There couldn't be a better choice for our new kids' book ambassador than Katherine Paterson

Mere days before the announcement of the new children’s book ambassador, speculation was still running wild. Who would they tap for the prestigious two-year position? And, even more to the point, who could possibly measure up to the very capable Jon Scieszka, the first National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, whose humor and flair would surely be a tough act to follow? As it turned out, there was no reason to worry. When the Library of Congress introduced Katherine Paterson as our new kids’ book ambassador on January 5, the choice was greeted with unrivaled enthusiasm. Katherine Paterson! Why, of course! Who could better represent the best in books for young people and spread the message about the importance of reading to children? A two-time winner of the Newbery Medal (for Bridge to Terabithia and Jacob Have I Loved) and the National Book Award (for The Master Puppeteer and The Great Gilly Hopkins), Paterson has won almost every award a children’s book writer can win—and not just here in the United States. She’s one of only four Americans to nab the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, an international honor that recognizes an author’s or illustrator’s lifetime achievements. And in 2006, she took home Sweden’s Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which aims to give kids’ books the same esteem as works recognized by the Nobel prize. Paterson is known throughout the world for her unwavering commitment to children and to children’s literature. Her own childhood began in Qing Jiang, China, where her American parents were Presbyterian missionaries. By the time she was eight, her family had been displaced twice by war and the Japanese occupation of China. They returned to the United States in 1940 but continued to move around, and by the time Paterson was 18, she had lived in 18 different places. It was undoubtedly those early experiences that gave her such a broad view of the world, as well as a strong understanding of the importance of belonging. Despite her accomplishments, the 77-year-old Paterson remains a very down-to-earth woman whose easy conversational style is frequently punctuated with laughter. Shortly after she was named children’s book ambassador, we spoke about her new role, her life as a writer, and her latest novel, The Day of the Pelican (Clarion, 2009), which tells the story of a refugee family from Kosovo.

Photograph by Kevin Brusie

As children’s book ambassador, what’s your most important role? In some ways, I feel like what they’re asking me to do is what I’ve been doing for 30 years. It just has another name. Because what I’m trying to do is to encourage people to take books seriously and to take children seriously—their spiritual and intellectual needs, as well as their bodily needs. It’s more of a platform for the things I’ve been saying for a long time. What was your reaction when you found out that you’d been selected? It was a big thrill. I felt like a kid, really. And then I thought, Gee, I’m 77 years old, and I’ll be 79 before I finish, since it’s a two-year term. But I still have a good bit of zip for an old lady, and I hope that they know what they were doing. Has Jon Scieszka given you any advice about your new job? Well, you know Jon. [Laughing.] He’s told me about the cape and the helicopter and the jet-pack that doesn’t work. But his chief advice was just to enjoy myself—and I will. I love people, and I love to talk about what I care about. So I can’t imagine the job as a chore. How will your approach differ from his? I’m just a totally different person. I like to think I’m a moderately funny person, but I’m not Jon Scieszka. There are those who think all I do is make people cry, which is not true. When children ask me why I write the kind of books that I write, I say that I really write the kind of books that I like to read, that have the full spectrum of human emotion, that tell about all of life. And there are times to laugh and times to cry, really. Tell us a little bit about the platform you’ve chosen, “Read for Your Life.” Your life means not just your solitary life but your family and your classroom and your community and your world. It’s about the importance of literature for our lives and for the general good. We’ve forgotten about the general good. Unless you have a reading, thinking population, the general good goes out the window. I think it’s very important to read things you don’t agree with, for example, and to be open to learning about the way other people believe and think, including the religions and ideas of cultures that are quite different from our own. Are kids in this country getting a chance to read those stories? One thing that I really have tried to say for years is that we have to have books in the United States that come from other countries. More and more we’ve got to know about children in other places. You talk to people in publishing and they say, “We can’t publish them because they won’t be bought.” And librarians say, “We can’t buy them because they’re not published.” And we go round and round. But there are some things out there. There’s a soldier in Afghanistan who’s been writing to me. He just sold a novel to Arthur Levine at Scholastic about an Afghan girl that he and his buddies helped. Early on, he said to me, “I don’t know if I can write from the point of view of an Afghan girl,” and I said, “You better try because who else is doing that?” Whose work has especially impressed you? There are so many people around the world. Years ago, I went to Indonesia, back in the years of the dictatorship. The government of Indonesia was lamenting the lack of interest in reading among Indonesian children. They were trying to figure out what was going on, so they brought me to Indonesia, along with French and German experts in children’s literature, about a dozen Indonesian writers and artists, and a children’s literature professor from the University of Jakarta named Murti Bunanta, who was in charge of the project. Of course, the real problem was in those days you had to publish the book, and then the government would decide whether they would allow it in schools and libraries. Censorship was killing everything. But we were charged with writing books that children might actually like to read. We were meeting in this windowless room with the Board of Education and the Education Ministry, and I would look around the room at those people, and I would think, We’re plotting sedition in this room. We’re really trying to write real books. Your own books have often been challenged in this country. Is that still happening? Well, Harry Potter helped a lot by knocking me off the [most frequently challenged] list, and I don’t think I was on the list last year, which is fine with me. People would sometimes say, “Aren’t you proud?” And I’d say, “No, because it means every time a book gets challenged, some teacher or some librarian is in trouble.” How can I enjoy that? It makes me very sad. It also makes me feel humbled that someone thinks my work is worth standing up for and worth risking their job and reputation for. I don’t like it. Which of your books get challenged? Sometimes it’s The Great Gilly Hopkins, but most often it’s Bridge to Terabithia, and that’s simply because it’s the most visible book. I have unspeakable things happening in Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom, but no one ever challenges that. I think it’s because it’s not in the school curriculum, and children don’t bring it home. What scares people about Bridge to Terabithia? It started with someone complaining about “the gutter and unholy language” of my work. One of my children responded, “I’ll show them gutter and unholy language!” and I said, “No, you won’t!” [Laughter.] So it started with language and then it expanded to disrespect for teachers and disrespect for church, because the children [in the story] said they were bored in church. But the last thing I had was a complaint about the incest in the book. And I said, “The what?” I can kind of understand some of the other things, but incest? My friend Stephanie Tolan said, “Katherine, the brother and sister sleep in the same bedroom.” Don’t they know any poor people? It’s ironic that people say your books are disrespectful of religion, because I think of you as someone with such strong faith. Plus, your husband is a minister. I’ve had people try to defend accusations by telling them about my ancestry and my life story, and they respond, “Well, it just proves that Presbyterians are all evil.” How has your faith influenced your writing? Well, of course, everything you are influences your writing. And if you write out of yourself, then whoever you are is going to come out, for better or worse. I’m not always proud of what comes out. We now know that you were bored in church sometimes, for example. I was bored in church a lot, and I misbehaved as well! Let’s talk a little bit about your childhood. You were born in China, and you spent your first five years there. Yes, I came to the United States for the first time when I was five. But then we went back to China when I was six and came back again when I was eight. But my first five years were spent in Chinese culture. We lived in a Chinese house. We lived very close, and everyone who lived near us was Chinese, except for my family. Did you feel like a foreigner when you returned to the States? Oh, I was a foreigner. I often say to children that in those days my friends were in books. I was weird to my classmates, and other times, I would feel at home in a place. I’d make friends, and then we’d move and I’d have to start all over again. So books were very important to me as a child, because there was nobody in the book who was going to bully me or make fun of me and also because they helped me understand myself and to understand other people. Your latest book is set in Kosovo. How did that come about? Steve Dale, who is one of the choir members in our church, said to me, “You know, Katherine, you should write about the Haxhiu family.” They were a family that our church had sponsored who were refugees from Kosovo. I’d never met them because they had come in the summertime when I was away, and they were Muslim and had never been to church. There were other people in the church who had been very active working with them, and I wasn’t one of them. It’s the only time in my life when someone has told me they had a great idea for me that I’ve taken. What made you decide to take it on? Avi had asked me to do another Breakfast Serial. I thought it might be a good idea for that because the events in Kosovo are so full of action that I could do three pages and a cliff-hanger. I did arrange to go over to meet the Haxhiu family and spent a very pleasant afternoon with them showing me pictures and using mostly sign language because they couldn’t speak much English and I could speak no Albanian whatsoever. I wasn’t getting a lot of information that way, so I had to do an enormous amount of research, mostly newspaper stories and there were some books out about the events in Kosovo. How did three chapters and a cliff-hanger turn into a book? Virginia Buckley [Paterson’s longtime editor] said I should turn it into a novel. I was a little desperate because I had done a lot of research to result in three pages and a cliff-hanger. With a novel you have to have a good bit more than newspaper articles and nonfiction books. I started by looking on the Internet, and I came across this collection of 200 amazing photographs of Kosovo. I was able to find out the name and email address of the photographer, and so I wrote to him. He immediately answered a couple of questions that I had sent to him and that emboldened me to send him another list of questions. We worked very closely together. I would send him a chapter with a paragraph highlighted, and then he would send me a reaction to the paragraph that was about twice as long. Then I would rewrite the chapter, and he would do the same thing to my revision, and we went through it all several times. Is he from Kosovo? He’s an American who had lived in Kosovo for seven years and had worked in an Estonian refugee camp when the people were expelled from the country. He speaks Albanian and has close Albanian friends. So if there was something he wasn’t sure about, he would call up a friend. It was sort of a collaborative effort. He didn’t do any actual writing, but he sure did a lot of actual reacting to my writing. So that’s how it came to be. It’s not like any way I’ve ever written a book before, but it was a very enlightening experience for me. I sure learned a lot. Do you think you’ll actually have time to write during the next two years? I hope so, because I think if you’re just making appearances and not taking care of your soul, you have problems. Most of us who write think the way to be ourselves is being alone in a room and trying to write. I’d like to think I have a few books left in me. Should we address you as Madam Ambassador now? [Laughing.] Oh, gosh, no! I haven’t changed. I’m still Katherine.

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Kathleen T. Horning (horning@education.wisc.edu) is director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.