Today I’d like to
welcome Karen Day, author of acclaimed fiction for middle grade readers.
Karen wanted to be a
writer since she was in fourth grade. She wrote her first (highly melodramatic)
novel when she was sixteen and took journalism in college. When she graduated,
she wrote for newspapers and magazines, doing the last interview with tennis
great, Arthur Ashe, before he died.
But she yearned to write fiction. Finally she
left journalism to write full time.
We’re glad she did!
Her titles include the A Million Miles
from Boston and Tall Tales. Today
we’ll be talking about her sports novel for girls, No
Cream Puffs.
It’s the story of 12-year-old Madison Mitchell, the first girl in Michigan
to play baseball on an all-boys' little league team. Madison must deal with all
the pressures of being a trailblazer. What will her friends think? Will the boy
she likes still be interested if she strikes him out? How will she deal with
the unwelcome publicity?
Karen, could you describe how the book evolved? What came
first, the plot or the characters? Did you work from a detailed outline or were
you a “pantser”?
The writing of every book is always different for me
(although it’s always hard!). But one thing is true about every book I write: I
always come up with the internal arch first. As a writer, mom and reader, I’m
most interested in the inner life of kids. How they deal with trauma. How they
feel about the inevitable changes that adolescence will bring. In No Cream
Puffs, I knew I wanted to write about a girl who was “searching” for a father
who didn’t want her. I also knew that I wanted to write about the drama of how
it feels to “lose” your best friend, if only temporarily. That my main
character would play little league came later. And yes, I am a pantser. No
outlines for me!
You capture Madison’s conflicting feelings about playing ball
with the boys so well. Were you an athlete as a child? Did you play baseball or
another sport?
I loved sports and played everything I could. Like
Madison, I was the first girl in my part of the state to play little league
with the boys. A lot of what happens to Madison is fictional; however, a lot I
took from my life, too. Like Madison, I was a pitcher, played short stop and
batted cleanup. And like Madison, I struck out the star of little league in the
championship game. I was a natural athlete, but unfortunately I didn’t have the
head for it. I was filled with a lot of doubt and conflict. A headcase! I don’t
think that people who knew me back then realized this about me. And so this is
one of the themes that I wanted to write about in No Cream Puffs – what it’s
like to be good at something, a trendsetter, and yet have ambivalence about it.
I quit baseball after just one season and turned to competitive tennis, which I
played until I was 18. I was a headcase in tennis, too!
I wasn’t athletic as a child. In fact, I was the last one
picked for any team. I always envied girls like Madison, but this book gave me
a glimpse of what an athletic girl’s struggles might be. How do young readers
react to Madison? What do you hope a young reader might take away from your
book?
I get more emails about Madison and No Cream Puffs
than any of my other books. Madison is at an age when girls aren’t always
comfortable with the opposite sex, so I think that many of my young readers
like reading about a girl who has so much direct contact with boys! Others like
her spunkiness, sympathize with her and her fight with her best friend, and
cheer for her against Billy. Underneath all of this, I want girls to know what
it was like before there was such a plethora of sporting opportunities in our
country. Today’s girls don’t have to worry how to be athletes. Nor do they have
to worry that their sporting teams might go away. It wasn’t always like this.
I love Madison’s mom. She blazed trails in her own legal
career, and she struggles to give Madison the room she needs to make her own
choices about baseball. Was Madison’s mom drawn from anyone you know?
In early drafts I really struggled with mom and what I
wanted her character to be. I knew that Madison would have a push-pull
relationship with her. I’d been reading a lot of female adolescent development
books and was fascinated by the idea that a girl’s primary struggle in
adolescence is learning to separate from her mother. Still, my own mom and
other mothers I knew kept getting in the way. Then one day, Mitali Perkins, who
was in my critique group, suggested that mom should have part of me in her. And
something about this helped free me, and I saw her character more clearly.
Huey, the has-been rock star next door, is a unique figure in
middle grade literature. He becomes a sort of father figure to Madison, even
though he isn’t a very responsible adult. Can you tell us more about this
character?
I was very conscious in this book of not doing the
expected. For example, I could have written a story where the main character is
a star, everyone is against her and she “fights the establishment” to get what
she wants. In stead, I made the primary struggle an internal one. Likewise, it
seems natural that Madison’s father figure would be the baseball coach or
someone who was a good athlete. In stead, I introduce Huey. And I did this
because I wanted to show that Madison wasn’t struggling with baseball as much
as she was struggling with expectations and fame, something Huey knew a lot
about. Also, he was a screw up. So, he was a good alternative to her mother who
Madison thought always did everything right.
Madison’s brother David is such a wonderful mentor for her.
And she has a marvelous relationship with fellow teammate, Brett. Did you have
any strong male mentors in your life? Do you see any parallels between them and
these characters?
My dad was a terrific sports buddy when I was growing
up. He taught me to play ping pong, basketball, football and baseball. He was a
serious, competitive man who valued sportsmanship and winning. He never seemed
to tire of playing with me, especially after I started beating him at
everything! Because of him, I was very comfortable around men and boys. I
realized, at an early age, that what they valued most was winning. The boys on
my baseball team liked me because I was good and helped the team. The tennis
coaches liked me because I was coachable and won. There were no mind games and no
drama. And so, yes, I carried over these experiences when I crafted Brett and
David’s characters. They both like Madison and they respect her because she’s
good.
A Million
Miles from Boston is about Lucy, who’s had a difficult school year, and
whose Dad has a new girlfriend. Tall
Tales is about Meg, who struggles to keep her father’s alcoholism secret.
Where do your book ideas come from? Do you see any recurrent themes or strands
that run through your books?
All of my novels seem to deal with girls who feel
alone. Lucy misses her mom who died six years earlier. Madison is the only girl
playing baseball with the boys and Meg has just moved to a new town and
desperately wants a friend. I think that this feeling of being alone is
something with which I’m quite familiar and so it feels natural to write about
this. Over and over and over! Many of my story ideas come from personal
experience. But I also have kids in middle school and high school and so I’m
constantly listening to them and their friends and trying to pick up ideas.
Ian, the annoying boy in A Million Miles from Boston, came to me after
listening to my middle child talk about an annoying boy at school. Meg’s story
is based on my husband’s childhood. One of the things I love about writing is
taking what I know and experienced and setting it in a different place, with a
made-up plot, and seeing what happens.
You work with an editor I greatly admire, Wendy Lamb. What is
it like to work with her? Can you tell us a little about the editorial process?
Wendy is an incredible editor. She has a way of
strengthening my strengths and building up my weaknesses. My first editorial
letter from her, about Tall Tales, was 14 pages long, single spaced! I usually
do anywhere from four to eight revisions for her. It’s worth it. She has made
all of my books so much better. Typically she’ll break my novel down into
individual threads, and she’ll make suggestions on how to change or deepen a
particular thread. This is a very comfortable process for me since it’s the way
I’ve always approached revision.
Are you working on something new? Can you tell us a little
about it?
I’m fascinated by how competitive sports change and
disrupt family dynamics. I’m just rewriting a novel about two sisters, one who
is a star diver who wants to quit but her family won’t let her. I’m interested
in how the younger sister, who narrates the novel, is affected by the attention
and drama given to the older sister. I’m also working on a new project, about a
12-year-old girl with psychic abilities. It’s a fun story, something new for
me, but also with a serious side. And I’m teaching a lot more now. In the
winter, I’ll be running a writing-for-kids adult workshop at Grub Street in Boston.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Thanks for having me, Linda!
Thank you
so much for being my guest today. For any readers looking for a great book
about girls and sports, I highly recommend No
Cream Puffs by Karen Day. You can find out more about Karen and her work at
http://klday.com/books/.
