Transcription of Maria Padian for the show Kid Literature, #102
Dr. Lisa We’re talking to Charlotte Agell, who’s an author and illustrator and teacher of my own children but most recently of the book, The Accidental Adventures of India McAllister and also author Maria Padian who has most recently written the book, Out of Nowhere. Thanks for coming in.
Maria: Thank you.
Charlotte: Yes. It’s great to be here.
Dr. Lisa: Charlotte, you are recently profiled on the back page of Maine Magazine so people who have seen that know that you are a very interesting person. You have this background that most Maine authors don’t have. Where are you from?
Charlotte: This is quite a story. I actually marveled how Sophie was able to boil it down because we chatted for quite a while but the thumbnail is that I am from Northern Sweden, quite far north. My parents immigrated when I was basically a toddler. We moved to Canada, always spoke Swedish at home but I learned most in French. We moved back to Sweden where we had actually gone in many summers when I … at the summer after fifth grade but didn’t stay there very long because my father was posted to open up the far east for Volvo so I moved to Hong Kong and came from there because why not, to Bowdoin College where I have never been before.
In fact, the sort of sum total of my US experience up at that point was three days in New York City when I was 11 and what I remember most was writing every port because I was a very serious fifth grader on what we used to call eskimo transportation, Inuit transportation and something about the Empire State building but I’ve been here really almost ever since with the exception of grad school. I feel like it’s my adopted home, Maine.
Dr. Lisa: You live still in Brunswick.
Charlotte: Well, we moved back there, my husband and I when the kids were little. We’d sort of lived, I joked, in every smaller Maine town kind of from Portland to Gardiner, maybe not every single one but yes, we’ve been there a long enough time to call it almost forever since the early 90’s. ’94, we moved back there.
Dr. Lisa: Is that how you got to know our other guest, Maria Padian?
Charlotte: Yes, I think it would be. We have a lot of friends … I think we have a lot of friends in common first.
Maria: Right.
Charlotte: Our kids are … my kids are little. My youngest is just a bit older than your oldest so our kids didn’t exactly overlapped but in Brunswick like in any town, there are a lot of sort of Venn diagrams of people you know.
Dr. Lisa: Yes. Brunswick does seem to be a hot spot of creative sorts and especially writers.
Maria: There are a lot of writers. We wonder if there’s something in the water.
Charlotte: Yes. It’s almost insanely so. I was at my school library, Harrison Middle School and I brought in a Lisa Jahn-Clough book, her new release, Nothing but Blue I think it’s called and the librarian jokingly said, “Oh, is she from Brunswick, too?” Actually, she lives upstate … does live in Portland sometimes. I thought about it and I said, “Oh, well no but she grew up in Brunswick.” I started to laugh because maybe you could say it of every Maine town because I think it’s a very creative state in general but something about writers in Brunswick and you could fill up the entire interview with listing them. That would probably get pretty silly but …
Maria: Exactly.
Charlotte: You could probably do that.
Maria: And a supportive group, too. I think that’s what’s been so amazing about Brunswick, not just the community in Brunswick but also the Kid Lit community is really supportive, helpful, kind.
Charlotte: We’re colleagues.
Maria: Yes, not competitors but colleagues and that’s really neat.
Charlotte: Colleagues, absolutely, the way it should be. Also, of course grounded by not just the college but the best … I mean there are more of these … shout outs to Longfellow Books, too … but the best independent bookstore in the world, Gulf of Maine. That’s just if you ever want any literary conversation anytime during the day, just saunter in there and you can find it.
Dr. Lisa: Good point. I mean literally, you can just walk right up to the register and start to engage with Gary Lawless, the owner and he’ll take you right on. Talk about everything.
Charlotte: You’ll never know who’s going to turn up in there, too.
Dr. Lisa: Yes. I’m interested by … your books are very different, the books that you write. Describe … and actually, even amongst your books, they’re very different. This most recent one that you’ve written, Maria is about something that’s actually happening here in Maine which is sort of the integration of people in Somalia into our towns. I’m just going to read from the book jacket.
Some guys have all the luck. At least high school senior Tom Bouchard does, top of his class, currently number three and top of his game soccer. He’s the guy with a hot girlfriend and even hotter college prospects if he ever gets his applications done but here’s the thing about luck. It changes and Tom’s idyllic life quickly gets turned upside down when he least expects it. His hometown becomes a secondary migration location for Somali refugees fleeing their war ravaged homeland, refugees Tom hasn’t thought about much until four of his new Somali classmates joined the soccer team.
I’m not … I doubt that you wrote your own book jacket. Is that true?
Maria: That’s true.
Dr. Lisa: Okay, so these are not your words but I thought it was a good summary of something that I think a lot of people … a lot of teenagers in Maine are actually dealing with. It is interesting because Maine is a fairly white state and a fairly cold state.
Charlotte: Also known as, I think the whitest state but …
Dr. Lisa: Probably whitest state, right, and you’ve chosen to write about the integration of people from somewhere very far away and warm in a very sort of hit the ground kind of way.
Maria: Well, if you go into cities like right here on Portland and certainly up in Lewiston, we have plenty of diversity. There’s also people from all over the world who have landed on our shores partly because of the refugee program and partly because this is a wonderful place to live and the word spreads which is really what has taken place in Lewiston as you know. We have sort of a housing crunch in Portland. Folks in Lewiston let everybody know, “Hey, we’ve got some available housing,” to some of the Somali refugees in particular who are spillovers from Portland, ended up in Lewiston.
What really brought in the big numbers was that the Somali community is very closely knit and word went out as far away as it landed Georgia and Southern California, “Hey, this is a wonderful place,” and they began to show up in great numbers.
The book is fiction. The characters are fictional but of course, the story arc is based on some real events which have taken place in Lewiston over the last 10 years.
Dr. Lisa: You yourself have children, I think high school, college at this point?
Maria: College age right now. I’ve got a junior and a freshman in college but my kids were really little when this whole came to a head in Lewiston so when we brought them … they had then the big support rally in the community. When we brought them to that, they were really little kids playing out on the snow bank but then as they got older and they were playing high school parts, I was privileged to attend soccer games in various cross-country meets and I would see the wonderful diversity reflected just in the students who were competing against each other.
In particular, I saw these Somali athletes who were playing soccer and changing the nature of the game particularly in a town like Lewiston. I was wondering particularly because my grandparents are all immigrants. Of course, I just thought, “Oh, you know it’s the immigrant story all over again,” but with a whole bunch of twist because not only are these … not immigrants but refugees and there’s a real difference between an immigrant and a refugee in terms of the resources you come with and the mindset you come with but also, they were black in a very white state and they are mostly in a post 9/11 world.
I really wanted to know, wow, what is their experience like? In particular, what is the experience of the children in school and that’s where the story began.
Dr. Lisa: You did a lot of research.
Maria: I did a lot of research. I did a lot of research that proved fairly fruitless. A lot of conversations particularly when I started with adults because the topic was so charged and so much had happened and a lot of times, people were not talking to me necessarily about their experience about what agenda they were bringing to it. Then I got really lucky and I stumbled on a couple of high school kids and that’s when it changed. They were so genuine and generous and open and they are grateful to somebody just wanted to hear their story.
Suddenly, what I just realized is kids just want to be kids. They just want to fit in. They want to make friends. They want to go to the prom. They want to be invited over to the party so suddenly, I have this wonderful window into what sort of relationships were really possible and what was really happening in school because the folks at the schools aren’t going to let me in. I had to meet the kids outside of school and meet them in downtown Lewiston and go out and eat their food and go to their soccer games and just spend a lot of time with them and get them to tell me to their stories.
Charlotte: Now, the schools … and I can speak from experience being a public school teacher here in Maine … are inviting the book gang and I think it’s going to provoke some excellent conversations.
Maria: I hope so. I hope so they’ll come. I would love to hear those conversations because what’s been so interesting for me now that the book is out, I was in Lewiston last week and read portions of the book to a largely Somali audience and when I was done and I said to them, “You do understand that you’ve been my scariest audience.” They looked at me and said why and I said, “Because I’ve … this is you. This is your story. Did I get it right?” That moment I’ve had in a long time was all their like started nodding. What a relief. What a relief.
Charlotte: This inhabiting of other people’s stories can be scary. It’s a privilege and reflection and a dream come true.
Dr. Lisa: The reason I came to know about this most recent book, Maria, was because my daughter Sophie, we were at the local bookstore and we have our own local bookstore in Yarmouth on Main Street.
Charlotte: Royal River Books is it right?
Dr. Lisa: Yes. She came out to me and she said, “I really think that we should get this book.” I looked down. I said, “I know that author.” It was this interesting roundabout way of being introduced to something really important because of course, as soon she was finished reading the book, I started reading the book as myself. It is exactly what happened with your book, Charlotte.
Charlotte: Great.
Dr. Lisa: Sophie was reading it. I went back and read your book and there is a funny thing that happens when you read about the way that adults come across to kids in books that are for kids because you realize that that’s absolutely true and yet we’ve kind of forgotten as we’ve aged. I think the uncle in this book comes across as really having some very strong opinions about the Somalis and about immigration and it was really kind of like stopped me for a minute to think that this is how kids might actually perceive adults kids might actually perceive adults.
Maria: It’s interesting you bring up the uncle. I was at one of my tennis matches which was being played in Lewiston and I was heading out toward the tennis courts and all the buses were parked outside and in the distance, there were group of Somali girls who were going into a building. The bus driver caught sight of them and I heard him very angrily speak to another bus driver and he was expressing just his dismay with these folks in the community and saying things like, “I’ve got a daughter who’s been on a waiting list for housing and she can’t get in and these folks would show up and they get in.”
There was this pent-up anger and frustration that he felt and I thought this is all part of the mix here and that doesn’t necessarily make people good or bad or right or wrong. It’s what’s part of the mix and what I hope to do in the story was to bring in a variety of characters who were expressing that point of view and demonize anybody or take anyone else and elevate them. I wanted to just throw them out there in as realistic way as possible to spur conversation particular among particularly among young people because that’s what the book is for.
Charlotte: It feels so authentic to me. I think probably … I recommend a lot of books being a teacher and a crazed reader and I think seriously, Out of Nowhere, since it has come out has been the one I really have been recommending most not just because you’re a friend of mine but because it is that I think everyone in Maine should read it.
Dr. Lisa: We have an author on the show who has said it’s hard to have an author in the family. It’s hard to have a writer in the family.
Charlotte: Because they’re always slipping up from the dinner table saying, “Wait. I’ll be right back. I’ll just have to right this down.”
Dr. Lisa: Well, that or they’re always observing things.
Charlotte: True.
Maria: I was going to say it’s difficult because they’re really moody on the days when the writing goes bad. My daughter would say or she’ll come home and they’ll know that the writing went well because it looks like someone came in and ransacked the house or dishes are done …
Charlotte: Right.
Maria: The dog isn’t fed. I become obsessed by it sometimes.
Charlotte: It is a funny occupation because it is one of those ones where if it is going well, you can sit down and then look up and it’s hours later. It sort of grabbed you and then of course, they can go just fast … there can be days and I do. Even though I have this wonderful middle school teaching job which I just do, I want to point out, as a three-day-a-week gig. I think if I were back to teaching full time, I would have a harder time being also a writer because teaching is an amazing profession. It takes so much energy and this is not the time and place for it but I’m so saddened by all the vilification of teachers. Most of them are incredibly hardworking people.
Anyway, I feel like … my policy is I write every day. I think the book dictates that even if it’s just two minutes. Sometime, it goes well but sometimes, it goes disastrously awry and you just have to be appeased with … I just spent three and a half hours straight writing … I call it compose. It’s a more dignified way to say it because also, something might come out of it, a little sentence or an idea but it is a profession where you could feel sort of work, work, work and then just have an utterly unproductive day.
Maria: I think also too, that comes with time and you’ve been doing this for a long time so you also understand that there’s plenty of stuff you’re going to write and it’s going to end up on the editing room floor.
Charlotte: For sure.
Maria: Charlotte and I, we’ve just went to a critique group and we met … it was just last week and it was really amazing of how much of what I showed Charlotte last week is going to never show up anywhere else again but having this … this one is processed many times … asked me when I was writing my first book if I was going to be able to do that and it would have been way harder. Now, I understand why. I’m going to lose a lot of stuff but there’s more that’s going to come. It will be okay and I think that’s part of the process, too, is understanding there’s a lot you need to write that no one else needs to … or should ever read.
Charlotte: Right, it’s part of the process. I try to impart that to kids because there are so much good writing workshop stuff going on in schools and that writing essentially is rewriting, not very often will you sit down and suddenly have an opus appear before you.
Dr. Lisa: For parents who worry that maybe their kids don’t read enough or that want to know what types of books their kids should be reading or just want some tips from a teacher and from two writers, what would you say to them?
Maria: I guess it depends on how old the kids are and where they are in their leading lives. Read out loud to them and get them books on tape.
Charlotte: Yes.
Maria: If you’re outside and they’re picking up books on their own, all that time you’re spending in a car taking them to whatever sports activity or going to a long vacation. Books-on-tape is a great way. Hook them on a good story. Help them to learn to love a good story because I think that’s just part of human nature, is to want to hear a good story.
Charlotte: Hang out in libraries as much as possible when your kids are little. You could make them know that that’s just a place that we go to. Remarkable when we go to the public library.
Dr. Lisa: Your children are older now.
Charlotte: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: Both of your sets of children are older now.
Charlotte: My youngest is graduating in college in two days and he’s a writer.
Dr. Lisa: Very nice. I can see. How did that work out? This advice that you’re giving on reading to a parent-story listening, how did that work out for your own children?
Charlotte: Well, it’s funny because both my kids are very artistic, are into reading and writing but John actually wasn’t a very big reader, the one who’s graduating with a writing degree and all sorts of writing awards and beginnings of publications, really one of the best writers I know I have to say but his main use for book when he was about four or five was to see how far across the room he could throw it but we did read a lot. I just remember reading a lot and kids come to reading, I think, in their own way.
My daughter just came downstairs one day. She wasn’t even four. She was reading and she’d somehow decoded it but John, the younger had a harder time and kind of needed … for him, he seem to be seven but like what Maria said, we were always reading stories and telling stories in whatever context. I hope that still continues. I think car rides are perfect for that and I worry sometimes that we disappear so individually into our electronic devices that they’re … certainly, they can deliver a story too but I like the idea of communal story even telling stories in around in the car.
Maria: I would say that before my son’s eyes had even begun to properly focus, I think I was holding Chicka Chicka Boom Boom in front of him so that’s what we have done as a family. It’s just been a huge part of the bedtime routine and then we all read and so then we all spend a lot of time talking about what we’re reading.
I have a son who is probably not much of a writer but he’s an avid, avid reader and he’s … at this point, he’s veering into theater and acting so that’s where he’s found his stories and how he’s going to express his creativity.
My daughter is sort of a science person but she is the one of the best editors I’ve ever come across and we talk about books all the time so it was just, I think, part of the pattern. There’s always books, stories, storytelling even if it’s just around the table, what did you do and you tell it as a story. It was interesting. I was talking …
Charlotte: Having dinner together, that’s a good to place to start.
Maria: Dinner together and telling stories, not necessarily reporting but just being there in your own way. I was chatting with the girl who teaches in Cape Elizabeth where the schools have got plenty of resources, plenty of books and she was citing electronic distractions as a big problem particularly for her boys that she’s teaching. I don’t know. I think trying to limit electronic distractions and going back to the … around the fire of telling the story might be a good way to do it.
Dr. Lisa: Maria, how can people find out about your book, your latest book, Out of Nowhere, and also the other books that you’ve written?
Maria: They’re in the libraries. They’re on Amazon. They’re in local independent bricks and mortar bookstores and Out of Nowhere in particular is going to be part of the Portland Community Read. That’s going to be beginning this month, the whole I am your neighbor read which is a celebration of just diversity and immigrant culture and new commerce to Maine so that’s one way that they can find that book.
The other two, I know scholastic book fairs has been carrying Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress so the kids could get it that way and Jersey Tomatoes are the Best which is partially set in Jersey. It’s not a Maine book. That book again just … bookstores and Amazon. It’s in the schools.
Dr. Lisa: You have a website.
Maria: I have a website and I have a Facebook page, Maria Padian on Facebook and I have a Twitter account, all the social media things.
Dr. Lisa: You’re everywhere. That’s good. Charlotte, how about you? How will we …
Charlotte: Well, I’d say a good central clearing house would just be to go to my website which you will find if you just type in Charlotte Agell. It will bring you there and it’s a conduit, I guess a portal. I don’t have a Twitter account or too many fancy bells and whistles but you’ll find everything you need to know, I hope, there.
Dr. Lisa: Well, I am privileged that you took the time out of your busy schedules and out of your writing lives because I know that’s very important that you’re going to write … to keep writing.
Charlotte: You know what? It’s amazing that you said that because I think some people may think that writing just happens, that it doesn’t take time. I know, I think I suspect … well, I teach three days a week but I suspect that my elderly neighbor thinks I can always drop everything and have tea and sometimes, I can’t. He sees me there so he assumes I’m not doing anything.
Dr. Lisa: Well, I know that both of you are taking time out of your writing lives and it’s very impressive to me that you did this, that you came to talk to me and that you take the time to write for people like my daughter Sophie and my other children. Also, thank you for teaching, Charlotte.
Charlotte: My pleasure. I feel like I have the best gig in the world. It’s a great combo and the kids are wonderful and great.
Dr. Lisa: All of my children have enjoyed their interactions with you.
Charlotte: Hi, shout out.
Dr. Lisa: I’m … as I said, I’ve been speaking with Charlotte Agell, author and illustrator and Maria Padian, also an author and I’m sure we’ll have you back again sometime to talk more about your future works.
Charlotte: Thanks, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: Thank you very much.