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
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