With 30 books to his credit, in 2001 Richard Peck received the Newbery Medal–given by the American Library Association for the most distinguished American children’s book of the year–for “A Year Down Yonder.” The book was a sequel to “A Long Way From Chicago,” which features Depression-era city kids visiting their feisty Grandma Dowdel in rural Illinois. His most recent book, “Fair Weather,” brings some country kids to the city for a visit to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and it is trademark Peck–full of eccentric, charming characters who feel utterly real. Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor talked with Peck recently about his writing and his Illinois roots:
Q. You grew up in Decatur. Did you come to Chicago often as a child?
A. I didn’t, but I lived in Chicago after I was grown. I worked with [publisher] Scott Foresman for two years, and I taught at Glenbrook North.
Q. What did you teach?
A. English–what else? That was before it was replaced by language arts, which is English without grammar.
Q. When did you start writing novels?
A. I wrote my first line of fiction when I was 37. That was the day I quit my teaching job. I was teaching in New York by then. And I had found the people I wanted to write for, which is the first consideration. At 22, you think you’re writing for yourself. At 37, you realize you’re writing for other people or you’re not writing at all.
The training I got as a writer was from students. And the best teachers are 7th and 8th graders. They’re not good students, but they’re excellent teachers. They warned me against autobiography. They weren’t interested in my life and times. They’d heard those stories from their own parents. They didn’t believe any of that could have happened.
As an English teacher, I was trying to get them to identify with the story, identify with the character. And that really trained me in being a writer. I got things from my students [that] you don’t get in a creative-writing class.
Q. Anything in particular that you recall?
A. That if they don’t like the first page, they’ll never see the second. That’s one thing. They must identify with the character. But they’re willing to identify on only a handful of traits. And that they know no history and no geography. So it’s our obligation to bootleg a little history and geography to this generation because they’re not learning it now, and they won’t learn it in college.
Q. You create characters with whom young adults can identify–and they’re frequently quite elderly.
A. Another thing I learned from being with young people, particularly in the suburbs, particularly in Northbrook, was [that] now there are generations of people who don’t know their ancestors. They don’t know their grandparents. And they don’t have to write thank-you notes for gifts from grandparents. So they rob themselves of their roots and are once again at the mercy of each other. So that was another thing that I learned from the young that I wouldn’t have learned in the creative-writing class: Always put in an elder as a truth-teller, as a survivor, as a root for the reader.
Q. Why do you think schools don’t assign new books for students to read?
A. You will notice by the time students are in middle school, high school, it’s the classics, because that’s got to look good to parents. We’re finding now less and less commitment to the new book in middle school or high school, partly because they’re not parent-proof and schools are far more frightened of parental censoring now than they were when I was a teacher.
Q. Your older characters are not just truth tellers, but they also show kids what they can be like when they’re older.
A. I hope so because I’m very much opposed to sentimental portrayals of old people. I think if you’ve lived that long, you’re tough. After all, the basis of all fiction is the idea that in the long run, you will be held responsible for the consequences of your actions. And these are people who are being held responsible for the consequences of their actions. They have lived. They’ve paid the price. And they’re still there. Also they have a wealth of experience to draw upon. But you will notice they’re also rather childlike.
Q. Why do you make them that way?
A. Partly because they’re getting back to that age [in outlook] and partly because I’m trying to draw the line [connecting] them and the young. Granddad Fuller in “Fair Weather” is an extreme example. But I think Grandma Dowdel–who will end up to be my most popular character–is in fact an adolescent in disguise. After all, she believes the rules belong to other people. She means always to win, and she doesn’t care what she has to do. I think she’s a teenager in a big Lane Bryant dress.
Q. You’ve written about city folk heading to the country. Why did you decide to write about the reverse in “Fair Weather”? And how did you decide to set the book in the 19th Century?
A. I have always loved World’s Fairs. I have a small collection of memorabilia and books about them that I dip into every once in a while, and I realized that the World’s Fair of 1893 was really the debut of the 20th Century. It was based, in fact, on a frightening premise that electronic technology will solve everything. And so we haven’t made much progress there. But the idea of the curtain coming up on the 20th Century, with motion pictures and electricity and women’s rights and suffragism and all of that–all of that was a showcase of the fair. And I thought, what a wonderful way to introduce young people then to their futures. And of course they’d be farm children, because most people lived on farms then. And the impact of seeing that electric fair on people who had never even seen a light bulb was so dramatic in my mind.
Also it was in Chicago, and that recommends it enough to me because I think we have far too many books set in New York and the East and far too few set in Chicago and the Midwest–for the ugly idea that publishers live in the East and editors know nothing of American life.
You would be amused to see the comments made [by editors] in the margins of my books questioning the most basic references to places in Chicago and the Middle West. Whereas they would never question anything about the East. And they do kind of wonder why I want to write about nobodies.
Q. What did you read as a child?
A. Mark Twain. I needed to find somebody who was from the Middle West and of course there was a good one, [with] his use of local color and vernacular and folklore and my part of the country. You can’t match him, but what an inspiration. Of course we were taught in school not only to appreciate him, but to sit at the feet of the British writers. And I did that too. And that was a great interest for me, but that wasn’t an incentive to be one.
Q. What did winning the Newbery mean for you?
A. It meant that I lost a book in the past year. I didn’t get a book written because of it. It’s meant that I’ve been much on the road. And after Sept. 11, of course, life got more complicated, but I was able to keep going at first in rental cars. But I’m back to the air again.
It’s been a wonderful year. It’s a reminder to appreciate the people who were there for me and my work before this. It comes at a time when I can appreciate it. I didn’t expect it, of course. I didn’t think they gave it to sequels. I didn’t think they gave it to comedies. I didn’t think they gave it to a lot of things, so I was completely innocent when the phone rang a year ago.
Q. You write about the Midwest, but you choose to live in New York. Why?
A. I live in New York to keep my eye on the publishers. It’s just easier for me to hand-carry a manuscript sometimes. I mean, writing is hard enough anyway. So I am in New York to keep my hand in there.
Oh, one more thing. I think Chicago is the Great American City. And I’ll never live in that climate again. New York makes you appreciate Chicago. New York people make you appreciate Chicago people, so I’m back often. And I think Chicago has gotten better and better in my years of absence.
Q. Do you write every day?
A. Oh, no, no. Oh, heavens, no. I haven’t in a year. Actually I’ve done a lot of speech writing and article writing, but no, I don’t write every day, because I travel so much. I just keep at it until it’s done. I write each book six times, because I can’t get anything right the first five. As I say to teenagers, I’m just like you. I never get anything right in the first five drafts either.
I write five times from beginning to end, and that takes about a year. And when I finish the book’s sixth draft, I take the first chapter and I throw it away. Then I write the first chapter that really goes with that book now that I know how it ends. Because the first chapter is the last chapter in disguise. And the first chapter in fact must have all of the elements of the book to come. I learned that by reading, and rereading, Agatha Christie. She knows how to shape a story. And the young want a very defined shape. They want beginning, middle, end. They want a very traditional form in anything, except their own writing.
