Book Blog Tour: Kerry Madden

I'm happy today to present a brief interview with Kerry Madden, the author of the brand new book Louisiana's Song. Louisiana's Song is the sequel to Gentle's Holler, which got starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Children's Literature Award in 2006.

I first met Kerry almost exactly a year ago in my hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. We were both in town to sign and sell books at the Knoxville Festival of Reading on the former site of the 1982 World's Fair. She was gracious enough to join me and Wendi for a late lunch at The Sunspot, where we learned her connection to Knoxville: Kerry first came to our fair city as a teenager when her father was hired as a coach at the University of Tennessee under then Head Coach Johnny Majors, whose tumultuous tenure with the Vols I remember dominating the conversation at every Gratz family gathering for more than two decades. Kerry later attended the University of Tennessee, as did I, and like me still finds herself drawn in to the gravitational pull of East Tennessee even though she now lives in L.A. Given her connections to Tennessee football, I had to throw in a question about her first book, Offsides, even though she's moved on to even greater success with her "Maggie Valley Trilogy" . . .

GI: Give us the thirty-second blurb about your new book, Louisiana's Song, and its place in your Maggie Valley trilogy.

KM: Thirty seconds, Alan? I'm too long-winded with gaps, breaks, and unfinished sentences. . . but here goes: Louisiana's Song is a story of art, auditory hallucinations, music, and family. When Daddy comes home from the Rip Van Winkle Rest Home dramatically different than the daddy the children knew, the kids band together to bring him back to them through murals, flashcards, fairy hunts, and songs. Louisiana "Louise" is the hero despite her terrible shyness - and the story is set against the backdrop of Ghost Town in the Sky, Maggie Valley, and the turbulent history of 1963. (I bet that's longer than 30 seconds.)

GI: That's all right. We forgive you. But points will be deducted from your overall score. Now, did you know when you were writing Gentle's Holler that you wanted this to be a three-part story, or did that come later at the request of the publisher?

KM: No, I didn't know it would be a trilogy. I thought I would write a book from each kid's point of view, but Livy Two is the family storyteller and I'm so glad she is the voice of the first three books. (Thank you, wise editors!) Of course, I still have more Weems' stories to tell, but these three books felt right as a Smoky Mountain Trilogy of Maggie Valley stories.

GI: What is the larger story being told by this trilogy?

KM: I think the larger story is family and imagination and longing - I wanted a big messy family who loved art and music and yet had regular squabbles and longed for adventures.

GI: How do you balance telling a larger, three-part story with the need to make each book work as a stand-alone volume?

KM: Well, I picked three characters I wanted to focus on in each of the books. In Gentle's Holler, the character of Gentle is a huge part of the plot - her eyes - blindness - and the introduction of Uncle Hazard, the dog, who becomes her loyal friend and guide. In Louisiana's Song, I wanted to explore the life of a very tall girl and shy artist who finds her courage and her father, who is lost in his own recovery from the accident. And in Jesse's Mountain, we go back to the 1940s through Mama's diary, her love of birds, and we see the girl she was and how she came to have ten children. So even though Livy Two is our narrator and eavesdropper and plotter, I focused each book on one particular character in the Weems' family. Now I have to decide whether to write more Livy Two stories or write from the point of view of say, Gentle or Caroline or Cyrus or even Jitters - Jitters, though, does get her chance to shine in Jesse's Mountain.

GI: Okay, I can't resist, because I know your connection to UT football. Your first novel, Offsides, was well-reviewed when it came out more than ten years ago. Can you tell us where that story came from, and what happened with that novel?

KM: People have noted Offsides was a lot like The Great Santini, only from the girl's point of view with a football instead of a military backdrop. It was a New York Library Pick for the Teen Age in 1997. The story came from my own life growing up on the gridiron in the world college football, dressing in orange and white, blue and gold, purple and white - and considering myself a Cyclone, Wildcat, Demon Deacon, Volunteer - wherever my dad happened to be coaching. Offsides is the metaphor because Liz Donegal, my alter-ego, is perpetually "offsides" in the world of high-haired coaches wives, locker rooms, Catholic Schools, and constantly moving around from the North to the South to the Midwest - she is swept up in her father's search for the opportunity to win some football games!

Offsides also went through the Hollywood mill, optioned by Jim Henson Productions with Diane Keaton and Bill Robinson of Blue Relief attached to produce and direct. We had meetings in Hollywood for four years - I'm not kidding. It was tossed around as a feature film, a one hour pilot (LIFETIME for a minute), a half-hour sitcom - you name it. We had meetings at Working Title, Jim Henson, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox Family, Lifetime, UPN, WB . . . every incarnation: can the coach be African American? Could it be the Thursday Night Wives Club? Could it focus on Mom and Dad instead of the kid? Diane Keaton did send me chocolate football - a regular football of solid chocolate - and she came for dinner. Here is an essay about her coming to dinner called "Toys in the Crawlspace" from LA Weekly.

My agent is currently submitting Offsides as a YA novel because it was never published YA, so maybe it will have a new life. (Frankly, I think it needs cutting.)

GI: I hope it finds a second life then! Now, I know that your father's occupational wanderings when you were a child eventually led you to Knoxville, Tennessee, my hometown, and that you attended the University of Tennessee. Your own travels have taken you to Europe and Asia, and you now live on the West Coast. What is it about the mountains of East Tennessee/Western North Carolina that won't let you go? Was it love at first sight, or did the mountains have to win you over?

KM: You're right, Alan. They won't let me go. And I never ever planned for that to happen. I left Knoxville never dreaming I'd look back, and I've spent two decades looking back in one form or another. When I got my driver's license on my sixteenth birthday in Knoxville, my mother handed me the keys and said, "Congratulations. Now go pick up your brothers from football practice." From that day on, I drove everywhere, and when friends would come to town, I would drive them to the mountains. Friends were always stunned by the beauty, and I began to feel proud of the mountains - a tiny claim to them - after an itinerant childhood. I was always searching for home with moving so much and being the new kid. We go back every year - we even found Maggie Valley on a road trip when the kids were tiny. When I began to write Gentle's Holler, I picked the most beautiful place I could think of - the Smoky Mountains. My dream is to live there again and teach at a university and write my novels. I have never felt really like Los Angeles is home - I love our friends and our lives, but it's not home.

GI: Thanks Kerry - we hope you come back to stay. In the meantime, everyone here at Gratz Industries wishes you the best of success with Louisiana's Song!

And hey, we're just the third stop on Kerry's Book Blog Tour this week. Check in on her previous installments at Elizabeth Dulemba's blog and Dotti Enderle's blog, then later this week on Kim Norman's blog on Thursday, and Ruth McNally Barshaw's blog on Saturday. And go pick up copies of Gentle's Holler and Louisiana's Song! Kerry needs bus fare back to Knoxville . . .

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Book Blog Tour: Ruth McNally Barshaw

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Ruth McNally Barshaw to the Gratz Industries auditorium!

GI: First, give us the thirty second sales pitch on your first children's book, Ellie McDoodle: Have Pen, Will Travel.

RMB: Ellie's a kid who goes camping with relatives she can't stand and she keeps a sketch diary of it all. It has games, pranks, observations, nature facts, survival skills -- everything but the kitchen sink. Actually, there IS a kitchen sink in it, a camper's sink, which Ellie throws at her cousin. But because it's a kid story, it ends happy. (20 seconds)

GI: Your sketchbooks, many pages of which are posted on your web site at www.ruthexpress.com, are fantastic. Tell us more about them. How long have you been keeping sketchbooks? What sorts of things do you sketch? Do you worry about correcting your art as you work in your sketchbooks?

RMB: Thank you! I've been keeping a regular sketchbook-diary off and on since high school. One of the first is from my trip to Mexico at age 15. My mom made me take slide film for the camera, no print film. So when I wanted to view my photos from the trip it wasn't easy. I was so glad I had the sketchbook, to relive all the cool things that happened.

I sketch all sorts of things. The hardest thing to sketch was a soccer game. Running horses are really hard, too. The saddest thing is funerals; I think I've done 6. Happiest was the birth of my grandson. I started sketching with a pen 17 years ago. My grandpa was in poor health and I started writing him every few days, mostly cartoons of the funny things my kids were doing. Eventually it became cumbersome to sketch in pencil and redraw in ink. It was expedient to just sketch in pen. Scary, but expedient. I still make lots of mistakes. The perfectionist in me sometimes screams in pain at the mistakes. But few artists sketch in ink, and I feel it's a valuable skill, so I keep at it.

GI: Tell us about your experiences sketchbooking at the SCBWI Winter Conference, and how that led to you selling Ellie McDoodle.

RMB: I went to the 2005 conference not knowing where I was going to stay. I was flat broke, took out a loan to get there. I had a strong sense that something important would happen there. But even though Cecilia Yung, Penguin AD and SCBWI Advisory Board member, kept saying to the audience, "If you are great, we will find you," nobody seemed to find me. I sketched it all -- my angst and despair, and also all the many cool things that happened. When I got home I put it all on my website, all 180 pages.

Within days there was a huge buzz: Hundreds of emails arrived, many exhorting me to do a kids' book in that style. It took a while to convince me. I felt my work was not strong enough, or someone would have "found me." But I started the book, and an agent emailed me, all within a week of coming home from the conference. I finished the book as quickly as I could, the agent and I signed together, and she sold my book to Bloomsbury. From conference to sale was 6 months. Almost overnight, my life changed completely.

GI: Tell us about your other cartoon and illustration work. Did you go to school to be an artist? Was illustrating your job before you sold your first children's book? Where has your work appeared?

RMB: I went to Michigan State University to study advertising. I took 2 art courses but felt I didn't fit in with the studio artists so I took other art-like classes in landscape architecture, value engineering and mechanical drawing. I didn't fit in there, either, nor in advertising. I got a job at the newspaper doing comics and ads, then fell into a job with the university doing all kinds of fun promotional stuff. I quit to work out of my home when my (then-) youngest was 3. (She's now 18.) There I bounced around, looking for the right niche. It was an astoundingly frustrating time, mitigated by winning some big money in essay contests with little books.

My work has appeared in all sorts of things related to MSU; stadium cups, apparel, pizza boxes. I've designed a thousand t-shirts, drew caricatures at events, created a few comic strips. Most of my art stayed local, but if you visited a Marriott in California or the Washington DC area, maybe you saw my tourist maps.

A children's cookbook for a hospital was the first job in my life where I went to bed excited from working on it all day and woke up excited to get back to it again. I should have taken that as a clue: Get into kids' books. But, no. It took another 7 years. In the meantime I self-published lots of little books for family and friends. Uncle Charlie's Tasteless Booger Jokes is one of my favorites.

GI: I love your sketches of famous children's authors and illustrators! Have you ever shared your pictures with the writers and artists? If so, what's the best reaction you've ever gotten?

RMB: Thank you! I have shared my pictures with almost all of the writers and artists. They were all gracious and kind, except one who was somewhat dismissive. Maybe I didn't do a good job on that drawing.

The best reaction was Richard Peck, 16 years ago. I drew him at a school district awards luncheon for young writers (I was there because my kid won). He was delighted and promptly gave me his editor's name at Dial, saying I should contact her. I was far too scared and eventually lost the name. How I wish I'd contacted her. And how I wish I still had that drawing. It's around here somewhere. Someday I will meet him again and thank him for his confidence in me at a time when I had none.

Thanks Ruth! The book looks great - good luck with it!

You can follow Ruth's Book Blog Tour on Dotti Enderle's blog, Elizabeth Dulemba's blog, Karen Lee's blog, and Kim Norman's blog.

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Book Blog Tour: Joe Kulka

Here at Gratz Industries, we're happy to be part of a Book Blog Tour for a number of authors this summer, beginning with Joe Kulka (left), the author/illustrator of Wolf's Coming. Here are five questions with the wolfman:

GI: Give us the twenty-second blurb about Wolf's Crossing.

JK: I think the good folks at Lerner did a fine job summing it up on their website so I'll cheat and paste in their description here:
As a distant howl echoes through the forest, animals quickly stop what they're doing and run for home. Look out - Wolf's coming! As the shadowy figure gets closer and closer and the day draws to a close, the animals shut the door, pull the shades, and turn out the lights. Soon the wolf's glowing eyes appear at the window and the front door opens . . . But things are not as they seem in this suspenseful, clever story, and it's the reader who's in for the biggest surprise of all!

GI: Wolf's Coming! is the first picture book you've written and illustrated, but you've illustrated many more books by other authors. Can you tell us more about the collaborative process with authors?

JK: It does vary but most of the time it's pretty much a solo effort. A lot depends on the publisher. Some don't want any direct interaction between author and illustrator. I enjoy initially seeing the manuscript with little to no illustration notes. I like to be able to interpret and, ideally, enhance the text. I think that is the job of the illustrator - to bring a second view point to the story and help tell the story. If I happen to come up with a unorthodox way of looking at the story - and honestly that is what I strive for - I will run the idea by the editor and art director with a request that they let the author know what I'm planning. I never want to have an author hate what I do with their story. It's always nice to know that the author likes what is being done.

GI: As an author now of picture books, do you find you think about your story first visually or verbally? Did you have scenes and illustrations in mind and build bridges to them with story, or work from strictly from a pre-written manuscript?

JK: Both. There are times I will be sketching and I like the way something looks - a character, or a setting, that I think would make for interesting elements of a story. But when it's time to get the story going I sit down and start writing. I usually keep going until I have a rough version completed. I may let it sit for a while if I'm not too happy with it and then start sketching again. Sometimes those sketches will spur a different direction or new idea. Then I'll go back and revise the story. It's usually at this point that I'll make a very, very rough dummy. Essentially a 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper with 32 squares on it that I'll put some scribbles on. This gives me a quick overall feel of the breakdown of the story as it would appear in book form. Then I can see where I may need to adjust the pacing or maybe be able to tell some/more of the story just through the illustrations. By now I have pretty decent grasp on the story and work on fine tuning the text. Last step would be putting together a full dummy with fairly clear sketches and sending it out for consideration.

GI: Tell us about the choices you made for Wolf's Coming! As an author/illustrator, you were in the enviable position of choosing thesubject matter you'd be illustrating. Why forest animals? Why that setting?

JK: The story evolved from a game I used to play with my 6 year old son when he was 2. I'd take him fishing with me and when it was time to go he'd usually be lagging. So being the good father that I am, I decide to scare the bejesus out of him and tell him there's a wolf in the woods so we'd better run back to the car. Don't worry, it was always done in fun. He loved it. We used to hide in his bed and pretend the wolf was outside his bedroom door.

So using that as a starting point I came up the story for Wolf's Coming!

I briefly played around with the idea of there being human children in the story but it just seemed to make more sense for them all to be animals. Since they were all animals I wanted to keep the setting in the woods but still give them an anthropomorphic feel.

I've always been a huge fan of the old Warner Brothers/Tex Avery cartoons so of course I had to put Wolf in a suit and tie. It also serves as a clue that maybe since he is so dressed up that just perhaps Wolf is well aware of the surprise planned.

GI: If you could steal any other illustrator's career, whose would it be?

JK: That's a tough question. There are so many illustrator's careers that I want to steal or at least be able to steal their drawing ability. J.C. Leyendecker would be my top choice I guess. Nobody could draw like that man and he was pretty darn successful for many decades. N.C. Wyeth would be a close second. Of living illustrators, I wouldn't mind having David Wiesner's career, or William Joyce's or Chris Van Allsburg's.

Thanks Joe! Good luck with Wolf's Coming!

You can follow Joe's Book Blog Tour on Elizabeth O. Dulemba's blog, Ruth McNally Barshaw's blog, and later this week on John Nez's blog (Thursday) and Dotti Enderle's blog (Friday).

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