Karen Cushman
Newbery award-winning children’s book author
Professor Nancy Roser, of the University of Texas at Austin, shaped a poem from her children’s literature seminar students’ resonant phrases after they read Catherine, Called Birdy. Prof. Rosen framed the poem with a page from the original manuscript, which she studied at the Kerlan Collection of the University of Minnesota, where my working materials are housed. Thank you to Nancy and her students! This is a toast I will always cherish.
I hope you’ll share my delight at the gift of words from librarians, authors, and poets who are helping me celebrate the 20th anniversary of Catherine, Called Birdy. Thanks to everyone who contributed (librarians Edie Ching and Peggy Jackson, poet Julie Larios, authors Gennifer Choldenko, Barbara O’Connor, Augusta Scattergood, and Caroline Starr Rose), to the Nerdy Book Club, and to Kirby Larson who rallied them all together.
There is no one reviewing or editing or criticizing my research. It is just me and a hundred thousand interesting bits of information. And I discover things I love knowing, like the fact that an unknown Egyptian laborer invented beer when his bread fermented. Or that Saint Simeon Stylites lived for thirty-seven years atop a pillar. Or that in the eighteenth century, children were punished for not smoking, it being thought that tobacco smoke warded off plague germs.
Although I now can do much of my research online, a shelf in my study still holds the basics: The Oxford Book of Slang, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England, The Oxford Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms, The Oxford Historical Thesaurus, and, of course, the invaluable Oxford English Dictionary.
And here are the books I used frequently to research my medieval books:
Writer’s Guide to Everyday Life in the Middle Ages, Sherrilyn Kenyon
The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century, Ian Mortimer
Growing Up in Medieval London, Barbara A. Hanawalt
A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, William Manchester
A Medieval Home Companion: Housekeeping in the14th Century, translated by Tania Bayard
Lost Country Life, Dorothy Hartley
Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony, Madeleine Pelner Cosman
Gerard’s Herbal: A History of Plants, Marcus Woodward, editor
Castle, David Macaulay
Oxford Dictionary of Saints
I was asked not long ago if I plan to write in other formats—plays, poetry, screenplays, or picture books. My short answer was good grief, no! but here’s more. I think I wrote all the plays, poetry, and screen plays that I had inside me before I was fifteen. I still have boxes of them: plays like “Jingle Bagels,” the story of Santa Claus going down the wrong chimney on Christmas Eve and finding himself in a Jewish home; a notebook called Plots for Elvis Movies; and of course poetry, poetry I wrote when I was happy, angry, frightened, in love, broken hearted—even a series of poems based on the life of Elvis (do you see a theme here?). No, I believe I’ll stick to middle-grade novels. They have gotten me this far.
Why did I write a book about a boy? I had in mind a story about a child alone and on the road in Elizabethan England. I knew a girl likely would not survive there in those somewhat brutal times. And I don’t believe that in a world with so little privacy, she could successfully disguise herself as a boy for long. She wouldn’t have access to a private bedroom or dressing rooms or bathrooms. London did have one public restroom—a plank with 18-holes, emptying directly into the Thames River. In fact using the whole world as a toilet—streets, fields, the halls of great houses—was so common that a book of manners from 1731 stated that it was impolite to stop and greet someone who is urinating. So it had to be a boy, and Will Sparrow was born.
It was important to me to build a Will who was believable, true to his character, his gender, and his times. My first attempts made Will more like a girl in britches so I had to do a lot more research. I read books on psychology and child development. I spoke to boys and mothers of boys. I watched boys at the bus stop and my husband and his friends at play. The resulting Will has boundless energy, his voice is changing, he distrusts displays of emotion, and he longs to grow facial hair. But he lives in a time that was more chaotic and dangerous so he is extremely vulnerable. There was no concept of adolescence so a boy of thirteen, no longer a child, was considered a man, with the responsibilities of a man.
I hope I have managed to construct a Will who is believable, not a stereotype, and wholly entertaining. Let me know what you think.
This article originally appeared on the Green Bean Teen Queen blog.
Allyson Valentine Schrier, Meg Lippert, and Heather Hedin Singh, the women behind The Story Sleuths, did a seven-part series on Alchemy and Meggy Swann, culminating in an interview with me. They look at things such as character transformation, inner dialogue, and details. It’s a good thing an author doesn’t have to plan all of this while writing a story. Much better to have the readers mull it all over and find meaning.
Someone said I am in love with words. It’s true. I am. I love the way they sound and the way they look on a page and if words had a smell, I’d love that, too. I love how they roister and rumble, thrumble and gallop and galumph! If I had more than 110 words in which to say this, I could use every one of them up and still not tell you everything I love about words. Fortunately I have found a way to make a life out of my love affair. Otherwise I might be locked in a rubber room somewhere shouting gallimaufry and willy-nilly and hullaballoo.
Yes, I have gone public. In my NCTE talk, I announced that I am writing a fantasy, working title Song of the Wise Woman’s Daughter. I trepidatiously read a few passages aloud and no rotten fruit was thrown so I am encouraged. My fantasy has no vampires or zombies. No one dies. The world is not destroyed or even in much danger because the kind of book I like is the kind that celebrates love, embraces compassion, honors intelligence, and ends with hope. G.K.Chesterton said that fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. And, may I add, even without magic.
For a week or so now, I have been stuck on my new book. My main character needed to be in danger, but from what? This didn’t work, that was unbelievable. What to do? Finally, in frustration, I went back and read from the beginning of the story, and there they were—the vicious “edge dwellers” who had appeared and disappeared in an early chapter. Perfect villains, frightening and dangerous, and they were there all along.
I think we writers write more into our stories than we even know, not because our characters take over or we are channeling someone or because there is a muse at work. I think we do it ourselves, unwittingly, because we are preparing ourselves for surprise. We merely find what we planted there, the unconscious gifts we give ourselves. So I am for the moment unstuck and ready to deal with those vile edge dwellers.