BIO

Deborah Wiles is the author of EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the E. B. White Read Aloud Award for Older Readers, and LOVE, RUBY LAVENDER, an ALA Notable Children's Book, a Children's Book Sense 76 Pick, and a New York Public Library Book for Reading and Sharing. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

© Copyright 2007, Harcourt Children’s Books. All rights reserved.

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INTERVIEW

May 11, 2005

Kidsreads.com contributing writer Alexis Burling interviewed Deborah Wiles, author of EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS, about a ten-year-old girl whose family runs the town funeral home. Wiles explains how she came up with the names of the characters who appear in the novel and her reasons for choosing each one. She talks about the lessons that can be learned from the different ways in which each character deals with death, the authors and books that inspired her to become a writer, and two new novels that fans of Wiles can look forward to reading in the near future.

Kidsreads.com: EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS is set in Snapfinger, Mississippi. Are you from that area, or what made you choose this for the setting?

Deborah Wiles: I was born in Mobile, Alabama and grew up most of my summers in Mississippi, where all the relatives lived and where my parents were born and grew up. My dad was an Air Force pilot, so I moved a lot as a kid. Louin, Mississippi became the homeplace. I've made up a fictional county, Aurora County, where my characters live. LOVE, RUBY LAVENDER was the first novel to take place in Aurora County, in the town of Halleluia. Snapfinger is "the next town over" from Halleluia. All the names in both books are fictitious, but they represent towns in Jasper County, Mississippi, where I did so much growing up. There are crossover characters in LITTLE BIRD who made their first appearance in RUBY, but the books are not sequels. I think of them as companions.

KRC: Comfort Snowberger is such an endearing character. Is she based on a real person?

DW: I love Comfort, too, thanks. She comes from the best in me...maybe from the best in all of us.

KRC: Your characters' names (Comfort, Dismay, Declaration, Tidings) resonate with many of the overarching themes in the book. Describe the strategy of coming up with each name and why you chose each one.

DW: Comfort's father, Bunch, is the undertaker. I imagined him singing Christmas carols as an antidote to all the sad funeral hymns he must hear. So I gave the family names from "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" --- Merry, Tidings, Joy, Comfort, and Dismay. I settled on Comfort as the name for my main character long before I had a Christmas carol in mind, however, possibly because I needed comfort as I sat down to write this book! Comfort's best friend is Declaration. Her father owns the Aurora County News, hence her name, "Declaration." There are also jazz names sprinkled throughout because I love jazz: Plas Johnson, Johnny Mercer, Clark Terry...homages are everywhere!

And you are right, these names resonate with some of the themes. The right name for a character is crucial, as I also use names to help me characterize. I gave the two wise, funeral-home-founding Snowberger brothers names that were deep rivers: Edisto and Allagash. Because I wanted to connect Great-great aunt Florentine with the Peterson Egg Ranch family from LOVE, RUBY LAVENDER, I gave Florentine the first name "Eggs." I also gave her a brother named Benedict. You can guess his first name.

KRC: Throughout the book, each character seems to have his or her own way of dealing with death. Comfort finds solace while sitting in her walk-in closet among Great-great-aunt Florentine's pillows. Tidings cuts the grass. Peach throws emotional tantrums and vomits in flowerpots. Why did you take specific care to point out each character's healing methods and what do you want readers to take away from that?

DW: I'm so impressed you see their reactions as healing methods. I wanted to show how there are infinite ways in which human beings express their grief, come to terms with it, and eventually learn to come through to the other side. Every way is honorable, for we do the best we can with what we have to work with. As we face our sadness and walk through it, we learn something about ourselves, about others, about the world. And we grow. We have something to offer someone else. It feels important, to me, that we try to honor each person's way of coping, healing, changing, growing. We are always learning, and we can learn from one another.

KRC: In the Acknowledgments, you mention that you wrote EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS while grappling with a number of deaths in your family. How did writing this novel affect your grieving/healing process?

DW: I wrote this novel at a time when I could not finish another story I had been working on for a long time. My editor told me to put it aside and to answer the question, "What CAN you write?" And that's what I did. As I sat at my computer and stared at the blank page, a phrase rose to my mind and I captured it on the screen: "I come from a family with a lot of dead people." That felt real to me, and true. It became the first sentence of EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS. I followed that sentence, that declaration, that voice. And as I wrote, I felt better about...well, about everything. I gave a voice to my grief and loss, I cried a lot, and then, like sunshine after a storm, I began laughing. I laughed as Comfort wrote "Fantastic and Fun Funeral Food for Family and Friends," or "Top Ten Tips for First-Rate Funeral Behavior," not to mention her colorful obituaries ("Life Notices") and her endless attempts at getting them published in the Aurora County News. Laughter became important to me. It was healing.

KRC: Throughout most of the book, Comfort and Peach are at odds with each other, mainly due to Comfort's intense dislike for Peach's immature antics. Towards the end, they are thrown together in a near-fatal experience and afterwards the two see each other in a different light. Is there a lesson in this encounter? In the growth of Comfort and Peach?

DW: I wanted to explore the idea of sacrifice, or, to put it in Snowberger terms, "We live to serve." What does that mean? It is one thing to serve those you love or to serve strangers. It is quite another to be called to help someone you intensely dislike, as Comfort is called to do. In the end, however, I think both Comfort and Peach sacrifice parts of themselves they hold dear --- certain behaviors and coping mechanisms --- in order to serve a greater good. I think these sacrifices help them grow and develop some understanding and compassion for one another that they didn't have at the beginning of the book. Sometimes it takes a near-fatal experience for us to see ourselves and others in a different light. And, of course, that near-fatal experience can be metaphorical --- it doesn't have to be a physical experience.

KRC: Dismay, the funeral dog, is a crucial character in the book and one that is sure to be adored by your readers. Describe the role he plays in the characters' lives and why you left his fate seemingly open-ended.

DW: I adore Dismay, too. He serves as the swallower of sorrows. Dismay takes on the grief of the world, doesn't he? He absorbs it, shoulders it, for us. He is a "feel good dog." He makes the ultimate sacrifice, as well. Dismay loves everything and everyone, unconditionally, with abandon, with no boundaries. Dismay is who we are when we understand that every living creature is worthy of dignity and respect...and love. I think we all want to be loved in the way that Dismay loves Comfort and Peach; we all want to be "seen" in the way that Dismay stands at calm attention by every casket at every funeral; we all want to feel as free as Dismay does as he stands on top of Listening Rock, surveying his kingdom. I think we get there, to this unconditional loving place, this freedom, through sacrifice and with a lot of hope. I so wanted to leave room for hope at the end of this book. So I did.

KRC: In Comfort Snowberger's Top Ten Tips for First-rate Funeral Behavior, #10 reads: "Don't try to hide death from kids. If Grandpa has died, don't say, 'We lost Grandpa,' because little kids will want to know why don't you go look for him. Just say, 'Grandpa died.' We get it. Kids are better at death than grown-ups give them credit for." This seems to be one of the main themes of the book and one that could potentially foster parent-child discussions about the importance of talking about death openly. Would you care to elaborate on this?

DW: I've been teaching personal narrative writing in the classroom for many years. It never fails that one of the main topics children want to write about is the death of a loved one. They often aren't sure that this is an appropriate topic, which leads us to a discussion about it. Often that discussion is hesitant at first, but soon everyone in the room has a hand up and wants to tell about a death or deaths, from the family goldfish, to grandpa, a sibling, even Mom or Dad. Sometimes it isn't a physical death, it's an abandonment, or perhaps the death of a friendship. It's clear that we don't talk easily about death with children, and I wonder why that is. Maybe death feels more organic to my life because I grew up surrounded by old people and death. I spent lots of time in the Louin, Mississippi cemetery growing up, and I still love to wander cemeteries and think about all those lives that were spent above ground. I didn't write this book as a response to what I see in the classroom, I wrote it as my own response to life and death. But I'd be happy if the story sparked conversation at school, at home, among readers.

KRC: You also have written two picture books, FREEDOM SUMMER (illustrated by Jerome Lagarrigue) and ONE WIDE SKY: A Bedtime Lullaby (illustrated by Tim Bowers, music by Jim Pearce). How did your experiences writing picture books differ from writing novels for young people? Do you prefer one over the other?

DW: Picture books are an entirely different art form and are so very challenging! So are novels. I don't prefer one over the other, but I am in a place right now where I am exploring the deliciousness of having some room to tell a story that can delve more deeply into themes I am interested in. FREEDOM SUMMER's theme is much the same as a major theme in LITTLE BIRD --- all human beings are worthy of dignity and respect. RUBY and ONE WIDE SKY speak to that theme as well. ONE WIDE SKY expresses it in 88 words. FREEDOM SUMMER speaks to that theme in 750 words, while LITTLE BIRD uses almost 35,000. I hope I make it worth the reader's time to spend a novel's worth of words exploring that theme, along with others, which is also a blessing of the novel --- there are subtexts, subthemes, subplots; there are deeply-felt characterizations and lovely food to be eaten in novels! And more.

KRC: Are there any particular authors/books that inspired you to become a writer?

DW: Hands-down, E.B. White has had the most profound influence on my wanting to tell my stories. While I love CHARLOTTE'S WEB, it's White's essays and letters I have read over and over for literally years, that have spoken to me deeply about what it means to tell your story. I'm also quite moved by DELTA WEDDING by Eudora Welty, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee, and THE REIVERS by Faulkner. I started out as an essayist many years ago, and then moved slowly and steadily into children's books and fiction. As I learned to write for children, I read over and over again almost anything by Katherine Paterson, Cynthia Rylant, and many, many more wonderful children's book authors. I feel honored to be in such august company on library shelves, and even more honored to have my stories read by young readers. That's the best feeling in the world for me as a writer.

KRC: What advice do you give to aspiring writers?

DW: Read. Read like a writer. "How does she do that?" I always tell my students that, after reading, there are three Deborah Wiles Guidelines to Writing Well: 1. Keep a notebook. Put everything in it. I put my grocery lists in my notebook, along with doodles, recipes, sayings, lists of all kinds, even writing ideas. 2. BIC --- put your butt in the chair and be as messy as you need to be, but get it down. Then, 3. Revise, revise, revise.

KRC: What are you working on now and when can readers expect it to be available in stores?

DW: I'm working on a serialized novel that will run in the Boston Globe in September. It's another Mississippi story, starring a boy and his faithful, wrinkled, yellow dog, Eudora Welty. After I'm finished with this story, it's on to "The Elvis Novel," as we've taken to calling it, as Elvis is alive and well in this 1966 Mississippi story. It's the story I was trying to write when I got sidelined by death and grief, and then got rescued by Comfort and her story. I'm glad I did. And I'm glad you asked me these wonderful, thought-provoking questions. Thank you so much.

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