Interview with Newberry Medal Winner Karen Hesse

Newberry Medal winner Karen Hesse speaks about her new book, Brooklyn Bridge, and where she finds inspiration for her books.

Commitment:  BROOKLYN BRIDGE is a beautifully written novel for young readers about the Mitchom family, Russian Jewish immigrants who invented the first stuffed teddy-bears. It is based on a true story. What inspired you to write this book?

Karen Hesse:  Thank you. We come across stories every day, don’t we? What is it about a particular story that begs to be explored, expanded, shaped into fiction? I can’t begin to explain the process and I worry that delving too deeply into the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of it might be misunderstood by my muse. All I can say is that when I read about the invention of the teddy bear in Bill Slavin’s book TRANSFORMED I got that tease, that tickle, that sensation of the curtain lifting for a moment. When that moment comes, if I can, I try to get behind the curtain with low-level research. If I’m still interested after preliminary investigations, I continue. If I’m still tickled by it a year later, if I'm still exploring behind the curtain, if I'm very lucky, something like BROOKLYN BRIDGE comes out of it.

Commitment:  In addition to the story of the Mitchom family, you include a tremendous amount of detail about Brooklyn during the turn of the 20th century. How much research was involved in writing this book?

Karen Hesse:  I spend about a year doing research on my novels before I ever write the first word. BROOKLYN BRIDGE is no exception. I delve into newspapers, non-fiction, music, fiction, art, photography, poetry, and plays created during the period. Then I go on to read anything relevant that has been written since the period. It’s important to me not to cover territory that some other writer has already documented. It’s also important to me to be fairly exhaustive in my research so that I can convey a reasonable sense of the time period to the reader. No one can ever get it entirely right, but knowing my work is read by young readers, I don’t want to mislead them. Even though I write fiction, I believe it’s my responsibility to base my work as much on fact as possible, not only for the sake of the integrity of the book, but for the sake of the trusting reader.

Commitment:  Is this the first time you've written a novel based on the lives of real people?

Karen Hesse:  No. But this is the least thinly veiled.

Commitment:  More than anything, the protagonist of BROOKLYN BRIDGE, Joseph Mitchom, longs to go to Coney Island. What does Coney Island symbolize for him?

Karen Hesse:  Okay, you may not like this answer but this is a sticky issue for me. I don’t believe any writer should interpret their work for the reader. A book is created by an author, but it is the reader who keeps it alive after the author sends it out into the world. If I give the definitive response as to how the reader should interpret my words, I have cheated the reader of the experience of co-creating the book with me. That’s just not fair, is it? So I make it a rule to never answer questions of interpretation. Sorry.

Commitment:  You won the Newberry Medal for OUT OF THE DUST, a novel which takes place during the Great Depression. One of the things that made OUT OF THE DUST so unique was that it was written in verse. What inspired you to write Out of the Dust that way?

Karen Hesse:  I’m certainly not the first to write a novel in verse. This form has existed for centuries. It’s not used much these days, though I suppose since OUT OF THE DUST it’s experiencing something of a resurgence. The reason I chose to write the book as a cycle of poems is because I wanted to represent to the reader how spare a life this family lived. How studied every movement was. How there could be no room for waste. I love the idea of wedding form and content. I’ve experimented with this in some of my other novels, too. In the case of OUT OF THE DUST, the poems perfectly showed on the page (form) the necessity to cut out anything superfluous during that time period (content).

Commitment:  Most of your novels feature female protagonists, but BROOKLYN BRIDGE feature a male protagonist. What this more difficult for you?

Karen Hesse:  This is not my only male protagonist, but you are correct, the majority of my narrators are female. Is it more difficult for me to tell the story from a male point-of-view? You bet it is!

Commitment:  In BROOKLYN BRIDGE, woven into the story of the good fortune and financial success of the Mitchom family (which Joseph often finds to be more a of a burden than a blessing) are tales of a group of children whose bad fortunes have lead them to a parentless and homeless existence under the Brooklyn Bridge. How important is the theme of fortune or luck in BROOKLYN BRIDGE?

Karen Hesse:  We’re bordering on interpretation again, aren’t we, but I think you only need to look at the first sentence of the novel to answer your own question. The way an author begins a book often tells the reader volumes about where they’re about to go with it.

Commitment:  The subjects of your books vary greatly: BROOKLYN BRIDGE deals with luck and the immigrant experience in the early 1900's; OUT OF THE DUST tells the story of a girl in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl during the Great Depression; LETTERS FROM RIFKA is the story of the journey of a twelve year old Jewish girl from the Ukraine to Ellis Island. What inspires you to tell a particular  story?

Karen Hesse:  Now we return to your first question. But I’ll try elaborating a bit more on the topic. There are times when a story grabs hold of me and won’t let go until I’ve written it out. Not all of those stories become books. There have been times when I’ve done the research, the writing, and even several revisions and I still don’t believe the book is strong enough, that it is worthy enough of readers. I know how fractured everyone’s time is. I don’t want to offer a book to a reader unless I believe it really might be worth spending their precious time inside it. So whatever that thing is that causes a story to resonate inside me so profoundly that I’m still thinking and caring about it one year or two or ten years later, if I can thread that wonder into the finished product it becomes a book. If I can’t, it gets filed in a drawer in the back room of my attic. And I wait for the next tickle of inspiration.

Commitment:  What are you working on now?

Karen Hesse:  Projects in progress are fragile things. As vulnerable as soap bubbles to poking and prodding. But I will say I’ve been inspired by some volunteer work I’ve been doing and perhaps something book-ish will come of it.

Karen Hesse is the acclaimed author of over a dozen books for young readers, including the 1998 Newbery Medal winner, Out of the Dust. In 2001 she won the Christopher Medal for her young adult novel, Witness; in 2002 she was the recipient of a MacArthur Prize, only the second author of books for children to win this prestigious award. She lives in Brattleboro, VT.

To purchase BROOKLYN BRIDGE, click here.