Karen Cushman

Elizabeth, Agent Terrible, and I just had a long conference call with publicity and marketing people from Clarion and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. They had lots of great idea about getting Alchemy and Meggy Swann out there to readers. Spring 2010 will be very busy with book tours, store visits, conferences, blog tours.  I will be in Los Angeles in April, Seattle in May, and Washington D.C. in June. So far. If you want me to come to your area, go to the contact page and email Kate Green at Clarion. No promises but who knows—I just might show up.

Often I’m asked why I started writing. I was almost fifty after all. Why did all of a sudden I decide to write a book? Because I had an idea for a story about a girl who lived a long time ago and I wanted to know what happened to her. I wanted to know what she did and felt and what her life was like, and the only way I could do that was to make it up and write it down. When I think of my writing like that now, it seems easier and brings me great joy. When I think, “Oh, I have to write a whole book!” or “Will readers, teachers, booksellers, librarians like this book I am writing?” or “This has to be good, better, the best book of all!” the joy goes away. The best reason to write is just to find out what happens.

Last week I read two very different books. Down Sand Mountain is the delightful story of a boy in a Florida mining town in 1966. It’s a lovely book about important things, and Dewey’s voice is wonderfully distinctive, funny, sad, and true. You’ll be crazy about him. I highly recommend you read it.

The other was The Marvelous Hairy Girls, about the Gonzales sisters of 16th century Spain. They had a rare genetic condition called hypertrichosis, which caused them to grow abundant hair on their faces and other parts of their bodies.Grace, a character inWill’s Sparrow’s Road,my work-in-progress, has the same condition. The book was interesting but it couldn’t tell me what I most wanted to know. How did the girls feel about their condition? Did they hate it or did it seem normal to them? Were they always aware of being different or did they forget at times? How did they respond to the attention—good and bad—they received?What would it be like to be considered abnormal? If you have any opinions, please email me and let me know.

My good friend Olivia Moats of Fresno, California, just sent me these pictures of Tip, her pet rat. Isn’t she beautiful? Tip is the sweetest rat I know—and I’ve met lots of rats—and likes to run in her wheel, eat popcorn and pistachio nuts, and take naps in someone’s sleeve. Tip and her family visited last winter, and she was the perfect house guest—quiet and funny and no trouble at all.

My daughter used to have a pet rat named Tova. We would let Tova out of his cage at times and he’d run around Leah’s room, finding secret places to sleep. When I wanted to find him, I would call “Tova, Tova, futfutfutt,” and out he’d come, waddling and answering, “futfutfut.”

Rats have gotten a bad rap in fiction—think of the evil Templeton in Charlotte’s Web. For another take on rats, you might read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Wind in the Willows, and Tor Seidler’s A Rat’s Tale. And then never call someone a dirty rat again.

Alchemy and Meggy Swann is three steps closer to being a real book. First, I finished the copyediting. That’s the part of editing where I have to change commas to periods and periods to commas and argue about spelling and grammar and odd turns of phrase. It’s also the part where I secretly snarl at my copyeditor but really shouldn’t because she is only doing her job and making my book better. But it feels so good.

Second, I saw a drawing of the art for the cover. Meggy looks beautiful with Louise the goose on her lap and alchemical implements in the background. I can’t wait to see it all finished in full color.

Third, Clarion has announced a publication date of April 2010. I hope all of you readers will look for my story of Meggy Swann, sent to the London of Elizabeth I, to assist her father the alchemist. I grew very fond of Meggy through the writing and I’m certain you will like her, too.

I have two new friends, Jillian and Mitchell. They are still young and weigh over five hundred pounds. Each. Oh yeah, they’re pigs. I don’t mean they’re sloppy eaters or especially messy—I mean they’re pigs. The new book I am planning, Will Sparrow’s Road, has a character who is a pig. She’s a trained pig called The Duchess, and she can tell time and do card tricks. In order to write about her, I had to get to know pigs. Glenda Pearson of BaaHaus Animal Sanctuary here on Vashon Island kindly let me come and play with two of her pigs. Now I know that pigs wag their tails much like dogs, they don’t smell bad, and they are very fast, very smart, and very stubborn. When Will Sparrow’s Road is published in, oh, three or so years, you can see what else I learned about pigs.

Want to read a good book? I read two this week: Rodman Philbrick’s The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg is a rip-roaring adventure starring, of course, Homer P. Figg, who sets off to rescue his brother from the horrors of the Civil War and reaches the battlefield just in time to witness them first hand. I loved Philbrick’s Freak the Mighty and this book, although very different, is equally good. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate introduces us to Callie Vee, a reluctant young lady and budding scientist at the turn of the 20th century. I predict a sequel, which is good news because there’s lots more I want to know about the Tate family. Happy reading!

For Mother’s Day we went on a tour of chicken coops here on Vashon Island. It was sunny but breezy, the chickens were lively, and I had a great time. I never knew there were so many kinds of chickens: fuzzy footed chickens, frizzled chickens, speckled chickens, chickens that lay blue eggs.

Then my beloved daughter gave me my Mother’s Day present: an iPod. Philip can’t work if music is going but I love to listen while I write so Leah thought this was a good solution. And she was right! I love it and now have to spend lots of money downloading the odd and wonderful stuff I listen to: Medwyn Goodall’s Druid, Renaissance of the Celtic Harp, La Mer by Charles Trenet…You have never heard of those? I am not surprised. I do have somewhat eccentric tastes in music. And people. And Mother’s Day events.

Thanks to the generous Tamara of Bookman’s in Tucson, I was given a copy of Gail Carson Levine’s newest book, Ever. In a mythical land, the mortal Kezi and Olus, the Akkan god of the wind who loves her, face seemingly insurmountable trials, but if they succeed, they will become immortal. The story is filled with romance, suspense, action, and the intriguing question: Would you truly wish to be immortal?

I thought for a review I would go to an expert on romance and suspense: a teen-aged girl who loves fantasy and loves to read. Below is the review from Ella McConnell, an eighth grader at McMurray Middle School here on Vashon Island:

“Ever started off slowly and definitely took me longer then it should have to read but over all it was a wonderfully written book. The characters have a very real value to them, even though some of them are gods. They enjoyed things that average people enjoy all around the world. Arts like rug making, weaving, music, and dancing were what made this book feel so alive and realistic. The main characters suffered to find out the truth in their lives. I would recommend this book to anyone who is able to read English.”

The question of immortality reminded me of other great books in which the question is asked: Ursula LeGuin’s The Farthest Shore, Tuck Everlasting, of course, and Interview With The Vampire, after which so many of us fell in love with the lovely, melancholy Louis.

I don’t know what Kezi ultimately decides but I think I might vote with Meggy Swann, from my new book who says: “I have found that living can be most toilsome and cruel. Why would any someone wish to be immortal?” But I must say it’s okay with me if my books live forever!

I have just finished writing the Author’s Note for Alchemy and Meggy Swann, and I am surprised by how much I have learned about alchemy by writing the book. If I am ever on Jeopardy and alchemy is a category, I am a sure winner—except I will probably forget to phrase my answer in the form of a question and be disqualified.

Alchemy and Meggy Swann takes place in Elizabethan England, but alchemy was not an Elizabethan, or even European, invention; people over the globe and over the centuries searched for the secrets of the universe. Alchemy is based on the idea that the world is composed of four elements: fire, air, earth, and water. The 8th century Islamic alchemist Geber analyzed each element in terms of four basic qualities of hotness, coldness, dryness, and moistness. He theorized that every metal was a combination of these four principles and so reasoned that the transmutation of one metal into another could be effected by the rearrangement of its basic qualities. To do this, one would need the help of the philosopher’s stone, a magical substance capable of turning lumps of inexpensive metals into gold. It was also believed to be an elixir of life, or panacea, useful for healing, for rejuvenation, and possibly for achieving immortality. It is said that many alchemists tested their discoveries on themselves and died of mercury, silver, or lead poisoning.

Alchemists, of course, never turned base metal to gold. They did invent procedures, processes, and equipment that showed later generations how to analyze minerals and metals and make medicines from them, how to distill essences, how chemical changes follow from combining different substances, how to use balances and weights, and how to build and use a variety of laboratory vessels. Alchemy’s significant advances laid the basis for the science of chemistry.

I am not ordinarily a fantasy fan, but I recently agreed to give a quote for The Farwalker’s Quest, so I spent a rainy afternoon immersed in the intriguing world Joni Sensel created. My quote read “Rich in characters, with a unique setting and surprising relevance, it’s a profound, touching, and wise tale about the important things in life: success and failure, courage and fear, absence and loss, trust, loyalty, and hope. On a dangerous journey, the headstrong Ariel, her brave young friend Zeke, and the appealingly mysterious Scarl discover the importance of remembering where we came from and knowing where we’re going. Their story is the story of all of us, carrying hope and crafting the future.” That’s the long version. Let me say to you that you’ll love the book—the fast action, many surprises, and delightful characters—and you won’t be able to wait for the sequel, out next spring.