Augusta Scattergood is the author most recently of Making Friends with Billy Wong, a novel for kids. She also has written Glory Be and The Way to Stay in Destiny. A former school librarian, she reviews books for a variety of publications, including Delta Magazine and The Christian Science Monitor. She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Q:
How did you come up with the idea for your most recent book, Making Friends with Billy Wong?
A:
The town I grew up in had a large number of grocery stores run by Chinese
Americans. That didn’t seem at all unusual to me!
Then
I read an essay by one of my high school friends about what it felt like to
grow up there as a young Chinese American during the Civil Rights era. It was
powerful. When I read it, I felt there was a story and a history to share with
middle-grade readers.
Q:
You tell the story from the perspectives of two characters, Azalea and Billy.
Why did you decide to tell Billy's story in verse?
A:
Billy’s chapters are more poetic than poetry! They are letters, lists, notes. I
worked so hard on those pieces and I hope they give a sense of what Billy’s
world was like.
I
relied heavily on my friends for advice, for their own words. But it was hard
to capture the southern voice of a Chinese boy in straight narrative. Then one
day I sat with a legal pad under a tree and started doodling, and Billy’s “verses”
came to me.
Q:
How did you research the novel, and did you find anything that especially
surprised you?
A:
In my hometown of Cleveland, Mississippi, we now have the Mississippi Delta
Chinese Heritage Museum on the campus of Delta State University.
After
spending a weekend there for a very large event to celebrate the museum and
people who’d grown up Southern American Chinese, I had a good start.
I
also used the archives at the university to read many oral histories from the
grocers. I researched in the county library’s city directory and learned there
were dozens of grocery stores there, beginning soon after the Civil War until
recently.
I
wasn’t surprised that we had these grocery stores because I’d shopped there.
But the numbers surprised me. The part of the south where I grew up had more
Chinese immigrants than some of the cities in our country.
Q:
Do you usually know how your novels will end, or do you make many changes along
the way?
A:
I usually have a vague idea of my endings. Or at least I hope I do! It’s the
middles that throw me. My writing process is long and arduous, with too many
changes to remember. After three novels, you’d think it would be easier,
wouldn’t you?
Q:
What are you working on now?
A:
I’m at the stage in a new story that I feel if I talk too much about it, it
might disappear! I have much work to do.
Q:
Anything else we should know?
A:
My own grandmother lived next door to us and loved to garden. Her garden was
more modest than Grandma Clark’s but I appreciated it about as much as Azalea
did when she first saw her grandmother’s garden. I was about five when I ate her
green beans and found a tiny worm in my serving. For a very long time, I
avoided garden beans.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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