Mel is Mel Boring, moderator of this interview with Deborah Wiles, and Web Editor of the ICL Web Site.

Interviews are held every other Thursday evening for two hours, beginning at 9 CANADA/
Atlantic Time, 8 Eastern Time, 7 Central Time, 6 Mountain Time, and 5 Pacific Time. 

Mel: WELCOME to the ICL Chat Room, Deborah Wiles! Ever since I was along for your great classroom presentations in 2002, I have wanted you to be our guest here, and so this evening is the fulfillment of a longstanding wish of mine. It was reading Love, Ruby Lavender that increased my wishfulness to have you as our guest. That is such a human, authentic, feelings-evoking, yet funny tale, which lets readers know you have an excellent writing touch in going from living-and-breathing real life to novels for young readers that also live and breathe. Chatsters here tonight are in for a real treat, I know. Thank you for making the time to be with us, Deborah!

Deborah: Thanks for having me, Mel! It's a pleasure to be here.

Mel: Are you the first writer in your family of origin, Deborah, or were there others who came before you—or are there some coming after you?

Deborah: I'm the first published writer, although there are many in my family who are good with words and who told wonderful stories. I don't know about after me!

Mel: What I meant about writers coming AFTER you was your family. Tell us about your four children, Alisa, Jason, Zach and Hannah, and your two grandchildren, Olivia and Logan, please. And of course you read to those grandkids, I'll bet!

Deborah: Well! How much time do you have? :> I started my family very young. I was 18 when my first child was born. Alisa is 33 today and a U.S. Marine. She lives in Washington, D.C. Jason is 33 and lives in Santa Fe. He's a stellar rugby player. Zach is 23 and also lives in Santa Fe. He is into music, big time. And Hannah still lives here with me, at least summers. She attends Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, lives in the dorm, studies history, sings, and is a good writer, too.

Mel: So it SOUNDS like Hannah MAY be a writer, any chance of that?

Deborah: She didn't want to be a writer for the longest time, possibly because I am. But lately, as she's been writing so many papers—actually, this change-of-heart started her senior year of high school—she decided that she likes writing. But we'll see—she adores history. She went to Russia this summer for a week and hopes to study abroad next year, in Spain.

Mel: We've got LOTS of time, tell us please about Olivia and Logan!

Deborah: Oh, yes, grandchildren! Olivia is four. She's Alisa's daughter. She's a Sponge-Bob fan and a dancer. Logan is ten and lives in Washington State with his mother. He's an avid reader and a sweetheart of a conversationalist, much more erudite than I am!

Mel: Did you have a favorite children's book you remember from your childhood? Or even adulthood?

Deborah: Oh, my, so many. I was thinking of this the other day. I read everything. I used to save my allowance until I had $1.25, and then I'd buy the next Nancy Drew. I adored Treasure Island and Grimm's Fairy Tales, I read the comics, backs of cereal boxes—I just read everything.

Mel: Can you tell us what your family of origin was like, and how you came out yourself as a "product" of your family?

Deborah: I was born In Alabama, the first child of two Mississippians. They both grew up in teeny, tiny towns, out in the sticks. My father was from Louin, Mississippi, in the piney woods, south of Jackson, and my mother was from West Point, three hours north of Jackson. They met when my father was stationed at Brookley Field in Mobile, Alabama. He was a dashing second lieutenant, and she was a stenographer. They met on a blind date! I grew up in an Air Force family that has spawned many, many military folks, including my brother and my daughter and a family full of hawks! I am the only dove that I know of.

Mel: ESPECIALLY with a father in the military, HOW in the world did you ever turn out a DOVE?

Deborah: Well…I think it evolved over time. I was rebellious, too. I had a highly evolved sense of justice, I think, and I don't know why. Now, I won't say that I was always right. I think that sometimes I was dead wrong, because sometimes I thought justice was just whatever "I" wanted to have happen, of course. But I did feel great empathy for others, for some reason, and I remember what it was like to feel like I wasn't understood—maybe that has something to do with it.

Mel: Did you pick up "the threads of your fiction" during your family's sojourns in Hawaii, Maryland, Charleston, SC, and the Philippines?

Deborah: Oh, yes. But I didn't understand that then, of course. It wasn't until I had been writing for a long time that I finally "got it" that I had a story to tell, and that it consisted of every feeling, every experience I'd ever had.

Deborah: What a good question! Yes. I hate change. I love my ruts and routines, even though I think I long for adventure. I'm a chicken at heart. But learning to accept that nothing is permanent, that everything changes—this has helped me to find stories to tell. It has also become the backbone of my writing.

Mel: Deborah, what IS story? And is it INNER or OUTER?

Deborah: Story is everything. It's all around us, and it's every breath we take, every thought we think, every word we utter, every experience we have. It's both inner and outer. There is always an outer story—what's happening here?—and an inner story: how do I feel about that? That exchange sets up a cause-and-effect that becomes story.

Mel: Here's a 64-dollar question: Since everything is story, HOW do you pick out WHAT to TELL and what to LEAVE OUT in a story, a novel?

Deborah: Well, I started out my writing as an essayist, which is where I learned that you had to pick what corner of your story you wanted to tell, and tell it well, that there would always be another day to come back and bite off another corner. And with fiction, which is what I seem to be writing now, well, what to tell and what to leave out comes as I'm working on it. I start with a voice. And through following that voice, I discover the story. And after that story begins to reveal itself, only then (and sometimes this is when I have a complete draft—or two), only then do I understand the theme and begin to understand what I need to focus on telling, and what can be left out.

Mel: If I remember right, in Love, Ruby Lavender, you really wrote about only ONE SUMMER. Is limiting the time scope that way important, even in a novel?

Deborah: For me it's important, so far, because using a time frame gives me a structure. I don't always know the time frame when I begin. With Ruby, I did know the story would be a summer's length, because I wanted Miss Eula to come home at the end of the story and for Ruby to have learned something important. And with the new novel, Each Little Bird that Sings, I began to understand, as I wrote it, that the story would begin at Easter and end at Thanksgiving, two holidays that held specific meaning to the story. Then, when I had that frame to hang my story on, I could see it more clearly. I could plan "what happens next" in a manageable fashion, if that makes sense. The story I've just written for the Boston Globe, which will be serialized this fall, takes place over a two-week period. I set that up from the beginning, for various reasons, then began to hang the story on that framework.

Mel: I find it REALLY HELPFUL that you said you start with a VOICE. Do you write out monologue that that person, like Ruby, might be saying, anytime, anywhere? And do you hear that voice inside your head?

Deborah: Yes, I do write out that monologue. I never thought of it as a monologue, but that's what it is, I guess. What happens for me is that a line "comes to me" such as "I come from a family with a lot of dead people." I grab a piece of paper, or, if I'm at my desk, I open a Word document and begin typing. I stay with that voice as long as I can, as long as she'll speak to me. When I look up, I may have three pages, or three chapters. And then, I may do nothing else for a long, long time. But I have that voice, that character, and I figure she has a story to tell. I don't start with a particular theme—I find that trying to do that stymies me. But I do come to theme eventually, and I see what it is as I'm writing. Hope that doesn't sound too obtuse.

Mel: NOT obtuse at ALL, Deborah, but VERY nuts-and-bolts practical, thanks! So at the BEGINNING you are really rather OBLIVIOUS to the STRUCTURE the story ENDS up in? It sounds like that structure, the chaptering, the timing, even, ALL come AFTER you "get the voice talking." Does that describe the process you're talking about?

Deborah: Hahahahahahaha! One of my teachers, Norma Fox Mazer, the "Structure Queen" would just howl at this in great recognition of how hard it was for her to teach me how to structure a novel! But I have learned how to structure a story—and I continue to learn, and relearn all the time. Ruby (my first novel) was more of an organic, hit-and-miss process. I worked with my editor on that novel for almost five years before it was published, and at that point, I went to Vermont College to learn better how to plot a story (and many other things). I believe Liz (my editor) and I said to one another something like, "We can't go through this again!" and laughed, so I went to Vermont.

Mel: YIKES, five years you and your editor worked on Ruby AFTER you had it "written"! What does an editor SEE in a manuscript that would make her/him want to work that LONG on one book, or with an author who had nothing else published?

Deborah: VOICE. That's what Liz said to me, anyway. I had submitted—over the transom into the slush pile!—a story to her (I had been submitting stories for at least ten years to different publishing houses, being rejected right and left). But I submitted that story to Liz at Harcourt called We All Be Jovie and That’s the Truth. She called me and said, "I really like it. Would you be willing to work on it?" and I said yes, of course. That story was never published. Liz also rejected a dozen more stories I sent her after that. But finally, I went back to Jovie and found the kernels in it that I liked and began refashioning it, turned it into a picture book manuscript (I had no idea of writing a novel, ever) that Liz liked and kept on working on with me. That became the book, Love, Ruby Lavender. What had been a picture book grew into a novel over the course of our working together.

Mel: Did you publish your essays during that ten years you were submitting Ruby? Did you also publish CHILDREN'S stories and articles?

Deborah: I had two children by the time I was 21, and was supporting them on my own, working at a construction company in Washington, D.C., a company that was building the D.C. subway system in 1976. I worked across the street from the Tenley Circle branch of the D.C. Public Library, which is where I spent my lunchtimes. I had always liked to write, but I don't think I really understood, as a kid, that people wrote books—does that make sense to anybody here? I didn't really think about that, I suppose—and I wanted to be mother, anyhow. That was my aspiration in 19whatever, 1960? I was born in 1953. Anyway, I got to be a mother, too—very young. And words had always been important to me. I read to those babies, and I read for pleasure, and I kept a diary or journal of sorts—still do, today.

Mel: So you wrote while you were raising your four children—how in the world did you ever get it done—PLUS working full-time OUTSIDE the home?

Deborah: When Zach was born, in 1982, I began to stay home and work. I had gotten married again in 1978. I started writing essays for publication when Zach was three. I wrote a story about his graduation from preschool ("Peanut Pals," it was called) and the local paper, the Frederick News-Post in Frederick, Maryland, published it. It was my first published piece and a big thrill. It ran on the op-ed page. I submitted stories to the paper for a few years, gathered clips, took them to a larger newspaper, then to a magazine, where I began to get assignments, freelancing. I loved this work—I could do it mostly from home, and it helped hone my skills as well. All my essays were about home and family and kinship and connection (I was heavily reading Anna Quindlen by that time, and other essayists more current, people I admired so much, and I was learning from them—this is my way), and that's when I came to writing for children.

Mel: I just HAVE to ask about the variety of jobs you've held, journalist, oral history gather, teacher, school bus driver, burger queen, and underwear salesperson. When in your career, and how, have you held all those jobs?

Deborah: Ha! Well, the journalism work was for the paper and the magazines, and the oral history work was also freelance. I went to my local Community Foundation and proposed a project to them—this idea came as a result of a magazine story I'd been given to interview people who were a hundred years old. I'd just loved that assignment, and it put me in mind of my relatives in Mississippi. I'd adored them so much, and so many of them were now dead, but they'd been precious to me. I didn't know some of them very well—their stories were lost to me. So I got this idea and proposed it to the Foundation, and they said yes, and for a few years I went around Frederick County with a tape recorder collecting stories that were aired on the local radio station on Sunday mornings, and that are now archived at the local library in Frederick and in their Historical Society's library.

Mel: Now, Deborah, you BEGAN in writing adult ESSAYS. HOW did you then make your way to the writing for children? And did your own children help bring on that transition, that "graduation"? (-:}

Deborah: I loved reading to my children. My first two children were born in the early 1970s. We'd make our weekly trip to the library and bring home as many books as we could carry. I remember Alisa loving Tomi Ungerer's The Three Robbers and Irene Haas's book, The Maggie B. She asked for that book over and over. Children's books changed so much from the time I was reading to those first two children to the time the second two came along ten and fourteen years later. I was sitting on the floor at Square Books in Frederick, Maryland with three-year-old Zach and I pulled a book off the shelf that changed my life. It was Cynthia Rylant's When I Was Young in the Mountains. As I sat there reading it to Zach, shivers ran across my shoulders. "THIS is what I want to do," I said to myself, and I knew it was. Here was someone writing about those same things I was trying to capture in my essays—home, family, kinship, connection—and the words were beautiful! There were pictures, too! :>

Deborah: Hands down, Cynthia Rylant's work has inspired me and challenged me most to become a better writer. Katherine Paterson's work has meant a lot to me, as has Patricia MacLachlan's. Also I have loved and reread Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird each year, and Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding. That's for starters. I learn from each book I write. When I teach in schools, I ask students to try and "read like a writer." How does she do that? How does she structure that story? Show and not tell? Use the senses?, etc. I have always studied that which I want to learn, and I still do. I have so much to learn.

Deborah: Love, Ruby Lavender is in third person from Ruby's point of view. But Each Little Bird is first person. Isn't it weird to hear someone say that a voice "talks to them"? I hate that. :> No, but for years I heard writers say that, and I thought, "Yeah, right...." But I don't know a better way to describe it. It's not as if I really hear a voice—it's more like I have an idea. A sentence comes to mind. Then another. And another. Like that.

Deborah: Oh, yes, it's a big influence—and thank you so much for that compliment. I didn't see Scout in Comfort, but I definitely think there is some Dill in the character of Peach, although I wasn't at all striving for that when I wrote the story. I think sometimes influences just seep through.

Deborah: Yes. After I found When I Was Young in the Mountains, I headed for the library. I began a systematic scour of the library shelves for children's books that resonated with me on some elemental level like this one did. I found a whole new world of children's books that I hadn't known existed, that had grown up since my older kids had been growing into their teenage years. And I began to study these books. I tried to emulate them. I read everything I could get my hands on about writing children's books. I bought the Writers' Market every year and I wrote. I wrote and I sent out my manuscripts, and they came back rejected. I started this in the mid-1980s. In 1990 I got a nibble. I wrote a story called Honeysuckle Summers. It was about my aunt's growing-up years in that tiny Mississippi town I mentioned, Louin. She'd grown up during the Depression and had recently made me some oral history tapes about that time, and I was taken with her story.

Mel: Is there any special connection between VOICE and STORY? Where you find a VOICE will you necessarily find a STORY too?

Deborah: Hmmmm...I don't know, Mel. Liz said to me at the time, "I like this. You have a wonderful voice. But you don't have a story. You've got a lot of lovely memories. I want you to let go of your memories and tell me a story." Thus began our five-year quest.

Mel: EXCELLENT ANSWER to my question—you DO know!

Deborah: I started out writing personal essays and sending them to the op-ed page editor of my local paper. Not all of them were published. As I got better, more of them made the page, and that encouraged me so much. I got no pay for these, but I got clips that I could take to the next job. I was creating credentials, I guess. I needed them! I wanted to make my living as a freelancer at the time. Does that answer your question?

southpaw: Yes!

Deborah: I don't know! I'd use anything I could, and I did.

Deborah: This is an interesting question. I guess I've chosen not to mine my children's lives, although I don't remember making this a conscious choice. After the experience I had trying to tell my aunt's story, and also I tried to tell many other kinds of stories, but could find no purchase for them—they weren't "mine" somehow—I chose to mine my own life for stories. All my stories are fiction—entirely made up—but they all rest of the scaffolding of my inner story, how it felt to be alive when I was ten. I think that's it.

Deborah: When I say I start with a voice, I think I'm also saying that I start with a feeling. And that's how it works for me that I get my life into stories. It's a voice, yes, but it's really a feeling that I want to make manifest, if that makes any sense. I don't even understand it myself all that well. I just know that when something is bothering me, or making me particularly joyful, it can find a voice in story.

Mel: VERY clear illustration, Deborah! And you DID show it, clearly.

Deborah: Hahahaha! Thank you for this question. I was wondering this about myself just the other day! And I've decided the answer is no. My first book, Freedom Summer, is a picture book published by Simon & Schuster. It takes place in 1964 Mississippi and surrounds the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and what it means to two young boys, best friends, one black, one white, who want to go swimming together at the town pool the day it opens to "everybody under the sun, no matter what color." It's about friendship and justice. I think, more than death, a theme that runs through all my stories is friendship. Also kinship, connection. Just as laughter is connected to tears, death to life, day to night, up to down, etc., I believe we are all connected one to another, and I try to show that as much as anything in my fiction. But you're right, there's a lot of death in there, too. And I do wonder about that. I find that children want to talk about death, though, so we get to have a dialogue. I love that.

Mel: I am amazed, and was touched so deeply by your Freedom Summer. How could YOU, a white girl at that time in Mississippi, have picked up all those "ingredients" of such a rich story about segregation and TWO BOYS?

Deborah: Thank you, Mel, for that compliment. It occurs to me that, in Freedom Summer, I was writing about that summer of 1964 when I started paying attention to differences because of the way they were brought home by the passing of the Civil Rights Act. I had never before noticed (being an Air Force kid and moving all the time was part of it; being young was another) discrimination, but I'm sure it was lingering there on the outskirts of my consciousness. And 1964 Mississippi brought it home to me. I remember the moment my consciousness changed, I remember recognizing, with a start, that the world I inhabited wasn't the world I thought it was—it changed my life.

Deborah: Transitions are hard. For me, anyway. I'm not sure how I do it, or that I always do it well. Revision has a whole lot to do with it, though. I know that.

Mel: Two related questions now:

Deborah: My agent is Steven Malk at Writers House. We've been together about six years. I didn't have an agent until the moment I was ready to sell a book. I tried to get an agent before that, as I thought maybe that was the way "in," but it wasn't, for me. I found Liz on my own, and also Anne Schwartz, who was my editor for Freedom Summer. I was introduced to her at a conference, and she invited me to send her a story, so I did.

Deborah: Yes, indeed. It has always been so.

Deborah: I wrote personal essays for some years, and then asked for assignments. I started out with tiny assignments. My first: "Worst Moments in Restauranting." I loved it, though. I got to call all the restaurant owners in town and they told me their stories. Then I wrote it up. It wasn't good. But it got published in this small paper, and I got another assignment, and I just kept on going.

Deborah: I don't see why not. I always start with my own stories, though, as they are the ones I can really FEEL and remember. That feeling is important for me.

Mel: I've gathered from what you've said this evening, Deborah, that our story must be our OWN in order to "go."

Deborah: Only for me is that true, and only for now, Mel. I don't know how it will be with the next story. I've wanted to write biography for a long time—I have a list as long as my arm of wonderful people I'd like to tell the world about! But I don't seem to be able to do it!

Mel: I think dcbraymer thinks you maybe drove a bulldozer!

Deborah: I answered phones and did the payroll, eventually, for Gates & Fox, a company sinking air shafts for the D.C. subway system. I made coffee. I was the only woman on the job, in a trailer, on Wisconsin Ave. in NW D.C.

Deborah: In some places it's common. I didn't call them "Miss" myself growing up then. But I took some artistic license there, because I wanted those characters to have the same name for every character, so I could define them well.

Mel: How much do you think SETTING impacts a story, such as the Deep South or Far West? Or is the Deep South merely "incidental" to the STORY of your feelings, your experiences there?

Deborah: Setting is crucial, for me. Place is a character in my stories and I treat it that way. The weather is important. The vegetation. The way people talk, the way houses look, the customs and traditions and more. I'm creating a world for the reader and I dearly want the reader to inhabit it with me and to lose track of time. Of course, I can go too far, too. :> But setting is important. One of my favorite novels of all time is Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty. My mother hated that novel. "It's all setting!" she said. "Exactly!" I replied.

Deborah: I have been in Atlanta for a year, so my friends are still new to me, though dear. We get together every Monday night for a meal, and for some good talk, and often for music. I like to sing, although I'm not a great singer, and several friends here play guitar. I love those evenings.

Mel: Thank you, Deborah! How I wish we could just go on and on chatting with you! But the end time has come, and you're still going strong with questions. Your dual abilities to BOTH understand children and their feelings, and to write it in books that children take to heart, are impressive. It's EASY to understand why you have won so MANY awards, including the American Library Association Notable Book for Children, the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) Notable Book in Language Arts, a Booksense '76 Pick (from independent booksellers) for an outstanding novel of the year, a Capitol Choices Noteworthy Book for Children, a One Hundred Titles for Reading and Sharing, New York Public Library, the Children's Literature Choice List, and Parent's Guide Children's Media Award—plus FIFTEEN state award nominations—and all those for Love, Ruby Lavender alone! I know I speak for everyone this evening in asking you if you would be willing to return someday to be our Chat Guest again, please?

Deborah: Oh, I would love it, Mel. This has been wonderful. Thank you all so much!

Mel: Deborah Wiles, HEAPS of HEARTY THANKS to you, the real Ruby Lavender, for coming into the chat room for this chat tonight! You've helped us by sharpening our own desire to write from our childhoods of experience. And you are so easy to talk with and ask questions of—an easy friend of all children's writers. We wish you WELL in your writing, and more HEAPS of AWESOME AWARDS to you, friend!

Deborah: It has been my pleasure. I loved meeting everyone, thanks so very much for having me.

Mel: Goodnight, everyCHILDREN'Swriter!