Karen Cushman

Karen Cushman

Newbery award-winning children’s book author

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Karen Cushman

Karen Cushman

What I’ve Been Reading

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You Bring the Distant Nearfor young adult readers

You Bring the Distant Near
Mitali Perkins

I was just writing this post about Mitali Perkins’ terrific new book, You Bring the Distant Near, when I saw that it is on the long list for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Of course! It’s fabulous, with romance, humor, and gorgeous writing. Five women in three generations of an Indian family struggle to adjust to life in the US. I’m not going to repeat what reviews say. You can read those. Just know this—I loved every word.

On Creativity: David LaRochelle

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My question to several writers I admire: “I find it profoundly difficult these days to be a writer. My inspiration and enthusiasm have been buried so far below an onslaught of awful news headlines and downright hate, trauma, and tragedy that I struggle to reach them. What’s a girl to do? In a world so woeful and broken, how can I dig beneath the heartbreak and create? Do you have the same thoughts? If so, how do you free yourself to write during these confusing and troubling times?”

I have received thoughtful and inspirational answers. I’m happy to share them with you here over the summer. I’m posting them in a random order, as I received their responses. If you have your own thoughts about these questions, I hope you’ll comment.

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David LaRochelleDavid LaRochelle writes:

It is easy for me to become overwhelmed by the news of the day: political leaders acting unjustly, elected officials disregarding our environment, dishonesty becoming an acceptable mode of ethics. Everything I care about most feels threatened. All of this news can leave me immobile with fear and sadness. What has helped me most to keep functioning has been learning to set limits on the barrage of news that I expose myself to. At various times this has meant turning off the radio, avoiding Facebook, and taking a break from newspaper headlines.

Is there something wrong with me for feeling this way? Others seem to be energized to action by seeing all the injustice in the world. With all my heart I want to make this planet a better place, and to do that I need to be an informed world citizen. But too much news makes me depressed and hopeless to the point of paralyzation, so I struggle with balancing the amount of news I need to know against the amount that will stop me in my tracks.

As I struggle, I also remember this advice: today I may not be able to solve the world’s problems, but I can treat the people with whom I come in contact with love and kindness. And that’s what I try to do. I cling to my values of honesty and compassion, even when it seems as if others have abandoned them. And I trust that this will make a difference. That gives me hope to keep going, and keep writing.

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David LaRochelle has been creating books for young people for over twenty-five years. His many picture book titles include The Best Pet of All, How Martha Saved Her Parents from Green Beans, and Moo! He is the recipient of the Sid Fleischman Humor Award, multiple children’s choice awards, and a three-time winner of the Minnesota Book Award. A former elementary school teacher, David still visits many classrooms around the Midwest (and world!) each year, talking with students about books, writing, and illustrating. When he is not creating new books, he loves to read, play board games, and carve unique jack-o’-lanterns, which you can view at his website.

On Creativity: Virginia Euwer Wolff

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My question to several writers I admire: “I find it profoundly difficult these days to be a writer. My inspiration and enthusiasm have been buried so far below an onslaught of awful news headlines and downright hate, trauma, and tragedy that I struggle to reach them. What’s a girl to do? In a world so woeful and broken, how can I dig beneath the heartbreak and create? Do you have the same thoughts? If so, how do you free yourself to write during these confusing and troubling times?”

I have received thoughtful and inspirational answers. I’m happy to share them with you here over the summer. I’m posting them in a random order, as I received their responses. If you have your own thoughts about these questions, I hope you’ll comment.

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Virginia Euwer Wolff writes:

Virginia Euwer WolffDear Karen, whose invitation is urgent and eloquent,

My mother cried at the daily news during The War. Despite our War Bonds and our Victory Garden, the Nazis metastasized across Europe and Russia starved. After the War, with tears left over, she cried when our church erupted in vicious factions, both sides insisting that they were the real Christians. Looking back, I wonder how in the world she kept her composure on the organ bench on those Sunday mornings, playing all the right notes, bringing the gifts of Bach, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Rachmaninoff and the dullish hymns into the sullen sanctuary—with tears in her eyes.

About the War and about the incivility in our church, my mother had zero sense of humor. Such consuming despair locked the gate against laughter.

It’s no surprise that I cry at the evening news of 2017. Nor any surprise that my sense of humor left abruptly on November 8 of last year. Like many others, I spoke little, brooded much, insulated myself and lived on the groceries that were already in the house. I took months to emerge, and that happened when I was able to join a small nearby March on January 21.

I still rarely laugh at the jokes, taking weeks to learn the new slogans and punchlines.

And this admittedly odd behavior seems to have permitted me to go on with my work. Hobbled, of course, by frustration, grief, and rage, I haven’t lost the motivation to continue with a long (fairly exhaustive) writing project, and, surprisingly, my will is almost more steely than before.

With our ear for language and our deep-seated respect for the art and science of it, I daresay we authors are all pained in this nerve-rattling time by hearing language corrupted, trod upon with ugly disregard, squeezed and contorted with indifference at best, foul misprision at worst. It’s our job to try to counteract these mutilations and present to our young readers the healthiest abundance of constructive, responsible language we can manage. And it’s our job to do it while we honor the vast, deep, humbling blessing of laughter.   

Easy to say.

How do we restore our resilience?

We find ways. Mine are pretty simple. A daily poultice of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Ravel, and the long heritage of music. Daily adherence to my work routine: in this chair, inching along. Guarded attentiveness to world events. Donations to needy causes. My signature on many of the petitions that come to this screen. And always reading: ideas by wise and generous thinkers who surround us on the shelves.

I refuse to let the appallment of the current White House crush my spirit, deplete my energy, strangle my will to do good, as well as my lights will let me. I won’t let the Executive Branch’s narcissistic craziness win. Promise.

covfefe.

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Virginia Euwer Wolff is the winner of the 2011 Phoenix Award for her 1991 novel The Mozart Season. Her 2001 novel True Believer won the National Book Award and her novel for young adults, This Full House (2009), is on the American Library Association’s Amelia Bloomer List. A long-time resident of Oregon, Virginia now makes her home in New York state. Visit her website.

On Creativity: Susan Cooper

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My question to several writers I admire: “I find it profoundly difficult these days to be a writer. My inspiration and enthusiasm have been buried so far below an onslaught of awful news headlines and downright hate, trauma, and tragedy that I struggle to reach them. What’s a girl to do? In a world so woeful and broken, how can I dig beneath the heartbreak and create? Do you have the same thoughts? If so, how do you free yourself to write during these confusing and troubling times?”

I have received thoughtful and inspirational answers. I’m happy to share them with you here over the summer. I’m posting them in a random order, as I received their responses. If you have your own thoughts about these questions, I hope you’ll comment.

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Susan Cooper writes:

Susan Cooper
Susan Cooper (photo: Tsar Fedorsky)

Dear Karen, dear Anywriter,

This is certainly an awful time, but I’m old enough to remember other awful times: the terror of nuclear confrontation over the Soviet bases in Cuba; the fury that sent us thronging the streets about the Vietnam war and the million-plus deaths it caused. We survived those as writers and we’ll survive this one, if we can avoid despair.

How? We’re writers, we have always led a double life. The writer’s mind has always been split between the rational life in the real world, and the story life that he/she creates. Times like today, we have to work harder at the first so we can escape from it into the second.

Here’s the only advice I can give to myself, and to you: First, focus hard on real life, on yourself as citizen. Do what you can to change or protest our present dangers: march, write, spend money, beg, nag, implore, shout. However little you achieve, you’re taking positive action, which releases pressure, lessens guilt—and frees the imagination.

Then the imagination, which made us all writers in the first place, will be waiting.  It’s fed by real life, by that compost heap that’s made of everything and everybody we have met or done or read or thought, but it has an absolutely separate life of its own. We know that. Our stories come out of it, and they reach out to the imagination of the reader, and the two connect. Those of us whose stories connect with children probably have the same quality of imagination that we had when we were children ourselves. (“It seems my child-self is alive and well,” said Maurice Sendak.) The imagination is the place where we live. Half the time.

Go there, the way you always do when you’re between books and don’t know what to write next: go there, do nothing, listen to wordless music, walk to nowhere, read something, anything. Real life has not gone away, but it is a noise in the background. The imagination wants you to write, it will tell you what to write. It will take some of us into the past, some into a future dystopia, some into fantasy. It is the antidote to despair—especially if you are published for children, because the one thing your book must not offer that young connecting imagination is despair.

Hang on to hope. Write.

love, Susan

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Susan Cooper is the author of the classic five-book sequence The Dark is Rising, which won a Newbery Medal, a Newbery Honor Award, and two Carnegie Honor Awards. Born in England, she was a reporter and feature writer for the London Sunday Times before coming to live in the United States. Her writing includes books for children and adults, a Broadway play, films, and Emmy-nominated screenplays. Her most recent books for children are Ghost Hawk, King of Shadows and Victory, and for adults a portrait of Revels founder Jack Langstaff called The Magic Maker. In 2012, Susan was given the Margaret A. Edwards Award and in 2013 she received the World Fantasy Award for life achievement.Susan lives and writes in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Visit her website.

On Creativity: Susan Fletcher

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My question to several writers I admire: “I find it profoundly difficult these days to be a writer. My inspiration and enthusiasm have been buried so far below an onslaught of awful news headlines and downright hate, trauma, and tragedy that I struggle to reach them. What’s a girl to do? In a world so woeful and broken, how can I dig beneath the heartbreak and create? Do you have the same thoughts? If so, how do you free yourself to write during these confusing and troubling times?”

I have received thoughtful and inspirational answers. I’m happy to share them with you here over the summer. I’m posting them in a random order, as I received their responses. If you have your own thoughts about these questions, I hope you’ll comment.

_________________________

Susan FletcherSusan Fletcher writes:

I find it both harder and easier to be a writer in days like these.

Harder, because the “hate, trauma, and tragedy” feel so intense right now, and it’s right there in our faces all day long. It seems difficult—and maybe even irresponsible—to turn away from the suffering and crises of our times to cocoon myself in my writing room and in the worlds of my books.

That said, I’ve found in the past that when there is tragedy in my personal life, writing can be a refuge. I can dive down into a book I’m writing and live in another place for a while every day. Right now, it’s 13th century England, in the menagerie at the Tower of London. In times past I have time-traveled to medieval Persia, Renaissance Venice, and places that never were. Writing gives me a break from the relentlessness of seemingly intractable 21st century problems. When I emerge from my writing room, the “real world” comes rushing back, but I am somehow better able to face it.

What’s more, writing offers a kind of sideways wisdom into the very difficulties I am facing. I’ve found that the crisis from which I am “escaping” by writing about a different world … seeps into the world of my book in altered form and lets me see it from different perspectives—at a distance from the intensity of emotion. Indirectly and through fiction, I gradually blunder my way to a better grasp of my thoughts and feelings … and then I can give them voice.

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Susan Fletcher is the author of a dozen books for children and young adults, including Dragon’s Milk, Shadow Spinner, and Alphabet of Dreams. Visit her website.

 

On Creativity: Avi

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A few weeks ago, I sent this question to several writers I admire. “I find it profoundly difficult these days to be a writer. My inspiration and enthusiasm have been buried so far below an onslaught of awful news headlines and downright hate, trauma, and tragedy that I struggle to reach them. What’s a girl to do? In a world so woeful and broken, how can I dig beneath the heartbreak and create? Do you have the same thoughts? If so, how do you free yourself to write during these confusing and troubling times?”

I have received thoughtful and inspirational answers. I’m happy to share them with you here over the summer. I’m posting them in a random order, as I received their responses. If you have your own thoughts about these questions, I hope you’ll comment.

First, from Avi:

AviKaren, I have nothing but sympathy and shared feelings with you. That said, I am writing, not just because the domestic budget requires it, but I like to think I can take the world as it is today and make it part of what I write. Perhaps it is the historical fiction I write (and you write) that helps. There are, alas, many moments in history which echo today’s world. If you can write about such, and as does happen in history (not always) the highest qualities of human culture triumph, you can imbue your young readers with a sense of their potential triumphs that might be, could be, and should be. In other words, let your struggle be your story.

Avi is the author of many books for children and teens, including the popular True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, Crispin: Cross of Lead, and Nothing But the Truth, each of which were honored by Newbery committees. Nothing But the Truth is being read in classrooms because of its connection with current events, much like The Loud Silence of Francine Green. Visit Avi’s website.

 

Glad You Asked, Q5

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I Love to ReadWhat did you study in college?

I entered college as an English major but quickly became enamored of the Classics department because it was much smaller and more interesting and they had sherry parties every Friday afternoon. My final major was double—Greek and English.

Fear, Propaganda, and Hysteria

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The CrucibleOne of the most famous of plays written in the 1950s in the midst of McCarthyism and the “witch hunts” accusing artists, actors, musicians, and people in many walks of life of being Communists was Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. It uses the allegory of the Salem witch hunts to spotlight the effect fear, propaganda, and hysteria can have on a community. The Loud Silence of Francine Green is set in southern California, where the accusations and suspicions cut deeply into the community of the movie studios and the thousands of people who worked for them.

On PBS, American Masters aired Arthur Miller, Eliza Kazan and the Blacklist: None Without Sin (2003). There are resources on their site that would work well to accompany reading Francine Green and discussing the fear that arises when oppressive tactics are fomented by people in power.

Glad You Asked, Q4

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Are there particular memories of growing up that, looking back, you see as leading you toward a writing career?

My first 17 or so years seemed to be leading me to a writing career.

I wrote all the time—poems, short stories, a 7-page novel, an epic poem cycle based on the life of Elvis.

A lot of what I wrote was involved with creating a world I’d like to live in starring a person I’d like to be.

Charles Loring Brace and the Orphan Trains

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Children's Aid Society

Rodzina Brodski is one of thousands of orphaned children who were sent West to find homes from 1845 to 1929. She is the heroine of my novel Rodzina. Here’s some of the factual background behind the orphan trains.

RodzinaThis article about the Children’s Aid Society recounts the history of Charles Loring Brace, the man who faced head-on the heavy immigration to the United States after the 1840 famine in Europe. With so many orphaned and abandoned children in New York City, Brace saw the need to establish an organization to get them off the streets. He was the mover behind the orphan trains, seeking to find homes for the children.

“Critical of congregate institutions such as orphanages and almshouses, Brace thought that the rigid discipline of those institutions sapped a child’s self-reliant spirit, and that charity only encouraged children to remain dependent. Alternatively, the Children’s Aid Society opened low-cost lodging houses for boys and girls, set up reading rooms and “fresh air” camps for their benefit, and established industrial schools to prepare them for employment and self-sufficiency.”

The photo above, which shows the CAS training children for office jobs, is one of a number available on Harvard University’s website depicting the Children’s Aid Society in its early years. The organization still exists today. It is considered to be one of the top children’s charities in the country.