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