[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]. 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.