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It's hard to find a major award for children's literature that author Richard Peck hasn't won. The Newbery Honor, Newbery Medal, National Book Award - embossed seals on many of his books proclaim that he sets the standard for great writing.
But most important to Peck is his popularity with his audience: young adults. "I write for the young because it's harder to be young now than anything I knew or remember," says Peck, 70.
In a recent telephone interview from his New York City home, Peck talked about his past (as a seventh-grade language arts teacher), his present (a recently released collection of short stories) and his future (a book titled The Teacher's Funeral due out in the fall).
Atkins: So many of your most recent books take place in bygone eras. Any particular reason for this?
Peck: I have made a commitment that the rest of my career will be in historic fiction because of 9/11. In the aftermath of 9/11, I went into schools everywhere, as I still do, trying to see how that affected the curriculum. Now that we see history repeating - we say we have had a Pearl Harbor for our time, for example - now that we see the foreign wars repeating, how is that being expressed in history class and, of course, geography?
Well, it isn't being expressed at all. This has not affected the curriculum in any way. I spent (time recently) with seventh-graders in a town in Indiana, and I said to them, "What is the capital of England?" One boy in 135 knew. And you want to think, "If they don't know that, what do they know?" They just don't know history. I can't rectify that, but I can write a story with a historic setting. After all, I fell in love with the Civil War, for example, in the pages of Gone With the Wind and The Red Badge of Courage - when I was not in history class.
Atkins: So you're still teaching.
Peck: Oh, you can't quit teaching. No, no. You just go on and on trying to turn life into lesson plans.
Atkins: One of my favorite characters you've created is Grandma Dowdel from A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder.
Peck: Yes, she has emerged as - well, she has taken over my life, actually!
Atkins: I know that one question your readers would want to ask is whether she was based on your grandmother.
Peck: No. She's the grandmother I wish I'd had. That's what you can do when you're a writer. You can give yourself the family and the friends you wished you'd had, not the ones you had. But to say to a writer, "Is that your grandmother?" Well, that doesn't give us much credit for creativity, does it? My grandmother wasn't the least bit interested in me, and (Grandma Dowdel) is a woman who secretly lives for the sight of her grandchildren, doesn't she? They're looking forward every year to seeing her; they don't realize how much she's looking forward to it.
Atkins: Any chance that Grandma Dowdel will be coming back?
Peck: I guess not. She has been so good to me that I don't want to beat her to death. She has won two Newbery Awards. Now would she win a third? I don't think so, and the people would say, "Well, he's going downhill, the poor old fool." On the other hand, kids write and say, "Well, let Joey or Mary Alice have children and send them back." But, you see, my problem there is those children would be 1950s, and I have a taboo about the 1950s, so I'd have to overcome that. I don't know whether we could have Grandma taking on the McCarthy hearings with a TV in her house. I can't quite picture it. Although the more I think about it, the better I like the thought of it. Anyway, that's what kids' advice is, and I've learned to listen to their advice.
Atkins: So do you have kids writing to you with ideas and advice?
Peck: Oh yes. I had one today that was very startling to me. These letters do have an influence on me because a reviewer is another adult. I didn't write the book for another adult. So, when I hear from young people, I listen.
Atkins: And you travel extensively as well, and you speak with students.
Peck: Endlessly. Too much. And then I come back and I have to deal with myself because I don't see anything that gives me any hope in the schools. Except for the individual, of course, which is what a novel is always about. When I entered this field, high school teachers were looking for books on real issues: the drug culture, the antiwar movement, divorce. Today, a high school teacher wouldn't go near them.
Atkins: I run two book clubs for the St. Petersburg Times and have found that young readers want books that speak to their experience in a straightforward, honest way.
Peck: But they do want a happy ending. I don't have happy endings for them, and I get a lot of outraged letters from the young. And they always say it the same way: "I didn't understand the ending." Well, they did understand it. What they meant was they didn't accept it. I don't think anyone of any age wants too much reality in fiction.
Atkins: But you're still going to give it to them.
Peck: Well, I'm going to bootleg it. You've got to put some other very attractive elements into the story if you've got a hard truth in there and an ending that isn't "and they all got married and lived happily ever after." But you've got to give them something else that carries them along. I always say one thing: A novel for the young must entertain on every page, but it needs to annoy on three. Because to give them everything they want replicates the permissive parent on television.
Atkins: Priscilla and the Wimps is one of my favorite short stories. I understand there's an interesting story behind how and why you wrote it.
Peck: I had never written short stories or been very interested in them. (In the 1970s) I got a phone call one day from the editor of . . . a magazine. And she said, "I've been reading your novels, and I'd like for you to do a short, short story for us. It can't be more than four pages, and it must end with a bang. That's the good news. The bad news is I need it Thursday." And I said, "Well, I don't do short, short stories." And she said, "Well, we pay $3,000." And I said, "Well, I'll try." So I had 36 hours to write my first short, short story. She had also said, "It's got to take place in junior high because all of the stories submitted to us are always about high school, but we want junior high stories."
So I cleared my decks and sat down to a blank page, and I thought, "There's only one thing I know about this story, and that is it's junior high, so the girl will be bigger than the boy." And from there it unfolded - and very quickly. I keep going to schools where the girls are bigger than the boys in that age group. And the girls slump and have terrible posture and look self-conscious and hang-dog.
I thought, "Wait a minute. A story must be better than real life. How could she be big and proud?" Well, the best way to do that would be to best the bully. And the fact that he's a boy adds spice to it. So I got my $3,000, and I got it in in 36 hours. But I found that I really liked those characters. I liked the concept. In puberty, your best friend is not of the opposite sex, but in the story, he is. So you see, there's nothing realistic about it. But I liked those characters so much, I wrote a novel for them called Secrets of the Shopping Mall. I learned from that experience that to write a short, story introduces me to characters; that often leads to a novel. And its happiest occasion is in the short story in the new collection called Shotgun Cheatham's Last Night Above the Ground, which turned out to be the first chapter of the novel A Long Way from Chicago, which won the Newbery Silver, and its sequel won the gold. So now I very much believe in writing a short story first, to get me started in a certain direction.
Atkins: Could you tell us about the new book you are working on?
Peck: As I tell young people, my career has been an unending search for the perfect first line. And so when I talk with young people about writing, I always say that the most important aspect of writing is one your teacher never told you, and that is: You are only as good as your first line. If your readers don't like your first line, they'll never see the second. Sometimes I write my first line 50 times before I find one. I have to write it, not with myself in mind, but with my readers in mind. So after 33 books I have found the perfect opening line. My problem then was to find a book that went with it. Would you like to hear the perfect opening line?
Atkins: Yes, I would.
Peck: "If your teacher has to die, August isn't a bad time of year for it." I've had standing ovations for that one. So I've written a novel about a one-room schoolhouse 100 years ago. The teacher dies on the first page, and the boy telling you the story thinks his life is solved now. They can lock up the school, throw the school down the well, fill in the privies and forget about education. But that isn't going to happen, of course. That boy is going to get for a replacement teacher his worst nightmare: his big sister. So if you will read a short story in my collection called By Far the Worst Pupil at Long Point School, you will see a preview of this novel. And it will be called The Teacher's Funeral. Is that a selling title, or what? That'll be out in October.
- Author's note: Richard Peck's collection of short stories is called Past Perfect, Present Tense: New and Collected Stories.
Holly Atkins teaches seventh-grade language arts at Southside Fundamental Middle School in St. Petersburg.