INTERVIEW

June 2010

Newbery Award winner Phyllis Reynolds Naylor has written dozens of books for children and young adults, including FAITH, HOPE, AND IVY JUNE, SHILOH and the Alice series. In this interview with Kidsreads.com’s Usha Reynolds, Naylor discusses what inspired her latest work, the Western-themed EMILY’S FORTUNE, and elaborates on the slow evolution of her main character throughout the story. She also talks about how she first fell in love with telling stories, comments on the variety of subject matter, tone and themes of her novels, and explains why she never gives away details about her works in progress.

Kidsreads.com: What inspired you to set EMILY’S FORTUNE in the Wild West? Is that a period of American history that holds a particular fascination for you? Are there any historical figures from that era who you admire or enjoy reading about?

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor: Actually, I just wanted to write something different --- a sort of Victorian, scary, tall-tales, evil-uncle kind of thing, and this is how it came out.

KRC: Emily has so little, even before she is orphaned, yet one never gets the sense that she is ever melancholic or self-pitying. What prompted you to create such a resilient and essentially positive character? Do you see her fortitude as being typical of her times, when life was hard, or is it just not in Emily’s nature to be mopey?

PRN: Her character grew on me as I wrote the story. She first started out shy and quiet, but something in a main character has to change to make a book meaningful.  I realized that she's not a Cinderella --- instead of being forced to work, one of her problems is that she wasn't given a chance for enough work experience to build self-confidence. This becomes her quest, whether she realizes it or not.

KRC: What compels Jackson to offer his help so readily and freely --- even at some risk to himself --- to Emily, who is a perfect stranger?

PRN: I'd love to say compassion, but it was probably a combination of boredom, empathy --- realizing that Emily was being chased by the Child Catchers as he had been --- and a certain loneliness. And Emily was someone his own age.

KRC: Most modern American children are sheltered from the kind of hard life that children of past generations routinely faced. Are there any lessons that you would like your young readers to get out of the story of Emily and Jackson’s perilous journey alone across the country in a stagecoach, while being pursued by a villain?

PRN: Mostly I'd just like them to enjoy the story. I wasn't trying to teach anything, but in a good book there are usually lessons intrinsic to the story. I think readers will see that the more Emily learns to do herself, the more confident she becomes in her own abilities.

KRC: Emily is very attached to her little green turtle, Rufus, even risking discovery for his sake. What made you choose a turtle as the right pet for her? Have you ever kept turtles yourself?

PRN: I remember visiting grandparents in Maryland when we lived in Illinois, and taking back two terrapins we found in Grandma's garden. We released them into our back yard when we got home, but I don't know what happened to them. For this story, I needed a very small pet that could survive a long journey and remain quiet, and a turtle seemed the very thing.

KRC: Miss Luella Nash is a crotchety old woman straight out of Dickens, going so far as to forbid Emily to play with other children, but she turns out to be a fairly benign figure in the end after all. Why was she so hard on Emily?

PRN: Perfectionism. The children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard variety. She probably thought she was doing the child a favor by over-protecting her and, not having any children of her own, didn't know what a child needed.

KRC: The creative use of typesetting and language in EMILY’S FORTUNE serve to underscore the Wild West theme very effectively. How was the decision made to come up with the idea of using specific fonts to enhance the story?

PRN: That was entirely my editor's doing, and I was so pleased to see the result. I hadn't even known that was in the works till I saw the proofs, and thought, "What a great idea!" It certainly does help to play up the Wild West theme.

KRC: From the Shiloh Trilogy to the Alice books to EMILY’S FORTUNE, you have shown a consistent talent for evocatively capturing a sense of place and time in a variety of settings. How do you ensure that you so accurately portray your characters’ experiences?

PRN: Well, I don't really ensure anything, I just try my best to make a story ring true. My husband is from West Virginia, and my father's people were from Mississippi, so I have a deep sense of the rural south imbedded in me, and the setting for SHILOH was easy to capture. The Alice books take place in the general vicinity of where I have lived the past few decades, so that wasn't difficult either.  Emily's setting was pure imagination, helped along by some of the research I did on stagecoach routes.

KRC: You have written a prodigious number of books, many of which have become very popular. However, these books, at least on the surface, appear to be very different from each other. Are there common themes to your work, or do you deliberately try to write something different each time?

PRN: I never write two books of the same type in a row. I hope this keeps me fresh so that I don't repeat myself. After I write a novel for adults, I may want to do a picture book. After that, a mystery for the middle grades, and then a serious novel for teens. I just like to vary my books so that I never feel I'm in a rut. I figure if I don't enjoy what I'm writing, neither will my readers. I suppose the one constant is that I feel the protagonist should change in some way, otherwise, how does this day or this event differ from any other?

KRC: What got you interested in books and specifically in writing? When did you know that this was going to be your life’s work?

PRN: Being a child of the Depression, we didn't have much of anything, but we did have books --- if not our own, then library books. My parents read aloud to us every night until we were in our teens. This was the most enjoyable part of my childhood. Both parents read with great drama, and listening to my dad read HUCKLEBERRY FINN and LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI were some of the best nights of all. They sang to us too, long epoch tales that were really stories. I wrote little "books" in grade school and sold my first short story when I was 16. It wasn't until I graduated with a BA degree, however, having paid my tuition myself with my earnings from writing, that I realized I could make a living at it. And because writing was my first love, I gave up plans for becoming a clinical psychologist, and wrote full time.

KRC: What, in your opinion, are successful strategies for turning reluctant young readers into book-lovers?

PRN: Finding that magical book for each child that is responsible for turning him on.  A book that is so funny or scary or exciting or wonder-producing that he just wants more and more. It's so important for adults --- a parent, a teacher, a mentor, a librarian --- to enjoy a book with him, to read a book aloud in class and laugh at the funny parts along with the class. Every so often I get letters from a number of children in the same class, and they all tell me the same thing: "Today my teacher had to hand the book to someone else to finish because she started to cry," or "This morning my teacher was laughing so hard when she read your book that she had to stop." Children will never forget this moment, for they are discovering that enjoying a book is not something children are expected to do as an assignment; enjoying a book is a wonderful gift being passed along to them.

KRC: What are you working on now?

PRN: I never reveal the plot of anything I'm working on at the moment, because if anyone so much as raises an eyebrow, it bursts my bubble. We have to go on pretending that the book we're working on now will be the very best we've ever written. But I will soon be writing the last two books of the Alice series, and would love to write another rollicking something-or-other in the near future.

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