Brit Bennett announced herself to the literary world in 2016 with her bestselling first novel, The Mothers. She now offers her second, a remarkable multigenerational saga called The Vanishing Half. Her storytelling savvy is evident from the opening hook: One of the “lost twins” of Mallard, Louisiana, has returned.
The lost twins are Stella and Desiree Vignes, who ran away at age 16 in 1954. Fourteen years later, Desiree is back, walking down the road with her “black as tar” daughter, Jude, beside her. Such a detail is of particular interest in Mallard, which was established by its late founder as a place for people “who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated as Negroes.” He hoped to create a “more perfect Negro,” with each “generation lighter than the one before.”
While Desiree’s return causes quite a stir, no one has yet heard from Stella, who turned her back on not only her twin but also the rest of her family and is now passing for white. She married her white boss and lives in California, but neither her husband nor their daughter, Kennedy, has any inkling of Stella’s big secret.
“I wanted to write about passing in a way that wasn’t judgmental. What is it that leads somebody to make this big, dramatic choice?”
Although this is not an autobiographical story, the invention of Mallard is inspired by anecdotes from Bennett’s mother, who grew up in Jim Crow Louisiana and spoke of a town whose inhabitants placed extreme importance on skin tones. “I was very curious about what it would be like to grow up in a place that is so insular and also very obsessed with this idea of skin color,” Bennett says, speaking from her home in Brooklyn. She read academic articles about similar towns, but she could never locate the exact place her mother remembered—which intrigued her all the more. “It took on a more mythological feel,” she says.
Bennett’s mother inspired The Vanishing Half in other ways as well. Like Desiree, Bennett’s mother worked as an FBI fingerprint examiner in Washington, D.C. And like Stella, she left Louisiana for California, which is where Bennett grew up. But what would her mother’s life have been like if she’d stayed in the South? “Being able to explore both versions of [her] timeline was part of my own kind of selfish curiosity,” Bennett says.
The 1959 movie Imitation of Life was Bennett’s introduction to the idea of passing, which she calls “an interesting and inherently contradictory topic. . . . I remember being so confused as I was watching [the film], like why would somebody do this?” Later, Bennett read Nella Larsen’s powerful 1929 novel, Passing. “I wanted to write about passing in a way that wasn’t judgmental,” she recalls. “What is it that leads somebody to make this big, dramatic choice?”
Another influence was Elizabeth Greenwood’s book Playing Dead, an entertaining investigation into people who fake their deaths, disappear from their lives or otherwise hit the restart button. “I often fantasize about going somewhere no one knows you,” Bennett admits. “I started to think of Stella’s passing as that type of thing—a kind of psychological death that she initiates in order to divorce herself from this really painful path and to have a chance to create a new life for herself. The idea of death-faking allowed me to think about her emotional state in a way that was a little bit removed from the historical legacy of passing.”
As the narrative moves from the 1950s to the ’90s, Bennett dissects not only the concept of sisterhood but also the notion of “the sister as a kind of alternate self.” Despite their estrangement, Stella and Desiree share a traumatic memory of their father being lynched by white men, which they witnessed as children through a crack in their closet door. Bennett masterfully explores the idea of inherited trauma and how it might affect the next generation, especially Kennedy, who “has no way to understand or even know what she has inherited.”
The Vanishing Half is a dazzling examination of how history affects personal decisions, and vice versa. In Bennett’s own life, she says that graduating from college during a recession “allowed me to take this big risk and go to Michigan for my MFA.” When The Mothers was released, she learned an important lesson—that “so much about publishing a book is out of your control.” Of course, such knowledge could hardly prepare her for the fact that The Vanishing Half would be released in the midst of a global pandemic.
But as a helpful writer friend suggested, “Focus on the things you can control, and the rest, you have to kind of let go.” So that’s what Bennett’s doing: sharing the good news on her poignant new novel. “I just like big stories,” she says. “I like stories that announce themselves as stories.”
Author photo by Emma Trim
The Vanishing Half is a dazzling examination of how history affects personal decisions, and vice versa.
YA author Traci Chee shifts from the fantasy genre of her first three books to tell a historical fiction story in We Are Not Free, which follows 14 Japanese American teenagers during World War II. BookPage spoke to Chee about her personal connection to the story, how she managed her large cast of characters and what can be gained by a deeper understanding of history.
Is this a story you’ve always wanted to tell? Why did you decide to tell it now?
I think my journey toward We Are Not Free started the day I first learned about the Japanese American incarceration. It was 1997, and the San Francisco Unified School District was awarding honorary diplomas to Japanese Americans, like my grandfather, who would have graduated from their schools if not for the mass incarcerations of WWII. I don’t remember much about the ceremony, but I do remember my grandfather being quoted in the local newspaper, and what he said was this: “Where were the bleeding hearts in 1942?”
That stuck with me. At age 12, I didn’t fully grasp the nuances of the term “bleeding hearts,” but I couldn’t miss that hard edge of anger and bitterness, that deep, decades-old well of memory and resentment.
I couldn’t forget it. Seventeen years later, when I began to pursue publication in earnest, I knew that I had to tackle the incarceration at some point. I began interviewing relatives in 2016—an experience that was both totally inspiring and totally confounding, because their stories were all so different and so good. For years, I tried to figure out how to combine all those rich historical details and varied, sometimes conflicting, experiences into a single novel with a single main character . . . until I realized I didn’t have to. I didn’t have to write a single story. I could write 14 stories. I could create this kaleidoscope of experiences and reactions and contradictions, all linked by friendship and love. I could write a novel-in-stories. And once I realized that, I could really begin.
“Part of the gift of researching We Are Not Free was that it gave me this new perspective on history—how long and deep and wide it is, connecting all of us—and that helped me to see the present more clearly, too.”
Your author's note in the book mentions that your research included interviewing your relatives. Had your relatives shared their experiences with you before? What did you gain from them that you might not have been able to discover from other sources? If you feel comfortable sharing, what was the experience of those interviews like for you?
I suspect this is common for many Japanese Americans, but my family never talked much about the incarceration. There were a few anecdotes that got told and retold, of course—like the story of my great-uncle being shouted out of an ice cream parlor when he was 8 years old—but for the most part, I think a lot of these stories were buried for a very long time. So it wasn’t until I began sitting down with my relatives and asking questions that I began to understand the depth and breadth of what had happened to them.
In these conversations, what came through most clearly for me was the fact that my grandparents and their siblings were just kids in 1942, when they were uprooted from their homes and forced into detention centers. My grandmother was 13, for example, and rather than quietly submitting to the oppressiveness of her situation, she came at the incarceration with the blazing, powerful energy of youth. She did so many things while she was imprisoned! She joined the Girl Reserves. She went to dances. She played basketball and organized socials and fought with her dad. She listened to the radio and snuck out at night and, in general, went at her teenage years determined to wring the most out of them, no matter the circumstances. To me, hearing these stories so many years later, that felt like a kind of resilience. Yes, there was a war going on. Yes, there were people in this country who not only wanted to imprison citizens like my grandmother but also deport them and, in many cases, kill them. And still she insisted on living her life like any other American teenager.
I didn’t know any of this when I started interviewing my relatives. Both my grandparents had died long before I began asking questions about camp. But listening to my great-aunts and great-uncles, I feel like I got to know them—maybe not as we would have known each other as grandparents and grandchild, but as they were when they were young and strong and foolish and falling in love. Doing the research for this book, from the interviews to the visits to camp to my grandparents’ letters, brought me closer to my family in a way I never expected and a way I will treasure forever.
As you researched this book, what did you learn that surprised you—and what didn’t surprise you at all?
It’s strange, because so much of my research was both surprising and unsurprising, shocking and, at the same time, totally expected. I’d known some of the facts of the incarceration before I started—community leaders swept up by the FBI right after Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 people evicted from the West Coast and imprisoned behind barbed wire—but I think it’s one thing to know the facts and another to understand them.
One of the most striking moments for me was in an interview with my Auntie Mary in 2016. It was incredible, and it was moving, and it actually gave me the title of the book, but it wasn’t until a couple years later, as I listened to the conversation again, that I realized I’d completely glossed over one part of the story. When Auntie Mary was a teenager, there’d been a family in her neighborhood—two parents, both teachers, and their two daughters—and after Pearl Harbor, both parents, who were cultural leaders in their community, were picked up by the FBI and shipped off to prison camps, leaving their daughters totally alone.
Initially, I’d blown right past this detail, but by the time I was relistening to the interview, a lot of things had changed. We were well into the Trump presidency by then, and family separation was in all the headlines. Parents being deported. Children being imprisoned. Infants taken from their guardians without any process for reuniting them. So many people were shocked, saying this wasn’t their America. This wasn’t us.
I didn’t have this reaction. Because at the same time, I was also listening to this story about family separation in the 1940s, and I knew it was us. Family separation wasn’t new. In fact, it’s been around since before the founding of this country.
I already knew this though, right? We already knew this. We knew that the children of enslaved people were separated from their parents and sold off by their enslavers. We knew about Native American boarding schools. I don’t want to directly compare these experiences, but I think they can be interpreted as part of a pattern of racism and oppression in this country, and I think they demonstrate that you can know a thing without really knowing it. You can see an injustice without really seeing it. Part of the gift of researching We Are Not Free was that it gave me this new perspective on history—how long and deep and wide it is, connecting all of us—and that helped me to see the present more clearly, too.
Your first three books were a fantasy trilogy. What was it like to shift to historical fiction? Do you think you’ll continue to explore new genres and categories of writing in the future?
For a long time, I assumed I was a speculative writer because I couldn’t help it. Whenever I tried writing contemporary fiction, the magic just sort of crept in without my even knowing it! So initially, I thought if I was going to write a story about the Japanese American incarceration, it had to be historical fantasy. The problem was that the more research I did, the more I realized that the real, lived experiences of the incarcerees were so rich and so beautiful and so poignant that they were already so much better than any magic I could hope to conjure up.
I realized that the magic was in those details, those pockets of history, those slices of life, and my job wasn’t to wave a wand over it and summon something out of thin air but to weave those details into a narrative that felt both authentic and respectful to the people who’d lived them. It was such a challenge, and I embraced it wholeheartedly, because as a writer, I always want to be challenging myself. So even though I’ll always return to speculative fiction, I’ll also always be tackling new genres and categories and combinations and finding new ways to tell a good story.
“The narratives of that time can be complicated and contradictory, and I hope we continue to tell them, because telling them will only enrich our understanding of this history and its impacts on us today.”
I’m so excited to ask you about the structure and characters in this book. How did you arrive at it? Was the structure inspired by any other works of fiction or art? What did you do to ensure each narrator was distinct? What do you hope the multiplicity of perspectives adds to the reader’s experience of the book?
Thank you! I am so excited to talk about the structure and characters in this book! Once I realized We Are Not Free had to be a novel-in-stories, I had to figure out how to make it work—in essence, how to tell many smaller stories that ultimately come together to tell one big story. As with most of this book, I found the answer in the actual history.
In order to create this kaleidoscope of characters with all their varied perspectives, I used each chapter to focus on a different aspect of the history. For example, in the first few chapters we have the anti-Japanese racism following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the mass eviction and the temporary detention centers. Then later we see things like the loyalty questionnaire that divided the community, the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the return to the West Coast in 1945.
Once I’d chosen these focal points, I found characters who could give us a nuanced perspective on what living through these times might have been like. Often that meant they were unexpected choices. Bette, for example, is our window into the dreary early days at the incarceration camp in Topaz, but like my grandmother, she’s a bon vivant, determined to make her high desert barrack lifestyle as glamorous as any Hollywood movie. There's Mas, who details his experiences in basic training with the 442nd and grows more and more uncertain that he’s made the right choice in volunteering to fight for his country.
These are just a handful of the many thousands of stories about the incarceration, but I hope they demonstrate that there is no single Japanese American experience from WWII, no reductive reading of this community and what happened to them, because Japanese Americans are not a monolith. I hope this book demonstrates, in part, that the narratives of that time can be complicated and contradictory, and I hope we continue to tell them, because telling them will only enrich our understanding of this history and its impacts on us today.
What do you think readers can gain from historical fiction that they might not by reading a work of nonfiction? What’s the power of telling (this) history through the lens of fiction?
I’d like to celebrate both fiction and nonfiction here, because I think they complement each other! I mean, there’s power in a narrative. A story can pull us in and keep us captivated and help us make sense of the world. It can evoke empathy and create understanding in a way that’s sometimes more difficult for facts alone. But the facts are powerful, too. When a work of fiction favors narrative over edification, nonfiction can fill in the gaps to create a more complete history.
I used both fiction and nonfiction in my research for We Are Not Free. I read novels. I read poetry. I studied the art of incarcerees like Miné Okubo and Chiura Obata, who, like my grandparents, were imprisoned at Topaz. I also combed through newspapers, letters, diaries, government documents and various books of nonfiction. Every text and every work of art gave me a different perspective, a different approach, and I think it was the combination that filled out my understanding and gave me the resources to tackle writing about the incarceration.
In short, I think we need both, and I hope we read both! I hope readers find their ways into history, whether they are fiction or nonfiction, that compel them and pique their curiosity, and I hope that leads to more reading, more learning, more connections made and more connections deepened. Although I didn’t know it when I was in school, history is fascinating. It’s full of details and full of stories, and it’s with us right now, in the present. I think the more we understand who we are and where we’ve come from, the more clearly we can choose who we want to be and where we want to go from here.
YA author Traci Chee shifts from the fantasy genre of her first three books to tell a historical fiction story in We Are Not Free, which follows 14 Japanese American teenagers during World War II. BookPage spoke to Chee about her personal connection to the story, how she managed her large cast of characters and what can be gained by a deeper understanding of history.
A dead body is “a brilliant jumping-off point,” remarks British novelist Stuart Turton, speaking by phone from his home in Hertfordshire, England. “I can’t think of a more freeing starting point for a novel.”
Case in point is Turton’s second novel, The Devil and the Dark Water, which begins with both a body and a bang. As passengers board a trade ship in the Dutch East Indies in 1634, a person with leprosy wrapped in bloody bandages appears, curses the voyage and then bursts into flames. A demon named Old Tom may be responsible for this person’s death. To bring himself up to speed on such matters, Turton took an online course on demons. “If you’ve got a few hours,” he says, “they teach you how to identify and banish demons, which is just bizarre. I don’t believe in any of this, but it was fantastic.”
An unexpected layover back in 2003 led Turton to the inspiration for this gripping mystery. After missing a flight to Singapore, the author, who readily admits that he is “terrible at sticking to plans,” found himself stranded in Perth, Australia. To kill time, he visited a maritime museum, where he learned about the 1629 shipwreck of the Batavia. Years later, he decided to fictionalize the ship’s saga. The actual story is apparently so horrible that “it wouldn’t have been fun to read,” Turton says.
“I felt like I was my own little ship sailing in between these different lighthouses and trying to get my characters to safety . . .”
Before writing this book, he returned to Perth, visited Indonesia (where his fictional ship, the Saardam, leaves port) and studied records in the British Museum and the British Library. He scoured passenger manifests from the 1600s, borrowing names for many of his characters. “Research is my favorite part of writing,” he says. “It’s just an excuse to travel and go to great places.”
The Devil and the Dark Water is filled with realistic details about life aboard the Saardam, including characters who bathe with buckets of seawater and must lean overboard to go to the bathroom. When asked how people survived such miserable voyages, Turton curtly replies that they “mostly didn’t.” He is hardly married to the minutiae of history, however. “The moment it interferes with my plot, I throw it away,” he admits.
History isn’t the only thing this author gets rid of. Upon the publication of his blockbuster mystery The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018), he burned his notes in a backyard bonfire. An exquisite combination of Agatha Christie and Groundhog Day, Turton’s first book stars a detective who inhabits the bodies of eight different witnesses in an attempt to solve and prevent a murder. Editing Evelyn’s necessarily precise timeline nearly drove Turton mad, however, so the bonfire felt like a symbolic way to free himself to write something completely different.
Turton plotted his latest novel using a method he calls, appropriately enough, “lighthousing.” He explains: “I felt like I was my own little ship sailing in between these different lighthouses and trying to get my characters to safety at the end of the book. It sounds weird to say, but I almost left it up to them to find their way through.”
As for this book’s dead body, Turton created a trio of Dutch women to investigate. There’s “fiercely intelligent” Sara, who is planning to escape her greedy, abusive husband, Jan; her genius young daughter, Lia; and Creesjie, Jan’s mistress and Sara’s friend. Although Turton read about the daily lives of women at that time, he admits to taking some liberties. “I made mine totally Charlie’s Angels,” he says. “I wanted them having witty banter, being really engaging characters and not being meek and dour, constantly humiliated by the men in their lives.”
Also on board is a Sherlock Holmes-type detective named Samuel Pipps, who could quickly get to the bottom of these bizarre events if he weren’t imprisoned, being transported to Amsterdam to await execution for an unknown crime. That leaves Pipps’ detective work to his devoted bodyguard, Arent Hayes, a hulking figure with an enigmatic past.
Despite this Sherlockian setup, Turton says he’s not a huge fan of the beloved character. “The miracles of Holmes’ talents always seem to happen within the first two pages of the story; then he spends the next 15 pages never using those talents again.” Instead, Turton has been an Agatha Christie enthusiast since reading her work at age 8, when he realized that Christie’s books were board games to be played against the author. Turton wants his own readers to feel the same invitation. “All the clues are there in front of you,” he says. “Just get out a notepad and start making notes. This is something we should be enjoying together.”
How about Turton’s own detective skills? Has he ever tried an escape room?
No, he says with a laugh. “Everyone expects me to be great at Scrabble because I’m a writer. I’m terrible at Scrabble, and I think I’d be terrible at escape rooms. Pure pride has prevented me from going into one.”
Author photo by Charlotte Graham.
A dead body is “a brilliant jumping-off point,” remarks British novelist Stuart Turton, speaking by phone from his home in Hertfordshire, England.
An abandoned baby bird helps a talented new writer come to terms with his past.
“Whenever I see a magpie flying overhead, in the back of my mind, I think it’s going to come and land on my shoulder,” says Charlie Gilmour, speaking by phone from West Sussex, England.
Such thoughts are hardly surprising, given that Gilmour and his partner once nursed an abandoned chick and raised her to adulthood. The magpie, whom they named Benzene, took over and transformed Gilmour’s life, helping him come to terms with the fact that when he was 6 months old, his biological father, Heathcote Williams, suddenly and inexplicably abandoned Gilmour and his mother.
Heathcote, who died in 2017, was a poet, actor and political activist, as well as an amateur magician with a knack for disappearing. Although Gilmour met him a handful of times, he never really got to know him. Gilmour describes his stellar debut, Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie, as “the conversation we never had.” Writing about his father came somewhat naturally, Gilmour says, because “in one sense, he has always been a character in my imagination.”
Though he just turned 31, Gilmour sounds infinitely wiser than his years. He, his wife and their child, Olga, have been weathering the pandemic with Gilmour’s mother, writer and lyricist Polly Samson, and his adoptive father, David Gilmour, the renowned musician of Pink Floyd fame. Commenting on his creative, colorful family, Gilmour admits, “I was very, very fortunate to have quite a cast of characters to play around with—quite a few larger-than-life people.”
By far the star of the memoir, however, is Benzene, who had free rein of Gilmour’s London home, stealing trinkets left and right while leaving droppings everywhere, often in Gilmour’s long, dark, curly hair. One time the brazen bird even plucked a contact lens right out of the eye of their visiting friend, a photographer. “Benzene had this weird knack of being able to know what people value, and then she would go for it,” Gilmour muses. Despite such antics, he never considered caging the magpie. “She wouldn’t have stood for it in any case,” he says. “She would’ve shouted the house down.”
Gilmour began honing his writing skills while he himself was caged— in prison. In 2011, during a state he describes as “possessed of maniacal energy and messianic purpose,” he was part of widespread student protests in London against raises in tuition. The 21-year-old was later arrested for violent disorder and sent to prison for four months, followed by additional time on house arrest. “People are often punished when actually what they need is some form of treatment,” he says.
one of the few things you can do for someone in prison. . . . It gives them the opportunity to at least very briefly escape from where they are.”
One bright spot during his sentence was a box of books he received from Elton John and his husband, David Furnish. “I’d never met either of them in my life,” Gilmour says, but he devoured their gift, which featured prison classics including War and Peace and Crime and Punishment. The gift of books “was a very generous and kind gesture,” he says. “I think it’s one of the few things you can do for someone in prison. . . . It gives them the opportunity to at least very briefly escape from where they are.”
While imprisoned, Gilmour kept a daily journal, and he continued writing after his release. Several years later, when Benzene became part of his life, the bird’s presence intensified his need to know—and understand—his biological father. He learned that Heathcote had also rescued a young bird not long before Gilmour’s birth, a jackdaw that he kept as a pet.
In a mysterious moment that seems straight out of Hitchcock’s The Birds, Gilmour says that when he was in the midst of writing the scene about Heathcote’s death for his book, he heard “a cacophony of screams from all the crows and jackdaws and rooks around me.” He recalls, “I ran towards the noise, and there was this angry cloud of corvids over the field, and underneath them, red kites [birds of prey] were standing over a jackdaw. I ran towards them and snatched the jackdaw off the red kites, and the jackdaw just died right there in my hands. It felt like this incredibly eerie coincidence considering I had just, in writing, killed my biological father.”
“After four years of it, I can safely say that the best place for birds is in the trees—not sleeping above your bed."
Featherhood also explores Gilmour’s own journey into fatherhood. “I love being father to this child,” he says of Olga, now 2. “It’s a joy. And it also makes me very sad that this joy was something that Heathcote couldn’t allow himself to experience.” One of Heathcote’s favorite quotations was Cyril Connolly’s adage, “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,” but Gilmour has found the opposite to be true. Somehow he became a more efficient writer after Olga’s birth, often attending to her needs at 4 a.m. and then writing for two or three hours. “It also feels like a bit of an f-you,” Gilmour admits. “I was going to prove him wrong by writing this book while the pram was very much in the hallway.”
As it turns out, nurturing Benzene was excellent preparation for fatherhood. “She taught me a lot about what it means to love and care for another creature,” Gilmour says. And of course, both birds and toddlers can be distracted by shiny objects.
As much as Gilmour treasures the time he spent with Benzene, he doesn’t endorse keeping wild birds as pets. “After four years of it, I can safely say that the best place for birds is in the trees—not sleeping above your bed, defecating on you as you yourself sleep. . . . I loved her, but I wouldn’t recommend the experience to anyone else.”
Author photo by Polly Samson
An abandoned baby bird helps a talented new writer come to terms with his past in Featherhood.
Julia Cooke’s Come Fly the World gives readers a bird’s-eye view of the gritty, global history of Pan Am and its iconic flight attendants. Here she shares her thoughts on air travel, past and present, and offers some suggestions for making your own glamour when you take to the skies.
As an avid traveler and travel writer, how did you get interested in writing this particular story?
I met a few former stewardesses at a Pan Am Historical Foundation event at the Eero Saarinen TWA terminal at JFK Airport (before it became a hotel). I just loved talking to them. They seemed to have lived life elbow-deep in adventure; they talked about geopolitical events as if they'd had martinis with prime ministers the night before; they were sophisticated and smart and funny. One 70-something woman told me she rarely bought a return ticket when she traveled because “you never know.” I loved their attitudes and the way it felt like they owned the whole world, and I wanted to know everything about them.
Your father worked for Pan Am. Can you tell us about your flying experiences as a kid and how they shaped you as a person and a writer? Do you remember your first flight?
My father was an attorney for Pan Am, but it was really my mom who was determined to make the most of his flight benefits. She used to pack us for both hot and cold weather, and we’d head to the airport to take whatever empty seats were heading somewhere interesting. We flew to Australia when I was around 3, before Pan Am sold its Pacific routes, and it took something like six different flights to get there!
I don’t remember my first flight (my mother tells me I was 4 months old), but I remember being in so many places with her. She is Italian American, so we went to Italy a fair amount, and I have vivid memories of going to the store to buy tomatoes in a small town we once stayed in when I was 4 or 5.
The independence and flexibility of travel absolutely shaped me as a person. It made me accustomed to and curious about different kinds of people and languages from the start—and those same traits, I think, led me to be a writer. Now I read a lot in transit and like to eavesdrop.
Did your family help your research at all? Did you pick their brains for memories, and have they read your book?
They have. My father was a great resource for talking through the history. On a more personal level, it was revelatory to see events from my childhood gain context within the airline’s corporate history—that trip to Australia, which is one of my first memories, for example, wouldn’t have happened had Pan Am not sold its Pacific division to United.
When you started this project, did you realize that it would contain such rich cultural and political history? What were some of your most interesting or surprising research discoveries?
I had no idea where the project would lead me, really, and I certainly did not think it would lead me toward the Vietnam War. I was so drawn to the contrast between the public image these women were asked to promote—beautiful, effortless, glamorous—and the really quite dangerous work they performed. I got outraged on their behalf at first; stewardesses were often stereotyped as being insubstantial when really their work contained grave stakes.
That said, it was still fun to peruse the detritus of the jet age—old dishes, uniforms, press photos and other ephemera. One surprise was the amount of fashion PR Pan Am engaged in; the airline hosted fashion shows in various countries and did shoots in custom clothing that I’d sincerely love to wear today. It’s hardly new or unusual for the grittier lived experiences of beautiful or fashionable women to be dismissed, but in this instance, the more I learned about both the projected stewardess ideal and their true-life experiences, the more I found it galling. What they’d done, en masse, was so evidently groundbreaking.
How did you find the women you profiled? Were they eager to share their stories, or did they voice any hesitations?
I found them mostly via Pan Am’s incredible network of former employees, as well as through one particular organization, World Wings International, which hosts events for former flight crew. I attended many luncheons and reunions in various places around the country and world (Savannah, New York, Bangkok, Berlin). Stewardesses’ social bonds, by the way, are a real inspiration for a younger woman to observe. They prioritize their friendships and take trips together and generally have a grand time. For the most part, they were very eager to share their stories. I did come across a few women who had experienced trauma on board and did not want to revisit their time with the airline, or who were hesitant to be interviewed by an outsider when so many actual Pan Am women are also working toward getting their own words into print.
The mother and sister of one of the women you profiled cried when they found out she was taking her job as a flight attendant because they believed stewardesses were “loose and immoral.” Were the women you interviewed constantly fighting against this stereotype—which the airlines seemed to promote?
Constantly. And even more broadly than the “loose and immoral” stereotyping, many 1960s parents thought it was a job for less serious women. So many of the parents of these bright, well-educated, ambitious young women were disappointed at the idea that their daughters would serve businessmen and tourists in the sky; the fashion- and beauty-oriented PR machine had convinced them that there wasn’t much substance to the work. The disappointment often turned around when a stewardess was assigned to a prestigious military or presidential charter, however, or when they began to attend diplomatic events in West Africa, or more generally as their daughters learned to engage with so many different kinds of people. It was a crash course in being confident and authoritative anywhere they landed. The generous family travel benefits helped, too!
"I think it’s up to us to make our own glamour now."
Your book almost made me want to become a flight attendant—at least if I had been a young woman searching for a job in the 1960s. Do you lament the loss of glamour in the way we typically travel now?
That’s a complicated question. I’d absolutely love to have been able to sip a cocktail with the jet-setters in the upstairs lounge of a 747 in 1972, but I also value the workers’ rights now enjoyed by flight crews, the lower cost of travel and other, broader changes that have rendered the glamour so hard for airlines to capture. I think it’s up to us to make our own glamour now. For me it’s my window seat and my favorite scarf, the specific meals I look forward to in particular airports, meandering hallways with my powder-blue suitcase, a cup of tea or glass of wine at a café, people-watching from a quiet place.
Of the many scenes you write about in Come Fly the World, which would you most like to have witnessed?For me it was the quotidian things in different global cities that my primary subjects mentioned—the travel routines they loved to slip into and the metropolises they loved. I heard about these scenes, like random Wednesdays spent exploring, over and over. I’d want to walk through Hong Kong with Karen Walker, eating at street stalls along the way and popping into galleries and shops, or to explore the souk in Beirut with Lynne Rawling before a daytrip to Byblos, or to play “shake the KGB” in Moscow with Hazel Bowie. And I would give a lot to be dancing to the Kiko Kids at the Equator Club in Nairobi on a Saturday night with Tori Werner and her friends.
Your passages about the charter flights to Vietnam are particularly vivid and often heartbreaking. How did it feel to record such intense first-person accounts of this chapter of history?
It felt incredibly rewarding, a real honor to be told these accounts with such candor. A few of the women had never spoken in depth about their wartime experiences to anyone before—the stereotypes around stewardessing meant that most people didn’t ask them about these flights or even listen when a pretty woman tried to interject her first-person experiences of the war into a broader conversation. Some of the women just clammed up. A few had been carrying these memories and feelings around with them silently for decades. It was incredible, too, to speak with Vietnam veterans who told me about these flights from their perspectives, and to women who had served in the armed forces, too, to understand these flights from various angles. The sheer youth of the people going to war—the average age on one of those flights would have been around 20—staggered me.
"As one feminist stewardess put it in the 1970s, they're 'too independent and curious about the world to sit around in a nine-to-five job getting cramps in their shoulders.'"
As you researched, did you collect any Pan Am artifacts? Do you have any favorites?
I did and do—one stewardess with whom I became good friends gave me a vintage Burberry silk scarf with a watercolor Pan Am flying boat on it. I cherish it.
Has writing this book changed your experiences as an airline passenger?
I look at flight crew very differently. They’re frontline workers, safety personnel, people who are still, as one feminist stewardess put it in the 1970s, “too independent and curious about the world to sit around in a nine-to-five job getting cramps in their shoulders.” And I’ve found that being curious about them and their stories (and being a generally courteous passenger) has improved my flight experience many, many times.
How and where have you spent your time during the pandemic? Where do you hope to fly next?
I have been at home in Vermont, isolating and working toward my next book (which will involve lots of travel). It has been so long since I’ve been on a plane—I had a baby, then was working on this book, then the pandemic—that my brain fizzles a bit when I think too hard about where I hope to go next. Favorite places I love and miss: Havana, Lisbon and the Portuguese coast, New York. And places a little farther off that I’d hoped or planned to visit for a long time: Nairobi, to visit a friend who moved back home there, for one. Everywhere, is the easy and difficult answer.
Author photo credit: Patrick Proctor
Author Julia Cooke shares her thoughts on air travel, past and present, and offers some suggestions for making your own glamour when you take to the skies.
In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Alison Bechdel writes, “My bookish exterior perhaps belies it . . . but I’m a bit of an exercise freak.” You name it, she’s tried it: running, hiking, biking, snowshoeing, weightlifting, running, paddleboarding, karate, in-line skating, aerial yoga and more.
At the start of my call to Bechdel’s home outside of Burlington, Vermont, I suggest that we should be doing something like cross-country skiing instead of sitting on our bums, chatting. “Although I’m sure I couldn’t keep up,” I add.
Bechdel laughs and says, “For all my bragging in that book, I’m not super fast or skilled at anything.”
She has her limits, Bechdel admits—increasingly so. The last time she did aerial yoga, for example, “I got up too fast and I ended up having a weird vertigo thing for two days.” She turned 60 in September 2020 and has noticed that “I’m still putting in the work, but I’m getting slower and weaker. I can’t do stuff I used to do, and it’s very disconcerting.”
The Secret to Superhuman Strength is a book with so many layers that it’s hard to describe; even Bechdel struggles to put it into words. Basically, she says, “It's the chronological story of my life through the lens of my fitness obsessions.” She began the project in 2013, “with a desire to write something about mortality and getting older”—an idea perhaps reinforced by her mom’s death that year.
On the heels of her previous graphic memoirs, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, about her father, and Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, Bechdel initially thought she might be in the mood for a change of pace. “I felt like I wanted to take a break from all of the intensely personal, introspective books,” she says, “but I don’t seem to be able to do that.”
Bechdel theorizes that her compulsion for candor may stem from her Catholic upbringing. “The notion of confession was always a very powerful experience for me as a kid,” she says. “I feel like I'm still confessing—like I'm going to receive some kind of absolution if I do it accurately enough. But I will have pangs afterwards. ‘Oh my God, I can't believe I revealed this,’ or, ‘Oh my God, my poor family.’”
“I wanted to capture some of the vitality and the exuberance of just being alive.”
Like all of her books, The Secret to Superhuman Strength is not only enlightening but hilarious, with a multitude of unexpected delights. Bechdel is the first to admit that it “veers into many different areas that you wouldn't think were necessarily connected to exercise.” Take, for instance, transcendence—how exercise gives her “the feeling of my mind and body becoming one.” To explore some of these ideas, she relies on repeated appearances by literary greats such as Jack Kerouac, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
One writer led to another, she explains, “like a chain reaction. . . . I started seeing ways that their actual lives informed mine—the ways they struggled with relationships or struggled with drinking too much or struggled to establish themselves as an author.” She’s thankful that “graphic narrative allows you to weave together some pretty complex material in a way that feels easily digestible.”
Visually, this is Bechdel’s first book in full color; previous books were simply tinted, with shading. “I wanted to capture some of the vitality and the exuberance of just being alive,” she says, “and that seemed to demand color.” Her wife, Holly Rae Taylor, is also an artist and helped with the extensive coloring. Bechdel calls this a good pandemic project—one that kept the couple “entertained and busy.” “If I hadn’t been home all day, every day, working for 18 hours, I wouldn’t have gotten the book done,” she says.
Bechdel’s creative process is a workout in its own right, largely because she takes photos to use as references for each sketch.
Throughout composing The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Bechdel kept up her running regimen, but weightlifting fell by the wayside. Her creative process, however, is a workout in its own right, largely because she takes photos to use as references for each sketch. “It makes drawing into a kind of a physical activity. I'm not just hunched over a drawing board,” she explains. “I'm posing. I'm sketching. I'm running outside with my bike to set a scene up. So it's all drawing, but it wouldn't look like drawing to someone watching.”
Now that the book is done and Bechdel finally has some free time, who would she want to work out with if she could choose anyone, dead or alive? She says her first thought is “hanging out with Rachel Carson and looking in tidal pools . . . but that’s not really a workout.”
Eventually Bechdel decides she would love to hike with 19th-century journalist Margaret Fuller: a climb up Maine’s tallest peak, the 5,267-foot Mount Katahdin, famed for its precarious Knife Edge Trail. “It seems scary to me,” Bechdel says, “but I think Margaret and I would push each other to do it.”
Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic memoir is a comic marvel that will make you think.
Wandering through Aspen, Colorado, at 3:30 a.m., Mary Roach turned into a dark alley and encountered a burly intruder: a full-grown black bear happily gorging himself on restaurant waste. Roach knew full well that the bear could be dangerous. She also knew that the bear shouldn’t grow accustomed to being close to humans because it could lead to bolder, more aggressive behavior in the future. Nonetheless, she pleaded with her companion from the National Wildlife Research Center, “Can we go just a little bit closer? Just a foot closer?”
As she chats by phone from her home in the Bay Area, Roach vividly recalls that impulse to forget everything she knew about responsible wildlife encounters. “None of that was in my head,” she says. “It was just, ‘I want to get closer.’ . . . People almost seem to have an inborn affinity for animals—particularly big, furry, kind of cute ones. People are drawn to them. They want to feed them. And there begins the problem.”
That Aspen garbage gangster is just one of a variety of furry fugitives Roach writes about in Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, her fascinating and often hilarious investigation into what happens when creatures commit crimes ranging from murder and manslaughter to robbery, jaywalking, home invasion and trespassing. Ever since her 2003 debut, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Roach has been taking readers on a series of surprising explorations—from space travel to the afterlife. Like Susan Orlean, Roach has a knack for taking a deep, deep dive into unexpected and sometimes even mundane subjects (the alimentary canal, for instance, in Gulp) and unearthing a narrative feast of freaky fun facts and captivating characters.
Roach started honing her keen observation skills early, as an elementary school student in Norwich, Vermont, where she and a friend sometimes ventured out at night to peek into people’s windows. (Decades later, her mother was absolutely horrified when Roach fessed up to these outings.) “We weren’t Peeping Toms, obviously,” she says. “We weren’t looking for naked women or men. We just liked to look in.”
And that, Roach says, is the curiosity factor that sparks her writing. “My motivating sentiment is ‘What’s going on in there? This is a world I don’t know. Maybe it’s interesting.’”
She also mentions another childhood adventure that may have signaled an early predilection for wildlife research. She and her friend called it “The Potted Meat Project,” in which the two pals would hang or bury potted meat sandwiches in the woods in Etna, New Hampshire, “playing naturalists. Then we’d go and take notes and look for tracks,” Roach says. When they returned, the food was gone and there were some tracks, but “we didn’t follow up. We were in fifth or sixth grade, and we had the attention span of a gnat.”
“My motivating sentiment is ‘What’s going on in there? This is a world I don’t know. Maybe it’s interesting.’”
Writing Fuzz involved much more follow-through as Roach trekked with man-eating leopards in the Indian Himalayas, investigated gull vandals at the Vatican the night before Easter Mass and tracked mountain lions in California. Thankfully, she finished these travels before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. “It would have been a disaster,” she says, imagining what might have been. “Yes, you can talk to scientists on Zoom, but that doesn’t work for me. I need something I can tag along for and see as it unfolds. That’s so much more interesting for my readers, and for me, honestly. I really love that part of what I do: the research, and the being there.”
Because of this commitment, Roach encountered intense, unforgettable new worlds as she researched Fuzz. In northern India, she came within 100 yards of a leopard wearing a radio collar—but, much to her disappointment, she never saw the animal, who was on the other side of a river. “I would’ve loved to be in the classic National Geographic scenario, surrounded by these creatures, but sometimes it doesn’t work out that way,” she says. In another part of India, she armed herself with bananas because she wanted to know “what it was like to be mugged by monkeys,” which is a widespread problem in many areas. “I was nervous,” she admits. “They’re not large animals, but they can get aggressive. I was standing with a bag of like six bananas, so I was asking for it.” The monkeys were speedy snatchers, as it turned out, so they left Roach unscathed.
Reading one of Roach’s books is always a breezy, informative treat, but a lot of behind-the-scenes effort goes into their creation, given Roach’s trademark immersive approach. The creation of this book, especially, involved hurdles from the start. In fact, Roach initially contemplated covering a completely different topic: natural disasters and the science of rescue, first aid, prevention and preparation. Eventually, however, she realized that she wouldn’t be allowed to tag along with first responders during those crucial early moments of a disaster.
“Yes, you can talk to scientists on Zoom, but that doesn’t work for me. I need something I can tag along for and see as it unfolds.”
After that, Roach turned her attention to tiger penises. (Yep, you read that right.) She’s fascinated by forensics, whether humans or animals are involved, and an expert taught her how to tell counterfeit tiger penises from real ones, which are valued in some cultures for their supposed powers of virility. “I can fill you in if you want to know,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve got all of these bizarre photographs of dried mammal genitalia on my phone.” However, once again, she couldn’t further develop this subject because she couldn’t legally visit crime scenes, which often involved poachers.
Roach then had a eureka moment: “What if we turned it around, and the animals were the perpetrators rather than the victims?” Before long she was in Reno, Nevada, attending a five-day training session for wildlife officers tasked with investigating animal attacks. (She refers to these professionals in chapter one of Fuzzas “maul cops.”) Roach was gloriously in her element, hearing tales of bears discovered in the back seat of a car eating popcorn and a cougar wrongfully accused of murder. (The murderer was actually a human, armed with an ice pick, who years later bragged about the crime.) During one training session, Roach and the other participants headed out to examine simulated crime scenes in the woods so they could guess what had happened. As with any crime scene, DNA is often key, but with animal attacks, clues are often contaminated by scavenger animals who arrive after a death. Roach relished such forensic details, jotting down remarks like, “Bears are more bite bite bite bite. . . . It’s a big mess.”
“You spend three or four days with those people, and you get the sense that, my God, animals are attacking everyone all the time,” Roach says. “But . . . it’s actually super rare. Animal attacks just tend to get so much media attention when they happen. It eclipses anything else happening in the news, even human murders.”
“Whenever these animals are coming in contact with humans more frequently, it doesn’t go well for the animals.”
In addition to killer animals, Roach’s book includes one chapter on poisonous beans, as well as one on “danger trees”—falling trees or limbs that sometimes kill bystanders. When one such tree was being blown up for safety reasons in British Columbia, Canada, Roach got to be a “guest detonator.” “That was awesome,” she says. “I enjoy large explosions.”
With all of this deadly data, has writing Fuzz changed how Roach feels about outdoor adventures?
Roach explains that when she hikes in California, she sometimes sees signs warning of mountain lions and coyotes in the area. “My first reaction is that I’d love to encounter one,” she says. “I don’t have a fear of any of them. But at the same time, it saddens me, because whenever these animals are coming in contact with humans more frequently, it doesn’t go well for the animals.”
Science writer Mary Roach shares some highlights from her worldwide travels to collect stories of marauding monkeys, bandit bears and other fuzzy fugitives.
German author-illustrator Torben Kuhlmann is well-known for his acclaimed picture books about intrepid mouse adventurers, which feature his jaw-droppingly imaginative art. When the mouse hero of Einstein misses the big cheese festival, he builds a time machine but accidentally travels 80 years into the past, where he meets a patent clerk with some very unusual theories about the nature of time. We chatted with Kuhlmann about why mice make irresistible protagonists, the challenges and pleasures of creating a complex time-travel story and what he has in common with his mousy heroes.
Could you tell us a little bit about the creative journey of this book? Every story starts with a core idea or a theme. In the case of Einstein, the idea to link one of the most famous theoretical physicists with the shenanigans of a time-traveling mouse came first. From there, I developed the narrative surroundings of the idea.
While in my research phase, many plot points seemed ideal for my premise of an Einstein-inspiring mouse. There was Einstein’s year of wonder in 1905, in which the young patent clerk wrote some of the most fundamental and revolutionary papers in theoretical physics. Where did his inspiration come from? Maybe from a mouse from the future?
As soon as I have a rough outline of the plot ready, I start working on the storyboard. I do rough sketches for every page in the book. These sketches also play with different perspectives and compositions for each scene.
As I craft the storyboard, I also start writing an early first draft, sometimes in rough handwriting next to the sketches. Once the storyboard is complete, I talk to my editor and tell her the story verbally.
The next and most time-consuming phase is crafting the artwork and writing the script. For each illustration, I use a combination of watercolor and pencil.
Einstein is your fourth book to feature a mouse protagonist, after Lindbergh, Armstrong and Edison. What continues to pull you back to telling mouse stories?
There seems to be a never-ending well of opportunities to link real historical events with mouse-size adventures. When I began writing, mice seemed to play a role only in aviation and space exploration. Then I moved on to inventors, visiting an unknown backstory in Thomas Edison’s career. In Einstein, the adventurous mice landed in theoretical physics. It’s fun to link the stories with each other and to hide small Easter egg-like surprises and hints to earlier titles. There is a small interconnected universe evolving.
All of your mouse books explore scientific ideas and figures. Did you enjoy learning about science when you were young, or is this more of a way to learn about topics you’re not already knowledgeable about?
It is a little bit of both. I have always had a keen interest in science. I always wanted to learn how things work. Even today, I am still eager to learn new things. Working on my mouse adventures, with their science and history-oriented themes, allows me to dive into different very interesting topics, like Einstein’s concept of relativity.
There’s a tradition of mouse stories in English-language children’s literature, including Stuart Little, Mrs. Frisby and Ralph S. Mouse. Many of these mice have human characteristics, but your mice seem more . . . mousey. Why do you think children’s authors are drawn to these small creatures, and how did you decide that your mice wouldn’t just be like small humans with whiskers and a tail? Indeed, mice seem to be favored characters in children’s literature. I grew up with many of these stories, but even as a child, I noticed that sometimes it seemed almost incidental that a mouse was the protagonist. For example, there is very little “mousiness” with a character like Mickey Mouse. Mickey is even taller than his dog, Pluto.
One of the main reasons mice are so favored in children’s literature might be their cuteness. That was one of my main reasons for writing about them as well. But I wanted my main characters to be as little anthropomorphized as possible, to look like any mouse you might encounter in your attic or your garage.
What was the most challenging part of creating Einstein? What was the most enjoyable?
The most challenging part of creating Einstein was figuring out how to tell a story about time travel and numerous causality loops while maintaining accessibility and keeping the narrative focus on the visuals. Much of the more complex ideas are only hinted at in the text and can be discovered by observing every detail in the illustrations.
This challenge was simultaneously also the most enjoyable part. It was a joy to figure out how a time-traveling mouse, inspired by Einstein’s theories, could inspire Einstein in the first place, and how to mirror that plot with the more obvious story of a watch lost in the past and the fate of a furious cat.
You’ve mentioned that you’re a huge fan of science fiction films. Were any films a particular influence on Einstein—either on the story that you tell, or on your illustrations?
An eagle-eyed observer might find some nods to my favorite science fiction films. You may discover a hidden DeLorean or the TARDIS time machine from “Doctor Who.” Films or, to be more precise, the language of cinema plays an important role in my work. I sometimes describe my method by comparing it to the work of a cinematographer or a director. It is my task to shoot a scene, to tell something visually, finding the correct lighting, atmosphere and composition for each moment of a story. But I use a pencil and watercolors instead of a camera. Filmmaking is something I am very interested in, and I use every opportunity to direct short animations myself—for example, the book trailers for my mouse adventures.
In the beginning of Einstein, the mouse is looking forward to attending a cheese festival. What’s your favourite kind of cheese?
That is indeed something I have in common with my mouse adventurers: I really do like cheese. It is hard to point to one favorite kind. Among them are Italian pecorino, French Camembert and some Swiss cheeses.
I love the way you use perspective, and how so many scenes are shown from the mouse’s point of view. You must have periods when you try to imagine the world as though you were a mouse. If you woke up tomorrow to discover that you had become a mouse, what would you do? Where would you go?
I would try to follow in the footsteps of the protagonist of Lindbergh and build an airplane from scrap and odds and ends—just to fact-check my own story. And of course I would avoid cats and owls at any cost.
Self-portrait of Torben Kuhlmann courtesy of Torben Kuhlmann.
German author-illustrator Torben Kuhlmann is well-known for his acclaimed picture books about intrepid mouse adventurers, which feature his jaw-droppingly imaginative art.
Kate DiCamillo and Sophie Blackall are two of the most decorated children’s book creators working today, so their first collaboration qualifies as a major event. The Beatryce Prophecy is an illustrated fantasy tale about a girl, a goat and the power of the written word, and DiCamillo’s and Blackall’s many fans are going to adore it. BookPage spoke with the author and the illustrator about the surprises and joys of working together for the first time.
Kate, you’ve said that you wrote this story by “following the goat and the girl.” Can you introduce us to Beatryce and Answelica? Did this story begin with them?
Kate DiCamillo: Beatryce is a girl who can read and write in a time and place when it is against the law for a girl to do either. And Answelica is the hardheaded, large-souled goat who becomes Beatryce’s friend and protector.
OK, that’s the introductions—now, on to the thornier question of where the story began. I’ve gone back through my notebooks, and all I can find is a few words right before I started to write: monk, moon, goat.
Two of those words became central to the book. Which is to say, I started with the goat, and she led me to the rest of the story—a story that was a complete surprise and wonder to me.
You began writing it in 2009, then you put it away for almost a decade, only to rediscover it while cleaning out a closet. Do you remember why you initially put it away? How do you think the years between impacted the book?
DiCamillo: I don’t know why I put it away. I can’t find any notes about that. My guess is that I wanted a story that was lighter, funnier (my mother had passed away at the beginning of the year), and I had this story about a squirrel and a vacuum cleaner and poetry that seemed funny to me.
When I did unearth the early draft of Beatryce, it had been so long that I was able to read it as something that I didn’t write—and that helped me see that there was something there, a story that needed to be told. Does that make sense?
“I feel like I became my true self when I learned how to read.”
Kate DiCamillo
As to how the years in between impacted it—I guess just that. There was this sense of urgency. As if the story had been waiting, as if Answelica and Beatryce had been waiting. They needed me to tell their story.
And all the closets (and drawers and file cabinets) have been cleaned now!
You’ve dedicated The Beatryce Prophecy to your mother. Beatryce’s mother, Aslyn, plays a critical role in the novel, instilling strength, courage and a love of books and stories in her daughter. Are there connections between your mother and Beatryce’s mother?
DiCamillo: It wasn’t until the book was done that I started to think about my mother’s impact on me as a writer, but most importantly as a reader. I struggled to learn to read. Phonics didn’t make sense to me. And I was so desperate to read. I remember crying to my mother in first grade about how I didn’t understand phonics. And she said something like, “Oh, for the love of Pete, don’t get so upset. You’re smart. We’ll just work around it.” And then she made me flash cards. A word on each flash card. And she had me memorize the words. And that worked for me.
Word by word, my mother gave me the world. She taught me to become myself.
This isn’t the first of your novels to function as an ode to reading, writing and storytelling. Why do you return to these themes?
DiCamillo: I feel like I became my true self when I learned how to read. I felt, then, as if anything was possible. I still feel that way about books and stories. They let us be ourselves, discover who we are and who we can become. I guess I keep returning to this thematically because I can’t get over the wonder and gift of books, stories, the written word.
I think readers love your willingness to ask big questions and to explore big ideas and emotions. “Who could understand the world?” and “How much could a heart hold?” are two of the questions posed by The Beatryce Prophecy. What does it feel like when you’re writing and a question like that comes out?
DiCamillo: What does it feel like? It feels like a cry from my 8-year-old heart. I remember doing an event in Boston and a boy raised his hand and said something like, “Why do you pose all these philosophical questions in books for kids?” And I said, “Because kids are the ones who are brave enough to ask those questions. When you’re an adult, you stop asking, you stop wondering.”
“When my editor sent a new piece of Sophie’s art, I couldn’t resist emailing her directly and saying, ‘This art, this art. What a gift in such a dark time. You are drawing my heart.'”
Kate DiCamillo
Did you always envision The Beatryce Prophecy as an illustrated novel? How did Sophie come to be involved with the book?
DiCamillo: I knew as I was working on it that it had to have (at least) illuminated letters. And when I was done writing, I asked my agent and Candlewick, my publisher, “Is there any way that Sophie Blackall could illustrate this?” And miracle of miracles, it happened. Sophie said yes.
Sophie Blackall: In Iate 2019, I received an email from Chris Paul, the creative director at Candlewick Press, with Kate’s manuscript for The Beatryce Prophecy attached, along with an outline of the publishing plan for the book. It mentioned a special slipcase edition. The words slipcase edition are hypnotic to an illustrator. But even without the slipcase, I would have said yes on the spot.
Sophie, you were probably one of the first people to read The Beatryce Prophecy ever, in the whole world. What did you think the first time you read it?
Blackall: When the email with the manuscript arrived, I was about to step out the door, on my way to somewhere or other. I read the first page. I put down my bag, took off my coat, canceled the something or other and, with goosebumps on my arms, read The Beatryce Prophecy from beginning to end. I felt a rush of gratitude for these characters. I felt I already knew them like dear friends. The honor of being one of the earliest readers is not lost on me, but I have also been impatient to share this book with the world. Keeping it a secret was almost too much to bear.
Authors usually don’t communicate directly with illustrators. Sometimes they don’t even meet each other! But you emailed back and forth as Sophie worked on the illustrations during the pandemic. What was this correspondence like?
Blackall: I can’t remember who emailed first. I know I was bursting to talk to Kate. I tried to be restrained, but my messages tumbled out, all essentially thanking her for this gift. The gift of a story that brought me solace and comfort and joy during an otherwise uncertain and worrying time. The gift of Beatryce and Answelica, Brother Edik and Jack Dory and Cannoc. The gift of beautiful things to draw: a mermaid and a wolf, seahorses and bees, meadows and moons.
“Kate DiCamillo writes up. Her sentences, which are full of beautifully arranged, interesting and even challenging words, are honest, fearless and clear.”
Sophie Blackall
DiCamillo: I had already written the text and Sophie was working on the illustrations during the pandemic, and technically (as you say) we shouldn’t have communicated directly, but we already knew each other. Every once in a while, when my editor sent a new piece of Sophie’s art, I couldn’t resist emailing her directly and saying, “This art, this art. What a gift in such a dark time. You are drawing my heart.”
And things like that.
You both realized, independently of each other, that you were thinking about Joan of Arc as you developed Beatryce’s character and appearance. What impact did this historical figure have on Beatryce?
DiCamillo: I was working on Beatryce’s story when I took a trip to Washington, D.C. I was in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and I walked into a room with this huge Joan of Arc triptych (“The Adoration of Joan of Arc” by J. William Fosdick), and it just kind of . . . undid me. I took a picture of it and kept the art nearby. It just felt like the story to me, like Beatryce.
Blackall: I think the image of Joan of Arc popped into my head at the moment when Brother Edik cuts Beatryce’s hair. Beatryce, like Joan of Arc, is a girl who defies expectations. Like Joan, she is determined, brave and resourceful. Like Joan, she carries hope in her heart and faith that “we shall all, in the end, be led to where we belong. We shall all, in the end, find our way home.”
Sophie, what other things did you research as you worked on these illustrations? How did that research find its way into your work?
Blackall: I worked closely with the creative director, Chris Paul, who had a detailed vision for the way the book would look, inspired by wallpaper, textile and type patterns of the designer William Morris, who in turn was inspired by medieval paintings and illuminated manuscripts. This was another gift, because after reading the manuscript I found myself strolling through museums and poring over books on Morris and medieval manuscripts, making involuntary sounds of delight, and so we were very much on the same page.
Can you tell us about the nuts and bolts of illustrating the book?
Blackall: Considering we were hundreds of miles apart and in the midst of a pandemic, Chris and I worked very closely on the art direction for this book. It is a beautiful object and we considered every fraction of every inch of every page. There are stories within stories, which gave us many creative opportunities. Ordinarily I work with Chinese ink and pencil and watercolor, but because we were all sheltering in place and I wasn’t sure about sending physical art, I decided to work digitally. The beauty of this was that once I had found what the characters looked like, I could direct them in a scene as though they were actors in a film. I would find myself talking to Jack Dory, for instance, asking him to lift his chin a little. Raise his arm. Look a little more pleased with himself. And I could move the images around and experiment with scale and perspective far more efficiently than if I was using pencil on paper.
I have to ask about goats. Kate, there are a number of prominent animal characters across your body of work, from Ulysses the squirrel to Despereaux the mouse and Winn-Dixie the dog. Was Answelica always a goat? Did you know much about goats before beginning to work on the book? Did you spend time with goats as you worked on it?
DiCamillo: Ha! I wish that I could spend some time with goats. I didn’t. I haven’t. But this character of Answelica arrived so clearly, so emphatically, that it really was just a matter of following along behind her. I did spend quite a bit of time gazing at goat eyes in various books. They’re spectacular, those eyes, and I’ve always been fascinated by them.
Blackall: I hold a special affection for Answelica. When I was 10, I had a goat. Her name was Josephine and her ears were like velvet. I had to give her away when we moved (we moved a lot), but the Josephine year was a good one. All children should have a goat year.
Kate, what do you love most about Sophie’s illustrations in the book? Do you have a favorite illustration in the book?
DiCamillo: There’s a two-page spread of Beatryce being spirited away and a story in the sky above her (like a constellation) that literally makes my heart skip a beat.
Every piece of art that Sophie did is so heartfelt, luminous. It’s a gift to me and to the reader.
Sophie, what do you love most about Kate’s storytelling in the book? Do you have a favorite passage you could share with us?
Blackall: E.B. White once said, “Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting [their] time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly.”
Kate DiCamillo writes up. Her sentences, which are full of beautifully arranged, interesting and even challenging words, are honest, fearless and clear.
As for a favorite passage, I might choose a different one tomorrow, but right now I am going to give you one that arrives quite early on. Brother Edik has discovered Beatryce, sick and lost, guarded by a fearsome goat. He tells the goat, Answelica, his plan to care for the child, which gives us a sense of the transformative relationship between the three. The way he feels at the end of the passage is how I felt while reading this book.
Brother Edik bent and gathered her in his arms. Her skin was hot to the touch. She was burning with fever.
“She is very sick,” Brother Edik said to the goat who was staring up at him. “The first thing we must attempt to do is to bring the fever down. And we must wash her. We must remove the dirt and blood. She has come from some war, I suppose. Do you not think it so?”
Answelica nodded.
“Lord help me,” thought Brother Edik, “I am conferring with a goat.”
He walked out of the barn and into the light of day carrying the child. The frost had melted. The world no longer shone, but it was very bright.
Answelica was at his heels.
He turned and looked back at her. He saw that the goat’s eyes were gentle, full of concern.
Strange world! Impossible world!
Brother Edik felt his heart, light within him, almost as if it were filled with air.
At one point, Beatryce tells Brother Edik, “Stories have joy and surprises in them.” What surprises did you encounter as you worked on this book? What joys?
Blackall: While making the drawings for the book, I was so immersed in illuminating the world of Beatryce’s story that there were times I would look up and not remember making the lines on the page. It was as if the images appeared fully formed. When I wrote to Kate about this phenomenon, she reported something similar as she was writing The Beatryce Prophecy. As though this story and its characters already existed. That’s magic right there.
DiCamillo: The surprise for me was discovering (when I was done) how much my mother’s spirit is in these pages.
The joy? The joy was in getting to do it—getting to tell the story—and then to watch Sophie tell the story again in art. Talk about joy.
Author photo of Kate DiCamillo courtesy of Catherine Smith Photography.
Kate DiCamillo and Sophie Blackall are two of the most decorated children’s book creators working today, so their first collaboration qualifies as a major event.
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Sophie Blackall: In Iate 2019, I received an email from Chris Paul, the creative director at Candlewick Press, with Kate’s manuscript for The Beatryce Prophecy attached, along with an outline of the publishing plan for the book. It mentioned a special slipcase edition. The words slipcase edition are hypnotic to an illustrator. But even without the slipcase, I would have said yes on the spot.
