Karen Cushman
Newbery award-winning children’s book author
Earlier I noted my favorite books about museums for adult readers. For young readers, I particularly enjoy Masterpiece by Elise Broach, in which James and a beetle named Marvin prevent a crime at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and, of course, everyone’s favorite museum novel, E.L Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, also set
Q. What are your favorite books about museums, written for adults? A. Jane Langton, who also writes for children, wrote a series of very entertaining mysteries set in and around museums: Emily Dickinson is Dead (the Emily Dickinson House Museum in Amherst, MA); Dead as a Dodo (Oxford University Museum); and Murder at the Gardner (the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in
Q: Did you ever go looking for gold? No. I grew up in Chicago, which left little opportunity for gold mining. We took our daughter to Columbia, a restored California Gold Rush town, when she was about ten. She wasn’t much interested in panning for gold but she was crazy about the mules
Question: What were your favorite books as a child? Answer: My favorite books are not very popular anymore: Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski, Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly, and The Bobbsey Twins series. How about you, Dear Reader? What were your favorites?
Question: How did it occur to you to use the Saints’ Feast Days as a device in Catherine, Called Birdy? Answer: I spent 12 years in Catholic schools so I knew all about saints’ days. And I knew it was customary in the Middle Ages to mark time by saints’ days and festivals. When I reached the halfway point of Birdy, I
Question: You grew up in California and two of your books are set there, The Ballad of Lucy Whipple and The Loud Silence of Francine Green. Do you have favorite books written about the state? Answer: A Room Made of Windows, Eleanor Cameron—part of a series about Julia Redfern who lives in Berkeley in the 1920s. We Were Here, Matt de la
Q: What drew you to working in museums? A: I loved the idea of learning from objects and listening to their stories. Who made this? Why? How was it used? Why did someone make this? What is the story behind it? What does it say about the people who made and used it or the world they lived in? In 2013
Q: Choosing names. Is there a story behind the names you’ve chosen for your characters? (e.g., Brat becomes Beetle becomes Alyce) A: There is no good answer to this question. Names just pop into my head, often before the story does. But there is a story behind Rodzina: When I was ten, my Grandma Lipski took me to the Polish cemetery in
How do stories spring from real-life events? You can see some examples from the 20 authors (including me) who are part of this collection, Been There, Done That: Writing Stories from Real Life, which looks at the process of taking our experiences and turning them into works of engaging fiction. I had a great time writing my pieces—so much easier than
From a recent interview: Question: You were born in and spent the early part of your childhood in Illinois. What drew you to writing about Rodzina, who set off on an orphan train from Chicago to an unknown home? Answer: In a bookstore in Berkeley, I found a book about the orphan trains. The cover showed a giant locomotive and a
