Lyn Miller-Lachmann
Albany, NY
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Friday, April 29, 2011 3:14PM
Children’s Authors on Voice & Place
The two empty chairs onstage at the PEN Children’s Committee panel, “Who Tells the Story? Children’s Book Writers Talk About Voice,” seemed to have been left there by accident, but unforeseen circumstances kept two participants from attending. Children’s Committee chair Susanna Reich fell victim to laryngitis, so her predecessor, Fran Manushkin, graciously welcomed the near-capacity crowd. Panel moderator Lisa von Drasek was also unable to attend because of an injury, and Jenny Brown did an admirable job of taking her place. She came with a list of thoughtful questions, tailored to each panelist, that elicited insightful responses.
Although I’m familiar with Gioconda Belli’s poetry, fiction, and acclaimed memoir of living in Nicaragua in the years before the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, The Country Under My Skin, I didn’t know of her as a writer of books for children. However, her picture book The Butterfly Workshop was published in 2006. Brown began the session by asking Belli about the difference between writing memoir and writing fiction. Belli characterized her fiction as a process of discovery. When she starts a novel, she knows how it begins, and she has a vague idea of the ending, but she doesn’t know how she plans to get there or even if the ending will turn out the way she conceived it. (As she spoke about the process, I nodded in recognition, as her experience is quite similar to mine.) With a memoir, though, she knows what happened, and the process of writing is a process of selecting memories that are meaningful to other people and creating a structure that situates readers and propels them forward. She said that The Butterfly Workshop started as a novel that didn’t develop as well as she’d first hoped, but she couldn’t let go of the characters and their circumstances. As a result, she made the little boy her main character and portrayed his relationship with his grandfather. Both are artists of the natural world, and the boy who creates butterflies is an apprentice of his grandfather, the designer of rainbows.
Brown had an entirely different question for Peter Lerangis, who has written more than 160 children’s books, most of them in series, and is currently one of four authors writing for the popular series The 39 Clues. She asked him how he develops characters for established series and in collaboration with other authors. Lerangis said that his training as an actor made him uniquely suited to taking on roles—and in this case, writing roles—that are not his own. In The 39 Clues, the creators of the series were careful to match four authors who had a similar voice. He also talked about researching settings with which he was not familiar, because the editors chose not to assign him the books set in countries that he had visited personally in order to have him model the research process.
Newbery medalist Rebecca Stead fielded a question related to her own background growing up in a changing Manhattan neighborhood in the 1970's and how it contributed to the unique characters and voice of When You Reach Me. Stead, who seemed to have matured emotionally a few years before her peers, longed to talk to them about emotions when she was nine or ten years old but found little interest. As a result, she discovered emotional connections in books, at least until junior high school when her peers caught up to her. When You Reach Me reflects her quest to capture what she was like at that age—learning about other family situations, changing friends, becoming aware of homelessness and other social problems, and coming to the end of her elementary school years and going out into the wider world. She (successfully) sought to bring those feelings alive in When You Reach Me through the end of Miranda’s friendship with Sal, her friendship triangle with the wealthier girls, the scary homeless man at the corner, and the mysterious relationship with the boy who hit Sal.
After addressing the topic of voice, Brown asked the panelists about their depiction of place. Belli talked about the 1972 earthquake that devastated Managua, her account of which begins The Country Under My Skin. She explained to the audience that even addresses disappeared in an instant, because in Nicaragua addresses do not consist of streets and numbers but directions from major landmarks. Once the landmarks collapsed, people lost their compass. The government’s abysmal response to the earthquake played a major role in the triumph of the revolution seven years later. Belli recalled the victory over the Somoza dictatorship, the feeling that “I own my own country.” Even though the utopia failed, the feeling of creating a utopia, like creating a work of art, remains to her “a joy forever.” Tying this experience to her artistic work has given her an intimate understanding of the kind of joyous imagining that permeates The Butterfly Workshop.
While Belli recalled the joy of a victory over oppression, Stead talked about New York City in what my husband, who grew up in Queens several years earlier, calls the “bad old days,” a time of widespread homelessness, seemingly random crime, abandonment of homes and entire neighborhoods, and infrastructure collapse. She described her quiet street in which half the houses were boarded up, without roofs, and populated by feral cats. She described walking past street people who obviously needed help and “when you turn around, who you don’t want see walking behind you.”
While none of the follow-up questions touched on this issue, I found it an interesting juxtaposition of a desperately poor, earthquake-stricken Central American country feeling such triumph, hope, and joy following their toppling of a brutal and corrupt dictator, and the grim acceptance of poverty and social breakdown in the richest country in the world. I applaud the Children’s Committee for their visionary choice of panelists who took this discussion to some unexpected places.
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