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With The Library of Unruly Treasures, Jeanne Birdsall steps away from her much-loved Penderwicks novels to try something new to her pen but beloved in her reading memory: fantasy, of the decidedly domestic kind. Penderwicks fans will feel right at home.

Roger Sutton: You mention in a note to readers in the ARC that The Borrowers was one of your favorite books as a child. So that leads me, Jeanne, to ask, “How do you see your childhood reading come into the books that you write today?”

Jeanne Birdsall: I had a difficult childhood, and books pretty much saved my life. The Borrowers books, in particular, were crucial. I read them without knowing the illustrators, Beth and Joe Krush, lived about a mile from my house. When I was in fifth grade, they visited our school. It was the first time I understood that real people made books, and not only real people, but ones who lived in my town. That lodged deep within me. The humor in childhood books was also an influence. E. Nesbit is my primary muse, with Edward Eager a close second. They were funny but not obvious about it, going “Here’s a joke. And here’s a joke.” They trusted kids to get it, and I loved being trusted. So I try to use humor that way. I never know if it works. The ideal review of one of my books would be, “This is the funniest book I’ve ever read!” Nobody will ever say that, but that’s what’s important to me — the humor, and the safety and the immersion. Also, I was a fast reader when I was a kid, and always wanted books to be longer, to let me stay in them for a while. Part of why I let myself stretch out my books.

RS: What was it like to move into fantasy from the Penderwicks books? Which are comic realism, but still realism. There's nothing that happens in them that couldn't happen in real life.

JB: And they’re the funniest books you’ve ever read, right? Sorry. Sorry.

RS: And here, you have little creatures with wings, the Lahdukan, flying around the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. So, major fantasy elements. Was it daunting?

JB: I wasn’t as daunted as I should have been. It ended up taking me eight years to write! I thought I could be like Nesbit. She didn’t bother with extensive backstories. She’d say “The Psammead has been buried in a gravel pit for centuries. He grants wishes and used to hang out with pterodactyls,” and leave it at that. But I found I wanted the whole backstory to understand what they did and why. I wanted everything to really make sense.

RS: You mean the backstory of the Lahdukan?

JB: Yeah. I wanted something that could have happened not probably, but possibly. I visited Edinburgh to look at the street where the Lahdukan lived before they came to America. I gave them the height and wingspan of eagles, making sure they’d be able to fly (maybe — there’s no way to test it in the real world). I made sure there really was a steamship that would take them from Scotland to America. I studied the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (one of the book’s locations) for secret ways Lahdukan could move from floor to floor. I was also going to try and learn Gaelic but the Gaelic scholars I consulted said, “We’re really sick of Americans using our language in their fantasy books because they always screw it up — go make up your own language." Since I didn’t understand Gaelic enough to make up a Gaelic-adjacent language, I thought "Where else could they be from?" And decided on Mesopotamia, because I could more easily invent words that sounded like they came from the ancient stew of Middle Eastern languages. Then I researched all those ancient gods and goddesses and — oh, it was so much fun. But that was the problem. When my editor Michelle Frey (who I’ve been with since the first Penderwicks book) saw the first draft she said, “You’re spending way too much time with them and not enough time with the humans.” So that was the first big thing I had to get through.

RS: I remember Laurie Halse Anderson talking about how she gets so into the history when she’s researching for a book, but you’ve got to remember to keep your focus on your character, not on the neat thing you discovered in the library.

JB: She’s absolutely right. The research can be addictive. The further and deeper you go, the more fascinating it becomes. But I need it. If I can’t learn something new from a book, I get bored. For The Library of Unruly Treasures, I wanted to learn about the Scottish clans, for example, and how they functioned throughout history. At one point I came upon the Highland Clearances, when the English confiscated large swaths of Scotland for sheep farming. They’d wipe out villages, scooping up the men and sending them off to one of the colonies. Eerie to be reading about in 2017.

RS: But you always had to bring it back to Gwen. She has to stay at the center of the story.

JB: Yes. And that was really hard until I really had the Lahdukan, and then I could learn more about her and figure out how she would react to them. What it would be like for her, for this child who’d been moved around too much in her life and had these gross parents, to have this group of small creatures delighting in her and saying, “You're our hero, we need you to help us.” And what that does to any human being, let alone a child. I was proud of her because of what she learned through the book. She accepted the Lahdukan immediately because of the little guy Abarisruk — she finally had somebody who wanted and accepted her love. She’d never had that before. She didn't even have a pet, so here was Pumpkin, Uncle Matthew’s dog, and then these creatures. Abarisruk climbs up into her hair and says in Lahdukan, “I love you,” and once she has that, once she has that feeling of being able to give love with all of her heart, there's no way that she wouldn't help them. So she did. She had fears, the biggest one being of heights, and it didn't matter — she had to help them. And I don't think she even overcame the fear; she just did it anyway.

RS: Just dealt with it.

JB: Yeah, and that was another thing I thought a lot about. What does courage mean? There are hero stories in which the protagonist is afraid of something and then does it and then isn’t afraid anymore. And with Gwen that wasn’t true. She’s always going to be terrified of heights. And I think that’s more real. But that was interesting too. Courage is something I think about all the time these days: “What can I do? What would I do if I were there when someone was being hurt? What would I do if I saw ICE taking somebody away?”

RS: When Gwen’s negotiating going to stay with her great-uncle in the beginning, I thought of Betsy Byars’s edict, her first rule on writing for children: “First get rid of the parents.” Because a kid then has more agency and independence to drive the story herself. But then at the end of your book, that last phone call between Gwen and her dad, that's pretty savage. I mean it's so absolute. Right? There's no question: she should stay where she is with her uncle. She should not go back to those people.

JB: I needed that to be true. I needed her to be able to give unqualified love to Uncle Matthew without any guilt or “shoulds.” And he loved her and couldn't believe he was going to get to sort of raise his daughter Nora all over again, who was one of the joys of his life.

RS: When I think of so many of the successful domestic fantasy books, they do have a strong family of some kind at the heart. There's this wonderful tension between the adventure and the coziness of home, and she certainly does have a cozy life with her uncle that allows Gwen, and in general these characters, to have fantastic adventures, like Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time.

JB: Oh, yeah. Which of course was also very important to me. With The Penderwicks, I did the whole cozy home thing to have the family so safe they could invite other people in. The first one they gave sanctuary to was lonely Jeffrey Tifton. He really represents me. The Penderwicks created a safe world for me to live in to renegotiate my childhood. I wanted to show my readers what the family stories I read as a child showed me: that this kind of safety and love and hope is possible, that you don’t have to live like this, there are other ways.

RS: And you do that here as well. You give Gwen a safe place with Uncle Matthew, and that allows her to take risks. To climb up high despite her fear of heights, to deal with these little winged beings — she’s got security at the heart of it. That allows her to be brave.

JB: I named Gwen’s Uncle Matthew after Anne Shirley’s kind, sensitive Uncle Matthew, wanting to add a layer to my understanding of him. (I didn’t ask that Matt Phelan illustrate the book because of his name, but it felt good to have two stellar Matthews to draw on.) I try always to have several layers to my stories. The action, and the emotions, and the details should all be going forward at the same time. I care so much about craft, and that's the fun for me — trying to get it as good as I can but to never get it quite good enough, so then I can try harder on the next book. I believe that books for children have many purposes, but one is simply to teach them literacy, to teach them what it is to read a book with layers in it. Not so that then they can go on to read Henry James, though that would be great, but because if we can’t continue to communicate in layers and learn and write in layers, we’ll be in even worse shape than we are.

RS: The Penderwicks were famous, among other things, for their slight remove from contemporary life, even though they were part of it. And when I started this book and Gwen has a cell phone, I was like, “Oh my god, Jeanne Birdsall moves into the twenty-first century!” But at the same time I feel like we're in—well, it's not an alternate world, exactly, but it is a gentler place.

JB: I try not to be time specific. I’m not interested in that. Again, going back to books I read as a child — the Noel Streatfeild books, Betsy-Tacy, All-of-a-Kind Family — I was too young to understand that they were written in different times. They were just books to me. And if, say, I was in third grade when I started reading Betsy-Tacy, and somebody asked, “When did it take place?” I'm not sure I’d have known what the question meant. I work hard to avoid anachronisms. Years ago, to my shame, I tried to read The Bridges of Madison County. Almost immediately, the hero was shooting with a camera that didn’t exist when the story was supposed to have taken place, and I was done. If a writer doesn’t do even the basic research, why should I read the book? I don’t want to make those mistakes. As for cell phones in this new book, they’re so much a part of our lives now. It would have felt artificial to leave them out.

RS: And I remember when technology began marching more and more into our lives, some of the early attempts in children's fiction to include it felt very awkward and self-conscious to me.

JB: It all comes down to what is important. What gives us joy to write, and what are we trying to give of ourselves to children? And our way of looking at brand-new technology and how it affects their lives is probably one of the least interesting or important things we can tell them, because they're already so far ahead of us. I also had the Lahdukan to play off of. When Gwen asks if they know what a cell phone is, they answer along the lines of, “We see people use them and we think they use them too much.”

RS: Will you go back to these characters? Will there be another book?

JB: I have no plans for another Lahdukan book. I have plenty of stories to tell of that world, but I have a few other books I’m already working on. Since I’m seventy-four years old and a slow writer, I might be running out of time for any more than that. I’d love to think I could be like Margaret Atwood, still writing at eighty-five, but who can say?

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