Activist and author of more than 30 fiction and nonfiction books for children, many of them set in developing countries and centering young people suffering from the effects of war and poverty, Deborah Ellis is best known for her Breadwinner trilogy, about girls fighting to survive in war-torn Afghanistan. For her nonfiction work, she has interviewed Iraqi refugees in Children of War, American children of soldiers in Off to War, and Palestinian and Israeli children for Three Wishes. Her newest novel, The Outsmarters, though, takes place in a small town in Ontario, where 12-year-old Kate is being brought up by her indomitable (some might say downright nasty) grandmother, owner of the “largest junk business in the tri-county area,” after her mother, who has been substance-dependent since being prescribed oxytocin as a teenager, left her there. Ellis spoke with PW from her home in southern Ontario about telling the stories of kids who are let down by adults, empowering young readers through her books, and how she chooses the best genre for doing both.
What was the origin of The Outsmarters? Did you start with a character, or were you drawn to a particular issue?
I started the book quite some time ago, but I do remember that I was drawn to the question of what tools we have when the supports we need are no longer in place. Where can we go to find the knowledge and supports we need? If you’re a kid, you have very few resources. So where do you turn?
My whole career, as a writer and an activist, has been about what happens to kids when the adult world lets them down through our policies and our actions: on a large scale—wars, climate change—and on a smaller, personal, one: poverty, child abuse and covering up for the perpetrators of child abuse. If we are ever going to create a world without war, for example, we have to change our thinking. We have to stop seeing “others” as enemies or potential enemies, and realize once and for all that we’re all just trying to get through life as best we can. It would be helpful if people could no longer make money off weapons. The motivation for war might go away if nobody could profit from it.
The book has multi-layered aspects and many fully developed characters. What’s your process of constructing a complex novel like this one, and, in particular, how did the main character of Kate come into being?
I don’t make a lot of notes; I just start writing—and I rewrite a lot! I write the whole book a few times until I think it’s worth my editor Shelley Tanaka’s time. I send it to Shelley when I think it’s great and she says, “Nah, do it again.” We probably went back and forth with the entire manuscript three or four times.
As to Kate, she emerged pretty full-grown! I knew from the start that she was an angry kid and had been on some difficult journeys. She is treated very badly at the start of the book and something in her character knows that this is wrong, and that she deserves better. She has the gumption to go after that—to be treated better. As I worked on the book, she became deeper and more complex.
In fact, Kate and her grandmother were both there at the start—though my only vision of the grandmother was seeing her in a junkyard. I soon understood that Kate and her grandmother are locked in anger and sorrow about the same woman—Kate’s mother—who is an unreachable person because of her addiction.
I know a lot of kids struggling with their parents’ addictions, or kids with parents in prison—we don’t hear a lot about those kids, but that’s our problem as a society. Writing about these kids helps bring their stories into the light. Young readers might start thinking about the whole picture. They might start seeing more of the complexities, the fallout from decisions, and the intended or unintended consequences that might make the overall problem worse instead of better. Maybe they’ll even come up with creative solutions that adults have not thought of yet. Often, though, there are no solutions, no happy endings; these kids just have to build their lives somehow.
You’ve written both fiction and nonfiction. How do you decide which genre is best for exploring a specific subject?
It depends partly on what is possible—if it’s possible for me to go somewhere and to interview children, for example, for a nonfiction book. And then I consider whether it would be a useful endeavor: would the book get published? I don’t want to waste people’s time interviewing them if that doesn’t seem like a strong possibility. I also think about whether I’ll be able to give young readers a clear enough sense of what’s going on in a situation through the interviews and other material in the book. For example, I wrote a book called My Story Starts Here, about young people in the criminal justice system. The interviews showed a clear line between parental addictions and other issues that led to behavior on the part of the young people that led them to be incarcerated. But there are lots of kids affected by their parents’ addictions who are not in the criminal justice system and they are hard to get to. You can’t interview them without parental permission.
Sometimes, though, I hear a character speaking to me from the start—then it seems clearer that I’m going to write a novel. Sometimes we can understand things through stories that we can’t through nonfiction.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
I hope readers will realize that even if it feels like your life is a train wreck, it doesn’t have to stay that way, and that you have more power than the people around you are telling you that you have. I especially want them to understand that you get to decide who you are and what your life is about. And finally, I want them to understand that sometimes adults are idiots.
The Outsmarters by Deborah Ellis. Groundwood, $18.99 Aug. 6 ISBN 978-1-77306-857-2
