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From the year 2000:
You have had three books published this year. Please list awards for any of your most recent books. Were these three titles all written at about the same time? Sold at the same time? Or did the production end of publishing determine the year 2000 convergence of so many titles?
Each of my three 2000 books was written several years before publication. I began writing Happy Birthday, America! in 1993, sold it in '94; Sugarbush Spring was drafted in '94, sold in '95; Prairie Train left the station in 1993, but wasn't sold until '97 along with Bonaparte. The millennial year was abundant entirely at the whim of the publishers' schedules. I would have preferred three separate births. Triplets are exciting, but can be overwhelming and individually underappreciated.
Although early in the year for awards, Bonaparte was recently listed as a Smithsonian Notable Children's Book for 2000.
What is Prairie Train about? Who's illustrating? Any others in the pipe?
Prairie Train (look for it in early 2003) is about a little girl's first solitary long-distance trip. A rite-of-passage piece, the prairie girl journeys to the big city for a visit with Grandma. Her glamorous ride on the grand Great Northern 1924 Oriental Limited is soon derailed, however, by an even more formidable prairie blizzard. Her confidence shaken, fear seeps in, as icy and gripping as the screaming prairie wind. John Thompson (Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters) is the illustrator. Several other manuscripts presently seek homes.
How long does it take you to write a book? What kind of research do you do? Do you belong to a writers' group? Do you have a mentor? Can you talk about the process a little? Any personal quirks?
I write the first several drafts in longhand. Ideas germinate on scraps of paper and grow or die in file folders. So initially for me, it's a very non-electronic experience—something about every scratch-out and primitive sketch that shows I'm making progress, which is sometimes slow labor, complete with false starts, shallow breathing, and the confirmed belief that someone else should do this. Rupa Raises the Sun, for example, was drafted, revised, overhauled, trashed, and resurrected several times over a course of seven years. But Up North at the Cabin nearly wrote itself in one weekend after a few months in incubation. Even Up North required some research, however. I canvassed about 50 tourists around Minnesota's second largest lake to hear what they called it: Lake Mille Lacs or Mille Lacs Lake. Most took the easy way out and said Mille Lacs. But I needed the extra syllable for rhythm, so went with Lake Mille Lacs as the choice divided by age cohort—the over-thirty set to which I belonged said Lake Mille Lacs; the younger crowd reversed it. And in researching Sugarbush Spring, I learned from the president of the Minnesota Maple Syrup Producers Association that the area surrounding Mille Lacs supports the sweetest maple trees in the state (the trees have the highest sugar content). If that isn't fascinating enough, consider my research to unearth one of the two remaining Class P-2/482 "Mountain" type steam engines in Willmar, Minnesota at the Kandiyohi Museum. There, the curator and I were able to color-copy old Great Northern Calendar engines to show the peculiar shade of green engine paint the illustrator could not find in East Coast museums and libraries. After that voyage, the Prairie Train's engine better not be black!
I've been meeting at least monthly with my regular writers' group (dubbed "littermates" because we clawed and squirmed our way into the writing world together) since 1987. I'm also very fortunate to be a part of semi-annual writers' retreats with other Twin Cities children's authors. I know I couldn't have carried through with some of my stories without their strong and able support. In the yearly years, I studied with Susan Pearson, Marion Dane Bauer, Jane Resh Thomas, and Jim Latimer—all fine writers and willing mentors.
Talk about teaching (1) writing for children and (2) adult literacy. Any stand-out experiences/anecdotes?
I've been fortunate to receive the scholarship and encouragement of so many fine writers in this community and now have the opportunity to contribute my support through school visits, young writers' workshops, and occasional lectures and courses in the writing of children's literature. Some hold the mistaken impression that writing for children is easier for me than writing for the more sophisticated adult audience (e.g., once a woman asked me if I could counsel her daughter to take up writing for children because she "really wasn't very bright, but could probably learn to write for kids.") Yet would we ever question a pediatrician's credentials to practice medicine? Good writing for children, like good medicine for children, stands on its own merits.
Reading has already revealed so much of the world to me, but now writing has deepened that experience. Though I've not traveled extensively, the world comes to me (minus jet lag and expense) through the international students I meet and teach in the Hopkins Adult Options in Education program. Once a young Spanish woman's recounting of a gypsy wedding ceremony in the Andalusian Mountains of Spain so captured my imagination that I studied the gypsy culture for six months. My character Rupa was born and seven years later told her story.
Give me a little personal info? For instance: Do you have children of your own? Are you shy or extroverted? An avid camper or a garage sale junkie?
I have two great kids—Lindsay is 19 years old, a sophomore at the University of Missouri, Columbia, studying journalism; Robbie is 15 years old, a freshman in Hopkins studying life. He says I'm "allergic to time." True, I may not always be punctual, but I'm always engrossed in what I'm doing. Maybe that's why I love the lake—whether I'm in it, on it, or by it, I lose time. The lake isn't governed by time—it doesn't arrive or leave by the clock. It's always there, morning, noon, night. It may change in state of matter, but it doesn't age. Time to me is a nuisance, a confining dimension. A friend recently reminded me of the axion that work should be play with a purpose. Writing to me is that kind of work, like being in water; I lose track of time, in the same miraculous way I did as a child in the backyard creating miniature worlds that slipped imperceptibly into nightfall.
Talk about your pets (from childhood and now). Talk about Bonaparte. Where did you get the ideas for Sugarbush Spring and Happy Birthday, America!?
The story of my childhood pets is short and not so sweet. My dog, Buff, died when I was four (choked on a bologna string); my kitten died two weeks after I got her for my seventh birthday (declawing trauma); my hamster died ingesting motor oil my dad had used on the proverbial squeaking wheel; my rabbit, Harvy, became the prey of a neighborhood hunting dog. Not so pretty, but if writing permits us to live life twice, so does having children. My own children's pets have proven almost immortal: the best example was Mickey (Mickey Fin, to be exact). Mickey, an ordinary goldfish, lived to be eight years old and at least that in length. No, we did not eat him. He painlessly expired from natural causes.
In homage to a family tradition of sugaring with our friends, the Flaherty's, owners and operators of Maple Trails Resort in northern Minnesota, I wrote Sugarbush Spring. This annual ritual signaled not only a natural clock, but also the dependability of nature's gifts.
My favorite warm weather holiday is the Fourth of July because it's the one time of the year that the entire nation celebrates itself as family. Happy Birthday, America! is the story of that national spirit told by the cast of my extended family. I used the names of 37 relatives in this piece and learned that it did matter to at least 37 people.
Has living in Minnesota influenced you as a writer?
Certainly. I've written of the three Minnesota habitats: lake, in Up North at the Cabin; forest, in Sugarbush Spring; and naturally, prairie, in Prairie Train.
When did you start writing? What inspires you? Where do you get your ideas? Why do you write for children? What motivated you to start writing for children?
I've always written. As I child I kept diaries as emotional barometers—"Gloomy today" or to record career goals—then to become a concert pianist. Sometimes I wrote purely to entertain (plays and puppet shows) or to inform the neighborhood: "Chuckie's Tonsils Out at Last!" When my mother discovered my until-then private adolescent poetry and musings and wondered aloud if we should see a psychologist, I realized that writing too close to the bone could be trouble. In college, I raptly read the writings of a lot of dead guys—you know the ones—and never wrote for myself and made the mistake of allowing my only "creative writing" instructor to submit my story, "The Spines," (I'm still embarrassed) to the campus literary contest, which I grudgingly won and all I could say was "go figure." That was one weird story, and if that's what inspired praise, I only wanted to do laundry the rest of my life. I recall a Rod Serling appearance and the writing awards ceremony that spring as nearly the same event. Besides, when I mentioned to my parents that the English Department recommended graduate study out East, they changed the subject.
"Being a writer" scared me. The stakes seemed too high, or low—drunknessness, debauchery, being dead. I opted for the higher calling of motherhood, a/k/a sainthood (notice there is no "authorhood"). Changing diapers (theirs) and endless crying (mine) somehow lifts writing to the level of ecstasy. I established a writing regimen, an hour a day during naptime (theirs). I tried all genres: creative memoir ("When I Wasn't Someone's Mother"), poetry ("Ode on a Grecian Potty"), fiction ("Withering Heights").
Then my own mother died and so did my sense of personal immortality. I read C.S. Lewis and Auden for consolation, but found little relief. Where I did find it was through the urgent rediscovery of a very mortal, concrete world, the same one I'd always explored with my children, but now through a new filter. What if this were the last time I'd ever see a tulip? Or what if this were the first time? Eudora Welty said that "children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way, all over again." So I wrote to interpret and preserve experience—to capture it so it could never be lost.
I was awakened to children's literature—I loved reading picture books with my kids. The lush illustration, the poetic writing appealed to me. I took one class, then another, studied craft with Susan Pearson for two years. I learned to relish children's fresh, concrete, unself-conscious discoveries of the world. Writing for children allowed me that joy of experiencing the world over and over again for the first time. Adults lose this childlike appreciation and discovery through over-complication. I like to make the complex simple. Not simple-minded, but pared down to the essential.
What are my truths? I'm a teacher at heart, and sometimes I'm my own worst student. It's as if I'm presented the same life curriculum over and over, never quite passing. I struggle to feel comfortable in my own skin. Children's filters are much cleaner. They perceive, then feel. As an adult, I perceive, evaluate my perception, filter my feelings, check for authenticity; in other words, sometimes make the simple too complex. Kids are honest about real stuff. I can't hide myself behind words with kids as I sometimes believe authors of adult fiction can. C.S. Lewis said, "I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story." I'm tempted to set it up that an adult story which is only enjoyed by adults is a bad adult story.
Kids are the best we have to offer. Like the pediatrician, I'm working with fresh material, not the damage of a lifetime's wear and complications. It's great work if you can get it.
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