Interviews
Barnes & Noble.com Interviews Sharon Creech
With Walk Two Moons, Newbery Award-winning author Sharon Creech captured the hearts and imaginations of readers everywhere. Now she takes us on a memorable new journey with The Wanderer. In this novel, 13-year-old Sophie is the only girl among the six-person crew of The Wanderer, sailing across the Atlantic. She's eager to face the challenges of the sea, but her goofball cousin, Cody, doesn't seem to be serious about anything. Through Sophie's and Cody's engaging travel logs, the perilous journey of these six wanderers unfolds. But for Sophie, the true journey is into her past -- as she unlocks the pain she has been hiding from herself and discovers what it means to belong to a family. Jamie Levine of Barnes & Noble.com spoke to Sharon Creech and found out more about The Wanderer, her work, and her family life.
Barnes & Noble.com: Did you want to be a writer when you were growing up?
Sharon Creech: A writer was one of the things I wanted to be. I think like a lot of kids, I changed my mind about every six months. I wanted to be a singer, and an ice skater...and the closest thing to being a writer I wanted was to be a reporter. Because I thought that's what writing was. My brothers and I would interview people in my neighborhood for our own made-up newspapers, but often I didn't like their answers, so I would change them. I realized later, maybe when I was in middle school or high school, that there was this thing called fiction where you could change the facts of the story. I think that's when I really became interested in fiction -- really in college, when I studied good stories.
B&N.com: The dedication in The Wanderer is "For my daughter, Karin, who journeyed across the ocean and who inspired this story. From the mother who worried while you were gone." Tell me about that.
SC: My daughter is an amazing person. She does all the things that I am not brave enough to do. When she graduated from college, she and six of her friends -- all male -- sailed across the ocean, from Connecticut to Ireland, as a sort of celebratory "we-finished-college" trip. I was terrified when she set off on this trip -- it meant three weeks without being able to call her and check on her -- but she kept reassuring me, "Mom -- don't worry, everything's going to be fine." And she was going to keep a journal of the trip, and she said she'd share it with me when she got back. So about 12 days into their journey, I got a phone call that had been relayed from a ham-radio operator saying that they were fine, they were about halfway across, and there were no problems. So I relaxed a bit. And then another two weeks went by, and I finally got a call from Karin in Ireland, and she was just breathless and she said, "Mom -- we almost died!" Oh -- I was just shattered! So when I finally did hook up with her again, and she gave me her journal, it was just fascinating to read this story of living on a boat and then encountering a terrible storm that ripped the booms and the sails and knocked out their communications equipment. There were several days there when they didn't think they were going to make it. So ever since I read her journal, I've been wanting to sort of fictionalize that trip -- take characters on that same geographical journey and have them encounter a storm. That's really what The Wanderer came out of.
B&N.com: So you have no familiarity with sailing, yourself?
SC: Well, I do have a little bit. I have sailed, and I did take a course in sailing right before I started writing this book. I can sail on a lake or a river, but I would never, ever attempt the ocean!
B&N.com: Many of your characters -- including Sophie in The Wanderer -- spend a lot of time with their extended families. What was your family life like when you were growing up?
SC: It was very much like that -- extended families. I spent a lot of time with grandparents and aunts and uncles, and my father was from a really big family. Most of them lived in southern Ohio and Kentucky, and when they would come up to visit, it wasn't just two people coming, it was maybe eight people. And they would stay for several weeks. There were always people like that around me. I think that when I start developing a character, I naturally begin thinking, "What's the family like?" Actually, when I wrote Walk Two Moons, I was trying to create an opposite of my family -- just a single child in a family, whereas there are five kids in mine. But then almost immediately, I had to snare in the grandparents, because I couldn't identify with just one child, two parents, no extended family. So I think that just naturally comes up in every book I write.
B&N.com: So many of your stories are about teenage girls on journeys of discovery, dealing with difficult issues like loss and abandonment. Is there any particular reason why you keep returning to this theme?
SC: I thought about this after writing Walk Two Moons, because I was very puzzled when people started asking me this. I wrote Walk Two Moons right after my daughter went away to college. We were living in Europe, and she returned to the States. I'd encouraged her to do this, because she hadn't lived around Americans since she was seven years old, and yet I was practically in mourning when she left; I could hardly bear it. What I did in the story is that I turned it, flipped it, so that it wasn't the mother writing about the daughter who goes away; it was the daughter writing about the mother who goes away. And I wasn't doing that consciously. I think I was just exploring the idea of "How do you deal with the fact that someone you love is gone?" And that's just the form that it took.
When I try to put myself in the mind of a 13-year-old, it seems to me that one of the things I keep coming back to, what they're all sorting out that's universal, is "Who am I?" You don't question that when you're very young -- you're just part of a family, part of a unit. But there comes that point at age 10, 11, 12, 13, where you start trying to be like your friends, trying on all these different identities, and trying to figure out, "What am I going to be? What am I going to be like?" I think that's so interesting. It's such fertile ground for stories.
B&N.com: The Wanderer is told through the travel logs of two cousins -- a boy and a girl. Was it difficult writing in a boy's voice for a change?
SC: No. It was kind of fun. I have three brothers, and I have grown up more around boys than girls, so that's where it comes pretty easy for me. And I like the personalities of my brothers. They're very funny people. I mean, there's a serious tone to them, but they like humor. So it's nice to kind of pull from boys like that.
B&N.com: Do you have a favorite book you've written? Is there a character with whom you most identify?
SC: I know that most people expect me to say Walk Two Moons is my favorite, and it does have this special life all its own because of the Newbery, but it's sort of like if you had five children and someone said, "Which is your favorite?" You can't do it -- you can't choose. They're all so different, and there's this love that went into making each one of them. And as far as my characters, I think if you took the main character in each book and maybe the secondary character and put them all together, that would be me. Like in Walk Two Moons, Salamanca has a very lyrical voice, she's very calm, and yet there's a humorous edge to her. And Phoebe is this sort of wacky, off-the-wall, yackity person. But I'm like both of them at different times.
B&N.com: What kind of advice would you give to kids who say they want to be authors?
SC: Continue to read a lot and write a lot -- all different kinds of stuff, like plays, poems, and short stories -- and just experiment with different things. Kids shouldn't expect to have the whole story in their head before they begin. I think that's what scares so many people [away] from writing. But if you just start out with a person and a place and start thinking "Who do they know?" or "What would happen to them? What are they like?", if you just start describing all that, then the story will come. And it's OK to stop something and put it away for a couple of weeks and then go back to it. I think that's reassuring to a lot of children.
B&N.com: I recently spoke to Chris Raschka, and he told me you have a picture book coming out in the fall (which he illustrated). Tell me about that project.
SC: It's been the most fascinating process. I've never done a picture book before. I had given a talk somewhere, and in this talk, I told a story about going with my father when I was young to look for the house he was born in. We couldn't find the house, and later we went fishing, and while we were fishing, I sort of re-created the house in my mind. I could remember vividly this picture, this image, and after I gave this talk, one of the editors from HarperCollins said, "Have you ever thought of doing a picture book? Because it seems like that might make a great picture book story." So that's how I came to write Fishing in the Air. And it was about that time that I had met Chris Raschka at another conference where we were both speaking. He's so amazing, and I just remember thinking, "His brain is so incredible -- I want to work with that person!" When I turned the manuscript in to the editor, one of the first people she suggested as an illustrator was Chris Raschka, and I said, "Please, yes!" So he took on the project.
The book is about a father and a son, and they go fishing, and they're not just fishing for fish; the more important thing is that the father is transferring things in his imagination to the kid's imagination -- sort of like how we learn how to see the world through other people, like our parents. But most of the action in the book is mental -- the kid imagining things. And I'm sure that was one of the challenges for Chris -- how to illustrate that. But he has done this amazing thing where the book becomes very active in the middle -- just through the line and the way the characters are swirling around the page -- and he's been able to portray, visually, this action of the imagination. I think he's done a brilliant job.
B&N.com: What else are you working on now?
SC: I've just finished the fourth draft of a book called Ruby Holler. That's a name of a place in Kentucky. It's like a Bybanks kind of place -- but further out in the country. It's sort of weird how that book came about. It came from one line in a letter my aunt wrote to me. She was telling me a story about when my father was younger and she said, "I think that was when we lived in the Holler." And I thought, "They lived in the Holler? What Holler?" And then several months ago...some of my relatives have a family web site, and one of the pictures that somebody posted was the house in the Holler. And to me, it was just so terrific -- it's a falling-down cabin, and this great, big, huge family lived there for a time, probably during the Depression. I just had to write about this place. And out of that came this story of two kids -- a boy and a girl -- who hook up with an elderly pair, a grandparent-like man and woman. And the kids are very rough-edged and rambunctious, and the older people have this very humanizing effect on them -- and the place, the Holler, has this effect, a sort of tranquilizing effect, too.
B&N.com: What are some of your favorite children's books?
SC: Actually, I hadn't read very many before I received the Newbery. It was sort of like I came in through the back door to children's literature. I had studied and taught classic adult literature, and when I wrote Absolutely Normal Chaos,, which was about a 13-year-old, it was my agent who said, "You know I think that's a children's book." So I thought I'd better find out about children's books! And after Walk Two Moons received the Newbery, I thought, I really have to go back and read some of this stuff, because people were always asking me about my favorite children's books and authors. And I didn't know any. But now I have lots of favorites. Like Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Shiloh. Christopher Paul Curtis's books; I especially liked his first one, The Watsons Go to Birmingham. I like Patricia MacLachlan's Sarah, Plain and Tall. It's such a simple gem of a book. Katherine Paterson's books -- anything she's written I like. And Gail Carson Levine. I especially like Ella Enchanted.