INTERVIEW WITH WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO HUMPTY AUTHOR, JEANIE RANSOM

1. Joe Dumpty's voice is fantastic. Please tell us what strategies you used to create such an authentic voice.

Thank you! Unfortunately, I don’t know that I have any strategies for creating an authentic voice --- not anything I do consciously anyway. I do know that for me, writing a story in first person seems most natural. I’ve heard editors say that if your story doesn’t seem to be working in third person, try rewriting the story in first person, and vice versa.

2. How did you decide which Mother Goose characters to include and which characters to exclude?

When I first starting writing the book, I included just a few basic Mother Goose characters. But as the plot thickened, as they say, I made a list of other characters I could weave into the story. From that list, I played around with which characters would best help advance the story. Of course, I couldn’t use everyone, but that’s what sequels are for.

3. I love that spider turns into a good guy, and Miss Muffet turns out to be corrupt. Was it your intention to switch their roles?

I really didn’t have any intentions when I started the story. In fact, these two characters were pretty much true to their traditional roles in the Mother Goose tales. But somewhere in the revision process – and it was quite a process! --these minor characters wrote themselves into major roles. I’m a strong believer in letting my characters take the lead in creating the story. It’s fun to see what they come up with, but I must admit, Little Miss Muffet took me totally by surprise!

4. Having a deadline of five o'clock definitely ups the ante. Are many mysteries races against the clock?

I can’t really speak with any authority, since this is the first mystery I’ve written, and I tend to read more suspense novels than I do mysteries. However, I knew that because I was writing a picture book, I had to get a whole mystery set up and solved in just 32 pages. I decided that having a deadline was one way to accomplish that.

5. Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?

I’m happy to say that this past summer, WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO HUMPTY became available in paperback. As for Detective Joe Dumpty, he’s busy working on his next big case. I’m not at liberty to discuss it right now, but I’m sure you’ll be reading about it at some time in the not-so-distant future.

INTERVIEW WITH CANDY BOMBER AUTHOR, MICHAEL O. TUNNELL

1. Thanks for joining us Professor Tunnell. A tremendous amount of research went into the Candy Bomber. How did you decide to break up the information into six different chapters?

The Candy Bomber’s story seemed automatically to fall into six chapters. First, I needed to give the “candy bombing” its context—so it was clear I needed chapter one to introduce and explain the Berlin Airlift. There was no question about what needed to follow: Lt. Gail Halvorsen must make his entrance. The event that launched Operation Little Vittles was the best way to bring him on stage. His meeting with the German children at the end of the Templehof runway, and the subsequent promise to drop them some sweets, made for a perfect chapter two. With the “candy bombing” underway by the end of the second chapter, the establishment and early growth of the official, Air Force-approved Operation Little Vittles was the next logical step. This part of the story easily filled a third chapter. Taking the operation into maturity was a natural choice for chapter four—it grew to be much bigger than Halvorsen. It took on a life of its own, continuing successfully even after Halvorsen was no longer in Germany. With access to all the letters and drawings children and adults sent to Halvorsen, I had a plethora of great personal stories shared in that correspondence; I wanted to include as many as possible. Chapter five became the place in the book where I did that. Of course, every book needs a conclusion, and so chapter six brought the Berlin Air Lift to a close and then followed Halvorsen forward in his life to show how the ties he’d established with those hungry children bound them together to this very day.

2. Your voice in Candy Bomber honors Gail Halvorsen’s compassion, bravery, and moral strength. Please tell us how you achieved this reverent tone throughout your book.

Getting to know Gail Halvorsen personally during the process of creating the book had everything to do with the tone. His humility and strength of character are undeniable, as well as his genuine care for other human beings. Gail was so gracious in helping me with this project. He opened up his files to me, and I scanned hundreds of his photographs and documents, many of which appear in the book. Never have I met a more genuine person, and I hope that came through as I wrote about him. Also, when you read and hear what others have to say about him, you quickly come to the conclusion that many other people see him in that same way. I read many, many letters sent to Gail over several decades from the children of the Air Lift who were parents or grandparents themselves when they wrote. Their love and respect for him communicated in their correspondence also affected the tone I adopted for the book.

3. I love all of the letters and drawings from the German children. How did you decide which letters to include and which to exclude?

At first it was difficult to choose. I wanted to include every single one of them. When I finally had to get serious about making the selections, it became an easier task than I would have believed. There were certain letters and drawings that seemed to stand out for one reason or another. Often this had to do with the personalities of the particular children. Who could have eliminated the letter from someone like Peter Zimmerman, who, when frustrated that Halvorsen wasn’t finding his house, wrote: “Are you a pilot? I gave you a map. How did you guys win the war?” Or the letter from Mercedes Simon that scolded Halverson for scaring her chickens when making the approach to land, thus ending egg production, but then going on to offer the pilot a way to make things right. “When you see the white chickens please drop the chocolate there.”

4. Candy Bomber and another one of your books, The Children of Topaz, take place during the 1940’s. Do you have a special interest in the WWII era?

I suppose I do. Even one of my novels (Brothers in Valor) is set in Germany during WW II. I’m not one hundred percent sure why I have such an interest, but it obviously manifests itself in what I write, read, and watch on TV or at the movies.

5. Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?

I think it is interesting to know that Gail Halvorsen is ninety years old and as active as someone half his age. He travels constantly to meet the demands of groups who want him to speak about his candy-bombing experiences. He is greatly loved in Germany to this day and is often invited back to commemorate the Air Lift in one way or another. He even is still qualified to fly the C-54 transport planes he flew in the 1940s, though he takes the co-piloting duties these days. As a side note, you might be interested in hearing Gail explain the Air Lift and see some original film footage of the candy drops and other Air Lift events. Go to my website (www.michaelotunnell.com). Choose the Candy Bomber icon, and you will see a link to this YouTube video.

INTERVIEW WITH MUDVILLE AUTHOR, KURTIS SCALETTA

KN: On your website Roy has a top-five baseball list and Sturgis has a top-ten music list. Did you make other contrasting lists in order to get to know your characters?

KS: I make a lot of those lists mentally, even if I don't write them down. I feel like, at least with major characters like Roy and Sturgis, authors should be able to answer the kinds of questions they'd be able to answer about their friends: what do they read or watch on TV, what kind of music do they like, what do they want to be when they grow up, and who are their heroes? But I only include those interests if they stand out or are a big part of a character's personality. Sturgis's music and books are a way for him to get to know his dad better, so they're important. Roy's taste in music isn't important so I don't mention it, but at I do know that about Roy -- he's OK with whatever's on the radio, unless it's jazz. But one thing about kids is that their tastes are always changing and they're always discovering new things. So as a writer, I have to keep that in mind. For example, Roy likes reading non-fiction better than fiction, but he tries reading something different in Mudville.

KN: I have to ask. Have you really cooked and eaten the dishes on Mr. McGuire’s favorite recipe pages? If so, have you served them to anyone else?

KS: Ha. Funny you should ask! My wife celebrated the week Mudville came out by planning a whole week of menus around Mr. McGuire's experiments. We had spinach surprise and spam manicotti and chili dog pie [ http://mudmambas.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/as-seen-in-the-novels-chili-dog-pie/.] Chili dog pie is actually really good, although it's not that healthy. What's scary is that I made those recipes up for the book, but was able to find every one online when I put the website extras together. They were all real things people had done.

KN: Before the story starts, you quote Roy Hobbs from The Natural, “A father makes all the difference.” Did you make Roy’s mother be uninvolved so you could focus on Roy’s relationship with his father?

KS: Yes, that's exactly what it was. It was a book about fathers and sons and brothers, so I decided to downplay the mothers of both of the main characters in Mudville. Women (and girls) are also only a minor presence in Mamba Point, which is mainly about brothers and masculine friendships. I'm making up for it with my third novel, which is in progress. There are several important female characters of different generations (and different species!) that the hero gets to know, and they're all important to him without filling a role as his mother or his girlfriend. It's of the things that I feel really good about as I slog through the nth draft. I'm confident that boys will connect with those characters and find them appealing.

KN: Mudville is a pleasure to read. Could you please talk about what you did to make sure Roy’s voice is consistent and strong throughout the novel?

KS: Thanks for the compliment! Roy's voice is a synthesis of my voice and one of the great narrators in baseball fiction, Henry Wiggen. He's the narrator and hero of The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly and two other novels by Mark Harris [http://mudmambas.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/in-memory-of-mark-harris/]. Wiggen is unpretentious and often funny, but those books are gorgeously written. Harris himself was taking a lot of cues from Ring Lardner's Jack Keefe stories. Anyway, that's how I found Roy's voice... the plot is like a W. P. Kinsella book, but I really owe a lot more to Mark Harris, and I said so in the acknowledgments.

KN: Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?

KS: Well, I already worked in one plug but let me work in another. I have a new book coming out this summer. It's not a baseball book, or even a sports book, but I hope people who liked Mudville will like this one, too. It's called Mamba Point, and it's about an American kid living in Monrovia, Liberia (that's in West Africa) who befriends a black mamba, one of the deadliest snakes in the world. A lot of the book is based on personal experience, because I moved to Liberia myself when I was thirteen. My dad worked at the U.S. Embassy, just like Linus's dad does in the book. I never befriended a mamba, but I did see a couple.

KN: Thanks so much for the interview.

KS: Thanks for the invitation. I really like your blog; the educational tie-ins are creative.

KN: Thanks for the compliment.

Interview with Poop Happened! author, Sarah Albee

KN: The humorous voice is strong and consistent throughout the text. How did you accomplish this feat?

SA: It wasn’t always easy to remain light and irreverent, because a lot of the information in the book covers episodes of human history that weren’t very funny—like plagues and poverty and overcrowding. I didn’t want to come across as uncaring or flippant. But usually I was able to find something light-hearted to focus on. My ultimate goal was to help kids appreciate the amazing ability humans have to cope with bad situations. I also thought it was important for kids to appreciate that the field of public health has only been a priority for civic leaders for the past hundred years or so.

KN: I love the TMI(too much information) sections in the book. Did you plan those out or did the book designer come up with that idea?

SA: It kind of evolved, actually. In an early draft I had a few boxes that I had called “Probably more than you wanted to know” and my editor changed it to TMI. Then we culled out more from the body text and made a few extra TMI boxes.

KN: In order to write this book, you had to do a tremendous amount of research. How much time did you spend researching and how did you organize all of the information?

SA: I did read a lot of books, in whole or in part, as I researched. The research part took about two years, although I wasn’t working exclusively on POOP that whole time. The biggest challenge was organizing it all and then deciding what information was most relevant and/or fun for kids. A good friend of mine who is a writer read an early draft that was perhaps twice as long as the finished manuscript. She gently pointed out to me that not everyone is as excited about sanitation as I am, and that I really had to cut out some of the information. Which I did. And then my editor asked me to make further cuts. Cutting the text forced me to consider what was truly essential to me to keep, and that made it a stronger book.

KN: Reading this book made me really grateful that I live in modern times in a country which has a good sanitation system. You mention that many of the sanitation problems of medieval Europe still exist in developing countries today. Did you visit any of these countries to have a better idea of what it must have been like to live in London or Paris over a hundred years ago?

SA: I lived in Cairo, Egypt for a year, and there I witnessed a great deal of poverty and poor sanitation, both in the urban center and also in the countryside. During the course of my research I also read an amazing book called The People of the Abyss, by Jack London (the writer of White Fang and Call of the Wild). In 1903, London left his comfortable lodgings in the west part of London and traveled to the East End, purchased second-hand clothing, and went to live in a London slum, to experience firsthand what the life was like. He walked the streets, starving and homeless, and then wrote about it. Because he’s such an amazing writer, his account really helped me understand what it must have been like to be poor at that time, when there were virtually no social safety nets. Unfortunately similar situations exist today in many developing countries.

KN: Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?

SA: I hope this book will get kids excited about history. I’m working on a follow-up book about the history of clothes, especially some of the funkier fashions like corsets and codpieces and ruffs and bound feet and bathing costumes and arsenic wafers. I hope the next book will be another fun way for kids to learn a little history—the kind that isn’t in their social studies textbooks.

KN: Thanks for the interview.

SA: A pleasure!

Interview With Unnameables Author, Ellen Booraem

KN: On your website, http://www.ellenbooraem.com/evolution.html, you have a fantastic description of Medford and Goatman’s development from paintings into characters. However, there are many other outstanding characters in The Unnameables. What did you do to bring each character alive?

EB: When I’m starting a book, I have a form I fill out for important characters, asking questions about their hopes and fears, even what they have in their pockets.

When characters first appear in a rough draft, I let them speak and act for themselves, doing whatever is required of them to move the plot along. When I’m ready to delve deeper—later in the rough draft and certainly during the revisions—I open a new document for each important character and write a brief life story, including his or her fears and goals, and often a journal entry in that character’s voice. When I was writing THE UNNAMEABLES, I did this at least once for Earnest, Boyce, Essence, Twig, Clarity, Arvid, and Deemer—and repeatedly for Medford, Prudy, and the Goatman.

I had a separate document telling me what everyone looked like. For a few characters, I had other documents tracking their mood changes throughout the book—especially important for Earnest, Prudy, and Twig, whose intentions and activities were hidden until the end.

KN: What a fantastic answer! I'll have to use those techniques to strengthen my characters. Why did you choose to have the island stuck in the colonial period versus another historical era?

EB: As a purely practical matter, I needed the original settlers to take over a distant, empty island and then be ignored or forgotten long enough to figure out their needs and obsessions on their own. That wouldn’t have happened as easily with a later settlement, especially after transportation became easier and faster.

In my head (not stated in the book), the original settlers were disaffected members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They’d be adventuresome by nature—having uprooted themselves once to sail from England to Massachusetts, it wouldn’t faze them to do it again. It made sense to me that they would have tired of the religious and social restrictions in Massachusetts, and would have tried to find a place where they could live according to their utopian ideals. And of course they ended up creating a society that was even more restrictive than the one they’d left.

I drafted a sequel that offered an explanation of why the Islanders continued to be left alone to the modern day. That draft is pretty much dead now because of changes in the first book, but I hope to revive parts of it someday so I don’t want to give much away. If you look at the map in THE UNNAMEABLES, though, you can see that the shoals around Island make it inhospitable to the casual visitor.

KN: In addition to the tremendous amount of historical research to inform your language style in the book, what else did you do to make sure the character’s voices were consistent throughout the book?

EB: Every morning before I started to write, I would read a chapter of one of Jane Austen’s books, which were written in the early 1800s. That set me up for the narrator’s voice and the way Islanders talked when they weren’t using Book Talk. Before writing dialogue in Book Talk, I’d dip into Samuel Pepys’s diary, written in the mid-1600s, and maybe the King James Bible or some plays from the mid- to late 1600s.

To make sure I had individual characters’ voices right, I would occasionally break away and read the journal entries I’d written for them, or maybe write a line or two more in a journal. After a while, though, I had each character so firmly fixed in my mind that their voices came naturally to me.

These were great questions, a lot of fun to answer. Thanks so much for asking them!

KN: Thank you for answering them.

Interview with The Witch's Guide to Cooking with Children author, Keith McGowan

KN: Fay Holaderry quotes authentic phrases such as, "I'm at the end of my rope." What did you do to craft Fay's voice?

KM: The witch's voice came very naturally to me with no explicit thought of writer's craft. Her sense of humor appeared on the page fully formed, and I laughed, more as a reader of her journal than as the writer of it. I think somehow her wry sarcasm must just be a part of how I was raised; I come from a very sarcastic family.

KN: How did you ensure Sol and Connie were attractive yet imperfect characters?

KM: The fact that we are all imperfect is a major theme of the book. Nobody is perfect in the book. For me, the truth about humans is that we make many mistakes--at least I do. I wanted to enjoy that imperfection.

Sol and Connie's good qualities come through strongly, on the other hand, I think because of their sibling love for each other. Sol admires Connie's strengths and Connie admires Sol's strengths, and seeing each child through the other's eyes gives us a sense of admiration too.

KN: Please tell us one way your published book is different from an earlier draft.

KM: Everything, in a way, changed from early drafts to late drafts--I am very big on revision--although the core elements of the story never changed. One example of a change is the witch's journal entries. I had a lot of journal entries written; which ones to choose was the question. If you look very carefully and read the entries in the final book, you'll see there's a little story arc of its own in the entries. That, I thought, was how the journal entries should truly read.

KN: Forgiveness is a theme in the book yet the protagonist, Sol, does not forgive Connie while the antagonist, Fay Holaderry, forgives her dog. Why did you chose to have the antagonist forgive and not the protagonist?

KM: This was a very important element of the ending to me. Forgiveness is a big theme in the book, which goes along with the idea of all of us as imperfect people. One clue to what's going on is the title of the last chapter: "Old Enough to Accept Things." The witch is centuries old and has seen a lot of life, so she can forgive others their mistakes. She accepts life's ups and downs. Sol, on the other hand, is only eleven. His sister has done something very upsetting, and the book ends on the same day he finds this out. Sol is still upset and not yet ready to forgive. Sol's inability to forgive his sister her mistake, at least right away, is a sign of his own imperfection and his age. But, you know, I always thought that readers can forgive Sol for his own character flaws.

KN: Is there anything else you'd like to share with us?

KM: I'd just like to thank you for putting together great curriculum ideas, and to let teachers know that if they read the book with kids, I'd love to hear from them personally about the discussions. My website http://www.KeithBooks.com has a little contact link at the bottom, and also a page for teachers if you go to the "Mixed Up Files" page. I am a former afterschool director and teacher myself, and the child of teachers, so education, teachers, and schools are very important to me.

KN: Thanks for the interview!