In the Attic with Myla Goldberg

Originally printed in the Washington Post Express

If there's one thing Facebook stalking old middle-school classmates can teach us, it's that people change. Reconnecting with those ghosts of friendships past can provide some insight into our former selves, which is what Celia Durst learns in Myla Goldberg's third novel, The False Friend.

"Part of what inspired me was that I remembered something very mean I had done in elementary school," Goldberg recalls. "I remember being the kid who was picked on all the time, but one time I threw a pair of scissors at my best friend at the time and scratched her on the leg. She didn't tell anyone and I blocked it out, but as an adult I remembered having done that."

Kids don't always turn into the adults you'd expect. "You have people you knew in high school, like the guy you're sure is going to be a Hollywood star but 10 years later he's a podiatrist," she says. "You never know what course we're going to take."

Goldberg's third novel follows Celia as she pieces together the disappearance of her best friend, Djuna, who vanished when they were 11. At the time, Celia told everyone that Djuna got into a stranger's car. Decades later, Celia remembers that Djuna fell into a hole — and she told no one. When she returns home to confess, no one — family, old friends who were there that day — believes her. Celia has a difficult time realizing that her memory may be fallible, something Goldberg says we all have to accept.

"I think, ultimately, we can never know ourselves and people we love can never know us," she says. "Memory is not this sacrosanct, golden thing, and if you talk to other people about your past you can figure out what memory's failure can teach you. Memory's failure is as good a way to learn about ourselves."

Goldberg's husband grew up in upstate New York, where she set the novel.

"The area fascinates me," she said. "It's a place of fallen empire, which ascended when the U.S. was making stuff and factories — cites and cultures sprang up around that. Now the U.S. doesn't make as much stuff, and the area is dead, depopulated and boarded up. It tied with my thinking about the people we are now versus what we were."

She also drew on her own childhood neighborhood in Laurel, Md.

"I attended high school in Greenbelt and I used it in the book," Goldberg says. "The great thing about fiction is that you can make a patchwork and draw from wherever you want."

In the Attic with Edwidge Danticat

In my journalism, I never have the luxury of including every quote or topic that comes up in the course of an interview. I recently interviewed Edwidge Danticat for a piece in Express (which you can read here) about her brilliant cultural criticism/memoir Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work and I had to cut out this question:


In Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, you write that “the immigrant artist, like all other artists, is a leech and I needed to latch on.” You also mention in the introduction that the executions of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin are one of your “creation myths.” How much of being an immigrant artist is telling other people’s stories, and how much is telling your own?

I think any artist is sort of a sponge and a lot of the re-creation of experience is a re-telling of your own experience where it encounters other people’s experiences. Being from an immigrant family, and with the past my family has, there’s always a person who tells it. As a result, people are often cautious around you. Even when I was a kid, I was the kid who told everything. I was shy, but I was a big observer and people were cautious around me when I started writing. My parents and my aunt spent much of their adult lives under the dictatorship, and even at the dinner table, where it was private, they would say, “is it safe to say this?” Having a writer in the family is counter-intuitive to that. Often when my relatives in Haiti read things of mine, they say, “how do you know that?” I always say, “I was listening when you didn’t realize it.”

In the Attic With Ben H. Winters

I conducted this interview to coincide with the publication of Winters' book Android Karenina — and then it never ran where it was supposed to. Much belatedly, here we are:

How did you make the jump from Austen to Tolstoy?

Quirk Books and I knew by the time we were done with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters that it was time to expand the franchise beyond Austen. Austen was great as the first “victim” of this idea, since her style is so prim and proper. We hit on Tolstoy next since he wrote great books, very important and serious literature, but he’s not like Dickens -- Tolstoy isn’t in any way silly on his own. You can give him many positive adjectives but “laugh out loud” is not one of them. His work calls out for this type of parody, whereas with other authors, trying to add levity gets in the way of the silliness already there.

Had you read Anna Karenina before sitting down to write the mash-up? What were your feelings on it?

I had read Anna Karenina several times and loved it. Before taking on the parody I needed to refresh myself with the plots and characters but I did know it and love it before.

How did you decide what to change in the world to incorporate robots?

It was tricky because the original is so long. It was pretty clear from the outset that the final version could not be as long as the original version — Anna Karenina is 800 or 900 pages. So the first step was abridgment, which was not as hard as it might have been — Tolstoy writes a lot into his books beyond the main plot. In his life when he became interested in agriculture or science or philosophy, suddenly a character would discuss it. I winnowed out what wasn’t central to the love story or the action story, and I had a shorter book.

Where did you go from there?

It was time to start reinventing, making big decisions and seeing how they play out in small ways. The first big decision was deciding where the technology was going to come from, so I created a miracle metal, discovered in the Russian soil around the time of Ivan the Terrible, and the metal enables the technology in the book. Once I figured this out, it allowed me to start reshaping characters. Levin is one of the Tolstoy protagonists, and in the original, he’s a landowner who owns huge estates, but in my version, he’s a miner who owns a huge mine that mined by robots.

Since Anna Karenina is written in Russian, you couldn’t use the original. What translation did you use?

The one by Constance Garnett. Anna Karenina is in the public domain, but the translation is not necessarily in the public domain. I couldn’t use the one from six or seven years ago by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky that was part of Oprah’s book club, but the Garnett is a staple translation. Because this is a mash-up, I also had more freedom to play around with the text — if I found a sentence that wasn’t fluidly translated, I could recast the original sentence even if not adding to it.

What were some of the differences between working with Austen and Tolstoy?

Austen is a much more contained writer, while Tolstoy… writes on a huge scope. His books are epic, vast things that cover years and years and dozens of characters. Austen uses a more limited range of characters and situations. The vastness of Tolstoy’s world meshed nicely with the grand vision of science fiction. Classic science fiction works take place on a grand scale, and they feel really Tolstoyan in breadth and depth.

In what way do you think the addition of robots and such adds to thinking about Tolstoy’s novel?

One thing it does is give the feeling of more forward motion. Anna Karenina is a beautifully plotted story, but it gets baggy in parts… making it a challenge to stay with the story. By adding some very plot heavy stuff, I made it, an action adventure with lots of plot, foreshadowing and tensions — the things contemporary readers look to to stay hooked in. This version has wizard aliens, and talking robots, and lasers — all the stuff Tolstoy forgot to put in.

In the Attic With Ben H. Winters

I recently interviewed Ben H. Winters, author of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and the forthcoming Android Karenina. The interview, originally published in the Washington City Paper's Arts Desk blog, is excerpted below. Read the full interview here.

WCP: What was your relationship to Sense and Sensibility before writing the book?
BHW: I hadn’t read it in many years, but I loved it and I had seen the Emma Thompson/Ang Lee film version. It’s hard to express what’s so great about that book—it has a classic, almost Shakespearean feel to it. There’s something bewitching about Austen’s writing and you really get drawn into the world of her characters. I hope by adding the zany stuff I’ve done justice to the original by retaining what makes it great and having fun at the same time.

WCP: How did you change the world of the Dashwood sisters to incorporate the monsters?
BHW: The book really doesn’t take place on the water at all, so I moved the central location to a deserted island, and changed London, the fashionable place they go in the middle of the book, to a sub base. There were places I stepped back and let Austen do the heavy lifting, and I tried to get monsters in there at the points where Austen’s characters are experiencing their deepest emotional peril. I equate the dangers of finding and losing love with the dangers of sea monster attacks.

WCP: What do you say to someone who says you’re negatively affecting Austen’s legacy?
BHW: First of all, I can’t get upset about it, because the reason they get so upset and lash out is because they love Austen so much. I hope people understand that a work like this is no higher form of flattery. Her work is worth enjoying in new ways and I hope people come to it from this spirit.

WCP: Your next mash-up, Android Karenina, besides having such a cool title, is also based on a favorite book of mine. What do I have to look forward to when it comes out on June 8?
BHW: I’ve tried to make this a great science fiction novel. It’s a really intriguing, dystopian, steampunk world with Tolstoy’s intricate and beautiful love stories playing around. Tolstoy was concerned about love and humanity, and I mix that with graphic science fiction—robots, aliens. It was so much fun to see what I would come up with and I think readers will dig it.

Read the full interview here.

In the Attic With Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier, most famous for Girl With a Pearl Earring, recently published her sixth novel, Remarkable Creatures, about two women who hunt for fossils on an English beach, in the States. The American author, who now lives in London, recently chatted with me via phone about her new book for an article in the Washington Post Express in advance of her speaking engagement at the US Navy Memorial tonight at 6:45. Below, an excerpt. Read the whole interview here.

What made you decide to tell the story of Mary Anning, a woman who collected fossils on an English beach?

I was interested in telling her story since I was surprised at how young she was when she made some of her discoveries. She was only 12 when she found the first complete specimen of an ichthyosaur. She was an uneducated, working-class girl who did things on instinct and had a good eye for finding things. ... Also, she was struck by lightning and survived. Accounts at the time said she had been very sickly and lethargic before and after she became lively and intelligent.

Were fossiis something you were interested in?

No, which is why it was so surprising for me that I had this idea. Fossils aren't something I would normally have gravitated toward, until I went to the dinosaur museum with my son, who was going through a dinosaur phase. Once I had a human face to put to the science, it made the science more interesting.

What do you enjoy about writing historical fiction?

I'm attracted to it because it gets me away from my contemporary life. I feel like I live it, so I don't need to write about it, and it's more interesting to write about things I don't know.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel about a 19th century Quaker family who worked on the Underground Railroad in Ohio.

Previous Attic Salt interviews.

In the Attic with Frank Bruni

Frank Bruni, the former New York Times restaurant critic, is the author of Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater, a wonderful and witty account of his lifelong struggle with his weight. He will be talking about his book with Times columnist Maureen Dowd at Politics and Prose in D.C. on September 29 at 7 p.m. Bruni and I talked last week for an article I wrote on him for the Washington Blade. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.


What made you decide to put your story down in a book?

It sounds so simple, but I thought I had a story to tell. When I was offered the job of restaurant critic, there was a span of time when I was reflecting on how ironic it was to feel like I could do it. I remember thinking that if my wager is correct and being a restaurant critic doesn’t send me back to a really bad place in terms of bad eating an weight gain, then I should think about at some point writing this story.

I had read many food memoirs on the romance of eating, and I felt there was unmined territory in talking about overeating, which is a big part of a lot of people's lives. In my first year on the job, I would go out to eat with food writers and people connected to food as a profession in the restaurant industry, and people who lived foodie lives were among the most watchful, disciplined, careful eaters. They knew that being around food all the time, if they left themselves go, they would let themselves go. All of us write in such exultant and celebratory ways about eating, restaurants and food, and we coax people to come into restaurants. You have to be disciplined if you want to enjoy food without being undone by it, and I thought that was the book for me to write.

With the Internet making anonymous critiquing harder, and so many bloggers writing about restaurants, what do you think the future of restaurant criticism is?

The real danger to the future of conventional restaurant criticism is an economic danger. Restaurant criticism done the best way, by visiting a restaurant repeatedly, and trying to make a thorough survey of a menu is expensive. This is true for periodicals of any kind, print, online, whatever, to fund a restaurant critic's beat. The future is tied up in how institutions will be able to afford restaurant criticism in the way it should be done.

A lot of stuff on the Internet that is kind of expanding the universe of restaurant criticism isn't really restaurant criticism per se. I'm talking about user generated content on Citysearch or Yelp. You really have no idea who is rendering an opinion or what it's based on. It could be the shilling of a relative of the chef, or your don't know it you're reading someone who got a free comped meal, or you don't know if the person raving about a restaurant had two dishes or ten, or if they went one time or three.

People always ask food writers how they get to do what they do, and how it must be a dream job. Do you think it is?

Yeah, I think absolutely dream job but when you use that phrase for it, it includes the word 'job.' As soon as you make going out to eat a matter of obligation, as opposed to an option, it does take on aspects of being a job. You aren't going out to eat in a purely hedonistic pleasure driven way, you're making a scientific survey. Among those jobs we do, having your job be to go out and eat, sit in restaurants, which are often just wonderful places to be, bring along loved ones and friends to your table, among those things one must do in the course of a job, having to go out to eat is a pleasant one.

You talk in the book about how you've never been much of a cook. Have you been able to improve at all?

I'm just kind of making that effort now. I've never been much of a cook, and in the last five and a half years I haven't improved because I haven't had the occasion to cook. I've been eating out seven nights a week, and if it wasn't seven nights, it was six nights, and on the off night I didn't want dinner to be a long thing that involved lots of cooking, but a quick thing. I have a great appreciation for what makes great food than I did five and a half years ago, and I'm improved over time with exposure to more and more great food.

There are a lot of cities that have great food reputations. What are some off the beaten path cities that you've enjoyed eating in?

I keep wishing I could spend more time in Austin. There's really good, casual Tex Mex, and a couple restaurants that don't get an enormous amount of attention. One is called Hudson's on the Bend, and they serve an array of exotic game, and the other is Fonda San Miguel, which does Mexican food at a level it's not usually done at. They go way beyond guacamole.

You've written about so many different topics for newspapers. Is there one in particular that you find most fulfilling?

It's the variety itself I really like. My little brother has teased me that I don't have a career, I have attention deficient disorder. Journalistically that's correct, and to me the great opportunity and joy of journalism is being able to get into and ping between so many different worlds. I'm lucky enough to be a quick enough study and quick enough writer that I've been able to do that. I think if I had to write about one topic, it would be difficult for me.

So you're going to be writing for the Times magazine next? What are some topics you'd like to cover?

I'm going to be a committed dilettante at the magazine. The job enables me to cover the things I've been interested in over a long span of time — culture, politics, and food, based on what story presents itself at a given time.

Photo credit: Soo-Jeong Kang

In the Attic with Nicholas Sparks

Nicholas Sparks is the best-selling author of books like The Notebook and A Walk to Remember. His new book, The Last Song, was released September 8, and a film version of the book hits screens in January. He will be in D.C. this weekend for the National Book Festival.

You haven't participated in the National Book Festival before. What are you looking forward to?

It's always nice to meet and talk with the readers who enjoy my work and tell those who are interested and show up to my talk a little bit about what I do and who I am. And honoring reading and literacy in general is always a wonderful thing.

What was the inspiration for your new novel, The Last Song?

Always when I sit down to write a novel, I try to write something different from anything readers have read from me before. There are many ways to do that — structure, setting, or one of the easiest is the ages of the characters in question. In my previous books, characters range from their 20s to 40s, and Nights in Rodanthe was 40s and 50s. So I said I didn't want to do a novel with characters age 20 to 50, and said I could either do another teen story, which I hadn't done since A Walk to Remember, or a more mature story, since I hadn't done that since The Wedding or The Notebook. I was leaning toward a teenage story, and since A Walk to Remember was about a boy, I wanted to do one about a girl.

Coincidentally at that time, Offspring Entertainment called and said that Disney had a two-option movie deal with Miley Cyrus, who was currently doing Hannah Montana. She loved A Walk to Remember, and they asked if I had anything that Miley might be interested in, and I said 'no, but funny you should mention that.'

What was it like writing a screenplay and novel so close together? Which one did you write first?

I wrote the screenplay first, and it was easy. Screenplays are easy and I don't find them nearly as challenging as a novel. They're much, much shorter and are all about the story. The hard part is coming up with the story. Once you understand the screenplay structure, with three acts, plot points, and understand the mechanics, it's just writing. Then when I finished it, I sent it off two Disney, wrote two revisions and sat down to write the novel.

You’ve seen so many of your books turned into movies. What’s it like to see stories and characters you create on screen?

It's a lot of fun. I've been very fortunate that the movies have been good ones and very close to the spirit and integrity of the novel. They've also been well received at the box office.

What do you think about the state of literacy in this country?

My opinions are just that, my opinions, but I think that one of the goals in education in general, at least at the high school level, should be to encourage reading, whether fiction of non-fiction. I understand everyone reading common literature, but it is a narrow set of books written hundreds of years ago that students are supposed to read. I'm not sure those encourage the joys of reading. Schools would be well served to broaden their curriculum and allow students to read books by modern authors, classics that aren't on the curriculum yet, so to speak, to encourage reading in general. And that's best served by having students pick the kind of books they want to read.

Photo credit: Alice M. Arthur

In the Attic with Jon Scieszka

Jon Scieszka, the author of kids' classics like The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, is also an advocate for literacy and started Guys Read to get boys reading. He has two new books out, Truckery Rhymes and Robot Zot! Scieszka will be appearing Saturday at the National Book Festival, and based on his reading last year (in which I, and many of the other adults in the audience, were in tears), you shouldn't miss it.

You’ve been to the National Book Festival in 2002 and 2008. What’s the experience like, and how is it different from other book events?

I’ve been a couple times. It’s spectacular. It’s really amazing to see how it’s grown. I was at the very first one, and there were just kind of seven or eight of us from the kids’ book world on stage, and last year there were 150,000 people, parents and kids. Everyone has something they’re interested in, and that’s the great thing about it. There are cookbook authors for cooking fans, mystery writers for mystery fans. It’s grown to be a beautiful, crazy thing.

Last year you read from Knucklehead. What will you be reading from this year?

This year I have two new books, one is Truckery Rhymes, for a younger audience and a picture book called Robot Zot! and [illustrator] Dave Shannon's going to be there two, so he and I are going to do some kind of presentation.

You taught elementary school for a while. Did you write while teaching? If not, how did you make the leap?

I taught for 10 years, which was great training and background for everything I do. I ended up teaching every grade from first to eighth and it gave me a new understanding of how kids’ brains worked, since they’re different from adults’.

Then I went and got a Master’s in fiction from Columbia and I was writing adult short stories, funny fiction, and I was getting published nowhere. It took me a couple years to put it together. I was teaching second grade at the time, and a light bulb went off — here are students, second graders are funny. I wrote The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, and took a year off to write kids’ books and get rejected.

What do you think about the way the country is going in terms of literacy? How can we encourage more people to read?

We’re on very shaky ground with literacy in general. But what’s even more frightening is the state of boys and reading. We’ve been testing kids for over 25 years now, at the national level every year, and we’re finding out that boys are doing worse than girls. We don’t do anything about it, but then just test them again next year. This mania for testing has adversely affected reading too… Boys in particular see reading as some kind of school thing.

There are a ton of good books out there, and if you can get a kid entranced by a book to start, they’ll read another book and another book. Non-fiction and humor are undervalued in schools, where I see adults taking away that book, saying ‘you can’t keep reading books about sharks and volcanoes.’ But I say, ‘maybe you can. Maybe you’re just a shark and volcano guy.’

What’s up next for you?

I’m working on a couple projects. One is to help kids understand media literacy. It’s called Space Headz, and it’s three about three aliens going to take over the world and they’re not too bright and end up taking over a fifth grade. One becomes a fifth grade boy, one becomes a fifth grade girl and one becomes the class hamster. There’s also going to be a web site, because the challenge is that Space Headz needs to sign up 3.14 million people to save the world, and it becomes an active experience. Fluffy the hamster is writing a blog, and you get the story from different parts and you have to decide what’s real and what’s not real.

I’m also working on an anthology called Guys Write for Guys Read, which will be a five volume set by genre. The first one is Guys Read humor, and will have a bunch of funny writers writing longer pieces. Ultimately we want to have kids who come to the library and say ‘I don’t have anything to read,’ and they can say, ‘check out our Guys Read library, there’s 12 funny stories in there, or 12 pieces of nonfiction.

Photo credit: Marty Umans

In the Attic with Sara Paretsky

Bestselling author Sara Paretsky's new book, Hardball, comes out today, and she'll be at the Barnes and Noble in Bethesda tomorrow night at 7 p.m. to discuss it. It's the first VI Warshawski crime novel to come out in four years, and it is about the private investigator's search for a man who disappears during the riots.

I recently sat down and talked with Paretsky [for an article in the Washington Post Express] about her experiences as a community organizer in Chicago in the mid-1960s, which served as inspiration for Hardball, and how the city's politics influenced President Obama. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

How did your work as a community organizer influence this novel?

The summer of 1966 was a defining time in my life, since it was in the middle of a lot of social upheaval and the civil rights movement. The summer I came here happened to be the time that Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Chicago to help local civil rights organizations try to combat inequality. Chicago has this horrible history of housing discrimination and job discrimination and that summer was really dynamic. It was a very violent time in the city.

I wrote a memoir ["Writing in an Age of Silence"] that was published two years ago that revisited that time and I realized that I needed to write more about it. So I put it into a novel about VI Warshawski and I have events that took place during some of the riots of that summer that come back and haunt people in the present day.

What was it like to relive that time?

There was a feeling of hopefulness [at that time], and thinking about that made me kind of sad. I felt the country was briefly experiencing a feeling of hope around the election of Obama, but for whatever reason we seem to be back to a pessimistic frame of mind as a nation. I thought it was just me, but I was just talking to a group of 30-year olds trying to work on health care and everyone seems to just feel bewildered and not hopeful. Going back to that time made me long for that sense of energy and possibility we used to have as a country.

Why do you think grassroots political work is still such a big part of Chicago politics?

Chicago is still very much a machine town. The players have changed, but corruption is still deep and wide in both the city and in Cook County, and I think without grassroots organizing, we're just sort of hopeless since it's very much a one-party town. It's very much a town in which things happen to benefit politicians and their friends and the community gets completely overlooked and things are allowed to disintegrate.

How do you think that environment affected President Obama?

Mr. Obama was my state senator, and I used to know him, so seeing him in the White House, I can't help thinking — that's my kid brother, what is he doing there?

But I hope what he understands from his years here is… that you if you can't engage people on the ground; the people at the top are going to run away with the show and ignore the ordinary person.

How is Hardball different from your other books?

It's more passionate, more deeply felt than a lot of my other novels. I'm under contract to write another novel in the series, which I'm working on, and it feels like I'm coming back and doing it mechanically after writing this so much from the heart.

What do you hope people take away from Hardball about that time in Chicago's history?

I hope that they first of all, enjoy it, since it's a story and it's meant to entertain people. I also hope that maybe people come away wanting to recapture that sense of hope and possibility that we used to have.

Photo credit: Steven E. Gross

In the Attic with Kate DiCamillo

Kate DiCamillo is the author of children's books, including Because of Winn Dixie and The Tale of Desperaux. Her new book, The Magician's Elephant, was released earlier this month. She will be appearing at the National Book Festival on Saturday.

You went to the National Book Festival in 2002. Have you been to any others? What was the experience like, and how is it different from other book events?

I went one other year [2004], so I’ve done it twice. Both times it just got a huge turnout and people are really passionate there. I felt a little like a rock star there which is kind of nice but also disconcerting.

Animals play such important roles in your stories. What are some differences between how you create animal characters versus human characters?

Sadly none at all. [laughs] Animals are just another character and they seem as real to me as the human ones, which reveals how psychologically disturbed I am. I never thought about that, but they’re the same as human characters.

Do you have a pet of your own?

I’m leaning on him right now. His name is Henry and his eyebrows just went up. He’s a poodle-terrier mix, a mutt.

You create such a wonderful sense of place in each of your books. What are some places that are particularly inspiring to you?

I was recently just in your neck of the woods. My aunt lives in Arlington and my brother and I visited her. Our mom passed away recently and we went to spread her ashes in the Chesapeake Bay, and that will probably show up in something. It’s so gorgeous there. We went to where she grew up, which is like part of Annapolis, Bay Ridge. That was just great and I keep thinking about that.

Florida is always in the back of my mind, and the landscape here in Minneapolis, up north on the shore of Lake Superior is always in my head and my heart.

Where did the inspiration for The Magician’s Elephant come from?

I was in the lobby of a hotel in New York waiting to meet someone and an image of this desperate magician appeared before me. This was a magician who was third rate and wanted to perform real magic, so I got out my notebook to write a description of him. When I was reaching into my purse, I saw another notebook, one I was giving to someone as a gift that had an elephant on the cover. I went from the magician wanting to do real magic and an elephant appearing and it seemed like a story to me.

In what ways is this new book different from others you’ve written? Either the book itself or the process of writing it.

It just about killed me. It was so hard to write and Edward was the last novel and that kind of wrote itself. That doesn’t happen very often. But this was more like Desperaux, and I was so focused on all the different characters and I had all these different balls in the air, and I had no idea how it would work out. When I look back on writing it, it was a long rocky road.

I think your books are great for all ages and everyone can enjoy them, but how did you know you wanted to write books that end up in the children’s section versus books for adults?

Thank you for saying that! That’s my pie in the sky dream, that I can be a storyteller for everyone. It happened roughly when I moved to Minneapolis and I got a job in a book warehouse. I was assigned to the third floor with all the kids’ books. I went around picking books off the shelves and as a reader you’re bound to start reading what you’re picking up, and that’s what I did. I fell in love with what you could do with books for kids. The first novel I read that was written for kids was The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963 and I thought I wanted to try to do something like that.

Did you always write?

I did, I started where most people start, which is short stories for adults, thinking that it’s shorter and therefore easier. I still occasionally write short stories for adults, and some have been in literary journeys, but it’s far more enjoyable writing for kids, and I think part of that is the potential for magic.

What do you think about the way the country is going in terms of literacy? How can we encourage more people to read?

I always came at it from my own bias, which is the power of story and I was one of those kids who felt like again and again what I got in the library saved me and it was stories that helped me understand the world I was in. When parents say ‘how can I make my kids read?’ I say, ‘Do they see you reading books for your own pleasure?’ I think that reading can sustain you for a lifetime and it helps you talk about your in the world and understand your place in the world and help you dream and that’s what I think reading should be.