Kate McMullan: On the Trail of an Ancestor
One of Kate McMullan's most vivid childhood memories is that of listening to stories about a distant relative by the name of George "Pegleg" Shannon, an Ohio native who lost his leg after being shot while escorting a Native American chief to meet with President Thomas Jefferson in Washington. But it was an earlier event in Shannon's life that intrigued McMullan: Shannon was a member of the Corps of Discovery, which accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their historic 1804 journey from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean.
Not surprisingly, veteran author McMullan's longtime interest in this intrepid fellow (the older brother of her great-great-great-grandfather) has led her to pen a book about this experience, a novel written in her relative's voice. Published in August under HarperCollins's Joanna Cotler imprint, My Travels with Capts. Lewis and Clark, by George Shannon features art by Adrienne Yorinks. "For years, every time I came across a book about the Lewis and Clark expedition, I'd open it and look in the index for George Shannon's name," McMullan recalled. "Passages about him more often than not referred to the fact that he had become lost, or had tipped his canoe—he seemed to mess up at every possible opportunity. I liked him for this and wanted to know more about him. And it also occurred to me that kids would easily relate to his mishaps."
Though McMullan believes that Shannon, one of the few members of the Corps who had an education, was a likely candidate to have kept a journal, there is no evidence that he did. So the author sought out alternative sources of information and found a gold mine in New York University's library. "At the time, I was teaching there and had access to the library's extensive section of books, journals and maps—some of which Clark drew by hand—relating to the expedition," she explained. "With my faculty privileges, I could keep a book out until someone requested it. Well, it seems as though I was the only one in New York City researching this topic, since I had some books out for a full five years."
Though she found the journals riveting, McMullan discovered they didn't tell what she termed "the personal stories—there was no sense of gossip. I wanted to bring all of the people to life, so I combed the books for every fact I could find about each member of the Corps and fleshed out the rest as accurately as possible. As I wrote, I felt as though I'd somehow channeled George and that he was actually doing the writing. The journey just took over."
In the course of the research, McMullan and Yorinks embarked on a journey of their own—to the Montana headquarters of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation. "We felt that we had to stand in the place where the Corps members had stood and we followed their trail for a while," she stated. "And we timed our visit to coincide with a reenactment in which people assume the roles of members of the expedition. Talking to the person playing Shannon, I realized I knew more than he did, but still I asked him many questions. I think he thought I was stalking him."
These days McMullan is stalking backhoe drivers as she does field research for a book about that machine. Obviously immersed in yet another realm, she spoke enthusiastically about having recently watched a backhoe remove a tree stump. "I love researching books," she stated with enthusiasm. "It's so much fun to enter worlds that you know nothing about." —Sally Lodge
Allan Wolf: The Lewis and Clark Expedition in 14 Voices
A first novel published by Candlewick this September also tracks the travels of Lewis and Clark, this one weaving together the first-person accounts of 14 members of the Corps of Discovery. Author Allan Wolf explained that New Found Land: Lewis and Clark's Voyage of Discovery grew out of a conversation he had with a fellow member of Poetry Alive!, a national touring company that performs poems as theatre in schools. "He's an armchair historian and mentioned that Lewis had committed suicide after returning from the expedition," Wolf commented. "That was the seed that planted my interest in this subject. I was curious to know what would make a man who had traveled to the Pacific and back and become a national hero take his own life. I decided I had to get to know this character."
Launching his research, Wolf first turned to Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, which he described as "the starting point for anyone who has a passion for Lewis and Clark." He then immersed himself in historical accounts of the explorers' journey, "going through layers and layers of books, reaching increasingly esoteric layers."
His decision to write his book as a work of fiction in poetic form and using various voices came quite easily, he said. "I'm not a historian and don't pretend to be. There are so many good history books written about Lewis and Clark. What I was most interested in are the personal aspects that you don't find in the history books. By taking a real person and creating a character out of that person, I was able to pick and choose from reality and follow my own agenda. I have been writing verse since I was a kid, often in first-person narrative, so I really didn't know any other way of doing this novel. And I'm also an actor, so the idea of multiple voices was a kind of theatrical thing for me. By creating the character's monologues I was able to have each of them speak their own minds and give their own descriptions of events and of other characters, leaving the reader to do the linking up."
During the four years that Wolf researched and wrote his novel, he discovered that some of the Corps members' voices came more easily to him than others. "Ironically, the individuals who have had the most material written about them tended to be the most difficult characters for me to find," he noted. "In fact for a while, I couldn't quite find the difference between Lewis and Clark." But their voices did come clear for Wolf, as did those of characters as diverse as Sacagawea, Clark's African-American slave, York, and Lewis's Newfoundland dog. "For four years, I kept having conversations with them all, whether I was driving in my car or cooking breakfast," Wolf said. "Their voices were always with me."
And now that those voices have subsided, the author has turned his attention to his two next book projects: Zane's Trace, a historical novel about the first road ever cut through the Ohio wilderness, which Candlewick will publish; and a young adult book about writing poetry, to be released by Sterling's Lark Books. "I've found that the best way to learn about anything is to write a book about it," said Wolf. "So much of the research involved doesn't end up on the page. It stays in your head and informs everything you do." —Sally Lodge
Andrea Warren: A Vietnamese Child's Journey
On the eve of Saigon's fall to the North Vietnamese in 1975, Long, an eight-year-old boy living in a Saigon orphanage, was flown out of that city as part of Operation Babylift, which brought 2,300 Vietnamese orphans to the U.S. to be placed in adoptive homes. In Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy (FSG/Kroupa, Sept.), Andrea Warren recounts Long's early years in his native land and his subsequent adaptation to American life after being adopted—and renamed Matt—by the Steiner family of Ohio.
This is the second book (after Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps) that Warren has written about children and war, a subject she referred to as "a critical topic and one that is highly underserved. When youngsters read about war, they are likely to read soldiers' stories. There is not nearly enough written for children that focuses on kids and what war means to them."
The author's personal life had an obvious impact on her decision to profile the life of a child born in war-ravaged Vietnam: her own daughter, now 30, was evacuated from Saigon on the very same day Matt was, also through Operation Babylift. "I have wanted to write about this since 1975," Warren explained. "But since my daughter was an infant at the time, she had no memory of her life in Vietnam. Without memories from her, I decided to write this story from another angle. I began interviewing some of the principals who had been a key part of the Babylift effort, primarily Americans who had worked in orphanages over there."
Warren traveled to Vietnam in 1996 with her daughter, 13 other Vietnam adoptees and their families and some former volunteers in Vietnam orphanages. "Being in Vietnam helped me to understand the country in a million ways," she recalled. "It was very important to my research to have made this trip."
After realizing that the book she wanted to write was not going to work "without a child at its center," Warren set out to find a person who was old enough at the time of the evacuation to remember the experience. With the help of the agency through which Matt was adopted, she was able to locate this man, now a physician with two children of his own. "My initial concerns were about his access to his memory and about what kind of person he was," she said. "Some people turn very bitter from their experiences and I didn't want to work on a book with someone with a negative attitude. Talking with him on the phone, I realized immediately that Matt was an incredibly sweet and generous man. We both made a commitment to do the book."
Since Matt's busy schedule didn't allow for personal visits, Warren interviewed him exclusively by telephone, which she found a successful method of communicating. "He was so very verbal on the phone that we didn't have to have that face-to-face," she reported. "I'd seen tapes of him and knew what he looked like, knew his gestures. We talked late into the night and on weekends, communicated by e-mail and sent the manuscript back and forth."
Next on the author's agenda is another book about the effects of war on children—this time, the Civil War. "I've been interested in this idea since I studied the Civil War as a student," she explained. "Given the amount of time it takes to write a book, one has to be very committed to an idea. I expect that this will be the last book I write on children and war. Hopefully, after this, I can leave that topic behind me." —Sally Lodge
Don Brown: Bringing Historical Figures to Life
The creator of numerous picture-book biographies of historical figures, Don Brown explained how he found his niche. "I have always loved to read history and have a particular bent for forgotten or unusual history," he said. "I think that who history forgets and who history remembers is a rather serendipitous thing." And, he discovered, there are many people in the former category who should be better known than they are. This belief, coupled with his quest to find books to read to his daughters which, in his words, "focused on real women who did brave and heroic things and would send great messages to them," led him to this publishing path: "I realize this is a hackneyed tale, but because I didn't find many books that fit this description, I decided to write one."
The resulting biography was Ruth Law Thrills a Nation, the story of the woman who set a record flying solo from Chicago to New York. Brown subsequently published biographies of such women as paleontologist Mary Anning, British explorer Mary Kingsley and pioneer and suffragist Anna Howard Shaw.
Yet Brown has also written books about Neil Armstrong and Mark Twain—and this season he spotlights another familiar figure in Odd Boy Out: Young Albert Einstein (Houghton, Aug.). Having read a number of books about Einstein (memorably Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain by Michael Paterniti), Brown recalled that "the thought of doing a kids' book about Einstein was percolating in the back of my mind. And then I read David Bodanis's E=mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, which collected stories of scientists over the years. The book profiles a French woman mathematician living around the time of the French Revolution and I thought about doing a book about her, but there wasn't enough information about her. So then, in what was probably my 'eureka!' moment, I thought, 'Why not do a book on Einstein?' "
He subsequently read "every Einstein biography I could find, looking for common threads." As is his usual research modus operandi, he did not consult original sources. "Since the text of picture-book biographies are only 1,200 words, I can't examine the characters with the same depth and breadth as do classical biographies," he said.
For his second title this season, Kid Blink Beats the World (Roaring Brook, Sept.), Brown turned his attention to a younger historical figure. In the summer of 1899, Kid Blink and his fellow New York City "newsies" went on strike to protest the decision of the owners of The Journal and The World to charge newsboys and newsgirls an extra penny per paper. Brown was drawn to this topic because "there is something about the turn of the last century [in New York City] that fascinates me. It was at that time the most densely populated place on the planet and was a weird political, sociological and economic stew."
His research tools for this book included the city's two newspapers—the New York Times and New York Tribune—that did not hike the price of their papers and, Brown stated, "took great pleasure in reporting on the troubles of their rival papers. Researching this topic also gave me an excuse to read relatively obscure novels of the era that gave me a good sense of both the time and place. Sometimes fiction can give you a flavor that straight nonfiction cannot. Of course excellent nonfiction in narrative form, rather than today's data-driven nonfiction, will give that same feeling."
Brown is currently at work on a picture-book adaptation of a chapter from Beryl Markham's autobiography, West with the Night, entitled The Good Lion, which Houghton Mifflin will publish; and Bright Path, the story of Olympian athlete Jim Thorpe, due from Roaring Brook. —Sally Lodge
Nancy Farmer: Fantasy Rooted in Facts
Known primarily for her fantasy books infused with science-fiction, Nancy Farmer started The Sea of Trolls (Atheneum/Jackson, Sept), an epic Viking tale, "as a vacation from my last two books [The House of the Scorpion and A Girl Named Disaster], which were a little downbeat," she said. "I wanted a heroic saga." Farmer's husband planted the seed: he gave her a book called Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway by Snorri Sturluson, which was written around 1200 A.D. Within three years, she began writing The Sea of Trolls. "That's often how it happens for me; an idea will just ferment in the background."
Even though the events of Trolls unfold during the days that Vikings sailed the seas, the author said that her process of researching this book was not really different from her other, futuristic novels. "I knew less about [the setting of Trolls] than I did about the other books. I knew about Scorpion because I grew up [in Arizona] and I lived in Africa [where several of her other books take place]," the author said. "With this book, I needed to do a lot of research because I don't know that part of the world."
But for all of her novels, she researches the details. For instance, with Scorpion, in which the villainous El Patron (whose human clone narrates the book) is drug lord and ruler of a country called Opium, she grew an opium poppy to observe its various stages. For The Sea of Trolls, Farmer said, "I inched my way through the book. Practically on page one, I describe Jack waking up in his house, and I needed to research how his house would have been constructed. Would there have been a privy? What shoes would he have worn?"
In her opening chapter, readers discover that Anglo-Saxons like Jack's family used corner posts to construct their homes. They would cut down a tree, and thrust it into the ground, root side up. "Otherwise the damp could come up through the roots and would rot," Farmer said. Another such detail emerged in that same chapter when Jack's mother heats cider. "I discovered they didn't have the kind of pot you could put on the stove; they'd heat up a poker and plunge it into the cider and heat it that way."
Readers of The Sea of Trolls know that such facts often translate into just a sentence or two per chapter, but these details build an atmosphere so authentic that readers feel steeped in the Anglo-Saxon culture. By the time Olaf One-Brow and his Viking crew assault the shore and carry off Jack and his sister for a high-seas adventure, the audience is ready to take flight into the intricate mythos of the Norsemen.
Those chapters about the legendary Norsemen, too, were rooted in factual research. Through a British bookseller, Farmer discovered a society that devotes itself to writing about Anglo-Saxon and Viking life, and she found books on what they ate, how they built their boats, and their war strategy. "They weren't very good navigators," she revealed. "In fact, if you look at the statistics, quite a few ships sank." One reason, she asserted, may be due to the navigational device they used, a kind of feldspar or Iceland spar. "In the book it became [Olaf One-Brow's] sun stone," she said. "It's something you held up and it told you the direction of the sun when there was only a little patch of blue."
She also discovered that some Danish scientists attributed the behavior of the Viking berserkers to their consumption of bog myrtle. They found that the berserkers went crazy after drinking it, resulting in their violent pillages. Once again, Farmer's husband was a great help: he tracked down a source for bog myrtle on the Internet and gave it to his wife for her birthday. The author got as far as brewing up a serving, smelling it and even tasting it, but did not actually drink it. "I chickened out," she confessed. "I still have one bag left and may yet give it a try."
Readers may find themselves urging her on, in hopes that a good mug of bog myrtle might bring on more Viking tales. —Jennifer M. Brown
Phillip Hoose: Championing a Cause
"I've always wanted to instill passion in young people for the work that I do, and the way to do that is by telling a good story," said Phillip Hoose, a conservation planner for the Nature Conservancy. Hoose wanted to write a story "with a charismatic species" at its center, and he found one in Campephilus principalis, the Ivory-billed woodpecker, which once thrived in the American South. As enthusiastic collectors hunted this large, astonishing bird and loggers depleted its forests, the Ivory-bill vanished. Hoose's The Race to Save the Lord God Bird (FSG/Kroupa, Aug.) examines the history of the Ivory-billed bird (which got its nickname when spectators cried, "Lord God, what a bird!") over the last two centuries.
Hoose began collecting Ivory-bill lore after reading that scientists Giraldo Alayón and Aimé Posada had spotted the bird in northeast Cuba in 1987. Intrigued, he read more about the Ivory-bill in Chris Cokinos's Hope Is the Thing with Feathers. He also felt energized by a Louisiana hunter's unconfirmed claim to have seen a mated pair in 1999. "The revived interest triggered me," Hoose said.
Hoose decided to speak with firsthand witnesses of the Cuban sighting. He used his Nature Conservancy contacts to locate experts from that expedition. "I had an e-mail correspondence with [spider and bird specialist] Alayón—he lives in a suburb of Havana. After I got a book contract I began to arrange for trips to Cuba," he said, and he visited the country three times.
Although Hoose could not get a permit to explore the mountain habitat where the bird had been glimpsed, while in Cuba he explored Ivory-bill history through conventional research and lucky encounters. "One night, I had gone to hear some music in Santiago," he recalled. "I saw a storefront illuminated, and two men leaning on the door sized me up for a tourist." Hoose mentioned his project, "and one said, 'Wait here a minute.' He came back with a collection of stamps issued after the Revolution. There was a stamp from 1961 with a picture of the Ivory-billed woodpecker—Carpintero real, as it's called in Cuba—a very rare stamp. I bought the entire collection for $30."
Making surprise connections, Hoose said, is among the pleasures of research: "You go down one path and find yourself headed down another. Just a sentence or a scrap of conversation opens whole new worlds." For instance, while reading an account by painter Don Eckelberry, who sketched the last known U.S. Ivory-bill, Hoose learned that two brothers had watched Eckelberry while he drew. "I called his widow, Virginia Eckelberry, and she gave me the telephone numbers of Billy and Bob Fought," he said. "They led me to Gene Laird, who was probably the last person to see the bird."
The Race to Save the Lord God Bird is filled with closely observed details and peopled with outsized personalities. In particular, Hoose focuses on ornithologist James Tanner, who wrote the definitive study of the Ivory-billed woodpecker. Hoose researched a now-legendary 1935 trip by Tanner and three other Cornell University scientists to Louisiana's Tensas swamp, where a few surviving Ivory-bills were photographed and recorded. Hoose even tracked down Tanner's widow for information on her husband's efforts. "I fell in love with Tanner the way I fell in love with the bird; he had great candor, optimism and vigor," he said. "I'm sorry I never had a chance to meet him."
Hoose's previous book, We Were There, Too! Young People in U.S. History, nominated for the 2001 National Book Award, took him five and a half years to research. But he spent most of his time on the phone and in libraries and museums. By comparison, The Race"involved a lot of legwork, just going places," he said. His next book will be an adaptation of his short story "The Perfect Day," which describes the 1956 World Series game in which his cousin, Don Larsen, pitched a no-hitter for the Yankees. But this doesn't mean he's through with environmental topics (covered in other books such as Hey, Little Ant and Building an Ark): "I've written about this so much I can't imagine not doing it again," he said.
After all the travel, research and writing, Hoose remains smitten with his subject. "The Ivory-bill is beautiful, and there's something so mysterious about it," he said. "It flits in and out of our consciousness and our geography as well. In a way it's almost a martyred bird," he added, noting that conservation efforts grew stronger as a result of publicity on its plight. "I want to show my readers that extinction is both tragic and preventable, and I want to help readers love that bird and mourn its loss." —Nathalie op de Beeck
