Carlie Sorosiak wrote her first middle grade novel, I, Cosmo, from the perspective of a family’s golden retriever. Leonard, the titular narrator of her second novel, is a cat—but he’s not just any cat. He’s actually an alien who crash-landed on Earth, intending to take human form but accidentally ending up as a cat. Now a girl named Olive might be his only hope of returning home to the stars. 

How did the inspiration for this book come to you?
A cat came first. I’d just finished writing a book about a dog, so I thought that a cat book would make for a natural follow-up! At the same time, I really wanted to write about a friendly alien. It occurred to me that I could blend the two characters together. (Aren’t cats sort of alienlike anyway?) The idea made me giggle. When I start to giggle about a story, I know I’m headed in the right direction.

How did you approach inhabiting both Leonard’s alien mind and his feline form?
It was certainly a challenge! I write chronologically, so I began with Leonard’s moment of arrival, when he finds himself transformed into a cat on Earth. I wondered what would shock him about his body. His tail? His claws? What would delight him? Leonard’s perspective bloomed from there. He has these catlike instincts (to destroy the curtains, for example), but for the first half of the novel, he actively fights against them.

My own family has two polydactyl cats, Bella and Duncan. Duncan has big Leonard energy, and I drew a great deal of inspiration from the way he moves and the way he approaches the world so curiously. The cat on the cover of Leonard even looks quite a lot like him!

What was fun about writing from Leonard’s perspective? What was challenging?
Writing this book was a perpetual balancing act. The narration is mostly alien, but every once in a while, the cat slips in (as cats tend to do). During the initial drafts, I found it difficult to maintain a balance between them. 

"At the beginning of the book, when Olive rescues Leonard in a storm, she’s feeling exactly the same way I did at 11: incredibly odd. An outsider on Earth."

However, that never took away a single ounce of fun! It was joyous to write from Leonard’s perspective—partially because it was so intellectually challenging and partially because I loved thinking about human customs that might baffle or delight an alien. For example, poetry! While I was writing, I was also preparing to teach an undergraduate poetry class, so Leonard’s variation on William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say” found its way into the novel. I can’t tell you how much I cracked up just thinking about an alien cat writing poetry.

Leonard is fascinated by seemingly mundane objects such as cheese sandwiches, raincoats and Swiss Army knives. How did you decide which objects would catch his attention?
Honestly, I just really love cheese sandwiches! As for the rest of the objects, many of them represent simple pleasures and general humanness. At one point, I think I also Googled “funny human objects.” During drafting, Google is my best friend.

Tell us a little bit about Olive. How did her relationship with Leonard develop as you wrote?
At the beginning of the book, when Olive rescues Leonard in a storm, she’s feeling exactly the same way I did at 11: incredibly odd. An outsider on Earth. And she’s absolutely obsessed with all kinds of animals, including cats. Throughout the novel, Leonard and Olive start to bond in deeper and deeper ways. They’re both outsiders—in Leonard’s case, quite literally! They’re both curious and compassionate and a little bit scared of what life might bring. But now they have each other.

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ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Leonard (My Life as a Cat).

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What do the concepts of home and family mean for Leonard and Olive? Did your own understanding of home and family evolve as you worked on the book?
One of my favorite lines in the book is, “You don’t have to be born into a family to call it your own.” I believe that wholeheartedly, and over the course of the novel, Olive and Leonard come to believe that, too. They develop this found family, together on Earth. 

I’ve always been interested in what constitutes a home, as I’ve moved a lot over the years and I often have trouble feeling grounded. But compassionate people ground me. Animals ground me. Friends can be your home.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that my understanding of home and family changed as I worked on Leonard, but the book did cement many of the things I feel. Hold your loved ones close. You can be weird around them, and they’ll still adore you. In fact, they’ll adore you because of your you-ness.

What do you think—and what do you hope—could be out there among the stars?
As a storyteller, I’m particularly fascinated by the Voyager golden record and the sounds of Earth that NASA chose to capture and send into space to represent humanity. Aliens are definitely out there. It’s a statistical probability. Whether they’re fluffy, catlike and dream about cheese sandwiches . . . well, that’s perhaps another story!

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Author photo courtesy of Carlie Sorosiak.

Lesa Cline-Ransome is an acclaimed children’s author whose first middle grade novel, Finding Langston, received a Coretta Scott King Award Honor. Being Clem completes a loose trilogy that began with Finding Langston and continued in Leaving Lymon. It’s a poignant story of a young boy in 1940s Chicago who must deal with the tragic loss of his father while navigating challenges at school, complicated friendships and swimming lessons.

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How would you describe Being Clem to someone who hasn’t read the previous two books in the trilogy? What was different for you about creating this story compared to the earlier two?
Clem is smart, outgoing and funny. He is the cherished youngest child and only boy, with two bossy older sisters and an overprotective mother who are all striving to protect him, but it’s not protecting Clem wants. He wants to be independent, brave and strong, like his father. His struggle to discover who he is as a young man finds him caught between a bully and a friend and never quite feeling that he can be honest about his fears without the risk of disappointing those around him.

Unlike the first two books, this story uses humor as a way of tackling many of the difficult issues Clem is facing. Being Clem also finalizes some of the loose ends of the friendship of Clem, Langston, Errol and Lymon, and readers will see how their stories ultimately play out.

Were these books always going to be a trilogy? What was it like to revisit familiar characters in Being Clem?
Interestingly, Finding Langston began as a too-long picture book that my editor suggested I attempt to expand into a middle grade novel. I never intended the book to evolve into a trilogy, but my editor and I found that readers wanted to know more about the cast of characters introduced in Finding Langston.

The problem for me was that I had only a limited scope for the secondary characters I created, so for Lymon’s and Clem’s stories, I began by looking at the culminating events in their lives that I alluded to in the first book—Lymon’s struggle with reading and the loss of Clem’s father in the Port Chicago Disaster—and worked my way into their backstories until I fully understood their uniquely individual stories.

Clem has internalized gender stereotypes, including ideas that boys can't be librarians or talk to other boys about their inner thoughts. What drew you to exploring these stereotypes? How did you balance representing them while also challenging them?
I am a mother of three daughters and one son, and I have always encouraged my son to be open with his feelings and emotions. His sisters were so verbal and emotive, and I’ve always encouraged my son to be the same, but outside of our home, the messages he received were very different. I often worried about my son and wondered if there was a space for boys who are sensitive or cry easily. It made me wonder about how often boys are asked to hide their emotions—how emotions are often feminized. To this day, I feel so proud of my son who, I feel, is so emotionally evolved in his ability to be honest about his feelings, to gauge and adapt to others’ emotions. I do believe that is because he had the space to freely express emotion as a child without being ridiculed. So it is my son I thought of when writing the characters of Langston, Lymon and Clem, who are all in their own ways sweet, sensitive, intuitive souls.

There were so many pieces of history that were presented inaccurately or incompletely when I was a student in school, so writing for me is often a way of relearning the truth of history, in particular the ways in which practices and systems directly impacted people of color.

In the book, Clem is given so many rigid messages about gender roles and what it means to be a man, but none of those definitions seem to apply to him. He begins to wonder, Can I ever be a man if I am afraid or not a fighter or smart or athletic? No one has told him that there are other ways to be a man. I think these are issues that so many young men are grappling with today.

Fear is another emotion that comes up repeatedly in the book. Expressing fear, Clem eventually discovers, is part of the journey toward conquering it. What do you hope young readers realize about fear through Clem’s story?
In a world where Black boys are often painted as hardened, violent and to be feared, I know the opposite to be true. In fact, because of that perception, Black boys are often the target of daily slights and injustice and violence. I wanted readers to see that fear and courage are not mutually exclusive. You can experience and embrace fear while forging ahead. It doesn’t have to immobilize you.

Many children’s books that involve bullying focus on either the person being bullied or the bully themselves. Clem, however, finds himself caught between the two. How did you decide this would be his role?
There is always the temptation to paint the antagonist as all bad and the protagonist as all good, but the truth of it is, people are never all one. There’s a little bit of both in all of us, so it is important to show readers that even good people can make bad choices on occasion and hurt others, which is what Clem does when he goes along with the bullying. Ultimately, when he is able to reflect on his own moral compass and inner strength, Clem is able to make better choices, but sometimes people can take longer to get to that place of awareness. I think these types of difficult choices that are nuanced and complex are the choices that kids are making every day, none of them simple. 


I want to ask specifically about Clem’s mother, who struggles between her desires to both empower her children to succeed and protect them from adult responsibilities. I think she will be understood very differently by young readers versus adult readers. Can you talk a bit about creating her character and what you wanted to explore or represent through her?
As a writer, there was a part of me that wanted the opportunity to create a different mother than was presented in the previous two books in the trilogy. In the first novel, there was Langston’s loving but deceased mother. In the second, Lymon was estranged from his difficult mother, and when they reunited, he discovered that she was far from maternal.

Clem’s mother is loving and maternal, but she is also grieving and depressed, and her mental state shapes the ways Clem and his sisters interact with her. Even while she feels she is being protective of them as a mother, her fragility means that her children are forced to mother and protect her.

I don’t think we talk enough about the challenges of motherhood and parenting through pain, depression, grief and loss, the lack of support available to mothers and what the reality looks like of having to provide ongoing daily care for children through it all. 


Your writing oeuvre includes middle grade historical fiction, picture book biographies and even a quilt-based abecedary, all united by your goal to “explore periods from America's past that were never discussed in the classrooms of [your] youth.” Being Clem in particular focuses on the Port Chicago Disaster and is set against the background of the Great Migration. Do you usually begin writing with a story or a character and then choose a historical setting, or vice versa—or are the two inextricably linked?
Generally speaking, I discover a period or an event from history I am looking to explore and then I envision it through the lens of a child. There were so many pieces of history that were presented inaccurately or incompletely when I was a student in school, so writing for me is often a way of relearning the truth of history, in particular the ways in which practices and systems directly impacted people of color.

When I first began the Finding Langston trilogy, it was because I had just read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which explores the stories of the 6 million Black people who left the South and travelled north in the 1900s. Reading that book led me to examine so many other historic events and touchstones that appear in the trilogy, including the Parchman Farm penitentiary, sundown towns, segregation and the Chicago Defender.

My own parents were part of the Great Migration and my father left Shelby, North Carolina, when he was 12 years old and moved to Providence, Rhode Island. I began wondering how, as a child, it would have felt as a child to leave behind everything and everyone you know and travel to a region so different in every way from your own. And by asking that question, I developed a character named Langston who finds he doesn’t quite fit into the city of Chicago, is teased and called “country boy,” but who eventually finds solace in the poetry of Langston Hughes and the Chicago Public Library. In that book, Clem from Being Clem becomes Langston's first friend in Chicago, in part because, like Langston, he has also lost a parent, a father in the Port Chicago Disaster.

Clem interacts with real events, objects and places, including the Bud Billiken parade, the Chicago Defender newspaper and his local high school's champion swim team. Can you tell us more about the process of researching these real-world elements?
Honestly, many of the real-world elements that I’ve included happened coincidentally and often took on a life of their own. For example, as I began researching segregated swimming pools in Chicago in the 1940s while trying to uncover where Clem might have been able to take lessons, I stumbled across one article about the undefeated DuSable High School swim team, whose members were all Black students, so I did some more digging until I had enough information to include it in the book and make it a central part of Clem’s story. What began as a small portion of Clem’s story revolving around his struggle to learn to swim ultimately evolved into a much larger social statement involving historic references to segregation, mentorship, newspaper delivery boys and the Chicago Defender.

Clem's friend Langston loves the poetry of Langston Hughes, and Clem is intrigued by him as well. How did you decide to highlight Hughes’ work in the novel?
Hughes’ work wasn’t even included in the initial drafts until I discovered a lecture series featuring Black writers who would share their work at the George Cleveland Hall branch of the Chicago Public Library, which was the library Langston visited. As I looked up the writers, I began reading the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen and Margaret Walker, but when I read the work of Langston Hughes, I discovered many of his pieces had references to the South, specifically to red clay roads and coming north and missing his mother. That’s when a light went on for me, and I decided to connect his work to my character Langston and his leaving Alabama.

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ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Being Clem.

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What do you enjoy about writing longer narrative forms like middle grade novels versus shorter forms like picture books?
I do enjoy both, but the beauty of writing in a longer form is that I have the opportunity to get to know my characters so deeply that they begin to feel like family. I am with them as they travel to school, spend time with their families or are in bed at night, so the way in which I inhabit their consciousness is very different from the way in which I write about a picture book subject.

Some writers love researching, some the initial draft and some revising. Do you enjoy one of these processes more than others? What do you enjoy about it?
I can tell you which one I enjoy the least: revision! Each provides its own rewards, but I have to say, there is no other feeling like when I begin getting that first draft down and the story begins to reveal itself to me. I know that I am going to have to change much of it, remove portions, rework entire sections, but it is so wonderful to meet the characters and find the settings and see where they will take me. 


We understand you’ve recently gotten a dog. Will you tell us about him?
Ah, Miles. Miles began as a foster dog from our local shelter. My plan was to keep him for just a few months until he was adopted. My family thought this was a terrible idea because they said I would become too attached and want to adopt Miles for myself.

Miles is an 8-year-old pitbull who has spent much of his life in shelters. There is nothing he loves more than a good couch and company, so he immediately set up camp in my office and happily stretched out, softly snoring behind me all day long as I worked or did my virtual school visits. We’d go for long walks, and at night he loved to watch movies as he stretched out on the couch next to me.

Miles is not easy. He cries too much, has arthritis and separation anxiety, is so terrified of rain that I have to coax him outside and cover him with an umbrella in order to get him to leave the house on rainy days, and you can never leave food on his level or he’ll steal it. But just as my family predicted, we fell in love and now he’s mine. I signed adoption papers two weeks ago.

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Author photo of Lesa Cline-Ransome courtesy of John Halpern. Photo of Miles Cline-Ransome courtesy of the author.

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.

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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.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Beatryce Prophecy.

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.

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Author photo of Kate DiCamillo courtesy of Catherine Smith Photography.

It’s difficult to think of a bigger children’s literature success story from the past decade than R.J. Palacio’s Wonder. The emotional tale about the importance of kindness has sold more than 12 million copies since it was published in 2012 and still regularly earns a spot on bestseller lists. In Pony, Palacio creates a very different tale: a slim, taut odyssey set in the American Midwest in 1860, anchored by a young boy named Silas, whom readers will find as irresistible as Auggie. BookPage chatted with Palacio about why she had to throw her new novel away (literally) in order to unlock the key to writing it.

Could you start by introducing us to Silas and Pa?
Silas is a 12-year-old boy growing up in an isolated house on the American frontier. He’s being lovingly raised by his widowed father, Martin, who’s an inventor and something of a genius, with only 16-year-old Mittenwool, whom no one else can see or hear, for a companion. Silas, it turns out, can see ghosts.

The story opens when three horsemen storm their little house in the middle of the night and take Pa away. Silas is left alone and quite shaken, so when the white-faced pony that one of the men had been leading shows up on his doorstep the next day, Silas takes it as a sign from the universe that he has to ride the pony in search of his father. Mittenwool, who is very protective of Silas, tries to talk him out of it, but Silas is determined to go.

The book is called Pony, so I have to ask: Do you ride? Do you like horses?
I love horses! When Iw as little, I used to draw them all the time. I would doodle them in my notebooks. I was obsessed—so much so that my parents got me horseback riding lessons when I was about 8 years old. Imagine two Colombian immigrants shelling out money they didn’t have so they could give their daughter weekly riding lessons in Flushing, New York. It was kind of crazy, but they did it. I only took lessons for a few years, and no, I don’t have a horse now or ride. I can still draw horses, though!

Family history, revealed in pieces over time, is such an important motif in Pony. Did any of your family’s stories inspire parts of Silas’ story?
The whole story of Pony was sparked by a scary dream my older son had when he was young. The events of the dream are different, but the imagery was taken right out of his head.

“We hold the people we love close to us, no matter where they are.”

I had my father in my mind when describing Martin. My dad was easily the most brilliant person I’ve ever known, an encyclopedia of knowledge. He could build anything, make anything, remember everything. He was the kind of father who would wake me up in the middle of the night so we could go up to the roof of our building to watch a meteor shower.

And of course, my mother is someone I speak with every day, even though she’s been gone for almost 20 years. We hold the people we love close to us, no matter where they are. I think of this book as a love letter to my mom and dad.

How did you develop the rules for the novel’s ghosts?
Silas sees and experiences the ghosts in Pony as they see and experience themselves. If they wear the wounds of their deaths, that’s how he sees them. If they don’t know they’re dead, Silas also doesn’t know they’re dead.

As to why some people stay behind and some don’t, Silas doesn’t know, and neither do they. He guesses that some people are more ready to go than others. Some people may have things they still want to see through. But in time, when they’re ready, they pass on. Everyone does eventually. Which is what I wanted to say: People leave us, but not forever.

Do you believe in ghosts? Have you ever had an encounter with something you couldn’t explain?
I’ve never seen a ghost, but I’ve experienced a sense of connection with loved ones who are no longer here. Whether that’s internal or external, whether there’s a science to it or it’s just wishful thinking, I can’t tell you. I don’t know. That’s part of the mystery of life, which is what this book is about. Silas learns to embrace the mysteries.

Pony features incredible old photographs throughout the book. You discuss these in your author’s note, but can you tell us a little bit about them here?
This book takes place during the dawn of early photography. New processes were being invented all over the world. People were experimenting with the incredible notion of being able to use sunlight and a mix of chemicals to freeze an image onto glass or paper. It’s pretty extraordinary! Silas’ father is one of those early tinkerers and invents a new form of photography.

“If you answer every question, you ruin the mystery for the reader. We can’t see everything in the dark. We see only what we shine a light on.”

I’ve had a daguerreotype collection for years, long before I wrote this book. I’ve always been drawn to old cameras and photographs in flea markets and antiques shops. As I was writing, faces from my collection would come to me. They helped form the characters in my mind. Ultimately, as I designed the book, I decided to use the images that literally inspired the characters as chapter openers.

In addition to your passion for old photographs, do you enjoy photography yourself?
I was a photographer for my school yearbook in middle school, which is when I got my first Pentax K1000 camera, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I love taking photographs on film, but I shoot digitally now, though I do miss the feeling of processing a latent image in a darkroom.

Your author’s note begins, “I spent many years researching this book, and I hope none of it shows.” Authors are often asked to discuss their research process, but instead, I want to ask you: Can you tell us about the work you did to hide all that research?
I was 400 pages into the first draft of Pony, which represented about two years of work, when I realized it wasn’t the book I wanted to write. I had so many notes, so much information. I knew how many miles and hours an Arabian horse could ride in a day. I knew their provenance, the name of the Bedouin tribe that Pony had come from. I knew the different photographic processes, what kind of lanterns were used, the names of real counterfeiters, the types of horse carts that were driven. I had topographic maps of the woods and the ravines and, well, so much!

I had a vision in my mind about the kind of novel I wanted Pony to be: a “quick epic.” That first draft, had I continued it, would have turned into a James Michener novel! So I literally threw it away. And I do mean that literally. But the story stayed with me, even as I worked on other projects. I knew I’d figure out a way to write it with the minimalism I had in my head for it.

“It was really challenging to tell a story with as few words as you can.”

After years had passed, I suddenly had a vision for how to approach it. I realized that I’d remembered all the essential parts of the research I’d done and forgotten what wasn’t important. The research had settled into the recesses of my mind, and that’s what made its way into the book. The woods became the Woods. The ravine was the Ravine. The only map of the world I needed was the one in Silas’ mind. That’s not to say the world wasn’t built, because it was—utterly and completely—but it didn’t need to be fully described.

The world is full of mysterious pockets and unexplainable and unfathomable crevices. That’s the kind of world I wanted to build. If you answer every question, you ruin the mystery for the reader. We can’t see everything in the dark. We see only what we shine a light on. That’s what I was trying to do here.

I kept saying I wanted to write Pony almost like it was a radio play, just voices in the dark, and then during lockdown, it started flowing out of me one day. It was a remarkable writing experience.

Your note also says, “Historical novels can be seen as road maps through history, but this book is more like a river running through it.” I love this metaphor. What were the challenges of telling a story with such a tight focus? What was rewarding about it?
It was really challenging to tell a story with as few words as you can. I kept trying to strip every sentence of words. Paragraphs. Pages. I wanted to get everything down to the bare minimum: enough to deliver an idea of the world, describe a linear sequence of events, and let the story almost tell itself. In that way, the narrative felt more like a river. It’s just barreling through. Going in one direction. And that’s all the reader gets.

Now, as the river passes through, we get the idea that it’s passing through other stories. We know there’s a lot going on with the other characters. The picaresque adventures of Chalfont and Beautyman, two characters Silas meets along his journey, could fill their own novel! But, see, that would have been part of that original epic that I had started to write. It’s not the epic I wanted to write, though.

The final version of Pony really is the closest I could get to the image in my head of what I wanted to do. Good or bad, right or wrong: It’s faithful to the image.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Click here to read our starred review of Pony.