An Interview with: Janet Taylor Lisle

This week’s author is highly acclaimed Newbery Honor and Scott O'Dell award winning author, Janet Lisle. Her latest book is HIGHWAY CATS (you can see my review here). Welcome Janet!

Lori: Where are you from?

Janet: I'm a New Englander with deep roots in Rhode Island. My home is in a small, rural town, on the coast. I love the fields, ponds, beaches and woods surrounding my house and many of my stories contain passages that describe real places I walk every day. Near my home are ocean coves where rum-runners like those in my book BLACK DUCK once landed on moonless nights. The magical garden featured in THE LOST FLOWER CHILDREN is off my side porch. The forest that provides the scene for my novel about how wars start, FOREST, is just down the road.



Lori: Tell us a little bit about your writing process.


Janet: I wrote my first books with a pencil, pages that I then typed up on an electric typewriter before mailing them to my editor. I work entirely on computer now. Otherwise the process is the same. Writing is like fishing: first comes the small tug of an idea, then a cautious reeling in, a stronger pull from the water and then a big fight (usually about mid-way through) where the story tries to get away and you have to play it with cunning and patience. Finally, if you're lucky, you land a creature that isn't at all what you thought it would be, but you're so relieved the fight is over that you don't care.

Lori: Do you listen to music while you write?

Janet: I love music, and sing in several choruses. But I don't listen to it while I write. It tends to drown out the voices of my characters. Also, I like to read my work out loud from time to time to hear how it sounds. Words, sentences, even whole chapters, make music of their own.

Lori: Do you ever work on more than one book at a time?

Janet: No. Once I'm into a story, I can't think of anything else.



Lori: Tell us about the play adapted from your novel AFTERNOON OF THE ELVES.
Janet: AFTERNOON OF THE ELVES was optioned by a children's theater company and written as a script for stage so quickly that I didn't have time to participate. I would have liked to. It's been a big success and I like the play a lot, but I find it both sadder and less magical than my story. I'm basically an "awe and wonder" writer, someone interested in the power of imagination. It's why I love writing for children. They're more in touch with this side of themselves than adults. In the play, Sara-Kate's backyard elves are no longer real by the end. They've become a way to describe Sara-Kate's terrible social problems. In the book, I leave room for my readers to imagine what they please about the elves. Personally, I've always believed that, within the scope of the story, the elf village is awesomely and powerfully alive. This is what gives the story its imaginative depth.

Lori: What do you like to read?

Janet: My favorite books growing up were J.R.R. Tolkien's THE HOBBIT, and his RING TRILOGY. I loved his invention of an alter world complete with history, geography, moral code, and even a literature. The writing in those books, with its over-elaborate, mock heroic tone, isn't the best, I see now, but I still admire the sweep of Tolkien's imagination, and the sinister creep of evil that shadows his plots.

Lori: Can you tell us anything about what you’re working on now?

Janet: At the moment, I'm writing a history of my town for the local historical society. The town is one of the oldest in America. This fall, I've been researching what happened to the Indians who lived here first, back in the 17th Century. There's a mystery about where they went. Were they simply killed or deported, or did they gradually blend in with the newer inhabitants? I may use these ideas in a fictional book later.

Lori: Is there anything else you’d like to share about your writing life?

Fiction is a kind of writing that's best done on a full tank of ideas and emotion. I need time between books to fill up. For me, the best stories have meanings that go deeper than the surface narrative. It isn't enough that characters are "well developed", as the critics often say. Or that a story is deftly plotted or a fast, exciting read. Ambiguity, voice, the uneasy thrill of teetering at the edge of reality, are things I've learned to treasure in novels written for adults, and I work to bring them to my stories for children and young adults. This doesn't make me the most popular writer out there, but for those who care to look, there are special sights to be seen.

Lori: Thank you so much for dropping by. Your books are worth the wait! (Janet has a wonderful, informative website with more interviews here).