I’ve decided that when I say “today on the couch” I sound too much like a therapist. Besides, Kelly Barnhill, another member of The Lindsay Situation*, doesn’t seem like the sort of person who sits still for very long. If we were running, she’d be too far ahead and my questions would come out in huffing, puffing spurts. So let’s pretend we JUST went running, and now we’re walking, and one of us is probably limping, and we’re talking to Kelly about her new, almost-out book, The Mostly True Story of Jack. (Though in truth you can talk to Kelly about more than her book; you can talk to her about just about anything and she’ll tell you exactly what she thinks in her passionate, poetic way. Follow her on Twitter at @kellybarnhill or check out her blog and you’ll see what I mean.)
You may have already heard about Jack (Little, Brown and Co), which has already received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. The book’s officially coming out next week, although people who have preordered it seem to be getting it this week. It’s the story of a boy who seems to be mostly invisible, until he goes to a small town in Iowa and finds that he isn’t. He finds other things in Iowa, too: a strange house, eccentric relatives, best friends. People in Hazeltown, Iowa are interested in Jack. Some are a little too interested. And the reasons? You’ll have to find out those for yourself. The story is part mystery, part fairy tale, all good.
Me: Growing up, what were some of your favorite books?
Kelly: The books I loved as a child were not the books I read. They were the books I listened to. I was a bit of a delayed reader, but I absolutely adored anything read out loud. I had a Fisher Price record player that was all my own – a big deal in a family with five children. I had purchased it with my own money at a garage sale and wouldn’t let any of my siblings touch it. I had Treasure Island and Kidnapped and Oliver Twist and Call it Courage on old records, and I listened to them over and over and over. Also, my dad read to us every night – Grimm’s Fairy Tales and The Lord of the Rings and Great Expectations and The Chronicles of Narnia. As far as the books that made me into a reader, I was never the same after I read The Borrowers, and later The Five Children and It. And I’ve been a reader ever since.
Me: You mention in the acknowledgements (I have a thing for acknowledgements and yours made me all teary and bleary) that your dad had you given you Tolkein’s essay “On Faerie-Stories.” Talk a little about how that shaped your writing.
Kelly: One of the things that I love about about that essay is the assertion that the experience of the fairy-story is, at its heart, an earthy experience. Their aesthetic is rooted in the sensory information of the natural world. Fairy-stories require a consistence with the natural and a certain rationality, while still insisting on a vigorousness of vision and an insistence towards the beyond. But what kills me most of all is the language of fairy tales. In his essay, Tolkien says, “It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.” And it’s like that for me too – the ordinary achieves a sense of wonder and magic, not in spite of its ordinariness, but because of it.
Me: Where did Jack come from, and when did he come from?
Kelly: Jack came to me while I was running. This happens a lot, actually. I go running most mornings at six o’clock when the kids don’t have school, and shortly after I get them out the door when school is in session. And I spend a lot of time spinning sentences in my head or investigating images as I run. One day, I got a picture of a boy sitting in the back seat of a rental car as he and his mother drove across Iowa. The landscape intrigued me, of course, because Iowa is terribly intriguing. The swell and ripple of green. The air thick with growing. But the boy. I couldn’t look away from him. He was a terribly singular fellow, out of place and lonely. And I had to know what his story was.
Read on
