Writer Spotlight: Gary D. Schmidt

Yoda, Sir Gawain, blurring into YA, the sound of a prison gate closing, and a Border Collie: Gary D. Schmidt

Charlie Barshaw coordinates our regular Writer Spotlight feature and interviews writers of SCBWI-MI. In this piece, meet college professor and multi-award winning and prolific writer , Gary D. Schmidt.

Note: Gary said I could scrape off any images from his website. Problem is, he has no website. So I took it as a blanket invitation to pirate photos from the web. I've included minimal attribution.

You said, “At the heart of all stories—all good stories—are the essential human questions the arts and humanities pose so effectively, and at the end of those questions is story’s refusal to yield simple answers.” What are some of those essential human questions?

Trinity Christian College

I suppose that these questions will vary some depending on the age group for which we are writing.  But for middle grade readers, for whom I write, they are questions like these—though middle graders would not use this language:

What is the good?

How do I make discerning judgments?

Where do I fit in to the world around me, and the world far away?

How do I know that what I believe is not just what my parents believe, but what I truly believe?

How do I understand, accept, and come to love what might be different from what I think I understand, accept, and love?

How do I move into the future with hope and optimistic expectation?

 

You contributed to the Star Wars anthology by writing the only chapter from Yoda’s POV. How badly did you have to mangle your grammar muscles to, in Yoda’s voice, write it?

Doing this story was incredible fun.  I saw “Star Wars” when it first came out in 1977, and I’ve been a fan ever since.  (Well, let me clarify:  I’ve been a fan of the first trilogy.) 

I had to jettison all thoughts of grammar and just listen for the voice—and since all writers are constantly trying to listen to the voices of our characters, this was familiar ground—even though I’ve never done a voice this distant before.  

In so many ways, his voice is his character, so it kept me grounded not only in terms of what he says in the story, but also what he does.

You teach medieval literature at the college level. How do you make the Dark Ages relevant to today’s readers and writers?

Well, we start by disabusing them of the notion of them being dark ages.  Seamus Heaney talks about the writer of “Beowulf” as living in a time of violence and aggression—and doesn’t that sound like what we’re living in now?  

And Beowulf is the archetypal epic hero, it seems, but he is also called the most mild of men, most eager to be remembered, most beloved of his people.  Wouldn’t that be something if our culture was known around the world as mild, eager to be remembered for its goodness, beloved by others?  So we start there. 

Then, of course, we go to Chaucer, and Chaucer deals with types:  gentle souls, aggressive and wealthy women, hypocrites, mercenaries, fashion followers, quacks and frauds, and on and on.  In other words, he wants to deal with the whole world but looking at very specific types of people whose vices and virtues are deeply embedded in them.  

Or look at “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” whose central question is, “Is it possible to achieve moral perfection?”  Or “Sir Orfeo,” who asks, “In a world in which everything seems to be determined by powerful fate, how shall we determine our course?”—and the answer is, We act to determine our own fate. There is so much in the medieval period that any attentive reader will find familiar.

You seem fascinated by William Bradford. What is it exactly that draws you to his life?

William Bradford is one of the great figures of American history.  He was elected as governor thirty-one times—even when he begged not to be elected.  He didn’t want power; he wanted to start a new place with different rules about how we live out our religious convictions as individuals.  

His is (I think) still the longest held treaty between western settles and Native Americans.  For his settlement, he came up with the balance between working for the corporate good and working for one’s individual that saved the colony from extinction.  

People see him as this guy who wears a funny dark outfit, but almost everything we think we know about him as a pilgrim (a word he never used of himself) out in our culture is wrong.  That’s a place to start for story.

You’ve collaborated with Susan M. Felch for at least three books. Who is this writer, and what do you find especially gratifying in working with her?

Susan and I have actually edited six books together:  essays on each of the seasons, and then two books with essays aimed at book clubs reading modern international fiction.

Collaborating is a delight.  Often writing is such an individual experience; you’re sitting at your desk, working problems out by yourself.  But doing it with someone else is tremendous fun—plus you come up with many more options.  

And Susan is brilliant. She is a Renaissance scholar, working right now on William Tyndale.  She is the one scholar responsible for bringing the Renaissance writer Anne Lock into the canon—you can see her work in every Norton anthology about the Renaissance.

You’ve written MG and YA, yet you seem to blur the line. Even your light-hearted MG novels, such as Pay Attention, Carter Jones and The Wednesday Wars, have a dark center to them, with death, substance abuse and teen pregnancy sometimes playing a role. Why tackle difficult issues with middle school readers?

The Literary Maven

I do see myself as working in middle grade, but I can see why some would see the above problems as blurring into YA.  But I think we kid ourselves if we believe that issues that are harder should be kept out of middle grade.  I once had a teacher tell me that teen pregnancy “would never happen in my school,” and I prayed that it wouldn’t, since the two kids might not get the support they need in such a place.  

Do we believe our kids don’t know darkness, and abuse, and hatred, and hurt?  Do we believe they don’t make mistakes that have long consequences?  I want to show a world where there is hurt, and where we do make mistakes, and where we can be supported and learn that we’re not alone and find ways to move forward.  

Isn’t a good thing to tell a story of two kids who become parents and who want to take up that responsibility?  Isn’t it a good thing to show a kid who stand up to racial hatred in his community?  Isn’t it a good thing to show that violence is real and needs to be survived?

Calvin University Chimes

You’re a full-time professor for Calvin University, a busy publishing writer, and the single dad to a family of six on a one hundred- and fifty-year-old farm. How do you find time to do it all?

Well, I wasn’t a single dad until nine years ago; my wife was brilliant and loving and caring, and she could do anything.  She too was a writer—the last line of The Wednesday Wars is hers, and three of her picture books have come out since her death. Getting stuff done is really a matter of prioritizing and staying up.  

Fortunately I have two jobs—teaching and writing—that I have loved for many years, and I know how unusual that is.  I also have, as you say, six kids and their wonderful spouses who are incredible supports—and good friends who have been there for me, especially since Anne passed away.  I also have a Border collie, who knows that his primary job is to wake me at first light and help me get going.

You like to work on three writing projects at a time. Describe how that process works.

I do like to work on multiple projects at once.  Usually they are at different stages, and they are always very different.  So right now, I’m working of several books with Ron Koertge that are aimed at middle grade readers, using short fiction.  I’m finishing a sequel to Orbiting Jupiter.  I’m trying my hand at a non-fiction picture book with Jackie Briggs-Martin, and writing an academic book on the writers of New England histories in the last decade of the eighteenth century.  I mean, those are pretty distinct.  It does mean that nothing ever gets done quickly, but the process of working on each one slowly makes a difference for the book, I think.

Your early education mirrored that of your protagonist Holling Hoodhood. I recall a talk where you said the youngest students were designated as a type of vegetable, and that you had been placed in the lowest vegetative state. What was your early educational experience like?

In my elementary years, we were tracked—meaning that it was determined how we would do in later education, and what kinds of jobs we were likely to have.  I was in the lowest group, and knew that.  I didn’t think at the time it was demeaning, and I didn’t rise up in righteous anger—I just figured it was true, I guess.  

I look back at that now as something akin to abuse, but it wasn’t meant that way.  In any case, my early years were sort of humiliating—until I got the teacher I came to love who taught me to love learning and reading and even, dare I say it, the world.

Holling Hoodhood faced off against Mrs. Baker when the two were stuck together while all the Catholic and Jewish students went off to their mid-week religious studies. How did real life differ from the novel?

This really was how it was.  I was a little younger than Holling, but I was the kiddo left alone.  In real life, Mrs. Baker was—perhaps justifiably—angry that she had to stay while other teachers could leave, since their classes emptied out.  But today I think, what an opportunity.  Suppose you were a teacher who had one—or even a handful—of students for two hours every week where you could do anything you wanted?  Isn’t that paradise for a teacher?

Courtesy CBS News

From the same presentation, you described the period of time during the Vietnam War years when the networks would broadcast the draft lottery of birthdays to determine which 18-year-olds would register to go to war. You used that as a backdrop for one of your books. Did this period of history have a Hunger Games effect on you?

When I explain to students what it was like to watch the draft, they can hardly believe it happened.  I think that those of us who grew up in the sixties and early seventies are haunted by Vietnam, and by a childhood seared with the live images of soldiers under fire.  We all knew someone who had been wounded—or killed.  And given the absurd politics that would not look for answers, we all figured we’d be there one day.  In 1969, chances of being killed in Vietnam after your first thirty days were one in three.  Imagine growing up, knowing you were heading for that.  In my family, we thought of Henry Kissinger as a war criminal—and it’s hard to get past the idea of an American more concerned for how its leaders looked than for its citizenry.

Whale Rock Writing Workshop

In addition to your college courses, you teach writing in prison and detention centers. At a talk several years ago, you described a particularly harrowing visit to a boy’s prison in the Upper Peninsula. Can you recount that moment, and the unfortunate young man you met?

To that, I’ll just say this:  Who in America believes that locking up eighth grade boys for extended periods in single cells, leaving them in a place far from their families—far enough that they didn’t get any visitors from relatives—and then shifting some to adult prisons, is a good thing?  To that person who would claim that, I’d ask him or her to go to a prison and just listen to the sound of a gate closing across a cell.  I’ll never forget it—and I’m on the outside.

In an interview you talked about assigning male prisoners a chance to write two concluding paragraphs for Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down. I saw Jason at a Nerd Camp where he opened his talk refusing to discuss the ambiguous ending of his novel-in-verse. You’re a big fan of the ambiguity of life, and in writing about it. What did Reynold leave unsaid that you knew your writers would want to say?

The opportunity for those prisoners to come up with their own endings was huge—remember, these were adult prisoners, many of whom are lifers, who never get a chance to express their own ideas.  They each wrote a poem to end the book, and it was fascinating that their decision was about fifty-fifty—half has the book end with revenge, half with the kiddo heading back upstairs.  Jason Reynolds created a work of art that gave space to all of them to work this out for themselves, and that’s one of the brilliant elements of that brilliant work.

You discuss taking a bold chance by opening your novel Trouble with 15 pages of description. How do you square this with what you tell your college writing classes about proper approaches to getting published?

Oh my gosh, it was really meant as a joke.  I mean, it’s like reading a Thomas Hardy novel.  I never thought that Virginia Buckley, my editor then, would let me do it.  But she really liked the description, and thought it created not just the setting, but the thematic meaning of the story.  So we left it in, and I haven’t heard anyone complain about it to me—which sort of surprises me.  But that was Virginia—one of the great editors of children’s books.

As a student of writing, do you have any advice all the pre-published writers in SCBWI?

Publishing is hard, but remember that that isn’t where you started.  If you tell a story just to get published, it probably isn’t very good.  If you tell a story to speak something you care about to those who will read it, then you’ve begun well.  

Tell that story—not the one you’re sure will get published, not the one that is part of some sort of fad, not the one you think it going to make lots of bucks.  Tell the one that moves your heart, that you can’t stop thinking about late at night, that makes you laugh and makes you cry.  Tell the story that asks the question that haunts you.

What's coming next?

In terms of future projects, "The Labors of Hercules Beal" comes out this May, a novel set on contemporary Cape Cod in which the young Hercules Beal, who has recently lost his parents in a car accident, comes to terms with his grief when he is assigned the task of re-creating the twelve labors of Hercules, but in a contemporary setting.

This will be followed in the winter of 2024 by a collection of short stories edited with Leah Henderson called "A Little Bit Super," in which all of the characters are endowed with very minor superpowers.  And that will be followed with "A Day at the Beach," a collection of short short stories set on the New Jersey shore and written with Ron Koertge.  After that, "Jack's Run" will be finished, a sequel to "Orbiting Jupiter."

Are there any questions you’d wished I asked?

Well, I could have talked a lot more about my Border Collie.  And I am kinda verbose about collecting seventeenth-century books, and books by the American Concord writers.  I could go on and on about that. 

Please include any social media contacts you wish to share.

Oh my, I don’t have any of those.  There’s some Facebook thingy, but I’ve never been on it.  And besides, I’m not sure but that the day will come when the history of our times has a lot to say about the real damage done by social media.

Thanks so much for your time and wisdom. (At the risk of plagiarism, I’m claiming this gratitude for Gary’s time and wisdom. But I think he wrote it to me. Which shows just how gracious he is.)

Big Request:

I'm writing an historical recap of past conferences, back to when I started in 2009 and even before.

There seems to be a dearth of official photos. Like our family, seems like SCBWI-MI forgot to take pictures, they were having so much fun.

But I know individuals have taken amazing photos over the years. (Thanks to Dave Stricklen, who showered me with excellent photos from the past decade.)

Anyone want to volunteer their private collection for a time capsule? You'll be acknowledged  for your contribution, and held in high esteem.

Email me at cjbarshaw5223@aol.com or DM me on FB.