folks who administer medicine, flitting in the background as the doctor pines by the patient’s bedside (“ER,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” etc.). The nurses know patients far more intimately than doctors do. They’re skilled and educated; they’re scientists, detectives, liaisons, advocates, teachers, diplomats, and so forth. But TV would have us believe they’re “Yes, Doctor”ing background minions rather than a critical part of the healthcare team.

"Nurses’ voices mostly go unheard, and this was an opportunity for them to get their messages across—their hopes, fears, concerns, frustrations, joys."

What was your most surprising or shocking discovery as you researched this book?
I was shocked repeatedly throughout my reporting. There are so many things that people can do to get themselves and loved ones better care—and in some cases lifesaving moves—in the hospital. But if I were to pick one shocking item, I’d say I was most surprised by some of the doctor misbehavior that goes on behind the curtain. Many doctors are wonderful, of course. Some, however, have done some pretty staggering things to patients (twisting nipples while patients are under anesthesia, pushing them to get surgery they don’t need, ignoring Do Not Resuscitate orders) and to nurses (throwing scalpels and other instruments at them, ignoring their pleas that a patient needs help, groping them, berating them). That was pretty eye-opening.

What do you think is the most common misconception about the profession?
I think the biggest misconception is that they aren’t a major part of the healthcare team. As one nurse told me, “We are not just bed-making, drink-serving, poop-wiping, medication-passing assistants. We are much more.”

Your book features profiles of four nurses and gives readers a “you-are-there” look at their experiences over the course of the year. What research process did you use to capture their stories? Did you shadow them on the job?
The process included interviewing, shadowing, and even some undercover reporting. I wrote the book this way so that it would have a fun, beach-read kind of feel for both nurses and for the general public. That’s the kind of nonfiction I like to read, anyway.

You use pseudonyms for these four nurses, and don't identify where they live or what hospitals they work for. Was this a difficult decision to make? Did you know from the start that you wouldn't be able to use identifying details?
Oh sure, I knew from the start. I was asking nurses to peel back the curtain to show us things that hospitals don’t want people to know. For the nurses to be able to share freely, they had to trust that their identities—and those of the doctors, other nurses, etc. in the hospital—would be protected. I have offered sources this kind of privacy in all of my books, from Pledged on forward. It’s important that my “main characters” are completely open, without fear of reprisal, so that they can share honestly and thoroughly with readers.

How did you go about winning the trust of those you profiled? Were nurses eager to share their stories? Were some reluctant to talk to you for fear of reprisals?
All of the nurses I spoke to were eager to share their stories; I had more nurses who wanted me to follow them as “main characters” than I had room for in the book. Nurses’ voices mostly go unheard, and this was an opportunity for them to get their messages across—their hopes, fears, concerns, frustrations, joys. I guess by now I have a reputation for protecting my sources, so trust never came up as an issue.

I think The Nurses would be fascinating and helpful to nursing school students, but I also worry that some of the harsh realities you describe might be discouraging. What advice do you have for those about to enter the field?
You make a good point; someone described the book as a One L for nurses. The Nurses makes clear, I hope, that even though nursing is not an easy job, it’s a rewarding, fulfilling, life-changing job that nurses feel passionately about. They told me repeatedly, “Nursing isn’t a job. It’s who I am.” I think students who want to go into nursing already feel that pull. There are challenges to every job, but nursing school students are well-prepared to anticipate them and to manage them. And the incredible moments of connection or healing that warm their hearts really carry them through their days.

I love all of the testimonials at the end of the book from nurses who adore the profession, but one that they told me frequently was along the lines of “I make a difference in someone’s life every working day.” How many people can say that? That’s just awesome.

One reason I didn’t romanticize the profession is because nurses need people to help them fight for better working conditions. We all do, actually, because better nurse environments (especially better nurse:patient ratios) translates to fewer patient deaths, infections, complications, falls, etc. But many hospitals haven’t been willing to hire more nurses and treat them right. How can we improve hospital care if we don’t talk about the issues? Glossing over them doesn’t serve anyone.

My advice to nursing students is to remember that there are many, many different types of nursing jobs. Nurses are everywhere—not just in hospitals. They can talk to seasoned nurses to try to figure out which nursing path is right for them.

How is your experience writing this book likely to change your thoughts when you enter a hospital, either as a patient or a visitor?
I’ve always brought treats for and expressed gratitude to nurses anyway, but now I want to give them all hugs, too. They are truly amazing. And the tips they gave me for my own or my loved ones’ hospital stay are invaluable. I have a list now that I pulled from the book that I will take with me whenever I visit a hospital, because you never know which tip will come in handy.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Nurses.

Author photo by David Robbins.

 

Best-selling journalist Alexandra Robbins has gone undercover again, exploring the world of The Nurses: A Year with the Heroes Behind the Hospital Curtain. While investigating a profession she calls a vital and grossly undervalued "secret club," she has unearthed a multitude of no-holds-barred truths and anecdotes revealed in interviews with nurses across the country.
NonfictionMemoir

Lucy Kalanithi

Interview by Alice Cary

Although Paul Kalanithi dreamed of becoming a writer, he first planned to spend 20 years as a neurosurgeon-scientist. Tragically, however, in 2013—during his last year of residency at Stanford—the nonsmoking 36-year-old was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. 

Soon after, he wrote a powerful New York Times op-ed piece, “How Long Have I Got Left?,” describing his diagnosis and struggle to make the best use of his remaining time. “Tell me three months,” he wrote, “I’d just spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d have a plan (write that book). Give me 10 years, I’d get back to treating diseases.”

In the months before his death in March 2015, Paul managed to do all three. He received treatment, continued to perform surgery as long as feasible, spent precious moments with his wife and family, became a father for the first time, and wrote a thought-provoking memoir about his life, illness and mortality, When Breath Becomes Air.

“He was working really hard,” recalls his widow, Lucy Kalanithi, a Stanford internist who met Paul while the two were in medical school at Yale. “He was suffering physically and of course emotionally. But he was very, very tough and thoughtful, and somehow coped and kept going.”

She describes her husband as “unbelievably smart, and, to top it off, the funniest person I’ve ever met, while at the same time, soft-spoken and subtle.” The couple often sat or lay side by side during his illness and Lucy’s maternity leave, with Lucy sometimes reading Paul’s words as he wrote. His manuscript afforded the couple a natural opportunity to communicate about what was happening and how Paul was feeling.

“It was exhausting, but we were having a really good time,” Lucy says. “It was very purposeful; we loved each other and we loved Cady [their daughter]. We knew that Paul’s time was limited and we were in pain . . .  but it was kind of an amazing time. It’s a weird word to use, but also very fun.”

Lucy notes that her husband was “uniquely positioned” to write this book, and that she, as a physician, was also uniquely positioned to help take care of him, along with their families and friends.

“And it still took everything I had,” she says. 

In the book’s foreword, Stanford physician and author Abraham Verghese aptly describes Paul’s writing as “stunning” and “unforgettable,” noting: “See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.”

Paul thought deeply before he wrote, and then his words flowed; his wife recalls that he wrote his op-ed piece during an airplane flight. “He wrote very quickly,” Lucy explains, “and didn’t spend a lot of time going back over it, partly because he didn’t have a lot of time and he knew it. Literally, he was racing to finish.” 

The beauty of his prose is hardly a coincidence, because Paul earned graduate degrees in English, history and philosophy before turning to medicine. Early in the book he declares, “I knew with certainty that I would never be a doctor.” Pages later, he eloquently traces his unforeseen career trajectory, explaining, “I realized that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context.” 

Paul didn’t expect to face his own intersection so soon. Summing up his transformation from physician to patient, he writes: “Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? What better way to understand it than to live it? But I’d had no idea how hard it would be, how much terrain I would have to explore, map, settle. I’d always imagined the doctor’s work as something like connecting two pieces of railroad track, allowing a smooth journey for the patient. I hadn’t expected the prospect of facing my own mortality to be so disorienting, so dislocating.”

The book was nearly complete when Paul died. “One of the last things he said to me was ‘Please get this finished,’ ” Lucy remembers. She explains that all the words in the book are his: His editor occasionally supplemented his manuscript with passages written elsewhere in essays, his book proposal and lengthy emails to friends. 

Lucy also penned a powerful epilogue describing Paul’s last days in a sad but elegant coda to the book. “I’m not at all a writer like Paul was,” she admits. “But writing that epilogue—I just loved it. It was the most meaningful thing I’ve ever written.”

As she works part time at Stanford (planning to return full time in March), Lucy finds the grief process to be “unexpected and unpredictable.” She rejoices in every milestone of their daughter Cady’s life. “Paul would have loved that her first word was ‘dog,’ ” she says. “There are all these little things that are just so bittersweet because he’s not here.”

When Breath Becomes Air closes with Paul’s heartbreakingly beautiful words to Cady, who brought him so much happiness during his dying days. “I’m so happy that he wrote it for her,” Lucy says. “That passage is my prized possession. I haven’t memorized it. I didn’t even try. I’ve just read it so many times.”

In the midst of her grief, Lucy remains excited about the book’s publication. “I’m keeping a promise that I made to Paul, which feels really important and makes me feel purposeful.” 

“I’m very happy about sharing him with the world,” she adds. “This book will be on people’s bookshelves. I can’t believe it. Paul really wanted to be a writer. We worked so hard to make it happen.”

Nonetheless, she can’t help but lament: “I’d give anything for you to be talking to Paul rather than me.”

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct the date of Paul Kalanithi's death.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Although Paul Kalanithi dreamed of becoming a writer, he first planned to spend 20 years as a neurosurgeon-scientist. Tragically, however, in 2013—during his last year of residency at Stanford—the nonsmoking 36-year-old was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer.
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Cameron McAllister

Interview by Alice Cary

British author Cameron McAllister was inspired to write The Tin Snail after seeing a newspaper photo of three prototypes for a car called the Deux Chevaux (or 2CV) that had been hidden in a French barn during World War II and remained there for 50 years. We spoke with the author to learn more about the fascinating true history behind this exciting middle-grade adventure.

Why did these 2CV prototypes stay hidden for so long?
The simple answer is that they were too well hidden and were forgotten about! You have to remember they were never supposed to be there at all. The boss of Citroen at that time, Pierre Jules Boulanger (Bertrand, in my book), had ordered that all trace of the experimental prototypes be destroyed so they couldn’t fall into enemy hands—not merely the invading German army, but also Volkswagen, their main rival (who were busy developing the Beetle at the time). So the story goes, the 2CV models were hidden by some of the engineers who’d helped build them, but who couldn’t bear to see them lost to future generations.

Were you able to unearth many more details about this story? Which were your favorite?
Where to start? The more I delved into the true story, the more wonderful nuggets kept turning up. I particularly liked that the car’s designer, Flaminio Bertoni (Luca, in my story) was wedded to his old BMW motorbike. When they were looking for lightweight parts to use on the first prototype, they cannibalized his beloved motorbike, stripping it of its engine and other parts. It really is also true that his boss, Boulanger, insisted that the car be capable of driving across a ploughed field with a farmer and his wife and two chickens without breaking a tray of eggs or spilling a flagon of beer. Unfortunately, the first model they built exploded! The more I discovered, the more charming the whole story became. It almost wrote itself!

Did you travel to the French countryside for fact finding? Were you able to see those prototypes unearthed in the barn?
I never found the original barn, but I pile my four children into our car twice a year and drive as far south through France as we can manage in a day. This usually gets us to the Bordeaux area, where I located the fictional village of Regnac. It’s almost exactly like a village we’ve often stayed in there. The map at the front of the book is pretty much a blueprint of the real place. However, I should say that there’s no evidence that the German army ever actually arrived in the real village—that was all my own invention. It seemed too exciting a story opportunity to pass up. I loved the thought of the German Panzer commander sitting in the local bar, determined to try and find where the locals have hidden the car, not realizing that the barmaid is pulling his glass of beer with the gear stick!

Where does the name "Tin Snail" come from?
The then-boss of Citroen, Boulanger, could be quite austere and insisted that the 2CV should be as functional as possible. This was vital if it was to be affordable to the poorest farmers and artisans in France—the vast backbone of France’s population who had been so woefully neglected by the car industry. The 2CV’s designer, Flaminio, kept trying to add little stylist flourishes, which Boulanger would insist on being removed. The final prototype was made out of little more than sheets of corrugated iron with just a single headlight, but its iconic domed shape reminded Boulanger of a snail. And so the nickname “the Tin Snail” stuck. For me, it perfectly captures the car’s quirky charm!

Tell us about your own fascination with cars.
As a little boy I loved Herbie, the movie about a VW Beetle with a mind of its own. The flying Ford Anglia in Harry Potter had a lot of the same qualities, though rather more mischievous. Strictly speaking, the car in The Tin Snail isn’t magical, of course, but it definitely has its own impish personality—especially when Angelo and Camille are being chased by a Panzer tank and it almost flies across a river.

I read that two books that inspired you were Danny, the Champion of the World, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Did you reread them as you wrote this novel? I was also interested to read your mention of Shirley Hughes’ novel, Hero on a Bicycle, which sounds fascinating.
Both Danny and Chitty feature children thrown into dangerous and extraordinary adventures to rescue their fathers—and in both cases they do so by driving cars! In Danny’s case it’s an old Austin Seven, which he uses to rescue his father from the clutches of the evil Mr Hazell. I loved the bond between Danny and his father as they outwit the local establishment. It’s very much the same plucky spirit Angelo shows in The Tin Snail as he tries to help his father’s ailing career and outfox an entire German Panzer unit! Hero on a Bicycle is set in the same era, a delightful story about a boy running daring missions during the German occupation of Italy, only this time riding a bicycle. Like The Tin Snail, the danger of war is never very far away.

"In the end the story is about heroism—the villagers are willing to lay down their lives to safeguard the Tin Snail because it represents the very best of French values."

You’ve written TV scripts before, but this is your first novel. Did you have any difficulties with the transition? Did your TV writing experience make it somewhat easier to write some of the great action scenes in your book?
I love writing action sequences—I think it’s part of the big kid in me. But oddly they can be the most boring parts of movies to watch, especially with the advent of CGI. If there isn’t enough character or suspense, and if it all seems too unrealistic, it doesn’t matter how many skyscrapers you knock down, I’m not gripped. So when it came to The Tin Snail, I was very conscious of trying keep the action believable (just!). One of the most obvious transitions I found from writing TV dramas to writing a novel was that I needed to write a lot more description. In TV scripts you might only have a few stage directions because the viewer will end up being shown everything. In a book, of course, the writer must conjure everything up in people’s imaginations, which I loved.

Tell us about the genesis of your main character, Angelo. Were you at all like him as a boy?
When I was the same age as Angelo, one of my uncles (who was a policeman at the time) gave me a pair of very old handcuffs with the strict instructions I was never to use them as the keys were long since lost. Naturally, the first opportunity I got I locked them round his wrists while he lay in bed one morning. I remember hiding in a tree for several hours as first one village police car, then two more, arrived to offer assistance. Despite the attempts of the entire local police force, no key could be found. This didn’t deter my mother who proceeded to serve pot after pot of tea, turning the whole thing into a social occasion. Eventually my father managed to saw the handcuffs off. So I’ll let you decide whether you think there are any similarities between myself and Angelo.

You do a great job of maintaining tension about World War II and the advancing Germans throughout the novel, yet you manage to keep a lighthearted tone in appropriate places. Was this a difficult balance to achieve?
I was keen for the book to be uplifting and fun, but it would have been irresponsible not to reflect the reality of war at some level. The sense of the German army approaching also provides an underlying suspense—not least because Angelo and his father know that the rival car company’s spies won’t be far behind. In the end the story is about heroism—the villagers are willing to lay down their lives to safeguard the Tin Snail because it represents the very best of French values. It was also important for me that the Germans weren’t all painted as the enemy. Despite working for rival car companies, Angelo’s father and Engel, his German counterpart, end up being united by a common bond . . . their love of cars!

What do you drive? Do you have any “fun” cars, or are there any special cars tugging at your imagination?
When I worked in London, I used to ride around on a Vespa scooter, which was great fun, if a little hair-raising. Now, because we have four children, I have to drive what feels like a large truck—made by the 2CV’s rivals, Volkswagen, no less! However, I’m always on the lookout on my travels for a 2CV to buy. It seems to be only dotty old aunties who still drive them in Britain, but I’ve seen some wonderfully preserved models in France and Italy. I think the nearest British-made car to the 2CV must be the Mini (now remade by BMW, of course, and originally designed by an Italian, just like the 2CV). Or perhaps the Morris Minor. Maybe one of these will inspire my next novel!

British author Cameron McAllister was inspired to write The Tin Snail after seeing a newspaper photo of three prototypes for a car called the Deux Chevaux (or 2CV) that had been hidden in a French barn during World War II and remained there for 50 years. We spoke with the author to learn more about the fascinating true history behind this exciting middle-grade adventure.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Kate DiCamillo

Interview by Alice Cary

Kate DiCamillo is a nervous Nellie. You’d think that after winning two Newbery Medals, the publication of a new children’s book would be old hat. “It’s like putting your kid on the bus for the first day of school, and you don’t know what’s going to happen,” she says. This time, the “kid” is Raymie Nightingale, her most autobiographical book yet.

DiCamillo, who launched her acclaimed career with the publication of Because of Winn-Dixie in 2000, quickly points out that writing such a personal book wasn’t part of her plan. “I thought I was going to write something funny and lighthearted about someone Ramona Quimby-like entering a beauty pageant,” she says during a call to her home in Minneapolis. “And then bit by bit, all of these pieces of me came in there, and it became a heavier story than I had intended.”

DiCamillo needn’t worry; her new novel is a gem, full of laugh-out-loud situations, heartfelt moments of kindness and genuine heartache.

The novel’s heroine, 10-year-old Raymie Clarke, is taking baton-twirling lessons during the summer of 1975 with the goal of becoming Little Miss Central Florida Tire. She hopes such acclaim might lure back her father, who has run off with a dental hygienist.

There are parallels aplenty between Raymie and the author. In a note at the beginning of the novel, DiCamillo writes: “Raymie’s story is entirely made up. Raymie’s story is the absolutely true story of my heart.” 

“Raymie’s story is the absolutely true story of my heart.” 

At age 6, DiCamillo moved with her mother and brother from Pennsylvania to Clermont, Florida (near Orlando), to try to end DiCamillo’s frequent bouts of pneumonia. Her father, an orthodontist, was supposed to sell his practice and join them, but he never did. 

As soon as DiCamillo realized that her manuscript-in-progress was becoming a story about a girl whose father had left, her response was, “Uh-oh.”

But that, it turns out, was actually good news.

“I’ve been doing this long enough to know that when the uh-oh shows up, I’m in business,” she says. “It means that the story is in charge and not me. So when something happens that I’m totally unprepared for, I also know that I’ve got something that matters.”

When she was 7 or 8 years old, DiCamillo competed in the Little Miss Orange Blossom contest, which, alas, she didn’t win. She remembers being at the pageant and thinking, “This is not where I should be.” And even before the pageant, during baton-twirling lessons, she realized, “This is just not who I am.”

Raymie’s baton lessons don’t go well either, but they introduce her to two lively, endearing characters: the tough-as-nails Beverly Tapinski, who plans to sabotage the contest, and the ever-optimistic Louisiana Elefante, who lives with her grandmother and claims that her parents were known as the famous Flying Elefantes. Before long, Louisiana has dubbed the unlikely trio the “Three Rancheros.”

Their subsequent adventures form the heart and soul of this novel, with madcap exploits that include secret nursing home visits and a night raid on the Very Friendly Animal Center in search of Louisiana’s beloved cat, Archie. (Animals are a necessity in every DiCamillo book!) But while the novel is full of action, the text has an exquisitely spare quality. Despite the outlandish predicaments they get themselves into, the Three Rancheros’ thoughts and dialogue always ring true. 

“Those characters,” DiCamillo says with a chuckle. “Just get out of their way because I don’t know what they’re going to do and what they’re going to say.”

It’s fitting that the words that pop out of these characters’ mouths—surprising even the author—are the actual seeds from which she begins creating their personalities. “As they talk to each other, that’s how I find out who they are,” she says. “Like when Beverly says at the beginning of the book, ‘Fear is a big waste of time. I’m not afraid of anything.’ I’m like Raymie; I just idolize people like that. I can’t conceive of not being afraid.”

That’s something DiCamillo shares with one of her literary heroes, E.B. White. “I’m super neurotic,” she says, “and I think that maybe he was, too, from what I’ve read about him. But he did things with words that very few people do, and I can’t figure out how he did it. And I think if I asked him, he wouldn’t be able to answer.”

DiCamillo says she wonders whether White’s apprehensions affected his writing. “It’s just that everything is burnished with love for him, and he manages to convey that to us. So the question is, does all the worry get in the way of the love, or does the love win over the worry? Because it looks like it did, from what he wrote.

“I sure would like to worry less,” she adds with a cheerful sigh.

DiCamillo believes the writing process helps her overcome certain personal shortcomings by keeping her eyes and heart wide open. “It’s my connection to my better self,” she says. “You have to pay such close attention to the world and people, and it changes how you look at the world.” Storytelling keeps her gaze outward, even as it teaches her more about herself. 

Does this process of paying attention mean that she’s always on the lookout?

“I am,” she admits. “And I think a lot about a friend that I grew up with named Kathy Lord, who is interested in everything and everybody. She liked to sharpen her pencil as much as she could in the classroom because that gave her a chance to walk to the front of the room, and not for something to do, but to look at what everybody else was doing. Other people were so fabulously interesting to her. I think of her sometimes when I’m out in the world. Pay attention that way. Make like Kathy Lord on the way to the pencil sharpener. Every little detail of somebody is interesting.

“And Kathy Lord’s mouth was always slightly hanging open as she did it, because she was just so gobstopped by people and what they were doing. And I think about that with me, and then I have to be careful sometimes to close my mouth as I’m staring at the world.”

As Raymie grapples with her father’s departure, she’s surrounded by a host of helpful adults. A young DiCamillo also benefited from such reassuring presences, including three kind, widowed ladies who kept close watch over the many children who lived on her dead-end street. “That’s one of the things that I was aware of consciously when the book was done,” DiCamillo says, “that this was kind of a tip of the hat to all those adults.”

When she tells fans about her childhood, DiCamillo is often delighted by young readers who come up to her and ask: Do you think that if your father hadn’t left that you would be a writer? Do you think that if you weren’t so sick all the time as a kid that you would have become a writer?

“I never say that explicitly,” DiCamillo says, “but that they get there is astounding.” These are her most satisfying encounters with kids, when a child walks away knowing that things that once seemed so hard and impossible actually helped shape her.

As for Raymie and her struggles, DiCamillo says, “The same thing that happened with Raymie happened with me. I found what friendship can give you. And there aren’t always answers, but there’s love and friendship.”

 

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kate DiCamillo is a nervous Nellie. You’d think that after winning two Newbery Medals, the publication of a new children’s book would be old hat. “It’s like putting your kid on the bus for the first day of school, and you don’t know what’s going to happen,” she says. This time, the “kid” is Raymie Nightingale, her most autobiographical book yet.
NonfictionMemoir

Lee Smith

Interview by Alice Cary

The author of Fair and Tender Ladies and many other beloved novels reflects on her Virginia childhood and her beginnings as a writer in the new memoir, Dimestore.

At what point did you decide to collect these essays as a memoir? Was that something you had in mind from the start?
I can tell you exactly the moment I decided to publish Dimestore: the day when my childhood home—the house my parents built and lived in for over 60 years—was demolished as part of a massive flood control project. The only thing I have left is the brass doorknocker with the curly “S” on it, for Smith, which a kind neighbor salvaged and put in a homemade box frame for me to keep. My father’s dimestore had already been blown up along with about 60 other stores lining the main street of Grundy, Virginia.

Even though I’d known for a long time that all this was coming, I was devastated. Place has always been paramount to me as a fiction writer—especially this place, this little town, these mountains. Immediately I found myself writing sketches, like word photographs, of all the people and places that were gone. I kept it up. Eventually I had the long title essay “Dimestore,” and then I decided to write some more, also adding and expanding some other occasional pieces and talks I had written over the years.

Is it harder for you to write about yourself than to write fiction?
Yes! It’s much harder! I have always believed that I could tell the truth much better in fiction than in nonfiction: You can juggle the chronology, switch the facts around to make your points, emphasize some elements and ignore others, write a novel from several different points of view in order to present everybody’s motivations. With nonfiction, you’re stuck with the little old boring stick-in-the-mud piddly SELF (though I should add that many of these Dimestore essays are actually more about other people who have made a big impression on me and on my writing along the way.)

Did you ever feel as though your parents might be watching over your shoulder as you wrote?
No, I’ve never really felt that way. Since I was an only child born to them late in life—a big surprise since they’d been told they could not have children—they were unconditionally OK with whatever I did. If I’d told them, for instance, that I wanted to be an ax murderer, they would have gone out and bought me the ax.

Tell us about your "writing house" that your father built on the edge of the Levisa River.
My writing house kept changing because the river kept flooding—every time, my father would build it back or make me a new one, mostly little prefab storage sheds with a table and a chair and an old wooden box to keep my books and treasures in, perched on the side of the riverbank.

Do you have any memorabilia from your father's dimestore? Or something you wish you had?
I really wish I still had my own little typewriter which Daddy kept right there in his upstairs office on the long desk where I could observe the entire floor of the dimestore—all the aisles—through the one-way glass window, reveling in my own power—nobody can see me, but I can see everybody! I witnessed not only shoplifting, but fights and embraces as well. Once I saw a woman put a big old Philco radio between her legs, under her coat, and waddle right out of the store!

I have lived in North Carolina for many years now, so Grundy is no longer my literal “home,” yet psychologically—and speaking as a writer, now—it still is. I think we are forever formed by what we first see and the way we first hear language, in my case that rugged ring of mountains and the unique mountain dialect, the soft Appalachian speech of all those older family members telling stories on the porch while I was going to sleep in somebody’s lap. So, even today, stories still come to me in a human voice, and I just write them down. I’m not so much a writer as a listener and a storyteller.

If you could time travel, how would you spend a perfect childhood day?
It would be summertime and I would get up early and eat some of Mama’s biscuits and drink some coffee with a lot of milk in it and then run out the door and go sit under my "dogbushes" as I called them (a big clump of forsythia bushes). It was like a secret room under there—where a whole town of my imaginary friends lived. So I’d check in with them, find out what was going on with everybody. My best friend was Vienna, named for those little flat cans of Vienna sausages which I always took under there and shared with my dog Missy—Vienna herself had red hair and a very dramatic life, but my friend Sylvia could FLY! Then after a while I’d go get my best real friend, Martha Sue, and some of the other kids who all lived along the river there in Cowtown, too, and we’d head for the hills, literally, climbing up into the mountains across the road where we’d run like wild Indians all day long playing cowboys and Indians, forming club after club, climbing cliffs and outcroppings, building forts, swinging on grapevines, exploring caves, and enjoying a degree of freedom seldom found in childhood today. The only kind of twitter we knew about was birdsong. We’d stay there until somebody rang the big bell to call us home.

What was it like being a go-go dancer with Annie Dillard in your all-girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs, at Hollins College?
It was wonderful. Hollins not only had an excellent creative writing program—long before most colleges—but encouraged (or at least tolerated) all kinds of creativity. We first performed at a Hollins literary festival, then went on the road to UVA, Washington and Lee, etc. We all had go-go names—mine was Candy Love. I wore a glitter top and white boots and a cowboy hat.

Is there a piece of advice you'd like to be able to give your 20- or 30-year-old self?
SLOW DOWN. (Which is exactly what Jerry Lee Lewis said to my good friend, the rock and roller Marshall Chapman, which she did not, and which I did not either.) As a young woman, I was just drunk on literature, on fire with novels and poetry and writing, I’d write all night long. Now I’d say, slow down, honey. Read. Just because you like to write doesn’t mean you’ve got something to say. Know what you’re talking about. Learn about history and psychology and science and everything else in this big world. It’s not all novels. And don’t throw yourself into everything so much, don’t fall in love all the time, don’t get married so fast . . . slow down. Life is long.

How did you manage to achieve the delicate balance of writing about both great joys and deep sorrow, such as the death of your son?
Thanks but I don’t think I’ve achieved “that delicate balance,” though I’m always trying, and I believe that the writing itself keeps me up on the tightrope. Writing is inherently therapeutic. It can be a source of nourishment and strength for us all. Simply to line up words one after another upon a page is to create some order where it did not exist, to give a recognizable shape to the chaos of our lives.

Writing is an addiction, you say, and early in a project you feel a "dangerous, exhilarating sense that anything can happen." What's been the most surprising thing to happen during your writing?
So many surprising things have happened during my writing that I don’t know where to start. Thing is, if a character really does “come to life” on the page as you write, she’s liable to do anything. Anything! Mine are always having religious fits or running off with men.

During the writing of Dimestore, the wonderful surprise has been that the more I wrote, the more I remembered—and at my age, memory is the best gift of all.

What's on your reading list these days?
Well, right now these books are not only on my reading list but actually on my bedside table: wildly different one from another, I just realized. But all fascinating. OK, here we go:

• American Housewife, stories by Helen Ellis, which I just finished—wild, hilarious, dark and subversive stories satirizing young American domesticity.
• The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All by the extraordinary poet C.D. (Carolyn) Wright, who recently died much too soon.
• Binocular Vision, stories by Edith Pearlman, just knocking me out. I have never read her before.
• The novel Stoner, by John Williams, kind of a cult book which people swear by and I haven’t read yet.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Dimestore.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The author of Fair and Tender Ladies and many other beloved novels reflects on her Virginia childhood and her beginnings as a writer in the new memoir, Dimestore.
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Karen Harrington

Interview by Alice Cary

Karen Harrington has described her books as “coming-of-age survival stories,” and she’s certainly on a roll. On the heels of two award-winning novels, Sure Signs of Crazy and Courage for Beginners, her third, Mayday, begins with a bang. Specifically, a plane crash.

Harrington’s latest inspiration struck while watching an episode of “Air Disasters” about a plane crash over France, during which a coffin, of all things, fell into a farmer’s field. “Imagine finding this really odd thing in the middle of a field,” she says. “That really caught my attention.”

Speaking from her Texas home, Harrington is excited about her new book, though she jokes, “My husband says now I’ve written a book that’s guaranteed not to be in airport bookstores.”

That said, she doesn’t believe her book will increase readers’ fears of flying. After conducting research that included interviews with several pilots, she concludes that survival rates are “actually pretty positive.” One vital piece of information she learned about accidents and disasters is crucial to Mayday’s plot: “If you just get moving in those first 90 seconds, your odds of survival increase tenfold,” Harrington says.

“My husband says now I’ve written a book that’s guaranteed not to be in airport bookstores.”

The novel’s central character, seventh-grader Wayne Kovok, does just that, guiding himself and his mother to safety after a commercial plane crash. However, his world is dramatically changed when he emerges with bruised vocal cords that leave him unable to speak for several months. His recovery involves not only physically regaining his voice, but also learning to confront the adults who seek to guide his life, including his difficult, divorced father and his military-minded grandfather, who moves in after the crash.

Wayne had been on Harrington’s mind for quite some time, after appearing as a minor character in Courage for Beginners. In both books, he’s known for sharing his love of trivia and intriguing facts. “He never fully emerged there,” Harrington says of his role in the earlier book, “and I was just so curious about him. It made sense to me that he might come from a family of very strong people, and that’s why he was trying to stand out in his own way.”

As a result, Harrington decided that one side of Wayne’s family would have strong military roots, as is the case with her own family, whose involvement dates back to the Revolutionary War. In middle school, her father gave her a copy of Howard Fast’s April Morning, a fictional account of the Battle of Lexington. “There are, like, 14 Harringtons in it,” she says. “I remember that making a big impression on me, connecting me to history, and my family being in it.”

To help connect her own two daughters (ages 11 and 12) with their storied past, she and her husband hung a gallery of family photos in their home to honor the many hard-working people who came before them. The photos include a grandmother who was a gifted seamstress and model and a grandfather who painted sets for RKO Studios and brought home gifts from Cary Grant. These photographs inspired “The Wall of Honor” in Wayne’s house: a hallway photo collage of deceased military ancestors. That wall takes on new meaning early in the book when Wayne’s beloved Uncle Reed dies while serving his country.

On their way home from Uncle Reed’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery, Wayne and his mother end up in the plane crash, and during the terrifying descent, Wayne lets go of his uncle’s burial flag, which he remains determined to find.

“At the time, I was feeling patriotic and having a lot of discussions with my father, and I thought I would love to link those,” Harrington says. She even modeled Wayne’s grandpa after her father. “My dad is extremely patriotic, and I get 100 percent of my patriotism from him.”

This isn’t the first time that a family member has given rise to one of Harrington’s characters. The mother in Courage for Beginners was inspired by Harrington’s late mother, who suffered from agoraphobia. 

After writing two novels that featured mothers with mental illness—the family situation in Sure Signs of Crazy is loosely based on the horrifying Andrea Yates case, in which the Texas mother drowned five of her children in the bathtub—Harrington made sure that Wayne’s mother was “awesome.” Nonetheless, Mayday does indeed feature another largely absent parent: Wayne’s father. 

While she says such recurring themes are “accidental,” Harrington muses, “Who knows? My favorite writing professor in college said that you will find your ‘country,’ and you continue to return to those themes. So if you think of someone like Pat Conroy, he stayed with his themes of his family and the Lowcountry. So perhaps that’s part of my country.”

Harrington had an important early influence on her writing career: Her middle school English teacher was a prolific historical novelist, the late G. Clifton Wisler, know for books such as Mr. Lincoln’s Drummer and Caleb’s Choice.

“There’s something about meeting somebody who is doing the thing that you are dreaming of doing that makes it seems possible,” Harrington says. “They no longer seem like they’re off in this magical writing place, wherever that might be. They’re right there; they’re in the lunchroom. That just made a huge impact on me.”

Many years and a lot of hard work ensued before Harrington’s literary dream became a reality, including years of night school and working as a speechwriter for Greyhound Bus Lines and Electronic Data Systems. “I remember really bad days when I would get binders thrown at me by speakers,” Harrington recalls. “I remember thinking that they don’t even know that a future novelist lurks in their midst.”

Just like Wayne, Karen Harrington has indeed found her voice.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Karen Harrington has described her books as “coming-of-age survival stories,” and she’s certainly on a roll. On the heels of two award-winning novels, Sure Signs of Crazy and Courage for Beginners, her third, Mayday, begins with a bang. Specifically, a plane crash.
NonfictionMemoir

Elisha Cooper

Interview by Alice Cary

In 2007, Elisha Cooper experienced one of those life-changing moments that every parent prays they never face. He had taken his nearly 5-year-old daughter to a Chicago Cubs game on a beautiful summer day when he happened to reach his arm around her torso and feel an unusual bump under her ribs.

Cooper wasn’t initially alarmed, but ensuing doctor’s appointments revealed that Zoë had a rare kidney cancer known as Wilms’ tumor. Happily, Zoë got better and is now a healthy, vibrant 13-year-old. But during the aftermath of that fateful day—surgery, chemotherapy and years of appointments to ensure that the cancer didn’t recur—Cooper says he “fell apart.” He chronicles his memories of that difficult time in his spare and heartfelt memoir, Falling: A Daughter, a Father, and a Journey Back.

Before that discovery, life had seemed idyllic. Cooper wrote and illustrated children’s and adult books while helping care for Zoë and her younger sister, Mia. The paperback version of his book about Zoë’s first year was being released: Crawling: A Father’s First Year. The family was scheduled to move to New York City in just two weeks, where Cooper’s wife, Elise Cappella, would start teaching psychology at New York University.

Suddenly, however, a shadow loomed over their busy life. In a phone conversation from his home in New York City, Cooper gives an admiring nod to Zoë’s unfaltering courage: “Here’s this girl who’s 5 and 6 and 7 years old and going through this thing, and she’s being tough. And meanwhile, I’m falling apart, because it was devastating to have that kind of worry. So I was always smiling, but I was not smiling inside.”

Cooper didn’t begin to write about the ordeal until after Zoë’s four- and five-year checkups came back clear. “It was then that I could almost take a breath,” he says, adding, “And, this is a ‘good’ cancer. That’s something I’m still very aware of. Most kids are OK with this cancer and survive it, although 40 years ago, that wasn’t the case. But we were in a clinic where there were kids who were not surviving, and I’m always very aware of those parents who went through that heartache. I can’t even imagine that.”

Cooper began to process his own emotions as he wrote Falling, mostly at a table in New York City’s Stumptown Café in the Ace Hotel. “The good thing about this space,” he explains, “is that it’s very dark. I would go there and cry really. Not cry—I would go and write and get weepy. This was a book-length attempt to use words to try to make sense of something.”

Even now, years later, it can still be difficult for Cooper to discuss an experience so close to his heart. As he and I chat on the phone, I read out loud one of the many fine passages in his book: “The words ‘fight’ and ‘battle’ work for some; the words that worked for me were ‘laughter’ and ‘thanks.’ I like ‘beauty’ and ‘hope’ too, as they speak to the best in us.”

When I finish, there’s a long pause on his end of the phone.

“Thank you. It’s kind of amazing to hear those words. . . . I got weepy a lot writing this, as you can imagine. Probably around sentences like that. Sorry.”

After another pause, he elaborates, “As much as I like fighting and battling it out in sports, I had to kind of submit to something here, at least to find some type of patience, which I really don’t normally in my life. And I was kind of thinking about how words are saving—words from people whom I loved or finding words within myself that made me feel better.”

“Consider having a day that asks the question, Will your child live?” 

After Zoë’s surgery and chemotherapy, years of watchful waiting were necessary, involving periodic scans to make sure that the cancer hadn’t returned. “Consider having a day that asks the question, Will your child live?” he writes. “Then repeat that day every three months.”

Cooper hated those appointments, which intensified his worries and made him feel “angry and protective and wild.” At times he found himself erupting in unexpected explosions, which he describes unflinchingly in Falling. One winter, when a sports car nearly hit him as he biked through Manhattan, Cooper retaliated by punching the car until he broke its side mirror. He groans when I bring up the incident.

“That was one of the harder things to write,” Cooper admits. “That was just crazy. Why did I do that? I’m still incredibly embarrassed. I think it was a moment after that when I realized I can’t go on being this upset. But was it all because of Zoë and her cancer? I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

His anger has subsided, and life now brims with cheerful details, like making pasta sauce for dinner, getting Zoë to soccer practice or taking Mia to lessons at the American School of Ballet. And Cooper can’t wait to present copies of his new book to the nurses and doctors who treated Zoë, most especially to oncologist Dr. Alice Lee at New York Presbyterian.

“I have so much appreciation for her,” he says, “both for being a scientist, and whip smart, and for doing all the things that she did, but also for being incredibly caring. Everybody there at the oncology department was.”

Cooper carefully anticipates the readings he’ll be giving from his new book. “I’m going to be talking to people who have undergone or are undergoing some worry or pain in their lives,” he notes. “And I just want to be present for people who read this book.”

Before ending our conversation, I mention one of Cooper’s children’s books, Homer, which he wrote and illustrated during Zoë’s illness and recovery. Cooper describes Homer as being about an old dog who “sits on the porch and worries about his family.”

“Later,” he says, “I realized, yeah, that old dog was me.”

 

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 2007, Elisha Cooper experienced one of those life-changing moments that every parent prays they never face. He had taken his nearly 5-year-old daughter to a Chicago Cubs game on a beautiful summer day when he happened to reach his arm around her torso and feel an unusual bump under her ribs.
NonfictionMemoir

Clay Byars

Interview by Alice Cary

"Oh hi,” Clay Byars says, answering the phone at his home in what he calls “horse and cow country” in Shelby, Alabama, about an hour south of Birmingham. “How are you?”

The fact that 43-year-old Byars is giving a phone interview is nothing short of a miracle, given that he nearly died not once, but twice—in a pair of events that he chronicles in the intensely powerful memoir Will & I. Not much has been easy since, he writes: “Actions as simple as brushing my teeth, shaving and showering all begin with the question ‘How am I going to do this?’ ” 

Writing remained one of the few things he could still accomplish without struggle and quickly became “a healing obsession.” Telling his story, however, proved to be anything but easy. 

“I figure that with all the different drafts,” Byars says, “I’ve probably been working on it for about 15 years. So it’s been a while.”

In 1992, during his sophomore year at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, Byars was riding in a car with friends when an oncoming car veered into their lane. Byars likely would have died at the scene had not a passing motorist removed a piece of broken jaw from his airway. Additional injuries included nerve damage to his right shoulder that left him unable to bend his elbow.

Meanwhile, his identical twin brother, Will, was hours away, back at home in Birmingham, studying for a test and unaware of the accident. Just before midnight, though, Will was suddenly awakened by a throbbing pain in his jaw. 

“We’ve had incidents like that throughout our lives,” Byars says. “People used to ask us what it’s like to be a twin. My response was always, what’s it like to not be a twin? So I didn’t think much of Will’s jaw pain at the time of my wreck.”

Tragically, things went from bad to worse. About nine months later, a New Orleans neurosurgeon nicked Byars’ vertebral artery while attempting to repair the nerve damage, causing him to have a massive stroke. For several weeks, he experienced Locked-In Syndrome, leaving his brain unable to communicate with his body. 

“It was a weird feeling,” Byars remembers, “and it’s sometimes hard to think about that now. The best way to describe it is having one dream inside of another and waking up, but not being fully awake yet from the first dream.”

Byars says the neurosurgeon continued to practice, eventually retiring. When Byars’ parents tried to sue, the surgeon was so respected that other doctors weren’t willing to testify against him. He never apologized, but Byar says, “I kind of understand why he didn’t. He didn’t want to make himself liable.”

The initial prognosis was dire, with the best-case scenario that he would remain paralyzed from his eyes down. Will recognized that his brother was “conscious and trapped,” which was unbearable to witness, so he said nothing and left. To others, Will’s reactions might have seemed abrupt, but Byars understood, writing, “Every stage of life we’d gone through not just together but as a unit, as a unity.”

Ever so slowly, Byars began to regain movement, first in his right leg and right thumb. While others rejoiced, hoping that Byars would recover fully, Will held no such illusions, and once again, quickly left his brother’s hospital room. “He didn’t know what to say, and I couldn’t speak,” Byars writes.

After months of physical and occupational therapy and workouts at a nearby gym and on his home elliptical, Byars never did fully recover, but today, he walks, drives and lives independently. His vocal cords were left extremely weak, and he’s been taking singing lessons for a number of years, trying to strengthen his “head-injury voice.”

As he explains in his memoir: “I like being able to do things I’m not supposed to do. . . . According to my MRI, I should have been more or less a vegetable.”

The “Will” in Will & I refers not only to his twin brother, but to Byars’ own incredible will, something that he understood anew while still in the hospital, in what he describes as a “liberating flash of vision.” Both of these “wills,” it turns out, have remained essential to his survival.

Undeterred by his vocal problems, Byars is an engaging communicator. In addition to our phone conversation, he answers follow-up questions by email and shares a letter he wrote to Will about his hospital vision, which he later understood to have been the Zen experience of satori, or enlightened consciousness. “It wasn’t a near-death experience,” he wrote. “On the contrary; it was the greatest affirmation of life I’ve ever felt.” 

Byars eventually finished college, and he now writes short stories and serves as an assistant editor for Narrative magazine. Will ended up marrying Byars’ high school girlfriend, and Byars eats dinner with the couple and their three daughters each week. “In many ways, our relationship hasn’t changed since the wreck,” Byars explains in his book. “We are no longer physically equal, but we are more open with each other than we used to be.”

When asked if he ever feels jealous of Will, Byars responds, “Sometimes I’m envious of the ease with which he can do things that take me hours, if I can do them at all, but on the whole, no.”

Byars’ first attempt to write his story took the form of fiction, but he deemed the storytelling ineffective and too linear. He kept at it, though, eventually attending the Sewanee School of Letters to work with writer John Jeremiah Sullivan, who suggested that he weave his voice lessons into the tale and who also helped him pare down his manuscript. “We went over it line by line, working for about three months,” Byars remembers.

The result is compact, substantial and thoroughly compelling—reminiscent of neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s posthumous bestseller, When Breath Becomes Air. While Kalanithi addressed the prospect of his impending death from cancer, Byars tackles the question of facing an immensely compromised life. 

When I suggest that Byars read Kalanithi’s book, he does, later emailing to tell me how much he admires it, and adding, “I wish he’d been my neurosurgeon.”

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

"Oh hi,” Clay Byars says, answering the phone at his home in what he calls “horse and cow country” in Shelby, Alabama, about an hour south of Birmingham. “How are you?”
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Cecilia Galante

Interview by Alice Cary

Cecilia Galante, author of The World from Up Here, talks about the constant process of being brave, what it means to share your unspoken secrets with the world and the incredible power of her eighth-grade students.

Your book begins with a letter to readers confessing that both you and your daughter are worriers like your character Wren, and that you both faced separate quests to act bravely. How are things going for the two of you in the worrying and bravery departments? And how does Sophia like your new book?
I’m pretty sure at this point in my life that being brave is a continual, ongoing process. It’s never a one-and-done kind of deal that gets shoved back on the shelf after we’ve successfully stared down a snake or found our way home out of the woods. There are opportunities every day to dig for courage, whether that means sitting down at your computer and waiting for the words to come (me) or going to Philadelphia to watch your older sister graduate even though large cities terrify you and you are sure that something terrible will happen (my daughter, Sophia). And the truth is that neither Sophia nor I get it right every single time. There will be days when I throw up my hands and shut my computer screen—after only 10 minutes. And the day we plowed through those congested Philadelphia streets, Sophia gripped my hand so hard that I was pretty sure at one point the blood had stopped flowing through it.

But here’s the other side of those scenarios: I came back to my office the next day and opened my computer and waited for the words to come. And despite her terror of being in the city, Sophia actually let go of my hand for a few minutes on the way to the Mexican restaurant afterwards for lunch. So I guess the short answer is that we’re both doing OK in the bravery department because we keep showing up and doing the best we can with it. And showing up, especially when you’re scared, is half the battle.

As for how Sophia likes the book, that remains to be seen, as she is still making her way through Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series. But she has a copy of it on her desk, and every once in awhile, I’ll see her pick it up and gaze at the cover, so I know it won’t be long!  

You teach eighth-grade English. How does that experience enrich your writing, in terms of plot, characters or in other ways?
Oh, my eighth graders! How I love them so! Interacting with them on a daily basis enriches my writing in so many ways, if only because they are so full of life and energy. Even their shortcomings are inspiring; their doubts and fears and lack of confidences are all so true and deeply felt. Everything with 12- and 13-year-olds is completely in the moment, wholly and unequivocally now, and always a life-or-death situation. They are convinced that most things are really the end of the world, that they will never survive the next test or crush or undertaking required of them, and that, despite a fledgling maturity, they will never get older. Being immersed in their world has been one of the best experiences of my life, because it reminds me of how important it is to live in the present, how deeply we all feel things and how critical friendships are to help us navigate those feelings.

"Being immersed in their world has been one of the best experiences of my life, because it reminds me of how important it is to live in the present, how deeply we all feel things and how critical friendships are to help us navigate those feelings."

I’ve only developed a few plot lines for my books from working with my students (The Summer of May was a big one), but you can see facets of their personalities in almost all of my characters. I tell them that I keep a notebook in my desk drawer full of secret notes about them, which is not entirely untrue. I don’t have a notebook, but I do have a very, very good memory!

The World From Up Here deftly explores several relationships, especially between Wren, her mother, her brother and her newly discovered cousin, Silver. It also features great mystery and excitement in the form of Witch Weatherly. Did you have any difficulty combining these two elements into a single narrative?
My goodness, did I ever! This book went through several major rewrites. And when I say major, I mean throwing out hundreds and hundreds of pages and then starting over again—four or five different times. My primary difficulty was figuring out how to combine the mystery of Witch Weatherly’s backstory with an interesting and plausible story regarding the two girls, each of whom come from very different backgrounds. I can’t begin to tell you how long it took for me to figure all of that out. Lots and lots of drafts. Some tears. Even a completely abandoned manuscript at one point. But something about the story—and Wren herself—wouldn’t let me give up on the book for good, and when I pulled the manuscript out for what might have been the 12th or 13th time, I was determined to keep trying until I got it right. I still don’t know if I’ve ever felt so simultaneously amazed and grateful when I realized that I finally did.  

Cousins Silver and Wren are both dealing with an absent parent, or in Wren’s case, two briefly absent parents. Your books often feature absent parents, estrangements and family secrets. Does your exploration of these potent themes stem from the fact that you spent your first 16 years in what you have described as a religious cult? And what is your relationship with your parents today?
I actually hadn’t realized just how many of my books featured absent parents or secrets until last year, when I started talking about my next book with my editor at Scholastic. We were throwing around story ideas and at one point she said, “How about something kind of light with a two-parent family?” I remember the question catching me off guard, and I sort of laughed it off, but later, on my three-hour drive back home, it gnawed at me. Why hadn’t I written a book yet that was somewhat “light” and involved a kid from a “two-parent family?” And what did it say about me that I still didn’t want to?

I think all writers probably draw from some aspects of themselves and their childhoods in their work, and this is certainly true of me. The strange uniqueness of my background, as well as the fractured relationship I had with my parents, has contributed to much of the material in my books. Despite the fact that my parents never divorced and that we lived as a “normal family” after the commune deteriorated, I think my early knowledge of such a tenuous parental structure continues to influence many of my fictional families.

It’s the secrets though (which I’ve come to understand most families keep) that I find the most interesting to write about. For years, I was forbidden to talk about where I’d come from or how I’d been raised, lest my family be seen as a bunch of freaks. I understand now that my parents were trying to protect me, but keeping a secret like that was akin to living with cancer. It slowly and very deliberately killed off any sense of trust I might have built in myself and the world around me. Luckily, I found a way out through my writing, but how many kids never find a portal to freedom? How many of them walk through their days at school, having heard their parents screaming at each the night before, or their mothers crying themselves to sleep? How many young girls sit at birthday parties and eat cake and ice cream with their friends, only to excuse themselves to go make themselves throw up in the bathroom? How many of them have heard a mother or father or an older brother say, “But don’t you dare tell anyone. Don’t even think about it.”

Many of my books address these types of situations because that time in my life is still such a vivid memory for me. I know what holding loaded images inside your chest every day can do to a kid. I know how it shapes the way they see others, themselves, everything around them. What my books try to explore ultimately, in a variety of different ways, is what a kid might realize, or even become finally, if those secrets implode and make their way out into the world. And that’s why I want to keep writing those kinds of stories.

"I know what holding loaded images inside your chest every day can do to a kid. I know how it shapes the way they see others, themselves, everything around them."

Several of the character in this book have interesting names, such as Silver, Bedelia and Witch Weatherly. Did you happen to draw upon any literary inspiration for these names, such as, perhaps, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, in which Whethersfield, Connecticut, is mentioned?
Wow, you’re good! I wish I’d been inspired by something as complex as The Witch of Blackbird Pond or Whethersfield, Connecticut! The truth is much simpler. It always takes me a long time to choose my fictional names; I spend hours on the Baby Name websites, scrolling alphabetically through endless lists of them and sometimes even studying their meanings. For this book, the name Wren came very quickly, because I already knew I wanted my protagonist’s name to be associated with birds in some way. Wren just sort of jumped out at me when I started researching the names of different birds, and I never looked back. As for Silver, I think the word itself is lovely and fluid sounding, and I’ve always been a sucker for alliteration, which is where Witch Weatherly came from.

Your book features some notable appearances by “hornet-head snakes.” Are you referring to coral snakes, by any chance? And have you had any run-ins with snakes, or do you harbor any particular fears?
I’m terrified of snakes. Mice, too. Animals like that, which have the ability to move so quickly, darting this way and then that, maybe deciding to bite, are just a little too much for my overly active imagination. Putting a little girl on the trail of an overgrown mountain swarming with hornet-head snakes was my idea of creating a legitimately terrifying situation. Obviously the snakes in the book, with their tiny horns and yellow eyes, aren’t real, but they do share a commonality with coral snakes in that they have the same unusual coloring and can deliver a fatal bite. Scary enough for me!

Witch Weatherly saves Silver with a concoction she calls “herb glue.” Is there such a thing?
I did a ton of research on the various herbs that Witch Weatherly could use to treat Silver’s injury. I was stunned to find that there were so many plants that had real medicinal qualities, such as elderflower, which is used to treat common cold symptoms, comfrey, which alleviates sprains, and dandelions, which are used as a diuretic. I definitely used the ones that would help treat wounds, such as yarrow and aconite, but ultimately I imagined the “herb glue,” which the Witch created by boiling the herbs down into a thick paste and then using to seal Silver’s wound.

What exposure to literature did you have while growing up in that environment? Did you go to school? And how did your love of reading and writing develop?
We were very well educated at the commune where I grew up. Our school was tiny—there were only two of us in the sixth grade!—but we had skilled and very dedicated teachers. I remember reading the Little House on the Prairie series not once but twice all the way through, as well as an entire biography collection of famous historical Americans including Ethan Allen, Clara Barton and Sacajawea. I think my love of reading began and developed with those early experiences, although it didn’t click that I might also love to write until I read The Catcher in the Rye in high school and realized that I could write about things I’d never said out loud—to myself or anyone else.

 

Author photo credit Herbert Plummer.

Cecilia Galante, author of The World from Up Here, talks about the constant process of being brave, what it means to share your unspoken secrets with the world and the incredible power of her eighth-grade students.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Kelly Barnhill

Interview by Alice Cary

Children’s novelist Kelly Barnhill had been thinking about her fourth novel for months but wasn’t sure where to set her story. That’s also when, after 15 years of marriage and three children, she and her husband decided it was finally time to take their honeymoon. A trip to Costa Rica solved both issues.

There, the two former park rangers spent a thrilling day hiking in the volcanic Rincón de la Vieja National Park, where they had to carefully avoid poisonous fumes, sinkholes and steam vents spewing boiling mud. “I’d never been in a landscape like that before,” Barnhill says, speaking by phone from her home in Minneapolis. “Rivers would just sort of erupt out of the side of the mountain and then go into a hole and disappear.”

The next morning Barnhill woke early, grabbed some coffee and her purple notebook and began to write. “Suddenly I realized my characters were on a volcano, and I wasn’t expecting them to be there,” she recalls. “And once I began, it was like it was always meant to be. I couldn’t imagine that story being in any other landscape.”

“That story” turned into The Girl Who Drank the Moon, an adventure-filled fantasy featuring a town whose leaders order that a baby be sacrificed each year to a supposedly evil witch named Xan. But instead of harming these babies, Xan actually delivers them to families on the other side of the forest. 

“Xan was doing what she truly thought was the right thing,” Barnhill says, “placing these babies with families, but she was unwittingly allowing this terrible injustice to persist.”

One day, Xan accidentally feeds one of these babies moonlight, imbuing her with magic powers. Xan decides to raise the child, whom she names Luna, with the help of a swamp monster named Glerk and a “Perfectly Tiny Dragon” called Fyrian. In the lovingly chronicled years that follow the baby-snatching, Xan desperately tries to shield Luna from the magical powers that will erupt when she turns 13, thus leading to an inevitable clash of forces in the novel’s cataclysmic conclusion, bringing together a large cast of characters followed through 48 chapters.

“It’s an odd little thing,” Barnhill says of her latest book, which follows 2014’s The Witch’s Boy. “I’m kind of surprised that people are enjoying it. I really thought I would be the only one.”

For a novel so clearly based in fantasy, a variety of its central elements arose from Barnhill’s real-life social concerns. Xan, Luna, Glerk and Fyrian form what Barnhill calls “that odd little family at the edge of the crater,” and when creating them, the author drew from observations she made while teaching homeless youth in Minneapolis years ago. “When you work in those contexts,” she notes, “you see the different ways in which families organize themselves. This notion of family is much more flexible and fluid than we tend to think.”

The author describes a sad reality behind one of the novel’s most arresting scenes, when the town rulers, known as the Protectorate, arrive to pry baby Luna from the arms of her mother, who tries to escape by climbing high into the rafters of her home. Barnhill acknowledges that this heartbreaking confrontation was difficult to write, and that the desperate mother reminds her of a mom she once encountered while working at a battered woman’s shelter whose child was seriously ill and being denied medical treatment. “It was like she filled up the entire room,” Barnhill recalls. “I was 16 at the time, and I felt like her shoulders were touching the ceiling.”

Barnhill’s own childhood changed in seventh grade when her mother helped rescue her from a school bullying situation. “Gosh, I was a lonely kid,” she recalls. “I was socially awkward. I just never felt OK in my own body. I was easily targetable.”

When her mother got wind of her daughter’s distress, she transferred her to a small, all-girls Catholic school, where she was taught by nuns who were “go-getters,” and the principal had walked arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr. “It was a magical year for me,” Barnhill remembers. “It was the first time I had seen that kind of activism that was part of everybody’s story.”

“Everything will alter when you follow this trail of breadcrumbs into the forest. And we tell these stories to remind ourselves that it’s OK. You do make it to the other side, and you are OK, even if you are altered.”

Just as Luna’s magic reveals itself at age 13, Barnhill’s own special gift was ignited about this time, thanks to a nun named Sister Geron at her new school, who required her students to write a short story each week. “I had this inexhaustible well of story ideas inside me,” Barnhill says. “I could just sit down and write a new one and then write another one. Just the practice of writing woke up something in me.”

Despite her love of writing, Barnhill was a delayed reader, not reading at all until the end of third grade, nor on her own until fifth grade. However, she loved listening, and her father read often to his five children, especially from a mammoth volume of fairy tales that became so tattered that he rebound it using an old checkerboard and duct tape, which his children then dubbed “the Checkered Book.” 

Barnhill notes parallels between the “metamorphosis narratives” of fantasy and fairy tales and adolescence, pointing out that such similarities are one reason why these stories are so appealing to kids. That’s certainly the case in The Girl Who Drank the Moon, in which Luna’s magic so vividly erupts as she turns 13.

“The deep dark woods [are] dangerous, and it’s scary, but you have to go in there and you are going to be irrevocably changed,” Barnhill says. “Everything will alter when you follow this trail of breadcrumbs into the forest. And we tell these stories to remind ourselves that it’s OK. You do make it to the other side, and you are OK, even if you are altered.”

 

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Children’s novelist Kelly Barnhill had been thinking about her fourth novel for months but wasn’t sure where to set her story. That’s also when, after 15 years of marriage and three children, she and her husband decided it was finally time to take their honeymoon. A trip to Costa Rica solved both issues.

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