Q&A with Philippe Girard

Philippe Girard is the author of the new biography Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life. His other books include Haiti, and he has edited and translated The Memoir of Toussaint Louverture. He is a professor of history at McNeese State University, and he lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Q: You write, “The challenges that the biographer of Louverture faces are many.” Why did you decide to write about him, and what were some of those challenges?

A: My initial interest in Toussaint Louverture simply comes from the fact that I was also born in the French Caribbean (Guadeloupe), where Louverture, as the leader of the only successful slave revolt in Caribbean history, is a towering historical figure.

But I would not have spent 10 years of my life studying him if he had been a one-dimensional figure; his complex personality, akin in many ways to his contemporaries Napoleon and Jefferson, is what brought me back to him every time.

As for the challenges, they are of two types: logistical and analytical. Louverture wrote thousands of letters and memoirs, but they are scattered in archives on both sides of the Atlantic: France, Haiti, the U.S., Cuba, Britain, Spain... Piecing together his papers, which have not been published or even cataloged, was a monumental endeavor.

Analytically, he was a secretive person who kept his cards close to his chest. His contemporaries acknowledged that they could never truly get "inside his head." Doing so two centuries after the fact was even more difficult!

Q: How did you research the book, and what surprised you most in the course of your research?

A: I researched the book over many years. Most of the work took place in France, which I visit every year as I have family there, but I also had to make trips to Philadelphia, Puerto Rico, New York, Cap Haïtien, and London, among others.

Altogether, I visited over 20 archives. Luckily, these are all very nice places!

I was also fortunate to be awarded a semester-long research fellowship at Harvard’s Hutchins Center, which gave me enough time to complete my research and finish the manuscript. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has created a wonderful research center on black history there.

When I began the research, my image of Toussaint Louverture was quite traditional: like everyone else, I saw him as an idealistic hero of slave liberation.

I was quite surprised to read in contemporary accounts that in his time he was seen as a complex and even devious character, and research in primary sources confirmed this. Among other things, Louverture had been free prior to the Haitian Revolution and even owned and rented some slaves.

The single biggest surprise occurred when comparing research notes with those of my colleague Jean-Louis Donnadieu in the spring of 2012: it suddenly dawned on me that Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first leader of independent Haiti, had once been employed as a slave by Toussaint Louverture!

This contradicted everything I thought I knew about Louverture. It took me years to fully comprehend his pragmatic worldview and understand the rationale behind some of his decisions.

Q: In the book, you write, “And the more we learn of Louverture, the harder it is to pin him down.” Can you say more about the contradictions that you see in his life?

A: The main issue of his time was slavery: whether it was right for a person to own and exploit another—but also, should slaves be freed, whether Haiti’s plantations would survive emancipation.

Let’s not forget that Haiti was the leading producer of Europe’s sugar and coffee when the revolution broke out. He spent his life trying to reconcile those two objectives.

He owned and exploited slaves as a freedman, but he also bought the freedom of his relatives. He launched the greatest slave revolt in world history, but then he forced former slave to continue working under a very strict labor regime.

He wanted to protect the interests of both slaves and planters (he had been both), and the tragedy of his life is that he never fully succeeded to square that circle.

Q: How would you describe Louverture’s legacy today?

A: In Haiti, he is obviously a hero: the national airport and countless monuments are named after him, and writing anything that could be interpreted as a criticism of his record is highly controversial.

I learned that from personal experience in the fall of 2013, when I attended the Haitian Studies Association meeting in Port-au-Prince. My paper was published ahead of time in the national daily, and some of my findings did not go well with the general public, to say the least!

But Louverture’s complex record is precisely what has made him so interesting to me and to people around the world. His legacy is so disparate that it has been appropriated by seemingly everyone. In the 19th century U.S., both proponents and opponents of abolition cited him as an example.

When visiting Besançon in France (a city near the prison where he spent his last months), I was surprised to find his portrait adorning the local trolleys: the French now see him as a hero of their revolution even though Napoleon was responsible for his death.

Louverture has also been coopted throughout the Caribbean as a leading figure of the struggle against colonialism, even though he never declared Haiti’s independence from France.

Louverture saw himself more as a Frenchman and a Caribbean Creole than an African descendant, but the people of Benin, where his parents came from, have erected a statue to honor him as a shining example of the African Diaspora.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: More biographies of Haitian revolutionaries! In October 2015, Professor Gates invited me back to Harvard to give the Huggins lecture series. I chose to focus on four remarkable individuals from the revolutionary era.

Jean-Baptiste Belley was a former slave who convinced the French national assembly to abolish slavery in 1794 and then became France’s first black deputy.

Isaac Sasportas was a Jewish idealist who died trying to export the Haitian slave revolt to Jamaica.

Joseph and Marie Bunel were a bi-racial couple that played a key role in Louverture’s regime (he was Haiti’s first ambassador to the U.S.).

I’m working on turning these four mini-biographies into a book. The Haitian Revolution was so multifaceted that the best way to retrace it, I have found, is to tell the stories of its main actors.

Biography has fallen out of favor among many professional historians because they see it as a form of top-down, “great men” history; but I find biography to be a tool that is both useful and compelling.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Everyone knows of the French and the American revolutions; the Haitian revolution tends to be less studied even though it was the most radical of the three.

Similarly, people like Jefferson, Washington, Robespierre, and Napoleon are better known to the public than Dessalines or Rigaud.

My goal is to bring people’s attention to this momentous revolution, and especially to the fascinating figure at its center: Toussaint Louverture. I hope this book will achieve my goal!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Douglas Smith

Douglas Smith, photo by Robert Wade

Douglas Smith is the author of the new biography Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs. His other books include Former People. He worked for the U.S. State Department in the Soviet Union and for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich, and he lives in Seattle.

Q: You begin your book with an anecdote about a photographer taking pictures of Rasputin’s home town in 1912. Why did you choose to start with this scene?

A: It’s always challenging for a writer, how you begin and how you end. The logical thing would have been with his spectacular…murder, but that was too obvious.

I liked the photograph—it was taken in 1912…It was a way to bring readers into the story and into the place with a remarkable color photo taken when all of Russia was talking about Rasputin. Rasputin’s house is not included in the photo, but it sets the stage and launches into the story…

Q: What are some of the most common perceptions and misperceptions about Rasputin?

A: One of the most common is that he was evil incarnate, Satan personified. That’s so utterly wrong, it’s [surprising] this myth took hold.

He was very much a man of peace. During the Balkan Wars before World War I, he came out against Russian involvement, and on the eve of World War I—I reproduce a letter where he was begging Nicholas II not to listen to the warmongers; if you are a true Christian, killing is wrong. That’s important about Rasputin and is misunderstood.

The idea that he was an orgiastic sex machine like in the Boney M song—he was an adulterer, no doubt, and he probably [was involved with] prostitutes, but if he was a sex maniac, there would have been illegitimate children, and there isn’t a mention of that anywhere.

His influence over policy and the Czar is greatly exaggerated.

Those are just a few of the myths we can do away with.

Q: Yes, I wanted to ask you about the relationship between Rasputin and the royal family.

A: He was only close with Nicholas and Alexandra and their children. The larger Romanov family all resented him, and thought he was wicked.

Alexandra was the one who was closest to him, closer than Nicholas was, though he too took comfort from Rasputin. He was their spiritual counselor, their life coach, their connection to the peasant masses.

They were isolated in the palace, and believed there was a mystical bond between the Czar and the people, and he personified that.

When people think about Rasputin and the royal family, they think he was brought to the lace and helped heal the boy [Nicholas and Alexandra’s son].

But even more important with respect to their relationship, Alexandra knew Nicholas was weak. Rasputin became a surrogate backbone. She looked to Rasputin to [help] Nicholas rule as he needed to. She was telling Nicholas, Do what Rasputin says! You have Rasputin’s comb, use it before meeting with the ministers to give you strength!

Q: Why does Rasputin still elicit such fascination today?

A: In part because his story still seems unbelievable. In the beginning of the book I refer to a dark fairy tale. It is one. A peasant on a religious quest makes his way to the palace where almost no one is granted access, wows them with religious insights, charisma, simple peasant ways.

There’s World War I, his spectacular murder, the fall of the Romanovs—it sounds like an epic. That’s why we find the story so [unforgettable].

Q: How did you research the book?

A: I didn’t want to just go to the library and repeat stories from previous books. I thought if I’m going to add something, I have to go back to the original documents, which hasn’t been done.

The book took six years full time. I went to Russia—I worked in the archives…I went to Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Cambridge, Stanford, Harvard, Yale.

There were fascinating letters, diaries, police reports, all sorts of documents no previous biographer had seen. It allowed me to recreate his life with much greater accuracy and detail. It helped explode the myths that people thought were true.

Q: And did anything particularly surprise you?

A: One example is that Rasputin was in Moscow and went to dinner at the Yar [restaurant]. This is an example of the dramatic stuff I’ve uncovered. We’ve believed  [this dinner] was proof of how debauched he was. I found in an archive in Moscow, in a police file, I found that none of the debauchery happened.

Only a couple of months later the head of the police agency in Moscow, a foe of Rasputin, had the whole story created. It was a complete lie. It was an attempt to blacken Rasputin’s image with the Czar...I was able to deconstruct the whole story.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m taking a break from writing a work of history. I’m doing a translation. A lot of people fall in love with Russian culture through Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. The book that made me fall in love with Russian Culture was The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky. It’s a new translation of that book, which will be out in 2018.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: It’s been getting great reviews in the U.K.!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Nov. 22

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Nov. 22, 1819: George Eliot born.

Q&A with Matthew Holm

Matthew Holm, an author and illustrator, is the co-author of Marvin and the Moths, a new novel for kids, and Little Babymouse and the Christmas Cupcakes, a new children's picture book. His many other books for kids include the Babymouse and Squish series of graphic novels. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Marvin and the Moths, and how did you and your friend and co-author Jonathan Follett divide the work on the book?

A: Jon and I have been friends since middle school, so it only seemed appropriate that we write a book about the horrors of middle school.

The idea actually first came to us when we were on vacation with our wives at a cabin in Maine. It was a bit, shall we say, rustic. Enormous moths were flying around, and spiders the size of hamburgers were crawling in the sink.

Jon and I always start making little stories to amuse ourselves, so on this occasion, we asked ourselves where these oversized bugs came from. Did they drink the fruit punch we brought, and it had an unusual effect upon them? Did they eat some of our breakfast meat, and it caused them to mutate?

Eventually, we sat down and started to work out the story for Marvin and the Moths, about a 12-year-old boy (Marvin Watson) who discovers that giant, superintelligent (and very sarcastic) moths are living in his attic.

I was living in New York's Hudson Valley at the time, Jon was living in Boston, and I'd drive up for the weekend and we'd have marathon writing sessions together at his house.

Then, I moved to Portland, Ore., and we had to figure out a new way to work. Google Docs was introduced to the public around that time, and we realized that, not only can you share a word processing file, but if two people open it at the same time, you can actually type and the person on the other end will see your words appear on the screen almost instantly.

So our "writing room" got a bit bigger. We would call each other on the phone, both open the same doc, and start talking and typing. We even worked that way while I was living in China for three months last year!

Q: Another of your new books is your first picture book, Little Babymouse and the Christmas Cupcakes, on which you collaborated with your sister, author Jennifer L. Holm. Why did you decide to do a picture book about Babymouse, and what's it like collaborating on books with your sibling?

A: When we started working on Babymouse, one of our main goals was to make comics for kids again. Throughout the late ’80s and ’90s, comic books had become darker and grittier, and written almost entirely for adult readers.

There were surprisingly few titles left that were appropriate for kids. So we wrote the Babymouse graphic novels for kids in elementary school—which was the age at which we, personally, engaged with comics the most.

As time has gone on, more and more comics for elementary-age kids have come out. Which is awesome! It's so great that so many of us are working in this category now.

So we've decided to expand our horizons a little more, and try to reach kids before they hit the age range for reading the Babymouse graphic novels, which are really for independent readers.

We were working on some board books for very young readers (the "My First Comics" series, which so far includes the titles I'm Sunny and I'm Grumpy), and then we figured we should fill the remaining gap, namely, those kids in the picture-book range!

The result is Little Babymouse and the Christmas Cupcakes, in which our heroine, at the tender age of four, finds herself on Christmas Eve having accidentally eaten all of the cookies she was leaving out for Santa.

It was a lot of fun bringing comics to this age group, as well as bringing Babymouse, with her can-do attitude and her wild imagination, to a new bunch of readers.

Working with my sister is actually quite easy. She's six years older than I am, so growing up, she mostly ignored me. I was that "annoying baby brother," but I was mostly not in her social orbit. We didn't get into the kind of fights that siblings closer in age to each other do, so we never had that baggage as adults.

Plus, we both worked in industries where your work is heavily edited and critiqued (I was in magazines, she was in advertising), and as a result we don't take criticism of our work very personally.

It's also extremely handy to work with someone who has so much shared history, because it makes communicating ideas while we're working on stories—especially stories inspired by events in our own lives—much easier.

Q: You have seven new books out this year! How do you organize all your work? Do you go from one book to another, or try to finish one before moving ahead?

I would love to be able to finish a project completely before I start the next one—so I don't feel like it's still hanging over my head—but that's never possible. Instead, I'm always working on multiple books at the same time.

Usually, I'll be doing pencil sketches for one book and then switching to inking a different book while those sketches are being reviewed, then revising a manuscript for a third book before switching back to inking the first book, and on and on. Trying to keep track of it all gets a little dizzying sometimes!

Q: What do you see as the relationship in your work between writing and illustrating?

A: I have a fairly unusual relationship to writing and illustrating, I think. I'm often called an illustrator, and it's true that the vast majority of my work involves me drawing.

But I was an English major in college, and I wrote for a magazine for eight years after college before switching to illustrating Babymouse, so I really always think of myself as an author—an author who also happens to draw.

To me, there is far less difference between the two—they're just storytelling. I've also done graphic design for many years, and I think of it all the same way: What's the best, clearest, most effective way to communicate this information? Sometimes it's with words, sometimes it's with pictures.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now I'm working with Jenni on a sequel to Sunny Side Up. I've finished the sketches and am partway through the inking. With luck, I'll be wrapped up on that sometime after the first of the year, and people can look for it later in 2017.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Jenni and I have a new Babymouse book coming out next year. It's another new format for Babymouse: a hybrid book, with both text paragraphs and comics (like Dork Diaries and Diary of a Wimpy Kid).

It's the first in a new series called "Babymouse: Tales from the Locker," in which Babymouse is slightly older: in middle school. This volume is Lights, Camera, Middle School! Look for it in bookstores July 4, 2017!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Nov. 21

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Nov. 21, 1694: Voltaire born.

Q&A with Sonya Chung

Sonya Chung, photo by Robin Holland

Sonya Chung is the author of the new novel The Loved Ones. She also has written the novel Long for This World. She is a staff writer for The Millions and the founding editor of Bloom. She teaches fiction writing at Skidmore College, and she lives in New York City.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Loved Ones, and for the two Lee families?

A: The Loved Ones—like many ultimately successful creative projects, I'm learning and realizing—was actually born of failure and lack of confidence.  

I'd been working on another novel for about three years, and in the summer of 2012, it became clear to me that the project was dead in the water. I was anxious and very low after that, wondering if I'd be able to move forward as a novelist.  

Later that summer I resolved to "just show up"—at my desk, to the blank page. In baby steps, I started working in territory that felt both familiar and interesting, which turned out to be an awkward, lonely Korean American girl's adolescence in the D.C. area in the mid-1980s.  The rest grew from there.

The two Lee families—Hannah's Korean immigrant family, and Charles and Alice Lee, who are an interracial couple (African American and white) with two biracial children—are ostensibly different in every way and "shouldn't" converge or collide. But they do—a series of unusual circumstances bring them together—and that was my primary interest.  

One thing I've realized in reflecting on my childhood in the D.C. area is how segregated it was: we lived in Montgomery County and were a minority among white, affluent families; my father's medical practice was in Prince George's County and D.C., and almost all his patients were African American; my mother's family founded the Korean church we attended in Silver Spring, and that's where we immersed in Korean community (mostly working class).  

These worlds never collided for me, and I wanted to explore/pursue that in this story. Since Lee is such a common Korean family name, and a name also somewhat common in the American South, it seemed not improbable, though interestingly coincidental, that the two families would have the same last name.

Q: How would you describe the role of race in the novel?

A: This is a Big Question and hard to answer succinctly, I confess. So maybe I'll go with the simplest version: all the characters in the novel are both deeply shaped by their race and also deeply individual.  

This is the line I'm most interested in walking—in life and in fiction. You cannot separate Charles from his identity and experience as a black male, and he is a unique, dimensional person, kind of an oddball for a black male of his time and place.

The same is true for Hannah in relation to her Korean immigrant identity and experience, and her specific quality of mind and soul. Alice is in some ways fleeing aspects of her whiteness, and she is coping with the particularities of her personal history.  

My ideal for this novel was that it all matters, it's all relevant—both/and, not either/or. 

I've spoken at length about cross-racial and inter-racial writing at an interview I recently did with Electric Literature, in case readers are interested.

Q: The novel jumps back and forth in time. Did you write it in the order it appears in the book, or did you move things around as you wrote?

A: Thanks for this question, as I'd never really thought about this process explicitly: in fact, I wrote the sections in the order in which they appear. My storytelling instincts seem to move naturally back and forth in this way; as if this movement is in fact "linear" in my mind when it comes to telling a full and layered story.

Q: Did you need to do a lot of research to recreate the various decades you write about?

A: I did a bit of research about the Korean War and the Peace Corps (Alice Lee went to Chile for two years after college), as well as military training and the climate for black soldiers at army bases in Korea in the '70s.  

I also did some statistical research about young black males and their incarceration and mortality rates in D.C. in the mid '80s. I had general ideas about all this but wanted to confirm a few specifics in later drafts.  

But in general, my goal as a novelist is not necessarily to get all the facts exactly "right"; rather I'm interested in possibility and plausibility in relation to the story I'm telling.

I did have a wonderful copy editor who helped me refine my memory: there were businesses like Staples and The Cheesecake Factory that appeared in original drafts.  These did not exist in the mid-‘80s as it turns out. At some point the world between ages 5 and 17 gets all blurred for me when it comes to certain details!

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Two projects — a novel, and a collection of essays. The novel is early on, so I can't say too much about it. The main character is an art historian and academic who was born of a French mother and a Japanese American father; she is living and teaching in the Pacific Northwest when a series of events shake up her (ostensibly) stable existence.  

The essays are thematically linked around the tensions and intersections between body and mind. One of the essays that I hope to appear in this eventual collection was recently published at Buzzfeed. 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: As I have opportunities to talk about my book and my work, I always like to give a shoutout to my publisher, Relegation Books, which is a new, tiny micropress based in Northern Virginia.  

My first novel, Long for This World, was published with a large corporate publisher, and I was a bit nervous at first about making the transition to a small indie press. But the experience has been fabulous: I could not have asked for a more ideal experience in bringing The Loved Ones into the world.  

The team at Relegation has been devoted, creative, collaborative, nimble, and just all around brilliant in working together to forge a dynamic and individualized publication path for The Loved Ones.  

I feel very, very fortunate to have found my way to Dallas Hudgens and Relegation and want aspiring writers out there to know that small presses offer an exciting, promising path if you're willing to branch out—i.e. roll up your sleeves and seek less conventional possibilities.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Shutta Crum

Shutta Crum is the author of William and the Witch's Riddle, a new novel for kids. Her many other books for kids include Thomas and the Dragon Queen and Mine!. She is a storyteller, librarian, teacher, and lecturer. Originally from Kentucky, she now lives in Michigan and Florida.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for William and the Witch’s Riddle?

A: Several years before I knew that William would exist as a manuscript, I’d started work on another novel, but only had the beginning. Then it stalled. There were two brothers stranded in a cottage at the top of a lonely peak.

I really loved those characters, perhaps because I have two brothers. My youngest brother is really attached to the elder one. In fact, my two brothers married two sisters. So I’d always wanted to write a story about two loving brothers.

After Thomas and the Dragon Queen made such a hit, my editor asked for another similar book. Now, I’d always seen Thomas as a “one-off” kind of book. But I realized she was right.  I could write another—not a sequel and not using the same characters, but using a similar sensibility, mood, etc.  And a new book must have a dragon as Thomas does.

Well, the dragon in Thomas is huge. For this book I wanted the opposite. Thus Squarmy was born—very tiny. I liked that! The dragon queen in Thomas lives in a cavern. I wanted Squarmy to live somewhere very different from Bridgoltha’s home.

My husband has a beard—I’ve never seen him without one! So one night it came to me, if Squarmy was miniscule he could live in an old guy’s beard. But when I got to working on Tuli’s character I realized that he needed to be a big part of the story and he couldn’t just be any “old guy.” So a Yana was born, as well.

And I needed a really bad antagonist. I’ve always loved tales of King Arthur, thus Morga a grand fae (from the ancient stories of Morgan le Fey) became my villain.

Things began to tumble together after that. And, of course, in all these kinds of take-offs from Western literature folk and fairy tales, things must happen in threes. So very early on I wrote the “riddle,” or chant.

Once I had that to guide me, I simply had to figure out how William would accomplish those three things—not easy! And I had to show him failing. Then, ultimately, a great deal had to be at stake if he failed. And what is the dearest thing to William’s heart—his little brother, Pinch.

Q: How do you think the book fits in with classic fairy tales, and how is it different? 

A: I wasn’t sure, at first, how I could tether this to the cannon of children’s literature. Thomas and the Dragon Queen was a take-off on the classic knight rescuing a princess from a dragon theme—though with a twist!

But I knew I had to fit in a folk or fairy tale connection, because the earlier book did. So I did a lot of reading with the knowledge that I did not want to set the story directly into an old tale—I didn’t want to do a complete retelling. I just wanted it to peripherally be something most young readers would know about.

And since I had to get rid of the parents early on—this is a tale of two brothers—I didn’t want both parents killed. One could just be sleeping somewhere. So I hit upon Sleeping Beauty; only the plot of William happens many generations later. And because of Morga’s evilness she has endured all this time.

I am hoping there will be a third book in this “trilogy.”  My editor currently has a manuscript based on The Three Billy Goats Gruff and a boy named Jack. Again, I am not interested in doing a retelling.

I think I am more curious about expanding the old tales into more—MORE. What if this happened? Or what if that happened? And what if it all happened in a different time or place?

So I don’t think of these books as retellings, or “fractured” tales. I think of them as the leap outward and the spot they have leaped from happens to be the tales of Western literature.

Q: What are some of your own favorite folk and fairy tales?

A: Interestingly, I’ve never really thought about whether I have a favorite. I’ve always loved reading the Brothers Grimm, and researching tales from other lands. (I own a number of collections of international folk & fairy tales.) But I can’t say as how I have a favorite, at least not of the traditional tales that Disney later co-opted.

I have always loved Beowulf—in its many versions, especially the Seamus Heaney retelling and the graphic novel version by Gareth Hinds. And I adore the old tales from Southern tradition; ghosts, bayous, pirates, monstrous alligators, and Jack tales, that sort of thing. I own a copy of A Treasury of Southern Folklore by Botkin that I do, indeed, treasure. Perhaps it is my Southern heritage?

Q: Do you usually know how your books will end before you start writing them, or do you make many changes along the way?

A: I’ve found that if I don’t have some sort of ending in sight, the novel doesn’t get off the ground. That happened with the story of the two brothers I’d originally started years before and that I alluded to above. When I had an idea with an ending, I used my unused characters from that start to write William.

It happened again when I did Nanowrimo about five years ago. I decided to simply jump in with no plan and see what came out. I loved what I wrote, but as I had no vision for where it was going—I got to about 45,000 words and simply stopped. This first half was shelved for a long time.

Finally, last winter I wanted a new project, pulled it out and gave myself the task of finding an ending. Only then, once I could envision an ending, could I sit down and write the last half. That just got turned into my agent at the end of October of this year. So we’ll see what happens with it.

With my picture books, I’ve usually got a “whole” feeling about them. I visualize their shape and where they’re headed well before I begin to play with words, so I don’t have this problem with the shorter books.

But the novel does seem to need a goal, or an ending, toward which I am writing. That doesn’t mean that I don’t change direction as I work on it. I may do so, but find it isn’t always a 180˚ turn—it may just be a bit of a swerve from my original intention.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Well, it’s only been two weeks since I sent my agent the latest novel—the one I’d originally started during a Nanowrimo month. The working title for that is The Ferryman’s Apprentice. (Not one of the young fantasies with dragons.)

So at the moment, I am in that stage where I’m bored, I’m reading a lot, and I’m listening for voices (hah!) of new characters. I’m sure other writers can relate though my family may be thinking I’m going through a mentally unstable period.

And I’ve been tinkering . . . trying to find my way into a new project. For the last few years my process has been to write a new novel draft each winter. Then during the rest of the year I work on picture books and do the revisions to the novel.

This seems to work for me. I find winter a time to hunker down and lose myself in longer, and often less playful, tasks. Picture books are more playful, they seem to fit into spring and summer in a more natural way—and they can be laid aside to scamper out and smell the flowers without doing much harm to them.

I can’t leave a novel aside for too long . . . to do so increases the chances of it being abandoned. It is much more difficult to leap into a whole world I’ve created and have to reacquaint myself with it fresh each time. So with a novel, I need to stay in it—even if that is simply in my thoughts each day, or my dreams at night.

So where is all this listening and tinkering leading? Not sure. But at the moment I am hearing the voice of an old tree in my head, and a collective POV from a whole grove. Hah! Or maybe it’s just my desire to run out and howl at this beautiful “super” moon we’ve been gifted with this month. We’ll see . . .

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: My website is full of goodies for writers. It’s at www.shutta.com. Under the “Writers” tab there are a number of articles I’ve written about writing for young readers, as well as some links to my handouts for various talks I’ve given.

I do workshops, presentations, and keynotes for conferences, schools and libraries. Information about my speaking gigs is also at my site. And folks can email me from there…

--Interview with Deborah Kalb