From the May/June 2001 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

An Intervew with Virginia Euwer Wolff

BY ROGER SUTTON

Virginia Euwer Wolff is the author of five novels for young adults, all of which are notable for their emotional intensity, for their innovation, and for characters that “grab hold and won’t let go,” as the Horn Book review of her groundbreaking free-verse novel Make Lemonade said. In True Believer, the sequel to Make Lemonade published this spring by Atheneum, Wolff continues the story of the vulnerable, resilient LaVaughn. In his January/February 2001 review, Roger Sutton noted how this “master stylist” makes “each line-break fall in exactly the right place, never relying on the bottom of a page to provide a punch line.” Sutton started thinking more about novels in verse and decided to give Wolff a call.

ROGER SUTTON: When you were working on Make Lemonade, did you know that you were going to be writing True Believer?

VIRGINIA EUWER WOLFF: No, I didn’t. But I became very interested in the questions that the first book raised, and I guess I just really got interested in LaVaughn. Thanks to my editor, Brenda Bowen, LaVaughn became a solid character in Make Lemonade, and I’ve been thinking about her ever since.

RS: And I see there’s going to be a third book as well. Can you tell us what’s going to happen in it?

VEW: No, because if I say it I will probably never get it written.

RS: Good for you. Sequels are tough. Booklist critic Hazel Rochman says that the best books make you want a sequel but refuse to give it to you.

VEW: Yes, and Anatole Broyard said “a good book is never finished; it goes on whispering to you from the wall.” I knew the danger from the very beginning of True Believer. I knew that there was a likelihood that it would be pedestrian and mediocre, two of the sins in my church.

RS: One thing people have talked about with Make Lemonade, as I’m sure they will with True Believer, is that we aren’t told the race of the people in it. I assumed they were white; colleagues have assured me that they are black.

VEW: I was very careful of not having them be any race, any particular ethnicity. I had hoped that the readers of Make Lemonade would have the characters be whatever ethnicity they needed them to be. I have on my wall a drawing, made by an eighth-grader, in which Jolly and LaVaughn are clearly Asian. That was the sort of thing I had hoped for. It’s true that their language is not the language of any ethnic group, and you could call that a virtue or a flaw, depending on how you look at it.

RS: : But they don’t come across as blanks. They’re not generic characters; they’re not archetypes.

VEW: My hope is that my characters are quirky and idiosyncratic enough to be real human beings.

RS: What brought about the form of that book, the free-verse narrative?

VEW: It’s the way I heard the voice that was telling it. I had an index card on my desk for months that said, Sit here in the mornings like Ray Bradbury. Bradbury used to sit and improvise, just typing words to see what would happen. I finally sat down one morning and it got very scary. Just sit and improvise? I can’t do that. So I gave myself a task, the creative writing exercise known as Be Something or Somebody. I said, Okay, I’ll be a babysitter, and out came the first five lines of section seven of Make Lemonade:

Those kids, that Jeremy and that Jilly,
were sloppy and drippy
and they got their hands into things you’d refuse to touch.
They acted their age so much they could
make you crazy.

The kids had names from the start, and they were sloppy drippy messy kids, leaving the messes my own little kids had left around, leaking liquids everywhere. The form just came to me. It was less intimidating than trying to fill a whole paragraph. And so I kept it, hoping I wouldn’t have to change it but being afraid I would. But Brenda Bowen said, No, this is fine, you don’t have to change it into paragraphs. I did try changing part of a draft into paragraphs, and I just got all blocked and stifled and couldn’t do it. It didn’t want to get written. I also kept it that way because Make Lemonade is dedicated to young mothers. I wanted young girls in Jolly’s situation, maybe pregnant or with babies, and maybe going back to school, to be able to say, “I read two chapters!” In the amount of time they had, with the amount of concentration they could muster, I wanted them to be able to get through the book. I myself am intimidated by huge pages of gray without any white space. I wanted the white space to thread through the story and give it room to breathe. That sounds a little pretentious but it’s kind of what I meant to do. I wanted the friendliness of white space on a page.

RS: What kind of thinking do you do about where to put a line break?

VEW: I talk it, all the time I write out loud. By now I have to work very hard to steer it away from pretentiousness, and that’s a challenge. But in the beginning it wasn’t so much of a challenge because I didn’t know what I was doing!

RS: That’s a problem I’ve had with some other books that have used this style, where the form is used either in an empty way, where you could put it in a regular paragraph and it would be fine, or melodramatically, where the last line provides a punch line. But yours have both natural speech patterns and the concentration of poetry. There’s a reason for it to be in that form.

VEW: I hope so. I talk it, I say it aloud over and over again. I’m extremely aware of the danger of this different form preening. Is that a fair word to use? Showing off: look, I’m different or, God forbid, look, I am poetry.

RS: Even poetry that does that is horrible.

VEW: Writing my prose in funny-shaped lines does not render it poetry. And there’s nobody more aware of that than I.

RS: I don’t agree. I think it is poetry. Formally, it’s poetry: once you’ve decided to use a line break for dramatic effect, whether for good or for ill, you are writing poetry. You’re using the shape of the page and the length of the lines to help tell the story. At the same time you — you, Jinny — are writing good poetry in these two books because each line and each chapter has the concentration of language that one expects from good poetry.

VEW: That’s the way I feel about it. I think meaning ought to radiate more fiercely in poetry than it does in prose; I’m certainly not alone in thinking that. I don’t put those demands on my prose. Poetry should have more ergs per word.

RS: I think that yours does. I can think of some great novelists who write in entirely conventional forms whose power is achieved by mass.

VEW: Toni Morrison, for example.

RS: But a poem doesn’t do that. It’s compression that makes a poem work. If the lines in True Believer didn’t work from their compression it would seem just another way to paragraph, an easier way to read. With some of these “prose poem” novels we’re increasingly seeing, it’s possible to rearrange the line breaks into paragraphs without feeling as if anything has been lost. I can’t do that with your books.

VEW: If form is only an extension of content and we want to try to make our stories as convincing as they can be, we have to find the right form. I find the only form in which I can write the thing. I like to think of the young man in Chekhov’s The Seagull who rants, “We must have new forms! . . . If we can’t have new forms, we had better have nothing at all.”

RS: I thought it was a pretty bold leap, in Bat 6, to have those twenty-plus narrators.

VEW: It was nothing but imitating Faulkner. I don’t care how many children’s and YA authors have done that before, we’re all just imitating Faulkner. None of us made it up. With twenty-one narrators, I knew I was straining the reader’s patience, but I wanted — you know, it takes a village to raise a child? I wanted a village to tell a story.

RS: You wanted every girl on the two softball teams to have a chance to speak.

VEW: Exactly. As in a traffic accident. Every eyewitness should be given a chance to speak. In the wake of last November’s election, we are quite aware that not every vote was counted, and I’m furious. For better or worse we are in a democracy. Whitman wanted everybody to have a voice, and Twain felt the same way, and I wanted to let the girls in Bat 6 each have her say, too.

RS: It must be dangerous when you’re writing about characters like LaVaughn, or Nick Swansen, or Shazam in Bat 6, all of them struggling and troubled, to resist the impulse to pontificate, to Make A Voice Heard.

VEW: Actually, I don’t have any trouble resisting that impulse
because I don’t have a clue what needs to be said. Marian Wright Edelman may know what needs to be said, or Howard Gardner, or Robert Coles — those people may have an idea of what needs to be said. I don’t.

RS: But you do give your characters advice. That marvelous teacher, Dr. Rose. I wish she had been my teacher. She’s clearly giving advice to the reader as much as she is to the characters, but she’s so charismatic that you don’t mind.

VEW: Well, I don’t mind. I happen to love her. That’s a dangerous thing, to love one of your characters, but I love her at a distance because I have nowhere near the strength nor the eloquence she has. But I did have a model for her, a person I never met in the flesh but saw a few times. I also didn’t invent some of her dialogue. “Adjectives qualify the world” comes from poet Ellen Bryant Voigt in a lecture. I borrowed it and added my own stuff. It might offend some readers that there is this soapbox True Believer who says that we must do this and this and this, etc., but there she is.

RS: Didacticism is something we watch for in books for young adults. But the problem is not the teaching, it’s when it’s not convincingly worked into the world of the novel.

VEW: And if it’s not, I start to barf.

RS: We recently ran an essay by Donna Jo Napoli about how her training as a mathematician helps her as a novelist (“What’s Math Got to Do with It?” January/February 2001 Horn Book). You’re a musician. What does that have to do with your writing? What has it taught you?

VEW: First of all, the fact that constructive criticism is necessary and inevitable! But I couldn’t have written Bat 6 if I hadn’t been aware of the many voices in an orchestra. If the oboe’s missing, we’re in big trouble. And my sense of beginning, middle, and end. My sense that motifs can come back, be repeated (and I hope not ad nauseum).

I play a lot of chamber music. (Incidentally, I turned into a teacher and a writer because I wasn’t enough of a violinist.) Chamber music consists of basically one person per part, and that’s perhaps at the core of how I know every voice needs to get heard.

I’m always listening to classical music while I’m writing. When I think I’m in trouble, all I have to do is tune in more closely to Schumann, who went berserk; Brahms, who never found a woman to love him; Beethoven, who went deaf and didn’t find love; Tchaikovsky and his tragic life; and I think, I can do this. All I’ve got is a paragraph problem. Big deal. Music touches the human heart with all its overwhelming sense of tragedy all the time. Even the lightest of music always has that underside that we’re going to die. Mahler wrote the most gorgeous, gorgeous of melodies when his daughter had just died. When I began writing Probably Still Nick Swansen, I saw in my mind a boy standing outside a building with all kinds of happiness, bright lights, and music going on within, and what was playing outside for him, his own private song, was “Eleanor Rigby.”

RS: It’s interesting to me that you can listen to music while you write. Don’t you get distracted? Maurice Sendak, for example, has said that he listens to music constantly while he paints but has to wear earplugs when he writes.

VEW: If I don’t have music, I’m half a brain. Because I don’t think I have much to say, but when I’m combining some little impulses in my mind with the great ideas I’m hearing across the room from the great minds of the past, then I find I do have something to say.

RS: You began Make Lemonade as an improvised writing exercise, but then you talk about loving classical music, which is a really ordered kind of performance. This is how it goes; this is where the oboe comes in . . .

VEW: Improvisation is certainly at the beginning of how I write, but at the end it’s carefully worked out. By the end I know exactly where the oboe has to come in instead of the six or seven other places where it might have come in.

RS: Other writers have told me that at the beginnings of their books they have to know where they’re going to end, and depending upon the writer, will more or less have outlined how they’re going to get there.

VEW: Katherine Anne Porter always wrote the last page first, evidently. I can’t do that; I don’t have any idea where it’s going. Well, Bat 6 came because I looked up in my brain and saw a whole crowd of people rushing toward first base, and I knew there was a crisis there. And so in a sense I wrote around that event, but that’s not the end of the book. No, I never know how it’s going to end.

RS: So how do you know when it’s finished?

VEW: Do you mean after all the many drafts and the hundreds of changes within them? Oh, I probably don’t recognize the end of the process at all. Brenda Bowen and I feel our way toward it together. I guess it’s when I can no longer do any more pulling, stretching, twisting, yanking, carving, coaxing, rending, mending, splicing. I don’t think there’s a gleaming moment of discovery: “Oh, it’s perfect now!” Nothing like that at all. More like a massive shrug of the shoulders, a huge exhalation. And in my case, it’s always “I guess . . . ” I’m never absolutely sure. Not of anything.