|
|
|
The Edge of the Forest: Welcome Jane, and thanks for agreeing to chat with me about your writer's life.
Jane: Thanks for the invitation to talk, Kim. I have very fond memories of our work together at Vermont College.
The Edge of the Forest: For readers unfamiliar with you and your work, please tell us a little bit about you, your writing, and the other hats you
wear in the children's literature field.
Jane: When my son was born thirty-seven years ago, a friend sent him Pat the Bunny to welcome him to the world. I laughed. By the time
he was six weeks old, however, he and I were devoted reading partners. When he was six months of age, we were at the library weekly to fill up
Red Owl grocery bags with picture books. When he was two, a woman saw him sitting on the floor, with a Richard Scarry book open and covering his legs.
"Ohhh, isn't that cute," she said. “He thinks he's reading.” No, not cute; he was in fact reading. He had pointed at a street sign a few days earlier and
said, "STOP!" He had pointed at the logo on the side of the bus and said "T!" He really was reading.
I had just finished my M.A. program in English literature, and I missed scholarly projects, so children's literature became my new area of interest. (I
had been an Emergency Room nurse in my previous incarnation, but my other interests sent me back to college.) After another year of reading with my little
Jason, I published my first essay—in The Horn Book, about anti-feminism in Watership Down, and wrote my first review of a children's book for
the Minneapolis Tribune; when I stopped writing reviews twenty-five years later, my weekly column was published in the Sunday paper's books pages,
and I had in the meantime read thousands of books for children and young adults and published several of my own.
The choices you make in the course of a writing career open up other opportunities. Marion Dane Bauer invited me to teach on the faculty of Vermont
College's low-residency MFA, where I worked for seven or eight years. Now I teach at Hamline University's similar MFA in Writing for Children and Young
Adults in St. Paul, Minnesota. This Hamline program, approaching its third term in January, 2008, is already a shining place for writers to hone their
talent and develop their skill in writing for children. We are trying to assure that the program's intellectual rigor matches our support of students and
our emphasis on craft. In its first year the faculty included Kate DiCamillo, Liza Ketchum, Alison McGhee, Phyllis Root, Gary Schmidt and other
professional writers, guided by the gifted and very involved Dean Mary Rockcastle. I'm extremely proud to teach at Hamline.
My other ways of earning a living include freelance editing, private children's writing workshops in my home and occasional weeks at the Highlights
Foundation's "Whole Novel Workshop," in the woods of the beautiful Pocono Mountains. (Carolyn Coman and I will teach together there for a week in June
with eight participants who will each bring a complete draft of a novel to work on. The Foundation's website presents more information.) I fall asleep at
night sometimes thinking of the farmer last summer, mowing his hay, in the meadow adjacent to the house where we and the students meet. The blue sky, the
scent of the hay, the beauty of the day are with me yet—as well as the hawks lurking in the air above, awaiting the small creatures that rushed out of
the grass before the machine could cut them down.
Teaching and editing pay the bills and are both vocations that demand my full devotion and attention. I love this work. Nevertheless, the consequence of
that intense focus is that it diverts me from writing my own books, my heart's own desire. My list of some fifteen or sixteen books includes novellas (some
call them "Chapter Books") (The Comeback Dog; Caught in a Trap; The Snoop); biography (Behind the Mask: The Life of Queen Elizabeth I); a picture book
(Wheels); illustrated story books (Lights on the River; Celebration; and Saying Good-Bye to Grandma); and
middle-school fiction (The Princess in the Pigpen).
My work has won a number of prizes. I'm especially pleased that the Children's Literature Collection at the University of Minnesota gave me the Kerlan
Award for contributions to children's literature.
The Edge of the Forest: What attracted you to children's literature and writing for children, and how long have you been working in the field?
Jane: I take my own advice and write what haunts me. The work that comes out through my fingers onto the page happens to be literature appropriate
for children. I love to participate in children's early reading. If we fail to teach children to love reading, as well as to decode, we shall have failed
to offer them an introduction to American and world culture beyond their immediate experience. I believe that reading fosters their ability to learn and
enhances their emotional and spiritual lives as well as their intellectual education. The way to give them these gifts is to supply them with books that
they choose and time to read them without interference such as testing. (How much would I read if somebody else jammed books they picked down my throat
and then made me pay by answering their simpleminded questions? No thanks. Just leave me alone, and let me read.)
Children's literature comprises several literary forms, like literature for other audiences, including, the big three: fiction, non-fiction (which needs a
more respectful, positive label), and poetry. Children's books are not "genre literature." Graham Greene compared Jemima Puddleduck's Beatrix Potter to
E.M. Forster. They had a similar way of "put[ting] aside sex and death," he wrote, and their dramatic action was described by an "acute and gentle
detachment.") Like the quality of literature for other audiences, children's literature varies extremely in its aesthetic value, and the best is worthy
to be listed alongside works in the other tributaries to the great steam of Literature. Children's non-fiction is the best way to catch a grip on an
unfamiliar subject. As a reader, I love fiction for children because of its emphasis on story—action, dialogue, motivation, dramatic tension;
beginning, middle, and end.
The Edge of the Forest: Let's talk about your writing life. When and where do you write? And what do you consider a good writing day?
Jane: I write all too little to suit me. A good writing day is that rare day when I find the wherewithal to write any work of my own, sitting in a
cherry-red wing chair in my living room, my little dog at my side and my computer (bought by friends who were so kind as to give me a $1200 fellowship
anonymously last fall) on my lap.
My advice to other writers, after all these years of doing the contrary, is to make your money in a field different from writing. The poet Wallace
Stevens was an insurance executive who wrote in his head as he walked to work. Carrying mail or delivering packages would be a good occupation for
writers. Do something that isn't about words, preferably something that allows you to wool-gather and observe events and people in the world. To return
to the desk or laptop is too much after working all day with other people's manuscripts. In writing or talking about others' writing, you've drawn all
day from the word well. To return to that same well and haul up bucketsful for your own use is difficult, if not impossible.
Do a lot of creative napping and bathing. That semi-sleeping state (a hypnogogic state) or a tub of hot water are conducive to imagination. The idea for
The Princess in the Pigpen came on the third day I repeated the same exercise in the bathtub: relax and imagine yourself in a comfortable place,
where a creature is bringing you what you need." I asked for a new story to write. On the third day, an imaginary woman, wearing a white robe and a
winglike headdress, walked up the inner slope of a volcanic dome where I waited on the sere rim. She handed me a white flower. Instant greenness swept
across the whole lifeless floor of the crater and burst into bloom.
Well, I thought. This show is very nice, but where's the story?
Then I sort of turned my head, and there, in the midst of a herd of pigs in modern Iowa, stood a girl dressed in Elizabethan costume, holding, in one hand,
a music box made of oak and gold and, in the other, a doll dressed exactly like herself, with features like her own. I leapt from the bathtub, wrapped a
towel around me, and left wet footprints all the way downstairs to my tablet and pen. At the dining room table, damp and cold on a winter's day, I wrote
the first chapter of my book. It won a children's choice first prize in England.
The hiatus between terms at Hamline in December and January will be a joy, giving me time to work on three short mss I've slowly developed this term, on
paper and mentally, all of them historically-based, illustrated storybook texts that will be, I expect, about twelve pages each. Living the kind of life
described above, I must choose ideas that I can handle in short forms—a work that I can pick up and set down as necessary, between stints of other
work.
When I write a book, I set a goal of two pages a day. If I'm rolling after two pages, I continue, but that spate doesn't let me off the hook of tomorrow's
obligation to write another two pages. The effectiveness of this simple discipline is shocking: two pages a day for sixty days yields one hundred and
twenty pages, the text for a middle-grade novel. This discipline is responsible for all the longer books I wrote while I was raising my son, cooking,
keeping house, teaching, and doing literary odd jobs.
The Edge of the Forest: Writing can be a lonely and isolating avocation. Where do you find the support and inspiration you need to survive the
process?
Jane: Writing is my vocation. The other work is avocation. Before I wrote and found other writers, I felt like a goose in the chicken
coop—an oddball who didn't fit in with the rest of the livestock; somebody who wrote in the basement on an old sticky typewriter that eventually
caused spurs on the joints of my left little finger, but I typed anyway; somebody who liked to hear and talk about things other than laundry detergent,
football, old cars, the children's ringworm, TV shows, and other enforced topics of conversation. Now I don't remember when any of my current friends
raised the subject of TV or radio shows, except for political TV and NPR. I've found my own flock of people, in whose coop I roost very comfortably.
Among us, the laundry detergent crowd, are the odd birds.
I wrote alone for many years. Then I joined the American Association of University Women, where every Monday morning a group of writers met, and I could
pay somebody downstairs to take care of my little boy. During the past forty years, many others have joined the community of children's books writers here
in Minneapolis, but during my early career, I knew only two who did what I did—Emily Buchwald and Marion Dane Bauer. I think the three of us have
nurtured other writers, who have nurtured yet others. Among these people I've found my kin. I belonged to a private writing group of seven writers for a
few years, then withdrew because it didn't serve my needs. Now I go on week-long private retreats with ten other serious writers twice a year, to an old
former Boy Scouts lodge in the Wisconsin woods during the winter, and to an island with enough cabins for all of us in the summer.
People like Phyllis Root and Kate DiCamillo and Ellen Levine have given me the community I always longed for, by email if we don't see each other in
person. Phyllis lives ten minutes from me. We meet often for gyros at the nearby Greek restaurant to talk about what we're doing, complain, complain,
tell the stories of our lives, complain, and feed our souls as we feed our stomachs. We're sworn to secrecy about what we say at these lunches, so we can
bellyache with no risk of reprisal. We're geese of a feather. She reads my manuscripts and edits them, usually by asking the same questions over and
over, the same questions I ask my own students. Even after all these years, I still omit emotional reactions from my work: "What does she feel?" Phyllis
asks. "What does she do that indirectly reveals her reaction?"
I read my friends' and others' books for inspiration. My students inspire and teach me. And inspiration is everywhere—even in the accident I had last
week, when I reached for something, lost my balance and slid off the bed, naked, and wedged myself between the bed and the table, arms behind me, and head
cocked so I couldn't breathe. I've killed myself, I thought. The more I struggled the more tightly I was trapped and the less air I could breathe. Even
as I thought I was dying, I swore I'd be damned if I'd allow the police, the coroner, and the undertakers to see the state of my bedroom, and my bare hind
end in the air. Mortification saved me. I remembered the sparrows calling to Peter Rabbit when he caught the buttons of his little blue coat in the net,
imploring him to exert himself. Determined not to die such an ignominious death, I somehow summoned the strength to pry myself out of the fix and escaped
with only bruised legs and arms that were black from elbow to shoulder. This terror, absurdity, and determination are instructive. I can use them
somewhere. The experience is in the compost heap now, simmering.
Absolutely everything that happens to a writer is useful. Even if the incident doesn't ever appear in a story, the emotions that attended the incident are
the energy that makes a story or a biography live.
The Edge of the Forest: Your website lists you as a gardener as well as a writer and teacher. I can't help but believe that the gardening you refer
to isn't just about growing flowers, but about tending your students as well. Care to shed some light on the subject?
Jane: Thank you, Kim. Of course, gardening metaphors are everywhere. The plants in my big perennial garden need the right soil and climate and
water and manure (compost) to create a habitat where the plants can thrive and flower. A little bit of work each day in the garden, early in the morning,
if the sun is hot, prevents the weeds from getting ahead of me. The same rule works in the garden as at the laptop, the two-daily-pages or one hour
weeding discipline. Phyllis often helps me with the heavy work, and I often divide my plants and give some to her.
Nakedness and one hind end have crept into these answers a couple of times, and I haven't deleted the slight indelicacy because it's so appropriate to a
discussion where writers and readers are the audience. Writers must learn to be naked. Writers must be willing to expose their nether sides. My writing
students don't do very much unless and until I love them and show them that I do, by telling them what haunts me, what makes me think and moves my heart in
their work, at the same time that I raise questions about it. Developing writers resemble my perennials. They need the right habitat. They need the
gardener to make adjustments to their nature. They need to be tended and cultivated and loved. And then they need to be let alone to do their work in
their own way.
They also must look clear-eyed at the truth about their own nature and feelings and their own lives, for they are like the Crane Wife in the Japanese fairy
tale, weaving fine cloth of feathers they have plucked from their breasts, their very selves. I'm grateful to them for making me a better, more open
person than I was. When they trust their gardener, they can afford to allow themselves nakedness, knowing they won't be crushed and suffocated.
The Edge of the Forest: What advice do you give most to your students and why?
Jane: Six admonitions have helped me in my life as a writer:
1. Write what haunts you. Novelist William Styron said that beginning a novel is like setting off on a journey between Vladivostok and Barcelona on
your knees. The journey is too hard for anybody to spend herself in a book that isn't from her heart. Even if she did last through the whole long
journey, who would read such a book?
Choose a work that is worth the effort. To find meaningful material, write lists of things that changed your life in childhood—without which you
would have become a different person: People, Events, Places, and Things or Objects. Write each list separately, at different times, and keep your pen
going for twenty minutes, even if you repeat yourself. Choose items from the list that reverberate for you, that make you nervous or angry or scared.
Then write sketches, accounts of that event or object or person or place. (Mr. Doty, down the street from my childhood home, threatened to cut off my ears
with his hedge shears and hang them in the closet to dry with all the others. [I think I had stolen one or two of his peonies.] He's worth a sketch.)
2. Set achievable goals and meet them. Although I may not be able to keep up with a writer like Hemingway, my work is not a competition;
I know I can write two pages. If I merely do that, with prolonged regularity, after two months I'll have a draft. I'll see what I was getting at on
page one and page fifty, when I didn't know exactly what I meant to say. Then I'll have something to work on.
3. Finish a draft. Don't fiddle around with your work. Tinkering won't take you anywhere, not to Moscow, let alone Barcelona. Keep going.
Write the first draft fast, so it benefits from an alpha state, a sort of trance, where you're in your emotional rather than your rational mode. Thinking
along with feeling will come when you revise your book, after you've finished a draft. Then you'll know what you're after and will be able to make the
work more what you want it to be—more what it wants to be, too.
4. Be as encouraging and kind to yourself as you are to your writer friends. We don't need to hear all the trash we talk to ourselves—you're
an impostor; you're a dope; nobody would ever want to read anything you could write; what makes you think you could write a novel?—you've never
written a decent one yet, because you don't know how; you'll never be able to write a two-hundred-page book; you should be washing the clothes and
cleaning the toilet. I hear all these insults from the nasty little Mugwump who comes out and sits on my shoulder and sneers at me when I write.
If I let him come out.
If I turn his nasty accusations around, they become instructive and constructive: The laundry and the toilet will wait, always there when I have a minute,
but right now, I can choose to be undistracted; maybe I never wrote two hundred pages before, but I've written two pages hundreds of times, so I'll just do
that—two pages today, two pages tomorrow, two...; if I never wrote a decent novel before, I'm learning how by writing one now; a writer is someone who
writes—I'm not an impostor—I'm a writer; people have told me they enjoyed what I wrote, and I enjoy the making of the thing, so I'll just go on
with this work and see what happens.
5. Set priorities. If you want to write, you have to put this work at or near the top of the list. (I have not been doing so, and I'm suffering for
it with disgruntlement. No books will come out for at least two years, because I haven't made time to write. Now I've changed my ways.) Arise in the
morning, if you can, before your husband, your children, or the dogs wake up. That way you'll assure that you're writing before the Mugwump wakes up to
join you. Write before you make coffee or walk the dog. Write before you turn on the radio or talk to anybody. If you do so, you will have worked on
your book as you slept, and your writing mind will be prepared.
Learn to say no: No, I can't join that school committee; I'm working. No, I can't make cookies for the church dinner; I'm working, so I've had to
cut back. No, I work and turn off the phone between nine and noon; please call at another time, leave a message on my answering machine, or email me.
Unless you yourself make writing a priority, whatever the sneerers and scorners say, nobody else will do so for you.
6. Do your work. Nobody else much cares whether you write. In fact, lots of people, including relatives and friends who say they love you, are
scornful of your dreams. When you're writing a work or have finished a draft, you can't control anything about it—whether others like it, whether it
sells to a publisher, whether the reviewers appreciate what you tried to do, whether anybody ever knows your name, even whether the book is any good. All
you can do is to do your work. So do that. Butt in chair, as they say—BIC. You can control whether you go to your writing chair every day. Whether
you do your work is a mast to hang on when the wind blows and the laundry sirens call, and the Mugwump starts in with the shoulds and the oughts. You will
probably wash the clothes with a more generous heart after your writing is done.
The Edge of the Forest: What's the last good book you read?
Jane: Since October, I've read every day about George Washington. That reading is part of my work. He interests me, that man whose portrait hung on the
wall by the clock in my childhood classrooms, looking down at me, disapproving and much too stern. I think we owe our country to him. Without him,
Jefferson would not have had a unified people to influence with his views about small government, and Lincoln would not have had a Union to save.
Besides, I think now that George wasn't really disapproving. He was just moaning as he sat for his portrait, "Criminy, these hippopotamus teeth hurt in my
mouth. Why can't the *&&^%^ craftsmen make some dentures that fit? Why doesn't that *&&^%^ artist hurry up?" (Washington was prodigiously
self-controlled, but he also had a volcanic temper; although he was very dignified in public, he swore long and loud when he exploded, and I think he
probably swore a lot in the privacy of his own mind.) So Washington haunts me, and I've read ten or twelve histories of the American Revolution and
biographies of him. They've been a pleasure to me. An idea has come of this reading, something about a minor figure who was a fraud, but his influence
helped the rebels win the war.
Reading is one kind of writing work. As is staring out the window and thinking and dreaming.
My favorite novel this year is Jane Gardam's Old Filth. It's a novel for adults about a man who was one of the orphans of the British Empire,
children who were sent back to England from the far-off countries where their parents worked for the East India Company or the British government's other
undertakings. Jane Gardam has also written splendid novels for children, including A Long Way to Verona; A Few Fair Days; and
Bilgewater. You can learn a lot about narrative and first-person p.o.v. from her. Queen of the Tambourine is a novel with an unreliable
narrator about a dotty children's book writer. You can learn from this book about how to use indirection in fiction, writing one thing in order to reveal
another thing indirectly.
Reading is part of the writing life.
The Edge of the Forest: Anything you'd like to add?
Jane: Only that I miss you and wish that we could have had this conversation over coffee down the street. Writers and their coaches and
colleagues develop unique intimate relationships that don't end because of distance. Almost any writer would benefit from the friendship of others who are
working in the same vineyard.
The Edge of the Forest: I miss you, too, Jane. Thanks so much for taking time out from your busy schedule to talk shop and process. I feel as if
you’ve treated us all to a mini workshop. Raising my cyber mug ‘o tea, and wishing you a Happy New Year.
|
| |
|
|