Chronicles Interview with YA Author Betsy James

[Teresa Edgerton]

INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR/ILLUSTRATOR BETSY JAMES,
conducted by Teresa Edgerton, for the Chronicles Network

Betsy James has written and/or illustrated more than a dozen books, ranging from picture books to young adult novels, textbooks to fantasy. Her list of awards and honors is impressive, including recognition from School Library Journal, Voices of Youth Advocates, and the Junior Library Guild.

As the daughter of a geologist and a zoologist, Betsy says she learned to pay special attention to rocks and animals. Born in Missouri and raised and educated in Utah, she lives now in New Mexico where she likes hiking and back-packing -- and adding to her collection of rocks during frequent forays into the desert

A self-taught illustrator, she’s hasn’t confined herself to children’s books; her resume includes medical and scientific drawings, as well as sketches made at archeological digs. In addition to writing and illustrating, she often visits schools to talk to children about writing. One of her favorite places to visit is Zuni Pueblo, where she helps to run an elementary-school writer's workshop.

I had the pleasure of meeting Betsy at BayCon, and was so impressed with what she had to say during the panel we shared with several other writers, I asked to interview her for the Chronicles Network. Returning home after the convention, I finally remembered why her name sounded so familiar: I had read and enjoyed two of her YA books, Long Night Dance and Dark Heart, several years before, but eventually gave up looking for a sequel when none materialized. Naturally, I was delighted to learn that new editions of both books were now available, and the long wished-for sequel had recently been published. Within a month of our fortunate meeting, I had reread the first two, and devoured the third.

The following interview, in two parts, was conducted via a series of emails:

PART ONE


CHRONICLES NETWORK: I like the way the way you portray Kat throughout the three books that make up the Seeker Chronicles: The more empowered she becomes in her own right, the more understanding she gains; it’s a slow but unmistakable transformation from girl into young woman. And the more she knows herself, the more clearly she sees other people. Did you foresee all these changes when you first began to write her story in Long Night Dance?

BETSY JAMES: The three books of the Seeker Chronicles—Long Night Dance, Dark Heart, and Listening at the Gate—follow Kat’s coming of age, from fifteen to seventeen. Of course I couldn't forsee Kat’s changes, any more than I could forsee how I would change in writing about her. I knew she would change—she was so clearly at a tipping point—and I trusted that I could bungle along after her as she did. That’s the excitement, indeed the passion of writing: when you can feel that a character is so ripe for change that she is poised for an inevitable plunge forward into the world, yet you can't predict—I cite chaos theory here—what shape her plunge and growth will take, because there are so many variables in the living world you have invoked. For a writer, that's exciting!



CHRONICLES NETWORK: In Listening at the Gate, I thought you were saying that when people accept the guidance of bad leaders even good people can gradually be led on to condone more and more shocking actions IF those actions have authority behind them. Is this right?

BETSY JAMES: Truly, I don’t write stories with intentional morals. I kiss the feet of Ursula Le Guin for her words on that topic, which you can find at http://www.cbcbooks.org/cbcmagazine/meet/leguin_ursula_k.html

I’m cautious about analyzing my own writing. It’s true I have an English degree (with no teaching certificate, which explains why I spent time as a waitress), but when I was earning it I was mostly interested in gypsies and guys.

That said, it seems to me that a recurrent theme in my writing is the absolute cultural relativity of ethics and morals. There have been times and places in human history when it was considered okay to eat babies. We think ourselves more enlightened, of course; yet currently, from some quite respected human perspectives, it’s considered okay to blow babies up. Though not to eat them afterwards, which from other perspectives could be regarded as a waste.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Do you remember how old you were when you first began writing your own stories? Do you remember any of those earliest stories?

BETSY JAMES: I began both writing and illustrating “seriously”—employing some version of the kind of imagination I still use to write—at eleven. I distinctly remember that “Aha!”: I was designing a WANTED poster for some drama or other, when it dawned on me that I could “look-listen-feel” inward exactly as I looked-listened-felt outward. I could use the same awareness and attentiveness to detail in the imagination as I could in my ordinary life, and could record it in either images or words. It was like finding the door to a private universe. I practiced it secretly.

My mother had the wisdom to keep me supplied with paper, brushes, pens, and a lockable box to keep my writing in. I wrote and wrote, tore up and tore up. At twelve or so I encountered the selkie story; the bulk of my writing thereafter was about people who were half human and half seal.

Later, of course, I considered myself to have outgrown such fantasies. But when I began to paint and write longer narratives I turned back to the early stories because they carried that passion which is at its most intense when we are teens. They formed the starting place for The Morning Series—a group of 315 watercolors which I painted as the best way to get back in touch with that deep, still-teenage intensity. The rough narrative they formed became The Seeker Chronicles: Long Night Dance, Dark Heart, and Listening at the Gate. You can find more about the Morning Series, with a selection of art, on my website, www.betsyjames.com.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Along with Celtic selkies, am I right in detecting a Native American (especially Inuit) influence on your seal people, the Rigi?

BETSY JAMES: As a teenager I was captivated by the selkie story, but knew nothing about the sea; I’ve always lived in the desert West, where the seas dried up sixty million years ago. In order to write Kat’s story I had to make ocean field trips and learn to kayak. Some bits of Inuit culture came along with that.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Listening at the Gate was written (or at least published) quite a while after Long Night Dance and Dark Heart. What made you decide to come back to this world and these characters, or was that something you always intended?

BETSY JAMES: Let us kneel and give fervent thanks to J. K. Rowling. When the first two were published YA fantasy was dead in the water: the books won awards and quietly vanished. Then along came you-know-who.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: What was your inspiration for the repressive, misogynistic society of the people in Upslope?

BETSY JAMES: For repressive, misogynistic, abusive societies, we don’t have to look too far anywhere on planet Earth, do we? I keep thinking, “My writing is too strong.” Then I read the news and think, “I’m not writing strongly enough.”



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Readers get a clearer and more balanced idea of both these cultures in Listening at the Gate. (I like the way that some of this emerges through Kat's maturing viewpoint.) Was this planned from the very beginning, or did this gradually develop?

BETSY JAMES: I’m awfully good and awfully bad myself. It’s hard to recognize that and not realize everybody else must be the same.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: What were some of your sources of inspiration for the songs, verses, and sayings that turn up throughout the Seeker Chronicles and Listening at the Gate? In the Rigi’s song, I think I see a Celtic influence: it starts out like an old ballad, “The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry,” but then it turns into something that sounds more like “The Song of Amergin.”

BETSY JAMES: You’re perceptive! “The Rigi’s Song” is derived from both the Child ballad “The Great Silkie” and Robert Graves’s “restoration” of the ca. 800 A.D. Irish/Welsh “Song of Amergin.”



CHRONICLES NETWORK: I was fascinated by the handslaps, the rhythmic chanting and clapping games that all the children play in LATG and I loved the idea of little girls playing games in the midst of turmoil -- but it’s not frivolous, because it’s a form of communication the adults have forgotten.* I thought it was brilliant, but how did you come to think of using children’s games in this way?

BETSY JAMES: My mother was an astonishing compendium of songs and ditties, popular and obscure, sweet and deep and hilarious and obscene. That quirky, free, sly education in rhythm and populist poetry was the best foundation for writing—and in some ways for life—that I could have had. Raffi she was not, thank god. When I go into the schools as a visiting author and watch teachers desperately trying to coax children into writing "nice" stories—"Can't the Great White shark and the Tyrannosaurus Rex be friends?"—I think with gratitude of Mom singing us to sleep with “The St. James Infirmary Blues.”

Kids are awful. We're all awful. And gorgeous, and silly, and tragic, and passionate, and happy; kids' chants and popular verse reflect us honestly. It was a delight to use my mother's singsongs, as well as my love of traditional folk music, to invite a singing culture for Listening at the Gate. Like Yeats and Dylan, some I flat-out stole. The carter's song on page 55 is a loose translation of a rakish Mexican folksong:

Dicen que los de tu casa
Ninguno me puede ver;
Diles que no batan el agua
Que al cabo lo han de beber.




CHRONICLES NETWORK: Related to that question: Are you familiar with Children’s Games in Street and Playground, by Iona and Peter Opie?

BETSY JAMES: No, but the Opie's The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren has been a longtime delight and influence.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: The bits and pieces of different languages that you drop in here and there add a feeling of depth and authenticity to your imaginary places and cultures. How did you go about forming the names and words that represent the various societies and ethnic groups?

BETSY JAMES: I was so busy paddling around in a proto-kayak that by the time it occurred to me, dimly, that languages have identifiable structures, the book was in galleys. I'll do better next time—though probably not much, since I learn imaginary languages the same way I’ve learned my bits of Zuni: the names of animals, almost no verbs, and a few bad words taught by third grade boys.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Traditionally, the jobs of spinning and weaving are most often associated with women, while men are portrayed as the hunters and defenders; in DH the men of Creek are weavers AND hunters, while the woman make pots and look after the home. How did these ideas develop as you wrote the story?

BETSY JAMES: I’m grinning; not from New Mexico, are you? Among the Ancestral Puebloan cultures the men were weavers and hunters, the women potters and homemakers. In Dark Heart it was fun to do a historically valid send-up of our culture-bound take on the division of labor. When the spindle is a phallic symbol, can there be spinsters?

In Long Night Dance I invoked a culture in which the men infantilize the women; in Dark Heart it was interesting to invite one in which the women infantilize the men. The government of Creek is female, and the men are seen by the women as eternally "lads": flighty jocks, no thoughts worth listening to, guys on a perpetual hunting trip. To me this latter imbalance is as pernicious as the former—and both are found in contemporary society. Few readers have caught this, which is interesting in itself.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Am I right in detecting a whiff of the southwest in the physical setting of the book?

BETSY JAMES: Writers write with their bodies, and mine has spent decades hiking the desert Southwest. I've taught at Zuni Pueblo intermittently for almost twenty years.

We are changed by the places we live and the cultures we live among. Because I try to inhabit my characters deeply, it would be impossible for me to write from the POV of an actual culture that was not mine—the Zuni, say. I could never get deep enough. Yet I've been profoundly changed by the Southwest, and that's truth, too. Fantasy provides the ideal venue for us to experiment with those influences without trying to pretend to be of a culture we don’t know in our bones. Fantasy is the soul's melting pot.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Bears play an important role in Dark Heart, and particularly through the rite of passage the girls go through to become women. What inspired you to make the bear so important in the rituals and the spiritual life of the people in Creek? Do bears have some special significance for you in the same way the seal people do?

BETSY JAMES: I like bears. Here in New Mexico they live in the deserts and mountains close to us; sometimes we meet them. They are human-sized, and seem like earth-people in fur coats, the way selkies are sea-people in fur coats. From what little I know, most of the Puebloan cultures have a Bear clan. Bears seem a natural choice for an animal to identify with.


(part two follows in the next message)

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

PART TWO


CHRONICLES NETWORK: Do you think you will ever return to the world of The Seeker Chronicles again?

BETSY JAMES: Would I invoke a subcontinent and then not make the most of it? I’ve just signed the contract with Atheneum for the next one.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Could you tell us something about your writing process -- whether you write on a daily basis, how much planning or outlining you do inadvance, etc?

BETSY JAMES: When I’m writing, I write six days a week, not counting the days when I sneak off to go hiking (which I consider church). What I do on work days, and for how long, naturally varies according to the stage of the project. Like nearly every other writer, I have other work commitments—illustration jobs, school presentations—and can be dramatically crabby if they keep me too long from writing.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Some of our members who write were discussing how different people approach their writing. Some set to work like an architect or a builder:* planning everything out in advance, then following the outline like a blueprint, building from the foundation up. Then there are those of us who tend our stories like gardners: planting a seed, watering, and nourishing it, then allowing it to grow in whatever direction seems most natural. Which one best describes you -- are you a gardener or an architect?

BETSY JAMES: I’d side with the gardeners, though in a sense Dark Heart describes my process: I walk up the mountain (or out into the desert) until what is looking for me finds me and eats me. Then I serve it until it has accomplished what it needs to and lets me go. And that sounds grandiose! But it’s a pretty accurate description of how many artists work.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: What are some of the special challenges in writing for young readers?

BETSY JAMES: To be honest, I don’t think much about this. I write what I write. Once it’s written I may tweak it a bit, usually with editorial input. Work that is “written for children” often has a subtle constraint or didacticism: the writer can’t resist subconsciously speaking as an adult who’s been through it and can’t resist “guiding” her/his audience. To me this kind of prearranged outcome has always seemed disrespectful of children, who are meeting the world with their whole beings, freshly and riskily. In the best writing I think the writer puts her/himself as nakedly on the line of experience as the child does, with no certain answers.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: On your website you refer to what Jung called “active imagination,” and what it means in terms of your own writing, and in Kat and Nall’s story specifically. Could you tell us more about that?

BETSY JAMES: The term is Jung's label for something most fiction writers do as a matter of course. A quick snoop through my limited library didn't turn up the official Jungian definition, so here's the Betsy James one: "Active imagination" is a waking daydream, deliberately entered and obediently pursued, followed by some action—writing, painting, dance, whatever—that makes the content of the daydream concrete.

In Ursula Le Guin's 1973 essay, "Dreams Must Explain Themselves" (in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, HarperCollins 1989), she responds to an editor who wants to know how she "plans" places and characters by saying, "But I didn't plan anything, I found it." In her subconscious, she says. Active imagination is precisely this scavenger hunt.

Using active imagination—rather than, I dunno, logic? outlining with subheads? market sense?—to write a book tends to result in a more organic story. Not to mention a more interesting and often personally terrifying one, since if we invite our sub- or unconscious to show itself it instantly presents us with those aspects of ourselves we would least like to advertise. Kat and Nall sprang up whole: complex, endearing, perfectly awful. I could not have "planned" them any more than I could have planned my quirky life. It didn't help to know that their worst qualities—as well as, I hope, their best—were also mine.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Have you any plans to write books that are not intended for younger readers?

BETSY JAMES: I have an adult novel in the works. It was a blast to write—a completely different voice, funny and fast and contemporary.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: What are you working on now?

BETSY JAMES: Backstory for the next in The Seeker Chronicles. Backstory always seems to me like driving from Boston to San Francisco in a VW van, stopping at every yard sale and buying whatever suits your fancy. When you reach the Pacific you sort it out and see what you want to keep.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Whenever anyone new comes along, practically the first question our members ask is what books do you like and which books would you recommend to the rest of us. What were some of your favorite books when you were a child?*When you were a teenager?

BETSY JAMES: As a child, Our house was thick with classics inherited from my mother. The list was typical for a reading household: The Princess and the Goblin, MacDonald; Kipling’s Just So Stories; the edition of East of the Sun and West of the Moon with Kay Nielsen’s illustrations. Naturally I had Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Graham’s The Wind in the Willows, Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men. Twain’s Tom Sawyer, and White’s Charlotte’s Web. For fairy tales, Hans Anderson, Andrew Lang’s Colored Fairy Books, and The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies with Garth Williams’s illustrations.

Kingsley’s The Water Babies is interesting to me now, with its anti-Darwin propaganda which, since my mother was an ardent Darwinist, sailed harmlessly over my head. Dated but wonderful were my mother’s battered copies of The Little Colonel books by Annie Fellows Johnston and Helen’s Babies by John Habberton.

For poetry, This Singing World, edited by Louis Untermeyer, and Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.

Once I was old enough to be let loose in the library I found my own. Favorites were: The Good Master and The Singing Tree, Kate Seredy; Understood Betsy, Dorothy Canfield; The Casket and the Sword, by Norman Dale (a bang-up adventure story by an unknown British author; I early figured out that the Brits wrote great books). All of Edward Eager, Elizabeth Enright, and E. Nesbit were my own discoveries, as was Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Farewell Rewards and Fairies. Another little-known Brit, Elinor Lyon, wrote one of the favorite books of my childhood, Run Away Home.

As a teen I continued to read a mixed range of books, from young to old. I have since thought that because I continued to read “kids’ books” as a young adult I was beginning to assimilate their structure more consciously, which may have helped me as an adult writer.

Perhaps of greatest influence were Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth, Warrior Scarlet, and The Shield Ring; and the Green Knowe books by L. M. Boston. Also Mistress Masham’s Repose, by T. H. White. (Interestingly, I didn’t much care for The Once and Future King.) Best of all, Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, which, written before the category “young adult” existed, has to be one of the best young adult adventure stories ever written. It strikes me that all these books are British.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Are there any favorite books for children or young adults that you've discovered since then?

BETSY JAMES: By William Mayne, Earthfasts, It, and A Year and a Day; by Margaret Mahy, The Catalogue of the Universe and The Tricksters; anything by Ursula K. Le Guin.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: What are some of your favorite books in general -- not necessarily for young readers.

BETSY JAMES: What do I keep coming back to?

Anything by Ursula K. Le Guin, but especially The Beginning Place, which is a metaphoric exposition on fantasy itself, and Always Coming Home. The Letters of E. B. White. Anything by Dorothy L. Sayers, but especially Gaudy Night.

I read hordes of nonfiction. In fact—she says guiltily—left to my own devices I don’t read much fantasy or science fiction, unless it’s by friends. I just write it.[/I]



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Have any of the books and writers you’ve mentioned above been especially inspiring in terms of your own writing?

BETSY JAMES: Rosemary Sutcliff, for her sensual descriptions and great action; L. M. Boston, for her eerie, yet homey sense of permeable deep history; Ursula K. Le Guin for a thousand reasons.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Are there any books that you have read quite recently that you are particularly excited about?

BETSY JAMES: I’m currently reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts. Thank god he wrote a sequel.


CHRONICLES NETWORK: As an illustrator as well as writer you must be very visually oriented. Have you ever considered writing a screenplay?

BETSY JAMES: Nope! Though writing dialogue is very play-like.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Are there any recent family-friendly movies that have impressed you favorably?

BETSY JAMES: I don't get to nearly enough movies. The most impressive in the last few years was Whale Rider. I was also fascinated by how the book became the movie. The book, though well-meant, is terribly amateur writing; the screenwriter took the essence of it and made a powerful movie.[/]



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Is there any favorite book, for young people or adults, that you would especially like to see made into a movie?

BETSY JAMES: MINE! Hey--imagine the crashing waves, the shape-shifting, the romance! Secret of Roan Innish{ Reaches Legal Majority!



CHRONICLES NETWORK: I understand that you do a lot of work with children in the schools, could you tell us about that?

BETSY JAMES: As illustrator as well as writer (and a Spanish-speaker to boot), school visits are great fun, the perfect complement to writerly solitude. I get to talk shop, draw pictures, play with kids, be loud and funny, and get paid for it—am I lucky or what? Whether I’m putting up big sheets of butcher paper and teaching collaborative story-making to younger kids (with myself as hired pen), or working on writing and art with older ones, it all circles back to what I’ve been interested in all my life: image and word, and the deep patterns in us they spring from.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Do you have any advice for parents who wish to foster a love of reading? What would you say to parents whose children don't like to read -- are there any tips for getting children interested in spite of themselves?

BETSY JAMES: Friends had a son who was a very reluctant reader. They gave him what amounted to an “account” at a local independent bookstore: with the collusion of the bookseller, he could buy—have for his own—any book that appealed to him, any time he wanted. At first he bought mostly photo books about Western history. Slowly he branched out into true life adventures. Last heard he was reading voraciously, though entirely nonfiction, which IMHO is just fine.

For the reluctant reader, and maybe the rest of us too, there’s something about owning books—having them in your bedroom, to be poked around in again and again—that carries weight. Books as furniture.



CHRONICLES NETWORK: Young readers tend to connect with favorite books and authors in a very personal way. Do children come to you with ideas for your next book?

BETSY JAMES: I love both the kids and the ideas; fan emails are so delicious that sometimes they make me cry; working with kids is a privilege and a delight.

 

[dwndrgn]

Another terriffic interview! You're going to have to stop this soon, my to read list keeps getting longer and longer!

Thanks to you both!

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

You're going to have to stop this soon, my to read list keeps getting longer and longer!

As a general rule I like to describe books rather than recommend them (because tastes differ and can be downright unaccountable) -- but if I was in the habit of recommending books, I would recommend hers. Particularly the last one.

 

[Carolyn Hill]

She sounds fascinating! I love her comment about children (and all of us) being awful--and then when she talks about bears and the desert and Puebloan cultures and Le Guin, yes, yes! I must get her books.

Thank you, Teresa, for having the inspiration to talk to her and for sharing the results in such an interesting interview.