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Karen Hesse has written novels for young adults, fiction for younger readers, and picture books for children. She often writes in the first person and usually has a self-reliant young girl as the main character. Here, Bryant highlights her interview with Hesse about her writing for children and young adults.
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On an autumn day when the maple leaves looked like gold coins flung against the blue New England sky, I met with Karen Hesse to discuss her writing for children and young adults. Karen lives in Williamsville, Vermont, with her husband and two teenaged daughters. She maintains an office/apartment in downtown Brattleboro in an old building that faces a main street and backs up to the Connecticut River and Wantastiquet Mountain of New Hampshire just beyond. Few of the apartments in the building where Karen rents her office have signs on the doors, and after I rang the doorbell next to her name on the mailbox, I walked down various dark staircases and corridors, hoping I had the correct date and time of our visit. On an upper floor, a friendly face with glasses and curly dark hair peered around an open door. "Ellen?" a voice asked. "Karen?" I responded, as if I knew lots of other women in this building. I had the right day after all.
Karen Hesse opened the door to her work place. Her office is every middle-aged mother's dream-a homey place of one's own away from home. The door opens into her kitchen with its wooden table and four chairs in the center and its friendly bookshelves along two walls. To the right is a room with her computer station and comfortable sofa. Off this room is a bedroom where infrequent late work schedules or predawn arisings can be accommodated without disrupting others in Karen's family. Off the living room and bedroom side of the apartment is a balcony where one can see the Connecticut River and the mountains of New Hampshire immediately beyond. Karen told me I had just missed the magical part of the morning when the sunlight danced on the river. Karen has rural New England out her back window and downtown Brattleboro with its coffee shops, book stores, and independent shops out her front door. I was ready to move in.
Karen has written novels for young adults (Letters from Biflia, 1992; Phoenix Rising, 1994; A Time of Angels, 1995; and most recently, The Music of Dolphins, 1996), fiction for younger readers (Wish on a Unicorn, 1991; Lavender, 1993; Sable, 1994), and picture books for children (Poppy's Chair, 1993; Lester's Dog, 1993). Karen often writes in the first person and usually has a self-reliant young girl as the main character. She writes like a poet, and in my reading classes, students have loved her work.
Reading Letters from Rijka (1992) started my personal Hesse author study, and certainly this story has prompted many questions from my students who were intrigued by the fact that Hesse had taken a real story from her family and turned it into a novel. Rifka is a resourceful young girl who is separated from her parents and, in fact, thrives and grows from her experiences. Hesse often writes about girls whose parents aren't there, girls who get what they need from others around them. Her latest book, The Music of Dolphins, published in the fall of 1996, explores this theme in a new way. I started our interview by asking Karen to speak about the genesis of this newest book.
A regular listener of National Public Radio's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," Karen was touched by a story she heard when Gross interviewed Russ Rhymer, a man who had written a book about a young California girl named Genie who had been kept strapped on a potty seat in one tiny room. Genie's parents had appeared to be functioning adults but were not. The mother had disabilities and the father was abusive. He could not tolerate sound, so Genie had learned to be silent and therefore had acquired no language. When she was an adolescent, her mother found out that she qualified for social assistance and took Genie with her to the social service agency. Genie could barely walk; she was hunched over and gave the appearance of a five- or six-year-old child. She was taken away from her parents and put in a hospital where she became the darling of the speech pathologists. They were thrilled-here was the ideal opportunity to study language development in a teenager.
Karen added:
So Genie was abused all her life by her parents, and then she was handed over to the scientific community and exploited by them. All I know is that she didn 't satisfy the scientists to the point that they wanted to be satisfied. The funding for her was cut off. She ended up in some sort of foster care-probably a group home situation. She made enormous strides and then reached a plateau and began to backslide again-as do all feral children.
Karen was so compelled by the story of this girl and feral children in general, that she decided she had to write about it, but she didn't want her book to end the way this story had. She began by reading all that she could about feral children.
After doing a lot of research and talking to speech pathologists about the whole situation, I tried to think of a community in which I could raise this child and have the hope of a more positive outcome. And so I thought about dolphins who use language and have a very highly developed social community. Then I began my dolphin research. I went down to Florida, and I spent some time with a single male dolphin. At each step along the way, I talked to the Coast Guard, to the dolphin specialist, to the speech pathologist, to divers. I talked to anyone who might be able to give me insight into whether what I was describing could work. It was tricky to pull off because I tend to write in the first person, and I had a child who was pre-lingual. It was the toughest challenge because if you 're telling the story through a first-person narration, and the person telling the story has no language with which to tell the story, how, in fact, do you tell the story?
Writing this book, Karen said, was very difficult emotionally. Mila, her main character, was a novice to human society. She didn't know how to act. She didn't know how to protect herself. She was totally vulnerable. Karen said she was open and vulnerable as she wrote that story, and the winter that she wrote The Music of Dolphins was a painful one for her.
Writing Phoenix Rising (1994) was also difficult. One night in 1992, Karen happened to see part of a program on television called "The Children of Chernobyl." She hadn't realized the scope of the devastation done to the children and the community, devastation radiating out hundreds and hundreds of miles from the actual power plant.
I had caught the program in the middle. I was haunted by the images. I just sat there on the edge of my bed. I couldn't move. I watched it through to the end, and I tried to go to sleep, but the images were so firmly planted in my brain that I went downstairs in the middle of the night and went through the newspaper to see if the program was going to be rebroadcast, and it was. I taped the program the next day and played it over fifteen to twenty times. I was totally obsessed. I couldn 't let it go. Well, you know what writers do when they 're obsessed with something-they write about it. So I did a lot of research and set the book right here in Brattleboro because if Vermont Yankee [the nuclear power plant] went up, this town would be wiped out. I wrote this very intense piece and sent it to the woman who was my agent at that time. Usually when I sent her a new piece, she called bach instantly. I didn't hear from her for days so I had a feeling that something was wrong. Finally, she called me back and said, "About that piece you sent-it's very powerful, but I think your energies would be better placed in another project. "
Karen's first draft of the piece that would become Phoenix Rising had its story set right in the center of the nuclear power disaster, and Karen now believes it was too intense and upsetting for a young adult novel. As it presently is, the setting for the novel is on the periphery of the accident and upsetting enough at that location. After hearing from her agent, Karen decided to give up working on that piece and move on to other story ideas.
I would try to work on other pieces, but I kept coming back to that story. So I talked with my husband, and he said, "Do it. It doesn't matter if you publish it or not. If you have to do this book, just do it. Get it out of your system and then you can move on. " So I did. I forgot everything else.
Karen had included a small scene on a sheep farm in the original piece, but after spending a day touring a local sheep farm, she decided to move the center of the story to that location.
At the same time I was searching for how to get a handle on the story, I saw an advertisement in the local newspaper that said there was an open house at a sheep farm-it was a fund-raiser for a community nursery school. So, I thought, I know very little about sheep. Why don't I go on this tour and maybe I can ask some questions? Well, I went on the tour, and I asked David Major, the sheep farmer, a thousand questions. There were several tours throughout the day, and I went on every one, just followed right behind him-me and his dogs that herd the sheep. He was wonderful, and I knew right away that was my solution, to back the story off to that location. So the farm that NyIe lives on in the booh is David and Cindy Major's farm. Everything I learned about sheep farming, I learned from them. David was very tolerant. He let me come and work on the farm with him so I would have a sense of what day-to-day life was like.
Karen weaves a rich tapestry of story lines and characters into her books. In many of her stories, there are characters who live with disabilities. Muncie in Phoenix Rising (1994) was physically challenged by her short height. Hannie in Wish on a Unicorn (1991) and Corey in Lester's Dog (1993) are both children with disabilities. I asked her about her compassionate handling of children who are different, children whose differences are not the central connection to the main character, but whose differences simply add to the richness of the story. This question led Karen to her experiences as a young girl growing up in Baltimore and to the writing of Lester's Dog.
I had a challenging childhood; there was a certain quality to me that didn 't quite mesh with all of my little girlfriends because I had undergone things in my life that were different. It wasn't as easy for me as it was for them. On our block there was a whole group of little girls, all of the same age, and then, three years older, was a whole group of boys. But in between these two groups, and two years older than me, was a young man named Joey who was profoundly hearing-impaired. This was back in the fifties, and he wore one of those great big hearing aids that wrapped around his ear and had a wire to a battery pack that he kept in his pocket. Joey, who was a normal, healthy, young boy in every other respect, was shut off from the boy community and, of course, from the girl community. So he was different, and I was different, and we became very close. He could cross streets-he was a couple of years older-so he could take me places I couldn't go otherwise. We didn't do a lot of talking because his speech was very garbled. We had a silent friendship. I guess that's where my fondness comes for people who are set apart from society.
Many of Karen's stories were inspired by her childhood. Karen's memories of her close relationship with her Aunt Bern were the impetus for the writing of Lavender (1993). Karen had a close relationship with her grandparents, as well. She spoke of feeling their unconditional love.
I could be weepy, I could be cranky, I could say nothing and they loved me. I felt their unconditional love whenever I was with them. I am sure that at times my aunt and my grandparents wanted to tear their hair out because I was not easy to be with, but I never felt it. I always felt that they loved me no matter what I did.
Karen conveys this strong sense of family connection even in those characters like Rifka in Letters from Rifka whose family is not physically present. Rifka's sense of family is anchored in her Jewish traditions, as are many of Karen's memories.
I did not get a lot of formal religious training, but my grandparents were Orthodox. I spent a lot of time in their home, so I was very familiar with the traditions of my religion, and I would even come to Shul with my grandmother where we sat up in the balcony separate from the men. And so it's all connected-my love for them and my gratitude for what they did for me.
Most of Karen's books contain interesting older characters. She writes with great respect and fondness for older people. Poppy's Chair (1993) is a blending of her experiences with her grandparents and her work with hospice. Karen said that she has given up many activities because her writing and speaking engagements have become so demanding, but hospice is the one thing she will never give up. Karen states that her hospice work gives her so much more than she could ever contribute.
Klaus Gerhard from A Time of Angels (1995) is a multifaceted older character. This novel was set in the same general time period as Letters from Rifka, although World War I was still ongoing. Central to the theme of A Time of Angels was the influenza outbreak of 1918-1919. Twenty-two million people around the world died from this epidemic, more than twice the number that died on the battlefields during World War I. I asked Karen what her inspiration had been for this book.
A dear friend of mine needed surgery, and I said, "Is there anything I can do?" She said, "Surround me with angels. " So, for the next two months, I dropped all my projects, and I wrote one angel piece after another: poems, vignettes, stones, just one piece after another-angels, angels, angels. She had the surgery-everything was fine-and I put the file away and completely forgot it. Well, my daughters go through my computer files-this was when I worked [at home] and the computer was right there-and one day they went in to play on the computer. They found the angel file and just started reading it. They printed out one piece in particular and said, "Mom, this needs to be a book. " So I sent it to my agent, and she loved it. I was totally surprised. This was a total throwaway for me. I mean I never expected anything. She sent it to an editor at Hyperion who read it, loved it, and wanted more. And it went from a little six-page book to this huge novel.
When I wrote the little piece, it had no clear setting in time or place. Once again I had been flipping through the television channels, and there was a documentary on influenza, and I thought: this is where I can set it. So I began to do the research on the influenza epidemic. I got a lot of primary source material by placing an advertisement in a magazine circulated to elderly citizens. I asked if anyone could share with me stories about the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919. I got seventy replies from people in their 70s, 80s and 90s. I'm still corresponding with quite a few of them. The second thing I did was read the newspapers from 1917-1918. This was very hard on my eyes. My eyes had been reasonably good until then, but the contrast between print and background on very old newspaper is virtually nonexistent, and I read them in the very poorly lit historical society for weeks and months. That's where I read about the straw suitcase that appeared on the top of Wantastiquet Mountain. No one has figured out where it came from.
I asked Karen when she had first thought of herself as a writer. She said she had seen herself as a writer since fifth grade when her teacher had put a check plus on a paper and had written the comment "very creative."
Believe it or not, up until that time not very many people had said very nice things about me. And so I embraced that. All of a sudden I had a way to define myself. From that point on, I thought of myself as a writer. I started writing poetry. I started submitting pieces for publication and even won a few awards. Finally I had an outlet. I'd been holding so much in, and I couldn 't say the real things, but I could begin to address the feelings of isolation that I felt then, that any adolescent feels.
In sixth grade I had an extraordinary teacher. His name was Clifton B. Ball, and he introduced us to different ways of writing. In sixth grade at our school, we had a graduation ceremony. I was so shy that I couldn't even look a person in the face. Mr. Ball said to me, "I want you to iurite the graduation speech. " I said OK because I already believed that I could write. So I wrote it, and then I gave it to him, and he read it, and he said, "OK, now I want you to read it at graduation." I think if he had told me I had to read it, I would never have written it. So I read it at graduation, and my mom saw me in a different way than she ever had before. My mom had never really seen me before that day. That was the beginning of a change and this man is responsible for it. When I'm imth teachers especially, I always want to say thank you. Thank you.
Karen has been writing poetry since elementary school, but she came to children's literature later in life. When she became pregnant with her first daughter, she says she lost her focus because poetry is extremely demanding. After her daughter's birth, part of her brain was always listening for her child. She felt as though this craft that she had developed over all those years was lost to her. She knew she still had to write, but she didn't know how or what. She began reading to her daughter and discovered children's literature. Early on she discovered Katherine Paterson's work. She read Of Nightingales That Weep.
I read that book, and I thought if this is what children's literature is about, I want a part of it. I want a part of it so badly I can taste it.
In 1981 she started to immerse herself in children's literature and began to market her manuscripts in earnest in 1985. Her first book, Wish on a Unicorn, was published in 1991.
During our interview, Karen shared with me some of her favorite children's authors. Besides Katherine Paterson's work, she admires the work of Virginia Euwer Wolff (The Mozart Season, Make Lemonade), and Jean Thesman's The Rain Catcher, among other titles. She is an admirer of Suzanne Fisher Staples's works including Haveli and Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind, Bruce Brooks's Moves Make the Man, Kyoko Mori's Shizuko's Daughter, and Meindert Dejong''s Journey from Peppermint Street.
Now that Karen has her office in Brattleboro, she does all her writing there and none at her home in Williamsville. She said when her office was at home, she would wake at 3:00 a.m., go downstairs, turn on the computer, work through the night, and be grouchy the next day. She says she sleeps more soundly now because she knows the work isn't waiting there on the floor below.
I asked about her writing process.
I write very fast. When I'm writing on first draft, I'm just compulsive. It's hard for me to stop because I don't know how the book is going to end, and I am a reader so I can't wait to find out. I write a very spare draft It's done very quickly-usually in a matter of a week or two. You basically get to know the character a little bit, you get to know the setting a little bit, you get to know that forward momentum, and you get to know how it could end, but it's still a long, long way from a book at that point. After I do that first draft, I take a day or so to breathe. And then I go back, and I begin to think about what the book is really about, what the character really needs or wants. I take the time to really work the story up in a way that will satisfy the reader.
I revise. I revise pages one through three one day, and then do pages two through five the next day, and then do three through six the next day, and four through seven the next day, so that it begins to grow very, very slowly. I'll go through a book that way until I get through to the end. That will be draft two. I just do that over and over again-probably seven to ten times-before I send it off to my editor for the first time.
I wondered whether she shared her early drafts with her writing group or whether, like Katherine Paterson, she waited until the book was ready for publication before she shared parts of it with anyone. Karen said she wouldn't share her story until she had finished the drafting process. When she read a chapter to someone before she had finished the whole piece, or before she really understood the book, the critique would throw her off. This led her to a discussion of children and their revision process.
To take criticism, you have to learn how to hear even though you 're being hurt. I think that's why kids have so much trouble with revision. You know, it's such a miracle-the chemistry that occurs in the brain when an idea forms and all those synapses are exploding. That is an electrifying thing that is happening to your idea. To take that and to transform it into written word, which then can communicate a similar reaction in someone else's brain, is so extraordinary, and yet we do it-we do it every day. And when that isn't cherished, when that first draft isn't cherished, I think the kids feel such devastation because it is a miracle that happened, and it should be honored for that. The children need to learn to see revision as "seeing it again. " After someone else has said, "This is the way I see it," you can see it again the way they saw it, not just the way you saw it. So I love revision, but I have to have been all the way to the end a couple of times in my draft before I show it to my group.
I asked Karen whether she kept a writing journal, or a sketch journal, as Hannah had in A Time of Angels. She said she didn't keep a sketch journal, but two artists in her writing group kept them, and she had run all sketch journal issues by them before including references to the sketch journal in her book. Karen said she had kept a writing journal for years, but at the moment, having just moved her work into her new office several months before, she wasn't writing in one. She didn't have the energy, but she thought she'd get back to one eventually. I asked how she kept track of her story ideas. She said that wasn't a problem and added, "If a story is mine to write, it will be there when I am ready to write it. "
In the publicity brochure from her publisher, Henry Holt and Company, Karen is quoted saying:
The issues I explore in my writing tend to be somewhat serious-but overall, I consider my books to be optimistic. Because I have such enormous respect for my readers, I want to give them characters and stones that they can identify with in their hearts. I want to give them something beyond superficial identification, and to honor the complexity of their lives.
Ellen Huntington Bryant
Reading teacher, Tower Hill School, Wilmington, Delaware
Copyright National Council of Teachers of English Apr 1997