Emily’s Post: Lois Lowry Interview (Part II)
In the first part of my interview with Lois Lowry, I learned about her personal life–how she lived in Japan shortly after World War II, how she dropped out of college to get married, and how she shocked a bunch of parents and teachers at small town 8th grade graduation. If you missed the first episode, you can catch it here. Now, it’s time for a look at Lowry’s professional life, including hints about her next book!
Emily Brown: So you wrote for magazines after you went back and got your degree. And you interviewed a painter with a vivid sense of color, Carl Nelson, who then went blind, and is that his photo on the cover of The Giver?
Lois Lowry: Yes. I had spent time with him and photographed him for a magazine article back in 1977. I worked often as a photographer. I studied photography in graduate school and it was a good adjunct to writing, so sometimes I would keep a photograph or two, even though I would deliver them to the person who had commissioned them, and the photograph of him was one that I had kept a copy of. It was years later that The Giver was about to be published and we used that on the cover and he, by then, was long dead, and it was his niece who told me he had been blind.
EB: I didn’t realize that you were a photographer. Do you ever use photos to help you with your writing?
LL: In my very first book, A Summer to Die, the young girl who is the protagonist is 13, and in the book, she is an amateur photographer and her father helps her set up a dark room. And I have another book called The Silent Boy which is entirely framed around photographs. Not photographs that I’ve taken, but I used old photographs from the early 1900s and wrote the story around those.
EB: Has anyone ever approached you about movie rights for your books? I’m thinking especially of The Giver.
LL: The Giver is in Hollywood now. So is Number the Stars. And [Sean] Astin, the actor who is in Lord of the Rings, is also the producer. He’s working on Number the Stars. It’s been a long haul with The Giver and so it may be a long time before it’s made. They had trouble getting the right screen play.
EB: I wondered if one of your books stood out as the most difficult to write.
LL: Hmmmm. I don’t think so.
EB: Does the writing get easier over time?
LL: Nope.
EB: I had bad feeling that’s what you were going to say. Does your strategy change or have you had the same way of writing since you started in terms of times and places when you like to write?
LL: Well, I have an office in my house. I have two houses. You’re talking to me in Massachusetts, but I also have an old farm house in Maine. And in both places I have a room which is exclusively mine. I’m going up to Maine this week on Thursday simply because when I’m here, I’m distracted by so many different things. I mean, here I am talking to you on the phone, yesterday I had lunch with the writer Alice Hoffman who lives in Cambridge, and tomorrow, I’m going to speak to kids. So there’s always something.
And when I go to Maine, there’s nothing. The phone never rings and nobody knows I’m there, and that’s when I really get uninterrupted work done.
EB: Your farmhouse in Maine, is it an old one?
LL: Built in 1768.
EB: Does it require a lot of work?
LL: We did a lot of renovations, but it’s also a lot of maintenance. Just this winter, in January, we had to have a new well drilled 320 feet down.
EB: Does it actually have a barn that goes with the farm house?
LL: Oh yeah, it has an enormous barn.
EB: What do you do with your barn?
LL: The barn is empty, but the grandchildren love to play in the barn and one time we had a 50th anniversary party for friends and we decorated the inside of the barn and had the party in there.
EB: I know writers can never say too much about what they’re working on now, but I think you’re working on a book called Crow Call, is that right?
LL: That book is finished.
EB: And what you can tell us about it?
LL: That’s actually a picture book—I’ve not done picture books before—it’s a story that was published many years ago in a magazine and it was a story for adults, but it was seen through the eyes of a child.
It’s autobiographical, about the time when my father came home at the end of World War II and he was a stranger to me. I was 9-years-old in the story, and in the first paragraph, there’s the line, “I sat in the car next to the stranger who was my father.” So the child desperately wants to love this person who she knows is her father, but she’s scared of him, and probably he is of her. So it’s the story of two people coming together with some difficulty.
EB: Can you tell us who the illustrator is?
LL: I’m not sure I pronounce his name correctly, but it’s Bagram Ibatoulline.
EB: Oh, how beautiful. I think there’s something old fashioned or fairy-tale-like about his illustrations. I think you worked closely with the illustrator for Gooney Bird Greene, too, and I wondered if that’s typical or if that was a unique experience.
LL: The woman who did those drawings for the Gooney Bird Greene book is a close friend of mine. When I gave that first Gooney Bird manuscript to my editor, who is a man who has since retired, he said he was going to have trouble finding an illustrator for it, and so I just asked my friend to do some drawings and she’s done the other books about Gooney Bird as well.
EB: When you saw the first drawing of Gooney Bird Greene, how did it strike you?
LL: Oh, I liked it—the first illustration in that book, where the child appears in her classroom wearing pajamas and cowboy boots.
EB: I remember that picture, too. Have you had any fan mail for your latest Gooney Bird Greene book?
LL: It’s too soon. The book comes out this week.
EB: Oh, I didn’t realize! In general, what kind of letters have you received from kids who read Gooney Bird?
LL: Kids are younger who read those, second or third grade classrooms, and often I’ll hear from a whole class, usually with photographs, that they’ve had a Gooney Bird Greene day and they can all wear outrageous clothing. Sometimes the teachers do, too.
EB: There’s a lot of talk right now about the publishing industry and it was a bad Christmas for bookstores. I wondered, does that affect you?
LL: Sure it does. Everybody’s very concerned about it. I think people who will be most severely affected are either brand new authors or people who have written one or two books that have not been best-sellers, because publishers are not going to take risks any more. They’ll continue to publish Stephen King and John Grisham and maybe me, but they’re all in financial trouble. But, you know, things will get better and books won’t go away.
If you can’t get enough Lois Lowry, you can check out her blog, and (even better!) you can come hear her keynote speech at the RIEMA conference this Friday, April 24th. Thanks to Lois Lowry and her publicist (and Zach!) for making this interview possible–it was such a pleasure.
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