Alice Cary

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.
Nonfiction

Luke Dittrich

Interview by Alice Cary

As an award-winning journalist, Luke Dittrich has investigated topics ranging from near-death experiences to atomic-bomb testing. But there was one story he was especially eager to explore: the role of his own grandfather in one of the most controversial cases in the history of neuroscience.

In 1953, Dittrich’s grandfather, neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville, operated on a young man experiencing severe seizures, removing part of the patient’s brain and leaving him with profound amnesia for the rest of his life. Dittrich reconstructs this dark chapter of medicine in Patient H.M., following the threads of his own family history to reveal what might have motivated Scoville’s fascination with the brain.

Why did you decide to write about Patient H.M.?
The case of Patient H.M. has fascinated me ever since I first heard about it. I think it would have even if there weren’t a family connection. Memory, amnesia, human experimentation . . . So many rich themes. The personal connection—my grandfather performed the experimental brain operation that transformed Henry Molaison into Patient H.M.—tipped it from fascinating into irresistible. For almost as long as I’ve been a writer, I’ve wanted to take on this story.

You say that writing this story has taken you "down a number of dark alleys" in your family's history. At any point did you have second thoughts about revealing some of your discoveries? Have any family members expressed reservations or objections?
Right after I got my book deal, I phoned my mom to let her know. She’s always been my biggest fan, and hugely supportive, but these were the first words out of her mouth: “Oh no.” And that was long before I uncovered some of the most troubling information in my book. Investigating my own family history, dragging old skeletons out of closets, was hard. I tell myself that the story is worth telling, despite the pain I know it will cause. What that says about me, I don’t know.

No doubt your grandmother's mental illness deepened your grandfather's interest in the mysteries of the brain. Her sudden suicide attempt when her children were so young was obviously startling for all, especially your grandfather. Were you aware of her health battles when you started this project?
I knew she struggled with mental illness, yes. But my understanding of the particulars was hazy, murky. Researching the book made me confront both the depths of her illness and the terrible “treatments” provided to her while she was institutionalized. My grandmother died a few years ago, at the age of 101. She was a beloved and highly private person. Shining a spotlight on the worst years of her life is a decision I’ve wrestled with.

If you could talk to your grandfather today, what would you ask him about Patient H.M.? And how do you think he would feel about your book?
I’d want to know what he was thinking, in the operating room, when he made that historic decision to remove those slivers of Henry’s brain. What was the balance between his desire to help Henry, and his desire to learn from Henry? There’s only so much I, or anyone, can understand about another human being’s motivations, from the outside looking in. That said, we’re often ciphers even to ourselves, so I doubt even having a chance to speak with him would have necessarily resolved that mystery.

I can’t imagine he would have liked my book.

You draw some interesting parallels about separate experiences you and your grandfather had, noting that both of you tried your hand at bullfighting, and that both of you ended up perched high in the air in memorable, unusual spots. Do you think the two of you share any personality traits?
I think he and I shared a taste for risky behavior. That said, the differences between us are significant. Chief among them: He saved hundreds if not thousands of lives. I’ve saved none. I try to keep that in mind.

Has this project changed your feelings about your grandfather?
In a strange way, researching my grandfather’s role in the history of memory science has had an effect on my memories of my grandfather. Today, thinking back on Thanksgiving dinners as a child, with my grandfather at the head of the table, I can’t help but think about all the unspoken secrets that may have lurked just beneath the surface. It casts a dark filter over memories that were once sunny. That’s one of the things modern memory science has taught us: Memories are malleable things, always in flux.

What do you hope your book will accomplish?
Henry Molaison was neurologically incapable of telling his own story. Instead, his story has usually been told (and in many ways owned) by the people who’ve built their careers studying him. I hope my book liberates Henry’s story from the researchers who’ve had an interest in telling it in a particular way. Henry’s story is important not just for what it can teach us about memory, but for what it can teach us about humanity, ethics, and our own sometimes ruthless pursuit of knowledge.

It's remarkable that your mother's closest childhood friend, Dr. Suzanne Corkin, became a neuroscientist whose research focused on your grandfather's most famous patient. But the amount of control she exerted over Patient H.M. seems to have been potentially excessive. Were you surprised when she wouldn't let you meet him? Were she and your mother still in touch?
That connection between my mom and Corkin is such a strange element of this whole thing. I knew Corkin ever since I was a kid. She was a regular at my mom’s dinner parties. Yes, I was surprised when she wouldn’t let me meet Henry unless I signed a document giving Corkin and MIT editorial control over anything I wanted to write about him. My mom and Corkin remained close, though my working on this book definitely put a strain on their relationship. Sadly, Corkin passed away while the book was in galleys.

Dr. Corkin published her own book in 2013, and you say she had a movie deal as well. Did she feel threatened by the fact that you, too, were writing a book?
I have no idea. I would say that our books are very different, and that her book brings its own useful perspective to Henry’s story. 

Dr. Corkin died in May, having previously told you that she planned to shred her research files. Do you have any idea whether she did?
What she told me is that she had already shredded most of Henry’s raw data, and that she thought she would shred more of it in the future. I did recently ask MIT for comment, but they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) shed more light on the matter.

What happened after Henry Molaison's death is just as intriguing as what came before. Is your book likely to provoke further controversy?
I think it’s already begun to, as a result of an excerpt that recently ran in the New York Times Magazine. That controversy is healthy, I believe. Questions need to be asked. Also, I hope that some of the other researchers who worked with Henry over the decades, and who held on to their own collections of Henry’s data, might now be motivated to pool that data, and have it archived and indexed, to preserve what’s left.

Your descriptions of the post-mortem dissection and study of Henry's brain and others are fascinating. Have you considered donating your own brain to science?
I do have that little organ-donor stamp on my driver’s license, but apparently that only covers our lesser organs, not the brain. I like to think I would donate my brain, yes, though for some reason the thought of actually doing so does give me pause. Also, my brain, unlike Henry’s, isn’t particularly interesting.

This story seems ripe for a movie. Can you imagine who might play the roles of your grandfather and his famous patient?
That's really fun to think about, but I don't want to get ahead of myself!

Author photo © Matt Moyer

As an award-winning journalist, Luke Dittrich has investigated topics ranging from near-death experiences to atomic-bomb testing. But there was one story he was especially eager to explore: the role of his own grandfather in one of the most controversial cases in the history of neuroscience.
NonfictionBusiness & Finance

Paul English

Interview by Alice Cary

What’s it like to be the subject of a book by Tracy Kidder, master of narrative nonfiction and Pulitzer Prize winner? We tracked down computer genius and entrepreneur Paul English, who’s portrayed in A Truck Full of Money, to find out.

A native of Boston, English received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from UMass Boston. After working as a software engineer, he co-founded Boston Light Software, which was sold to Intuit in 1999, netting $8 million. A later start-up, the travel website Kayak.com, would bring a far larger return when it was sold to Priceline in 2012 for $1.8 billion.

In a fascinating, fast-moving narrative, Kidder follows English from his days at Boston Latin School (where, as a seventh grader, he hacked a teacher’s computer and captured his password) to his recent passion for philanthropic causes, from education in Haiti to helping the homeless.

Did you have any reservations about allowing Kidder to write about you? How much access did he have and what were the ground rules? 
When Tracy first approached me with the book idea, I declined. Although my work often puts me in the public, I’m uncomfortable being the center of attention. However, I soon decided to accept his offer, hoping that the book might raise awareness for my nonprofit teams. Plus, Tracy is an insanely fun person to hang out with! He is the most voracious reader friend I have, so we had a lot of fun talking about books. Tracy and I spent a lot of time together over the three years this book was in process. He lived with me for a while—we would eat breakfast together, he would come to all of my meetings, and we’d often shop at Whole Foods after work to cook dinner for friends and family. Tracy gets really personal with his subjects—one day he accompanied me in a workout with my personal trainer, and another day he sat in the chair next to me when I got my hair cut!

"Tracy gets really personal with his subjects—one day he accompanied me in a workout with my personal trainer, and another day he sat in the chair next to me when I got my hair cut!"

Have you read A Truck Full of Money? Did any of Kidder’s observations surprise you?
Although Tracy trailed me for three years and took notes constantly, I had no idea what he was actually going to write about until I got my first read of the book in June. I admit that I only skimmed it, because it is a little uncomfortable reading a book about yourself. I provided no input to the manuscript. Although I’m open about my bipolar illness, I was surprised to see how much he decided to write about that. Some of it was embarrassing to read, although I hope it can in some ways be helpful to others, in the same way that Touched with Fire was useful to me so many years ago.

You evidently learned many of your negotiating skills from watching your dad make deals at yard sales. Do you ever think of him as you make deals?
Absolutely. My Dad was a very charismatic person, and he often got deals done by connecting with and charming the other party. I probably model his behavior in that I’m always trying to understand other people, and trying to get them to smile. This is true in daily life as well as when negotiating a big business deal.

At heart, you seem very much a Boston boy, and yet you’ve made much of your fortune from the travel business. Do you ever have the time or desire to travel simply for pleasure?
I travel extensively. In the last year I was in Japan with some friends, and then in Australia with my kids. In the next few months I will be in Haiti, London, Los Angeles and San Francisco. And I just signed up to take my son to climb Kilimanjaro in January.

Can you imagine what you might have done had you been born before the age of computers?
The most obvious role for me would be to become a social worker or psychotherapist, following in the footsteps of my mother and of two of my siblings. I’m fascinated about learning from other people. My own struggles with depression and anxiety allow me to feel the pain of others, and I enjoy trying to alleviate that pain whenever I can.

You’ve had many successes as well as failures. What’s your proudest achievement?
The first thing that came to mind was raising two kids with an amazing woman. The next thing that came to mind was my work creating Summits Education in rural Haiti. This is the longest-term project of my life. We are educating almost 10,000 kids in the central plateau. I’m committed to sending many of them to college.

Kidder vividly describes how being bipolar has affected you, asking rhetorically whether hypomania has helped you by increasing your energy and brashness, or whether you’ve made your way in spite of the condition. Your thoughts?
Sometimes I find mental health labels frustrating. I’ve had many labels thrown at me over the years—ADHD, ADD, bipolar illness, depression, etc. I knew as a teen that something was different about me, from frequent visual distortions (later attributed to temporal lobe epilepsy) to fascination with light and sound, dark depressions, panic attacks, anxiety, weeks with very little sleep, racing thoughts, grandiosity—you name it. The combination of being bright and hypomanic is mostly a great thing, because it can push creative instincts very far. If someone invented a magic pill to rid me of bipolar illness, I would not take it. I continue to struggle with finding meds that keep out the bad parts without eliminating the good parts of being bipolar. At the moment, I feel pretty healthy.

You’re a driven person who loves driving. Are you still an occasional Uber driver, with your Tesla? Do people ever recognize you?
I drove Uber last fall as a way to learn about what it felt like to know that you would be rated at the end of every trip. I wanted to learn this, since our Lola travel agents are rated at the end of each of our traveler’s journeys. Driving was really fun. It opened my eyes to meet all kinds of people in Boston who I would not normally come in contact with.

A Truck Full of Money is a compelling read, especially for young people starting out in business. Any advice for young entrepreneurs?
The most important decision you will make—by far—is who you decide to work with. Please pick people who are fun, confident, humble, curious, open-minded, ethical and driven.

Kidder writes that you “felt like going into hiding” when the news broke about Priceline buying Kayak for $1.8 billion. Any worries that this book will make you feel that way again?
I’ve had to learn how to cope with this over the last few years. I think my friend Tracy is going to cause my inbox to get flooded a bit more than the few hundred emails I get each day now, but I’m trying to get prepared. Check out my one-page site paulenglish.com to see how I list my top few projects these days.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of A Truck Full of Money.

 

A portion of this article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What’s it like to be the subject of a book by Tracy Kidder, master of narrative nonfiction and Pulitzer Prize winner? We tracked down computer genius and entrepreneur Paul English, who’s portrayed in A Truck Full of Money, to find out.

NonfictionHistory

Beth Macy

Interview by Alice Cary

"It’s the best story in town, but no one has been able to get it,” a photographer told journalist Beth Macy soon after she arrived in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1989 to write for the Roanoke Times. 

He was referring to the tale of George and Willie Muse, young albino African-American brothers from a sharecropping family who had reportedly been kidnapped in 1899 from the tiny tobacco-farming community of Truevine, then displayed for decades as sideshow freaks by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. They were billed under various stage names, including “Eko and Iko, Sheepheaded Cannibals from Equador” and “Ambassadors from Mars.”

It took Macy 25 years to unearth the brothers’ sad saga, requiring painstaking research on multiple fronts to try to “untangle a century of whispers from truth.” The result is a deeply moving and endlessly compelling book, such an intricate tale that it’s worthy of not one but two subtitles—Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South.

Thankfully, Macy had the much-needed investigative chops, having been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and written an award-winning bestseller, Factory Man. Still, she ran into plenty of dead ends, she says by phone from her home in Roanoke.

George Muse died in 1971, but Willie lived out his last years in Roanoke, cared for by his great-niece Nancy Saunders, the proprietor of a popular soul-food restaurant. As the family gatekeeper, Saunders wouldn’t let reporters anywhere near her beloved uncle.

“You’re too curious,” Saunders told Macy when she began inquiring, pointing to a sign that said, “SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP.” After dealing with decades of people knocking on her family’s doors, demanding to see “the savages,” Saunders had developed what Macy calls an “exterior toughness . . . so that people wouldn’t ask rude questions about her uncle.”

After Willie died in 2001, Macy was allowed to co-write a series of articles about the Muse brothers for the Roanoke Times, although Saunders remained guarded. Finally, on Christmas morning 2013, Saunders gave Macy her blessing to write a book, with one proviso: “No matter what you find out or what your research turns up, you have to remember: In the end, they came out on top.” 

The going was anything but easy; even seemingly simple facts proved to be roadblocks. “It’s so frustrating,” Macy explains. “George was born anytime between 1890 and 1901, and that’s a pretty big span.”

Macy began interviewing older African Americans who had grown up with the story. “Some of them just thought it was a hoax,” Macy says. “Some of them thought it was true; some of them lived near George and Willie in their later years and were scared of them like a Boo Radley figure.”

Macy drove the elders around town, listening eagerly as they shared memories sparked by passing landmarks. “Trying to figure out what happened was a challenge,” Macy recalls, “but also trying to figure out what the lore meant to people in the community as well as the family was a whole other layer of meaning to the story.”

In Truevine, Macy has created a vivid portrait of two men whose lives were forever upended one earth-shattering day in 1899.

Their observations and insights soon led to another revelation. “I don’t think I knew how much the book would be about race when I started,” Macy says. “The circus is such a whiz-bang thing, you think most of the book will be about that. But to me, those really palpable, gritty, daily experiences that African Americans had during Jim Crow, those were the most powerful things. I felt like it was an honor that people would tell me these stories and trust me to get it right.”

In Truevine, Macy has created a vivid portrait of two men whose lives were forever upended one earth-shattering day in 1899. Sideshow exhibits for decades, they became excellent musicians, playing multiple instruments and singing.

The boys were told their mother was dead, but in truth, she never stopped looking for them. Harriett Muse finally tracked them down and brought them home in 1927, after a truly heart-stopping showdown. This illiterate maid stood up to eight policemen at the circus, as well as the Commonwealth’s attorney, who happened to be the founder of the local Ku Klux Klan. Then she had the gumption to sue the Greatest Show on Earth, claiming it owed the family $100,000 in damages and back pay.

“How did she do it?” Macy wonders. “How did she bring them home, not get arrested, not get hurt? She had no protection; there’s never any mention that her husband was with her. It was her alone.”

Despite Macy’s exhaustive research, many questions remain unanswered. At one point she commiserated with Canadian historian Jane Nicholas, who urged her to keep digging. If we only wrote the histories of the people who left detailed records, Nicholas told her, “we would only get to know about the really privileged people. You have to piece together your evidence with empathy and conjecture.”

Even now, months later, Macy remains moved by this wisdom. “That’s my favorite quote of the whole thing,” she says. “That’s the heart and soul of this book. Because George and Willie’s history wasn’t just erased, it was never written down to begin with.”

Now it finally is, ready for the world to read.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Learn more about Beth Macy and Truevine in Alice Cary’s Behind the Interview post.

RELATED: Watch the CSPAN Book TV broadcast of Alice Cary's interview with Beth Macy at the 2016 Southern Festival of Books.

 

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

It took Beth Macy 25 years to unearth the Muse brothers’ sad saga, requiring painstaking research on multiple fronts to try to “untangle a century of whispers from truth.” The result is a deeply moving and endlessly compelling book, such an intricate tale that it’s worthy of not one but two subtitles—Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South.
FictionComing of Age

Lindsey Lee Johnson

Interview by Alice Cary

"It was a terrible time for me,” author Lindsey Lee Johnson remembers. “Everything was just falling apart.” She’s talking about 2008, when her college teaching contract wasn’t renewed because of the economic crash, her boyfriend left and she could no longer afford the home she’d just bought.

To try to put the pieces back together, Johnson moved in with her parents in Marin County, California, and began tutoring high school students at a learning center. 

Her first assignment was teaching SAT math, hardly her favorite subject, and her initial encounters with students were disappointing. “At first I just thought, oh my God, the way they talk, the constant foul language,” Johnson recalls. “It was loud, and I thought, why should I even be doing this? What happened to my life?”

Fortunately, what seemed like a catastrophe ultimately ended up being one of the happiest times in Johnson’s life. As she got to know the students, she enjoyed the new job, ended up marrying a fellow tutor and got the inspiration she needed to write her debut novel, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth, a page-turning high school drama that’s being compared to Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep. 

Speaking by phone from her home near Los Angeles, Johnson says she didn’t read Prep or many other books about high school until after finishing her manuscript (at which time she found Prep to be “fabulous”). 

“One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was that I saw a need for it,” she says. “I saw a place for a literary vision of contemporary high school and teenagers that was written for adults. I didn’t see much of that in bookstores.”

The seeds of Johnson’s story were sown as she spent hours listening to hundreds of teenage students. “The experience helped me out of my own head, to stop making everything about me, and actually invest my time in other people, just listening to these kids and really developing compassion and empathy for them—and remembering what it felt like when I was that age,” she says.

The Most Dangerous Place on Earth follows an ensemble cast of characters, beginning with an incident in their eighth-grade year: A boy commits suicide after a love note he writes is revealed on Facebook, prompting merciless ridicule and bullying. The tragedy causes reverberations that linger throughout these characters’ high school years. Set in Marin County, the novel chronicles a wealthy world that Johnson knows intimately, although she fictionalized the high school she once attended. She based her characters on a variety of student archetypes, including Ryan the jock, Cally the hippie, Elisabeth the beautiful girl and Damon the delinquent, but with a twist.

Growing up, Johnson felt that such categories were too limiting, noting that she was both a cheerleader and a nerd. “For each character, I thought of the archetype, and then I gave them a problem,” she notes. Overachieving Abigail, for instance, suffers from loneliness and takes a particularly destructive path with a male teacher to solve her dilemma. “I remember that feeling of being a teenage girl and going through that awkward phase,” Johnson says, “and feeling unappealing and unattractive. You know, kind of unseen.”

Although Johnson didn’t have to contend with the pressures of social media during her high school years, she vividly remembers a spiral-bound notebook that she and her friends circulated, writing notes to and about one another. “I don’t remember what we wrote in these things,” she muses, “but I’m sure it wasn’t lovely and nice. I’m sure it was a lot of gossip.”

"I don’t think kids today are any more cruel. It’s just that everything they do is public. And so the stakes are raised; the impacts are greater and more far-reaching."

She adds: “The thing is, those notebooks were private, so their ability to hurt was limited. . . . I don’t think kids today are any more cruel. It’s just that everything they do is public. And so the stakes are raised; the impacts are greater and more far-reaching.”

Johnson acknowledges that several of her characters make what she calls “questionable decisions,” and those are the personalities that intrigue her. “As a writer I’m very interested in characters who are not obviously likable and who do things that make us cringe, because I’m interested in the psychology behind it—and in trying to find empathy even for people I don’t want to empathize with. I think that’s an important job that fiction does in our world.”

She quickly adds a crucial qualifier: “The kids in the book feel 100 percent real to me, but I don’t want people to think that these are real kids that I tutored.”

Their dilemmas feel authentic, including struggles with grades, dating, sex, drinking and drugs. And when Johnson finished writing these teenagers’ stories, she added yet another layer, inserting several chapters from the point of view of a newly hired young teacher, Molly Nicoll, who becomes overly invested in her students’ struggles.

“I empathize with Molly in particular,” Johnson says. “Being a young teacher is a struggle, especially when you’re not that much older than the students. You want to help them, but you have to walk the line of how invested and involved you get.”

Happily, Johnson’s own teaching and tutoring experiences were productive for both her and her students. “I’ve always wanted to be a novelist,” she says. She wrote her first book at age 24, but says it was so terrible that she “sat down and wrote another one.” The Most Dangerous Place on Earth is her first published novel, but her “fourth or fifth manuscript.” 

“There’s no reason why I should have kept going,” she says with amusement, “except that it was the only thing that I cared about.”

 

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

"It was a terrible time for me,” author Lindsey Lee Johnson remembers. “Everything was just falling apart.” She’s talking about 2008, when her college teaching contract wasn’t renewed because of the economic crash, her boyfriend left and she could no longer afford the home she’d just bought.
YA FictionYA

Ibi Zoboi

Interview by Alice Cary

For immigrants like Ibi Zoboi, the unnerving process of uprooting and arriving in the United States “feels as though you’ve been transported to a different planet.” With her powerful debut novel for teens, Zoboi’s mission was to write not only about changing cultures, but also about the experience of moving “from one broken place to another.”

American Street starts with a heartbreaking scene: While on her way from Haiti to live with relatives in Detroit, narrator Fabiola Toussaint is separated from her mother while going through Customs at Kennedy Airport in New York. Fabiola, an American citizen by birth, is forced to fly alone to Detroit, while her mother is detained in New Jersey by U.S. Immigration. 

As a child, Zoboi lived through a similar experience. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, she and her mother moved to the Bushwick area of Brooklyn when Zoboi was 4. She recalls the move as a “tragic shift” marked by the shock of leaving a place full of family for an apartment defined by loneliness. “It was winter,” Zoboi says, speaking by phone from her home in Brooklyn, “and my mother [was] gone for long hours to this place called a job. I had TV as my sitter. It defined me as a writer and as a person, that shift.”

Four years later, when she and her mother returned to Haiti for a visit, Zoboi was not allowed to return to America.

“I didn’t know anything about Haitian culture, and I wasn’t allowed to go back home,” Zoboi says. “I was separated for three months and stayed with relatives. My mother worked tirelessly to get me back.”

As the novel unfolds, Fabiola is thrust into the Detroit household of her aunt and three teenage cousins, while the fate of her mother remains unknown. Fabiola experiences her first snowfall and begins classes in a Catholic school that resembles a haunted castle, and it isn’t long before she realizes that she felt safer in Haiti than she does in America.

Since the dangerous, desolate Bushwick neighborhood she knew as a child has been revitalized, Zoboi wanted to place her characters in a modern-day neighborhood that resembles the one she grew up in. She settled on Detroit, and was delighted to discover a road called American Street. Then, in a case of literary serendipity, she located the ideal spot for Fabiola’s relatives to live. 

“I’m kind of—not literally—driving down American Street on Google maps and I come across a Joy Road. . . . Where Joy Road and American Street intersect, I see that there are these little shotgun houses very close together, and it hit me right then and there. It’s real: There is an American Street intersection. It was just perfect.”

Zoboi hopes to travel to Detroit to see the intersection in person. “I’m going to take a picture of me standing at the crossroads,” she says.

Such a photo would be spot-on for a novelist who digs deep into what happens when cultures, nationalities, races and religions collide. Fabiola, who believes in Haitian Vodou and spirit guides, soon has a boyfriend named Kasim, who has grown up Muslim. Zoboi hopes her portrayal of Fabiola’s religion might help dispel the negative stereotypes many Americans have of the Haitian faith. 

“I’m really passionate about faith in young adult literature, whatever the faith is,” Zoboi says. “That’s who I was as a teenager, looking for some sort of faith, or some otherness. I think a lot of teenagers grapple with that, and I don’t see enough in YA.”

Fabiola is drawn to Kasim’s sweet, gentle ways, but worries about his close ties to her cousin’s boyfriend, a reported drug dealer with a violent temper. Eventually, she’s forced to make an impossible and life-changing choice between her loyalty to Kasim and to her family. 

“A reader who doesn’t understand the differences between cultures will see these girls as just black girls. But there is a huge cultural difference.”

Fabiola and Kasim’s relationship was loosely inspired by real-life headlines: When 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was fatally shot in 2012, he had been on the phone with a Haitian girl.

Whether speaking of Trayvon Martin’s girlfriend or Fabiola and her American cousins, Zoboi notes, “A reader who doesn’t understand the differences between cultures will see these girls as just black girls. But there is a huge cultural difference.”

Zoboi grew up living this cultural divide. Her fifth-grade teachers looked at her bright Haitian clothes and wrongly assumed she couldn’t speak English. They placed her in an English as a Second Language course, where she felt “invisible.” After studying investigative journalism in college and working at a weekly paper, Zoboi finally felt “seen” when she took to the stage at poetry slams in New York City, becoming part of the spoken word movement. She quit her newspaper job to work in a bookstore, and began taking creative writing courses, eventually earning an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. 

Zoboi’s transformation from fearful immigrant girl to adult writer with a vivid, resonating voice extends even to her name. As a girl, she was called Pascale Philantrope, but as an adult, she changed her name. She chose “Ibi,” Yoruba for “rebirth,” which she felt was a close translation of Pascale, a name tied to Easter. Her new last name comes from husband Joseph Zoboi, a visual artist and educator with whom she has three children, ages 9, 12 and 14.

Filled with precise, hard-edged descriptions, American Street weaves together elements of faith, family, loyalty, race, violence, trauma, American dreams and failures—all bound together in a riveting, tragic tale.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

For immigrants like Ibi Zoboi, the unnerving process of uprooting and arriving in the United States “feels as though you’ve been transported to a different planet.” With her powerful debut novel for teens, Zoboi’s mission was to write not only about changing cultures, but also about the experience of moving “from one broken place to another.”

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Jack Cheng

Interview by Alice Cary

Jack Cheng’s all-time favorite book is The Little Prince, the beloved classic in which a pilot who has crashed in the desert encounters a young interplanetary traveler. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that Cheng’s inventive middle grade debut, See You in the Cosmos, concerns an 11-year-old traveler named Alex Petroski who is making a recording that he hopes extraterrestrials will hear.

Cheng came up with the idea several Thanksgivings ago while hanging out in his younger brother’s room. He spotted a Carl Sagan book that reminded him of the Golden Record that Sagan helped create, containing images and sounds intended to portray life on Earth to extraterrestrials, which was launched aboard two NASA Voyager spacecraft in 1977.

“The next morning I woke up and had this idea for a story about a boy and his dog, and trying to launch a rocket into space,” Cheng recalls, speaking from his home in Detroit. “It immediately started to take on a life of its own.”

His character Alex idolizes Sagan so much that his dog is named after the astronomer. The pair board a train from their Colorado home to travel to a rocket festival in New Mexico, where Alex hopes to launch his own vessel into space. Meanwhile, he’s recording his thoughts on his golden iPod, transcripts of which comprise the novel’s chapters.

Alex is also in search of his father (who died when Alex was 3 but whom he suspects may still be alive), and so he travels in some unexpected directions, ending up in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. One reason that Alex is able to embark on his journey is that his mother has “quiet days” in bed. She’s eventually hospitalized for schizophrenia, an illness that Cheng portrays compassionately without making it a focus.

“That magical surprise of finding a new character or having your characters see something completely different from what you’re expecting—that’s one of the reasons I keep writing.”

Along the way, Alex stumbles upon many discoveries, including a half-sister named Terra, whose existence was equally surprising to the author. “When I started that chapter, the door opens and Terra was there,” says Cheng. “That magical surprise of finding a new character or having your characters see something completely different from what you’re expecting—that’s one of the reasons I keep writing.”

The 33-year-old’s path to becoming a writer has involved its own share of twists and turns. Born in Shanghai, he moved at age 5 to Detroit, where his father was earning a master’s degree in engineering. As a young immigrant, Cheng didn’t speak English and had a different name: Yuan. He remembers picking his English name because he loved playing cards and was familiar with the letter J on the jacks.

As Cheng reminisces about those early days in America, two of the first things he mentions are a dog and rockets—both major features of his novel. For a while his family lived in a mansion-like home whose elderly owner had a golden retriever. Cheng also remembers being mystified by the pictures of toy rockets he saw on certain cereal boxes, and describes trying to build rockets out of the cereal, not understanding that the toys were something to be sent away for.

Cheng loved to draw and later became adept at Photoshop. He majored in communication studies at the University of Michigan, then worked in advertising in New York, first as an art director and later as a copywriter. Eventually he and two partners started their own design studio, building websites and apps for startups and other companies. During this time he started journaling, which evolved into writing an adult novel, These Days, which examines relationships and technology through the lens of a young Midwesterner working in New York. He funded that novel through Kickstarter, an experience that taught Cheng a lot about publishing and also put him in touch with his agent.

“During that process I realized that I loved writing so much more than my day job,” Cheng says, “and that it was something that I would be willing to move back to Michigan and live in my parents’ basement in order to keep doing.” He did move back to his home state but, happily, never had to live in his parents’ basement. During this transition period he also took a Greyhound bus from L.A. to Detroit, commemorating a journey that his father had taken when he first came to the U.S. (a few months before Cheng and his mother arrived).

“That actual bus ride was very uneventful; I just slept most of the way,” Cheng admits. “But I think some of the themes of that trip—trying to get to know family and trying to understand my dad’s experience, and also just being around the Southwest—in hindsight those were huge influences on See You in the Cosmos.”

“There’s always a sense of finding yourself between two worlds.”

However, Cheng wasn’t ready to write a book about Asian-American identity. “Maybe that’s just an aspect of my own life that I wasn’t fully ready to explore,” he concedes, saying he may tackle the issue in future novels. In a nod to Cheng’s immigrant heritage, however, Alex is half Filipino.

“My Chinese heritage is something that I’ve been exploring more of in the past few years,” Cheng continues. “The whole question of figuring out where and what home is—I think that’s a very Asian-American question. I think it’s also very American in general; if we go back enough generations, we’re all immigrant families. There’s always a sense of finding yourself between two worlds. Alex is very much finding himself between this world—his life with his mother—and the world of not really knowing his father.”

Cheng still has one piece of unfinished business concerning See You in the Cosmos. “One thing I’m a little embarrassed about is I have never actually launched a model rocket,” he says. “As research for the book I bought one, but it’s still sitting in my closet. I think that on the day the book comes out, I’m going to try and do a little launch.”

 

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Jack Cheng’s all-time favorite book is The Little Prince, the beloved classic in which a pilot who has crashed in the desert encounters a young interplanetary traveler. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that Cheng’s inventive middle grade debut, See You in the Cosmos, concerns an 11-year-old traveler named Alex Petroski who is making a recording that he hopes extraterrestrials will hear.

NonfictionNature

Michael Finkel

Interview by Alice Cary

Through a series of personal interviews, journalist Michael Finkel uncovered the story behind Christopher Knight’s elusive 27-year existence in the Maine woods.

You write in The Stranger in the Woods that news of Knight’s capture in 2013 immediately “grabbed” you. Why did you identify with his story of living as a hermit?
One of the things I like to do most in life is spend time in the wilderness. Another great love is reading. Christopher Knight seemed to have both passions on an exponentially grander scale. I couldn’t help but be gripped by his life story.

You wrote to Knight in jail from your home in Montana. Were you flabbergasted when he wrote back?
Strangely, I wasn’t. Knight’s story—or at least the bit of it reported in the Maine daily papers—resonated with me so strongly that I had this odd sense we were fated to communicate.

Knight wrote you five letters, then stopped. So you took a wild chance and flew to Maine to try to visit him in jail. What did you think the odds were of Knight allowing you to visit?
I’ve been a journalist for more than a quarter-century, and one of the things I’ve learned is that it’s always best to show up in person. So I did. And Knight, despite long odds, agreed to meet with me.

What most surprised you about Knight during your first visit? Did subsequent visits get any easier?
I was most surprised by Knight’s wonderfully poetic way of speaking and his dry sense of humor. But he was not easy to spend time with—he put up with me but was never happy to see me—and the visits never really got any easier. Still, Knight accepted every one of my nine visits to the jail.

"I am certain that Knight wishes he could return to the woods. But I have a feeling he will not go back, at least not so intensely. I can envision him living in a small shack on his family’s land. But I believe that for the rest of his life, he will pine for his campsite on Little North Pond, his personal Eden."

Knight certainly seems to lament being captured. Did he ever acknowledge that as he got older, his life in the woods was becoming increasingly difficult?
Living outside, especially in a place like Maine, with its brutally cold and long winters, demands a great deal of energy and strength. And like an aging athlete, Knight—despite his incredible outdoor skills—found himself in a position where surviving was becoming more and more difficult. His eyesight was failing him. Cuts and bruises did not heal as swiftly. He became less and less confident that he’d be able to survive each winter. And yet he was not willing to quit his isolation.

Knight’s story is ultimately very sad. From your description, he seems highly intelligent and simply unable to fit in with society. Do you think he will ever return to the woods or wishes he could?
I am certain that Knight wishes he could return to the woods. But I have a feeling he will not go back, at least not so intensely. I can envision him living in a small shack on his family’s land. But I believe that for the rest of his life, he will pine for his campsite on Little North Pond, his personal Eden.

Knight once told you he wants to return and let hypothermia claim his life. Do you still worry that he might do this?
Yes. Every psychologist I spoke with about Knight’s case said that suicide is a distinct possibility. He lives by his own rules, and if he gets to a point where he feels that he has no other path to freedom other than suicide, he may opt for it. I certainly hope he will not choose this exit, but my worry remains, and probably always will.

Are you concerned that some readers of your book might be tempted to go to Knight’s hometown to try to catch a glimpse of him, or speak with him—both actions that he would despise?
I believe that one of the reasons Knight shared his story with me was specifically to prevent others from asking. Anybody reading this story who concludes that it would be a good idea to try and disturb Knight is making a grave and cruel error.

At what point did you decide to write a book about Knight? Does he approve of your project?
Though I wrote a magazine article about Knight, for GQ, I understood early in the reporting process that to adequately tell Knight’s story would require a book-length piece of writing. Knight himself indirectly approved of the project. He knew, from my first letter, that I was a journalist, and I took notes right in front of him. He even referred to me, in the end, as his “Boswell”—a reference to the Scottish writer James Boswell, the author of The Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the most famous biographies in all of literature.

Did you find any of your historical research into the subject of hermits especially intriguing or surprising?
Humans have been writing about hermits since writing was invented—it’s a primal fascination. I became obsessed with reading hermit stories, and devoted the better part of a year to historical research. I was continuously surprised that so many of the religious, scientific, philosophical, and artistic successes throughout history were the result of someone spending a significant period of time alone. People who have been compelled to seek alone time have dramatically shaped human history. Three examples: Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha.

You write that you enjoy being alone, although you once went on a 10-day silent retreat in India, only to find it "grueling." During the writing of this book, did you come to any new realizations about your own need for solitude versus socialization?
The process of writing a book inevitably demands a great deal of time spent alone. While I love socializing with my friends, and I live in a frenetic house with a wife and three young children, while working on this project it became clear to me that, in order to maintain a content life, I need to spend a significant period of time each day by myself.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Stranger in the Woods.

A condensed version of this article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Christopher Anderson Magnum Photos.

Through a series of personal interviews, journalist Michael Finkel uncovered the story behind Christopher Knight’s elusive 27-year existence in the Maine woods.

FictionLiterary FictionDystopian Fiction

Omar El Akkad

Interview by Alice Cary

A sense of necessity drew Omar El Akkad to war reporting, until another sense of necessity compelled him to write his stunning debut novel, American War.

For 10 years El Akkad led a double life, working as an international war reporter for Canada’s The Globe and Mail and writing fiction between midnight and 5:00 a.m., squeezing in sleep here and there. The grueling schedule allowed him to write three draft novels that never left his hard drive, but his fourth, American War, is not only being published, but creating significant and well-deserved buzz.

El Akkad’s future dystopian tale begins in 2075 during the second American Civil War, in which Red and Blue states clash over the need for sustainable energy. Climate change has wreaked havoc, with water swallowing Washington, D.C., and Florida, while a new Middle Eastern and North African superpower has emerged: the Bouazizi Empire. To keep track of all of this devastation and conflict, the author peppered his upstairs office walls with invented maps, timelines and drawings.

“I didn’t get many visitors up there, but the ones who did visit certainly had a few questions about what the hell was going on in that room,” he remembers.

Occasionally, during moments of early morning fog, El Akkad himself momentarily confused fact and fiction. “I’d be groggy because I was up until 5:00 writing,” he says, “and I would mention something stupid and have to catch myself and say nope, South Carolina still exists. Not a real thing.”

Born in Egypt, raised in Qatar and Canada, El Akkad now writes fiction full time from the home he shares with his wife near Portland, Oregon. In a multitude of ways, he seems uniquely qualified to have written this remarkable novel.

American War chronicles the life of Sarat Chestnut, who metamorphoses from an inquisitive 6-year-old living with her family in a shipping container in Louisiana into a radicalized, head-shaven warrior on the prowl in the refugee camp where she and her family end up. El Akkad peppers his page-turning narrative with short excerpts from history books, eyewitness accounts and other imagined documents.

“[Their inclusion] started as a bit of a crutch,” El Akkad admits. “I didn’t think I had the talent to tell the kind of story that I wanted without making it horribly clunky. So I would write the main narrative and then dream up a document that I thought would be left as sort of an archival echo of what had happened. As I progressed, I found that [these documents] had added an element of texture that I didn’t anticipate.”

Although set in America, Sarat’s riveting story in many ways transcends politics, with details so impeccable and a plot so tightly woven that the events indeed feel factual. How, I wondered, did El Akkad pull off this feat?

“The short answer is outright thievery,” he says, laughing. “I stole much of it from my experiences growing up in the Middle East and also from my experiences as a journalist.”

After moving with his parents from Egypt to Qatar at age 5, and from Qatar to Canada at age 16, El Akkad finished high school in Montreal and studied computer science at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “I can’t program my way out of a paper bag for reasons that still baffle me,” he admits, “but I earned a computer science degree.”

His real passion, however, was the college newspaper, where he spent most of his time. Later, at The Globe and Mail, he covered the war in Afghanistan, military trials at Guantánamo Bay, the Arab Spring protests in Egypt, the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri, and the effects of climate change in places like Florida and Louisiana.

“A lot of the world of the book is based on the things I saw while on those assignments,” El Akkad says. “I like to say that a lot of what happened in this book happened; it just happened to people far away.”

He points out that Camp Patience, the refugee camp where Sarat’s family lives, is modeled on the NATO airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and on Guantánamo Bay. “A lot of tents in wartime look exactly the same,” he notes.

The journalist was drawn to war reporting after reading Dispatches, Michael Herr’s classic account of frontline reporting on the Vietnam War. “It seemed to me that war zones combine the ability to write stories that otherwise wouldn’t be told with a sense of necessity—the idea that wars are among the most significant things we do as human beings and deserve the most coverage.”

On the front lines of Afghanistan in 2007, El Akkad discovered that the adrenaline rush he anticipated never materialized—even though he was in the line of fire during nightly RPG attacks.

“I never got that sort of strange Hemingway-like fascination with the kinetics of war,” he explains. “I was mostly interested in its effects on the losing side, the way that it moved the losing side backward in time.” In Afghanistan he saw people living in mud huts that “you wouldn’t be particularly surprised to see Jesus walk out of.”

The tragedies he witnessed as a reporter ultimately drew him back to his first love, fiction. He had no intention of writing a political future dystopian tale; that’s simply what unfolded.

“It’s called American War,” he says of the novel, “but I never intended to write a book about America or war; I intended to write a book about the universality of revenge. I wanted to explore the idea that when people are broken by war, broken by injustice, broken by mistreatment, they become broken in the same way.”

He continues: “The notion was to take all of these wars that I’d grown up seeing—the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict, the wars on terror, even cultural events like the Arab Spring—and recast them as something very direct and near to America. The idea being to explore this notion that if it had been you, you’d have done no different.”

 

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Michael Lionstar.

A sense of necessity drew Omar El Akkad to war reporting, until another sense of necessity compelled him to write his stunning debut novel, American War.

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