Writer Spotlight: Joan Donaldson

 

Organic berries, Rugby Tennessee, international fangirl, and a field of poppies: Joan Donaldson

Charlie Barshaw interviews SCBWI-MI children's book writers and illustrators for The Mitten. In this piece, meet Joan Donaldson, a longtime member with novels and picture books and a blueberry farm.

What does “organic” mean on your farm?

Our farm has been certified organic since 1977 and this means that we abide by the National Board that draws up organic standards. Every year, an inspector comes and reviews my husband’s records, looks over the farm, including our packing shed and blueberry line where we sort and pack our berries.

You said we had a tight window to get this interview done, sometime before early July or after the month of September. Is this a huge blueberry-growing operation? Or is it labor-intensive harvesting? 

We are a small family farm run by two people with a little hired help for pruning and on our blueberry packing line. John and I are the management, we also tackle any other task that needs to be done from processing orders (me) to picking off galls (both of us) to driving the blueberry shaker (John) to stacking 30# boxes on pallets. I also manage you-pick during the early part of the season. Most of our berries are packed into 30# boxes and frozen. We ship them around the eastern half of the US, and they are available at various stores in MI.

Hearts of Mercy (2019) has your young adult historical character Viney face off against what turns out to be an historical real-life group, the White Caps. By my count that makes three books featuring Viney. What kept drawing you back to Viney and the Appalachian land she inhabits?

For decades, I have maintained a strong interest in Appalachian culture, history, and literature. During the summer of 1974, I volunteered at a Presbyterian Mission far back in Eastern TN, just outside of the Great Smokey National Park.

When friends retired to Rugby, TN, they invited us to visit. While wandering through the historic buildings, I learned more about the colony and Thomas Hugh’s dreams of equality between sexes, races, and classes. I had to write about this agrarian community and how it influenced the area.

At first, I approached it from the POV of a British lad, Charlie, but the more I wrote about Viney, she took over the story. Plus, I realized that no one had ever written about Rugby from the POV of someone from Appalachia who would have seen the British as invaders.

After years of research and interviews, I wrote the first book. The second was my love letter to the Walker Sisters who are fascinating women who outsmarted the National Park Service. My agent is currently sending out a novel told by Lizzie and I have a couple of other Rugby books I would like to write for the series.

Song of Hope from 2018 illustrated by Michigan illustrator PJ Lyons. Sahana wants to be adopted into America. She could be a refugee from the Middle East, India, or Africa. Did you deliberately blur the specific details to make the story more universal?

Song of Hope deals with Child Sponsorship and is based on the experiences of a young girl whom I sponsored until she turned eighteen. My goal was to show children what life can be like for a young person in a developing country, and to alert them to the idea that they could sponsor a child. The book inspired a young friend to earn enough money to pay for school supplies for an African girl.

You’ve got a trilogy of picture books, with Song of Hope, The Secret of Red Shoes, and A Real Pretend. Red Shoes, I understand, is based on a family legend? Is A Real Pretend about something pretend becoming real?

Both The Secret of the Red Shoes and A Read Pretend came from family stories told to me by different friends. My imagination embellished them, but the basic elements are true.

A Pebble and a Pen (2000) is a middle grade historical novel about professional penmanship. What drove you to write this novel for young readers? 

In 1989, Tasha Tudor and I spent a week studying Spencerian Script from Master Penman, Michael Sull near the home of Platt Rogers Spencer in Ohio. During the mid and late nineteen century, Spencerian Script was the main form of penmanship taught in the United States. At the age of ten, Platt Rogers Spencer created the script from “the perfect forms in nature” such as the oval of a pebble, the angle of the rolling wave. Whenever I speak to groups of young people, I emphasize that he was only ten, yet Spencer changed the way a nation wrote. Who knows what a ten-year-old somewhere is creating that will change the world.

Why is historic Rugby a village you should fall in love with?

Most towns are founded by someone who settled the area, but Rugby was founded on the ideals of equality. Hughes wanted an Agrarian Utopian Community where working with your hands was respected. He imported young men who were the second sons of the landed gentry who did not want to follow society’s prescribed path.

Today, the folks who live in Rugby understand the need to preserve and promote that same sense of equality at a beautiful setting. Rugby is a peaceful village located at the edge of a National Park with numerous hiking trails. While Historic Rugby offers different sorts of events from ghostly storytelling at the cemetery to a May Day celebration, what I love about the place is the natural beauty and the hiking.

Your description of how you became a writer

After my first-grade teacher

Taught me to read and write,

I wrote a poem with my

Fat, red pencil

Is itself a poem.

Hmm, well, I don’t write poetry. I earned my Master in Fine Arts in writing nonfiction. Over the years I’ve published numerous essays in The Christian Science Monitor and in other magazines. Now I write and record my essays for Michigan Public Radio. And like Shirley, I write “passages” for a testing company.

Over the years you had a lot of mentors, influential women who pushed you to succeed.

I have been blessed by wonderful mentors from Tasha Tudor to Ellen Howard to the MFA faculty at Spalding University, and now by Kelly Baptist as part of the SCBWI-MI Mentorship opportunity.

One of those early mentors prompted you to write to your favorite author, Rumer Godden. She was popular and prolific. Oh, and she lived in the U.K. You wrote her a letter, and after a while, you got one back from Rumer Godden. Did you realize that you were blessed with good fortune, or was it just an international form letter? And what of the dolls?

Rumer Godden wrote me a personal letter which I still have. I had told her about my dolls and the doll house that my parents and I had built which resembled the illustration painted by Tasha Tudor on the cover Godden’s book The Doll House. Ms. Godden said that my dolls were much nicer than the characters in her book. Many years later, I asked Tasha Tudor where she had found a model for the cover illustration. She replied that she had imagined that image and my doll house was the only one that looked like her illustration.

You have a couple of e-booklets about cooking on a woodstove and making maple syrup. These published in 2013, as did Wedded to the Land, which also came out that year. What was going on in your life in 2013? And what was Wedded about?

Wedded is a collection of essays about my farm. The longer pieces were part of my creative thesis for my MFA while the shorter essays were published in The Christian Science Monitor. All I can remember of 2013 was how we were recovering from the devastation of 2012, an extremely hot year when fruit trees bloomed in March, and we lost 90% of our crop.

There is a photo of you playing a harp on your website. What can you tell us about the instrument?

The lever harp is a neo-classic Irish folk harp with nylon strings. I still have that harp and play it now and then, but for the past couple of years, I've concentrated on learning the ancient wire harp which requires different techniques. I attached a photo of me with my small wire harp and I recently bought a little larger wire harp with more bass strings. I play mainly Irish dance music and older airs along with some Scottish tunes. One of these days, I will write a novel about the Belfast Harp Gathering of 1792.

After the successful blueberry harvest, what's next?

My agent has shopped around a MG novel about a young girl who helps her grandfather train a team of oxen and then they take them to the fair. Terrie is also sending out a new novel for the Rugby series, plus an adult novel about Beaver Island during the reign of King Strang and I am writing a collection of essays about my time as a caretaker/companion for an amazing older woman with Parkinson Disease. And MI Radio just aired one of my short essays for Memorial Day.

This photo Joan sent needed context.  She explained:

That is our hay barn vs our goat barn vs our Big Barn that we raised in 1985. Every year, we plant a 4 acre wildflower field with red poppies, corn flowers and daisies. Now we plant it next to the Fennville Cemetery in honor of our son who served in Afghanistan,  returned with PTSD and took his life in 2015. If you check out the Pleasant Hill Farm Facebook page you will see scores of photo of the poppies.

Could it be said that at some point you wholeheartedly embraced the pioneer settler, down-to-earth, live-off-the-land lifestyle?

Yes, with a few twists like banks of solar panels and a wind generator for electricity.

 

Please share any social media links or contacts.

https://www.joandonaldson.com/

https://author.amazon.com/home

https://www.facebook.com/joan.donaldson

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/75124.Joan_Donaldson

Twitter:@sparrow3337