Do you mind if I begin at the end?  I was driving away from Sophie’s Coffee, where I had just had a lovely conversation with YA author Padma Venkatraman, when I realized my first question had revealed my own bias about her new book, Climbing the Stairs.

Don’t worry, dear reader, I loved the book.  It gives you a glimpse of India’s campaign for independence through the eyes of a young woman, Vidya, who is fighting for her own independence—for the chance to finish her education rather than getting married.   A stunning act of violence forces Vidya to move to her grandfather’s house, where strict hierarchies are preserved between the men and the women—to the point where women are not even allowed upstairs.  And upstairs is where the library is.  (Are you beginning to see where the title comes from?)  Naturally, I sympathized with Vidya’s struggle for permission to use the library.   But I had some doubts about it, as you can see by the way I began our interview.

Emily Brown: When I’m reading historical fiction with young, strong female characters, I’m torn because part of me wants them to prevail and be able to make choices and have power, and the other part of me feels like, is that realistic?  In the past, would women have had those choices? Did you struggle with that at all?

Padma Venkatraman: It was not an issue at all because my mother is essentially Vidya.  It’s not exactly her life story, but my mother actually lived in that sort of horrible environment in which she was not allowed to go upstairs to the library, but she fought for it and she’s now a lawyer in India at the age of 70-something, so it tells you a lot about the person she was and the struggle she had to go through.

I think to me, strong women have always prevailed in history.  And maybe not many, maybe only the very, very, very strong, but they have.  I’ve done a lot of research on women in science and mathematics.  Often very few of them actually succeed, but many of them, without a formal education, still have managed to do incredible things that we don’t recognize and we don’t know of today, because history is written by Western white men who erase [what women and minorities have done].  People say the victors write history; I think the victors erase history.

So there you have it.  Whether it was because the book was set in the past or because it was set in India (Where does my idea of India come from anyway?  Bollywood knockoffs?), I thought its portrayal of an empowered young woman was unrealistic.  But the book is based on family history and a personal experience of Indian and Hindu culture.

A number of the agents that Padma queried when she’d written Climbing the Stairs were skeptical about its marketability, and Padma says she’s observed a tendency in people to dismiss the book as “yet another book about a girl growing up in India and having a hard time.”

But this isn’t a Cinderella story that pits an angelic heroine against an evil environment.  It’s a tale in which each character has good and bad traits, and each culture has good and bad sides.

One of the “good sides” of India is the influence of Hindu philosophy. As a reader, you can’t help but notice the way religious holidays mark the passage of time and evolution of the main character.

PV: Just today I was asked, did I weave that theme in consciously?  I didn’t, and it came out in my book anyway, and now I know that, and I really want to make sure that it is not done in a heavy-handed way … because my culture is so misunderstood for its religion.  People think that Hinduism, thanks to Indiana Jones, is a culture where we eat children.  And this is the culture where we worship the Buddha, who talked about peace and love no less than Jesus Christ or anybody else, and we try to be vegetarian, for goodness sake!

Padma says that for her the most important issue in the book is the nonviolence/violence dichotomy.  The book takes place at a time when two great conflicts were going on: the Allied powers’ obviously violent war against the Axis, and India’s nonviolent campaign for independence from the UK.

The convergence of these two historical events forces the characters to ask themselves, is violence ever necessary?  Padma started the book when she was asking herself the same question–she had to, because she was considering becoming an American citizen at a time with the US was going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

PV: One very strong feeling that I have is that every human being is good and bad.  To me, the most important theme in Climbing the Stairs is peace and nonviolence in the sense that I think everybody has peace inside themselves.  I think everyone has violence.

If you look at the book, you have Mahatma Gandhi and Hitler, both who lived at the same time.  You know which one is good and which one is bad.

One step below that, you see the British, who were doing something very correct, who were fighting on the correct side in World War II, and yet, on the other hand were doing horrendous things—which don’t really come out in Climbing the Stairs completely—horrible, nasty things to the Indians, which they don’t really accept and the world doesn’t really know of.

Go one step down to India.  You look at India and you see this fantastic nation doing this marvelous, marvelous thing, to have the courage to say we are going to fight nonviolently for our independence.  And yet within Indian society, you have caste, which is a very violent custom.

You go one step down and say, alright they have caste.  What about the highest caste?  Is everybody happy there?  No.  Within the highest caste, which is supposed to be dedicated to peace, you have an extreme amount of violence of the men against the women.

And what happens when you take the women?  Are they happy?  Are they peaceful?  Are they nonviolent to each other?  No.

What is the next level down?  The next level is the self.  And if you go down to the individual, I wanted every individual in the book to have the violence, the peace, both.  The nice side and the not nice side.

And at this point, Pamda quizzed me on one of the characters.  No joke.  For those of you who haven’t read the book yet, I won’t give you my answer (it included a lot of “ummmmmm” and other incomplete sentences), but let me just say that she has definitely thought this through.

***

If you look “Venkatramen, Padma” up in the OSL catalog, you’ll only find one book: Climbing the Stairs. It’s not actually the first book Padma has written.  While working as an Oceanographer (that’s right—she has a phD in Marine Science), she wrote a number of stories and columns that teach science through stories, and published them under the name T.V. Padma.

However, most writers and reviewers are treating Climbing the Stairs as her first book.  I asked her how she felt about that.  She said that her previous projects felt more like play, but writing a novel—now that’s another thing entirely.

PV: For a very long time writing was like a hobby, an escape from science … a way to keep in touch with India and to reach out to the people of my new country … This is the first time I took myself seriously as a writer.  After you make the big sacrifice, the humongous commitment [necessary to write a novel], you see yourself in a different way.  Before I said I was a scientist and writer, then a writer and a scientist.  Now I say I am a writer.

So before she was a full-time writer, Padma was an oceanographer.  But before she was an oceanographer, she was a reader.  In fact, she told me about a particularly vivid reading memory from her childhood.  It happened when one of her Aunts came to visit, bringing gifts for her and her cousin.

PV: So this aunt comes down, and she gives this other cousin of mine this huge box, and she gives me this tiny, tiny package, and acts as though she’s giving me something wonderful.  Now in America, everybody opens their presents at once, but in India you don’t do that, because it is considered very bad manners to show interest in your present and not in the person who gave it to you, so you say thank you and then go and open it somewhere else.  So we said thank you and went to the other room and tore them open, and she had this fantastic game!  And I had a book.

And I open the book, and it doesn’t even have any pictures.  And I remember feeling so upset and then thinking that I had to pretend at least that I was interested and excited.  So I went on the veranda and I sat down and I opened that book, and I thought I was going to just pretend to read it.

I remember that moment so well, I remember the place, I remember the way the light was forming, I remember everything, because I was half way down that first page when I made the best discovery of my life, which was that there were pictures in my head far, far—with all due respect to all the Caldecott winners—far better than anything in any book.

I’m really looking forward to hearing Padma speak on Oct. 8.  She’s like those teachers in the movies who make everything interesting by being interested in everything.  You can imagine her pointing to anything in the room–a wooden chair, a folded napkin, an unusual shadow–and using it as an example for something more complex.  She sees the world in layers.

She’s also one of those talkers whose tangents are just as interesting as her main points.  For example:

PV: I hate [that phrase] “black or white.”  It’s full of racist implications.  In my mother tongue you would never say black or white for good or bad.  For us, actually, white is the color of mourning, so when a woman is pregnant, she gets a black and gold-embroidered sari because it’s a celebration, and when she’s widowed, the color of mourning is white.  But in the language itself, there’s no connotations [of good or bad] associated with either the color black or the color white.

Speaking of tangents, did I mention that Padma was considering becoming an American citizen?  Do you know what helped her make up her mind?  Libraries.  But not NPR.  Let her explain:

PV: You know I hate NPR?  Because I wrote them a “This I Believe” about public libraries, but it was too political, I guess, becuase they never aired it!  I tell every librarian, “You know what?  I wrote a piece about public libraries and I said that I became a citizen because of public libraries and I told them why and they didn’t put it on because they either thought I was being flippant or too political.”

EB: Well, that’s unfortunate, but I’ll be happy to include that in our interview.  We’ll get the word out to some people, that you love libraries!

To read more about Climbing the Stairs, visit the website, which includes teaching tips and topics for further study.  Padma Venkatraman will speak at RIEMA’s annual dinner on October 8, 2009, at Chelo’s Banquet Room in Warwick.

But not only that! Circulation: The RIEMA Blog is extremely lucky to be able to make its long overdue return to the blogosphere with our first ever featured author interview. Introducing: Mark Peter Hughes himself! And also introducing Emily Brown, a RIEMA Board Member-at-Large and librarian at the Mount Pleasant branch of Providence Public Library. Emily will be semi-regularly conducting interviews of various notable, important, eye-catching, and just plain fun folks who make us librarians – and the readers we serve – sit up and take notice.

We thank Mark Peter Hughes for his time, enthusiasm, and use of images. Best of all, if you attend the RIEMA Annual Dinner on Thursday, October 23 at Chelo’s in Warwick, RI, you’ll get to meet Mark and hear him speak! Please do join us – the cost is $30.00, and you can register by printing out and mailing in the linked registration form postmarked by Friday, October 10. The form is available here: flyer_2008

Without further ado, here is our very first Emily’s Post: The Mark Peter Hughes Interview. Enjoy, and please don’t forget to drop us a line in the comments.

Emily Brown: I know that last summer you went on a road trip to promote Lemonade Mouth, and I was sort of hoping for some anecdotes from that.  Did you see any particularly strange animals or have any particularly bad accidents?

Mark Peter Hughes: Well, we had our car wrapped with the cover of Lemonade Mouth.  And in fact, I thought the car was going to die between now and then, but it’s still kicking—

EB: So you still drive around with a car that says “Lemonade Mouth” on it?

MPH: Yes, I still get waves and honks.  It’s actually quite funny.  Let’s see, some anecdotes.  There are just so many.  We were gone for 8 weeks.  We did 13,000 miles and about 60 bookstores, and I went with my family of 3 small kids and my wife.  So it was a full summer-long adventure.  Well, I remember when we were in San Francisco, the cabs didn’t look that different from our yellow minivan, so we kept getting hailed.

EB: It seemed like you visited a lot of independent bookstores.  I was almost surprised when I was looking at your blog that there still are so many independent bookstores.  Any particularly memorable ones?

MPH: They all have their own personalities.  There was the Wild Rumpus in St. Paul—I hope I’m not getting this wrong—maybe that was the one in Minneapolis.  Anyway, the Wild Rumpus was full of animals, these exotic animals, everywhere.  It was like a menagerie, like a zoo, and my kids loved it.

EB: Actual animals or stuffed animals?

MPH: No, actual animals.  I couldn’t even tell you some of the animals that they had.  One guy walked around with this —it was sort of like a little mouse, but it wasn’t, it was like a weeble or something and he had it in his pocket.  They were just all over the place.  They had big cages for animals there.

EB: That’s memorable.

MPH: It was one of many memorable stops.

EB: I also want to know about this alternative rock band you were in.

MPH: You’re talking about Exhibit A.  When I was in my 20s, I was in a band called Exhibit A and we were the band that opened up for the band that you actually came to see.  I did it for 3 years and we played everywhere there was to play in the Boston area.

EB: What instrument did you play?

MPH: I played mostly the guitar, but we were a weird band and I would also play the violin, although I’ve never taken a lesson and I’d just play it very badly.  And we’d write a song around that: “I don’t ever want to play second fiddle in the orchestra of love.”  It was a weird and fun band, kind of like Lemonade Mouth.

EB: So what kind of music do you listen to now and has it changed since you were in your twenties—or even younger?

MPH: Well, there was a period recently in which I heard a lot of Barney, a lot of Wiggles and Raffi.  And I recently rediscovered the Sugar Cubes—I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them?

EB: I haven’t.

MPH: Oh, you’ve got to go download an mp3 or something of Motorcrash or Eat the Menu.  They’re from Iceland and from ’88 to ’92, they were actually quite huge.  They were international superstars.  They were the biggest thing out of Iceland.  They were kind of like the B-52s.  But Icelandic. [Ed. note: Sounds like Mark is talking about singer Bjork's former band before she started her solo career.]

EB: Thanks for the tip.  To kind of switch from music back to writing, you strike me as someone who is interested in different forms.  You’ve used haiku, diary entries, oral history.  Do you think about how your writing’s going to look on the page?

MPH: I absolutely think about how it’s going to look on the page.  It’s almost like a resume.  You have to look at the white space on the page.  It helps tell the story.  Sometimes you want a lot of words all together on the page.  It helps set a certain mood or a tension.  Other times you want the invitation of white space for dialog and things like that.

EB: You mentioned dialog, and sometimes I read books for young adults and children, and the dialog doesn’t really ring true.  I would say that the way your characters spoke was really believable.  I’m wondering if that was something you put conscious thought into or if it was easy to develop teen characters who talk like real teenagers.

MPH: I work hard at it.  With this particular novel, where you have 5 different voices, I basically wrote it from beginning to ending, but when I went back to do the more extensive rewrites, I paid even more attention to voice.  So I would sit there and say, I’m going to rewrite all Stella’s parts.  I would put them all together and write in that voice.  And then I would group all of the Wen things and write in his voice, etc., to try to make it consistent.

EB: Was it a conscious choice to write for young adults, or is that just what came out when you sat down and began writing?

MPH: It was not at all a conscious choice.  I sat down to write a novel about a girl whose diary was on the Internet and the main character happened to be a 13-year-old girl, and I was a draft or two into it before someone pointed out to me, you know, you’re writing a young adult novel.  And it was like, whoa, you’re right.  I didn’t realize it.

EB: I have to preface this by saying that I always feel put on the spot when people ask me this, which they do all the time because I’m a librarian, but I am going to ask you: what are you reading right now or what have you read in the past year that you really liked?

MPH: I liked M.T. Andersons’ new one.

EB: Octavian Nothing?

MPH: Yeah.  It blew me away.  Have you read it?

EB: I thought it was stunning.

MPH: I think he’s terrific.  I have been reading some of the things my son has been reading, the Alex Rider adventures—Stormbreaker and others by Anthony Horowitz.  It’s interesting because he’s going for something very different from what M.T. Anderson is going for, and I think it’s just as valid.  The action-adventure is more up in the front.  It’s more plot-driven and less character driven.

EB: I feel like that’s part of this debate now, too, about what kind of books boys most like to read.

MPH: It’s something people have often mentioned to me.  Especially right after I Am the Wallpaper came out, I had a bunch of booksellers and librarians at conferences come over and tell me, “Next time, write a boy book, because we don’t have enough of them.”

EB: And did you take that to heart?

MPH: Well, I thought about it a lot.  I would hate to think that I’m choosing what I write based on girl, boy, or any particular market.  And in fact, Lemonade Mouth is a story from the perspective of three girls and two boys, so you could argue it’s both.

EB: So, winding down, it seems like you’ve done a lot of things that people talk about doing.  You’ve quit your job to write full time, you’ve had a book published.  Do you have any other goals you’re determined to accomplish?  Oh, and the cross-country road trip!  I forgot that on my list!  You’ve done many things on people’s life to-do lists.

MPH: I don’t know if I’m going to jump out of an airplane.  Sometimes I really want to do it and sometimes I just get terrified even thinking about it.  But right now I’m very happy to be where I am.  I just want to get what I’m currently writing written.  I want it to be done.  So I can go on to another and another and another.