Mary Cappello Interview with Jerry Spinelli
Center City Philadelphia
April 15, 2007
My name is Mary Cappello, and I’m here with Jerry Spinelli today and Maria Fama who is behind the video camera, Maria Fama, the South Philadelphian, Sicilian-origined poet, and Maria brought for us some chick peas from South Philly and I thought we should draw attention to those to begin with. Maria, you were telling us how these were prepared; instant protein so that our interview can get off to an energized start. (laughter)
Maria: Yes, the Roman legions marched on chick peas…
MC: the Roman?
Maria: …legions
MC: …legions….
Maria: …marched through the Roman empire….
MC: …on chick peas
Maria: …that was part of their diet, a staple.
MC: And, how are these prepared?
Maria: Those are soaked and then salted and then roasted. And my grandfather said, “you always have to have some in your pocket, you never know when you’re not going to get food, and you just need some protein, so you should always have chic peas in your pocket.”
MC: A great Italian lesson!: always have chic peas in your pocket.
Jerry Spinelli: I’ll never go anywhere else without them!
Ok, it’s April 15th in the year 2007, and we’re in downtown Philadelphia, not too far from our respective childhood homes of Darby and of Norristown, Pennsylvania. And I wanted to begin by setting up a little bit of context, so you’ll have to forgive me while I talk a little bit more than I will throughout the interview, but just to set things up for people who might be interested in hearing us.
Jerry was a significant mentor, encourager and friend to me when I was a girl, and the fact that I, too, grew up to be a writer, and more recently one who has written, in particular, about adolescent awkwardness, made me want to carry out this interview with Jerry, which is as much an homage to him and his work as it is an alchemy rife with the unexpected: I’m wondering, I’m interested to know what happens when the girl and the man come back together for a chat many years after the fact of their first meeting.
I believe our first meeting was probably, “circa,” 1970 perhaps, ‘71 would you say?
Jerry Spinelli: hmmm, yeah, about that…
MC: Both Jerry and I have books coming out this Spring: Jerry’s Eggs will appear with Little Brown in a few weeks I suppose?
Jerry Spinelli: not sure when, soon, yeah.
MC: …and my Awkward will appear from the Bellevue Literary Press in June. In the Fall, Jerry will have a sequel to Stargirl that will appear called, Stargirl, Love, Stargirl from Random House.
So, to begin with, I wanted to mention the ways in which my relationship with you made clear to me the importance of having people in addition to one’s parents as guides, and confidantes, and teachers, and influences.
You and I met in Darby when I was about 10 years old. And you gave me my first “nothing book,” which was quite significant, to write in: it had a Peter Max butterfly on the cover (laughter). And I remember that one of the first things I wrote in it was an apocalyptic tale of nuclear disaster (laughter).
I had some ability as a sprinter as a young girl, and I really feel that you made it possible for me to think of myself as an athlete, and an artist, and a girl—and these are three things that I think are hard to come together in our culture, you’re sort of not allowed to be all of those things together, and having you as my guide told me that it was ok, in fact that it was something I could aspire to.
You told me that I ran like a deer and I believed you even though I was short. Maybe a small deer…(laughter)…
Jerry Spinelli: …a fawn…
MC: That I had perfect runner’s form……you gave me tennis lessons, and, unforgettable, you took me to see the Penn Relays at Franklin Field, and I remember being really tantalized by so many aspects of that day, from the stop watch, working the stopwatch, watching the second hand move, experiencing the brilliance of these master athletes, the steeple chase, which I really loved the most, somehow: I had no idea there was such a thing as a man jumping over a small body of water (laughter).
You heard me play the mandolin with my grandparents, and I was thinking that there aren’t too many people in my life who go back that far with me.
I wanted to begin then by turning our attention actually to Franklin Field, to sprinting, to track and field, to running.
I’ve noticed for example that in the books that I’ve read by you that running seems to be actually at the center of a number of them, and certainly at the center of the Newbery Prize Medal winner Maniac Magee, as well as figuring in Milkweed.
You foreground, a child’s ability in these books, it seems to me, to outrun assailants, in the latter case, or to need to run away from home.
And if I could just say a few things, draw attention to a few things in Maniac Magee, I promise again that I won’t talk this much for the rest of the interview, but Maniac Magee is a (homeless) runner who carries a book in one hand…but you can’t get a library card without an address…He lives in the deer shed at the zoo…(a detail that I was particularly fond of). “When he wasn’t reading, he was wandering. (I’m quoting from the book now). When most people wander, they walk. Maniac Magee ran.” (29) Milkweed opens with a memory: “I am running. That’s the first thing I remember. Running….” In the early pages of the book, the little boy who is the main character is marveling about electricity and that the merry go round is still without it, and he says: “For two or three days the painted horses had not moved. I imagined I heard them screaming. Let us run!” At the top of page 77, of the same book: “ ‘I can go anywhere.’ I was not boasting, I was simply stating a fact. I had come to love my small size, my speed, my slipperiness. Sometimes I thought of myself as a bug or a tiny rodent, slipping into places that the eye could not even see.”
So, you’ve drawn my attention to yet another one of your novels in which running figures significantly and that’s Loser, in the beginning of the book, racing, in particular, so, the question:
I’d just love to hear you talk about, to converse about, how running figures, or figured, in your life, in your consciousness and in your art.
Jerry Spinelli: I might say, point out, something that I’m not even sure you’re aware of, but sitting in front of this camera are two 50 yard dash elementary school medal winners
Laughter
Jerry Spinelli: You’re not the only one. I still have on my bookshelf a little gold medal from 1953 when I won the 50 yard dash championship of the Norristown elementary schools, and I can still feel a sense of pride about that. So that’s something we share that I’m not even sure you were aware of.
MC: I actually did know you won a medal…
Jerry Spinelli: probably I had bragged about it before…
MC: I don’t think it was because you bragged about it, I may have read about it, you know now that you’ve had some other achievements beyond that medal people can find things out about you on the WEB
Jerry Spinelli: yeah (laughter) I have actually written about it a few times…
MC: You know, from one medal to another, you know, to the Newbery Medal
Jerry Spinelli: yeah, yeah. Yes, running as I say, I think, something to the effect in Loser, and it’s always been in my mind something that I see as a seminal activity of, if not the human race, at least, boys. They run.
I believe, it’s simply an expression of the exuberance of freedom, when a kid is first let out of the house, you see it in dogs, you know, you take the dog off the leash and it takes off across a field, and it seems to me that that’s a perfect metaphor for a kid, a little kid, who will start to run, it just comes as naturally as breathing. You get bored, you cry, you breathe, you get let out of the house for the first time, you run. It’s just as simple as that. It’s nothing invented. It’s something that I simply observe.
So, I like to go back to basic foundations and build a kid from the ground up, and so in a lot of cases it begins with running, and running figures into a kid’s life in a lot of ways, so it’s simply natural.
MC: It’s sort of like we begin running, so that’s a natural place for a book to begin, at the place where we begin…
Jerry Spinelli: …sure, sure…
MC: When do we stop running though. When does that stop? And what happens when a girl runs? You think that this is something that especially boys do, and you’ve got your former track star sitting next to you here.
Jerry Spinelli: Well my favorite chapter of all the chapters that I’ve written in all of my books is a chapter called “Miles”: it’s in my first published book called Space Station Seventh Grade. And the hero of that book is named Jason, and he goes out for the track team in 7th grade, in junior high school, and there’s a girl who goes out for the track team as well, her name is Marcelina, and he’s in a race with her, and running the mile, and he does win, or at least he beats her, he doesn’t beat anybody else, but he beats the girl. But what’s significant is not that he beats her in the mile race but that he barely beats her, and that, as he says, something to the effect, I can’t believe I have to try so hard just to beat a girl, and this is a revelation to him, and a turning point in his perspective, and this perspective is compounded by her reaction to having been beaten. Rather than sulking off, or whatever, she comes up to him, apparently in better shape after the race than he is, and holds out her hand and says, “Nice race.” So he learns a double lesson that afternoon.
MC: I see…
Jerry Spinelli: That’s when you say boys and girls running that’s what comes to my mind.
MC: I like what you do with boys and girls, by the way. I like that you let your male and female characters explore things together, and have adventures together, and be friends together. I think there’s a way in which you get past the sort of segregating of genders that a lot of us live with from an early age, and I really appreciate the companionship that you let happen between Amanda and Maniac Magee, and Stargirl and that book’s narrator, it’s really great.
But I want to stay with track and field for a bit, actually we haven’t talked about track and field, if you don’t mind, I’d like to move into track and field,
Jerry Spinelli: Sure
MC: …because what’s the difference between running, you know, this initial urge that we have when we’re kids and the door opens—run!—and the cultivation of running in the form of a sport and a sport that, really I was thinking about this earlier, is different from a game, it’s different from spectator sports where you’re on a team, of course you’re on a track team, but what’s the difference for a runner? Between being a runner or being a soccer player or a football player or baseball player?
Jerry Spinelli: To me, track and field is the purest of all the sports. I’m often asked what’s your favorite sport, and I think a lot of people are surprised when I say track and field, not necessarily one of my favorite to compete in or to participate in, but my favorite to watch. I’ve always been a track fan, I’ve been to a couple of Olympics, and I don’t know, it’s just the purity of it.
The essence of it. It’s running, jumping, throwing.
It’s the human body performing its most elemental functions in an athletic way, and measuring them literally against history.
And to me it’s therefore the least contrived and artificialized of the sports. It seems to most naturally grow out of the human phenomenon, and this is what we do: we start out running, you know as soon as we’re let out of the playpen, and as all other human activities, it tends to become institutionalized, and so you wind up on a track team
MC: …well I remember about running this elemental quality for myself too, you know?
Jerry Spinelli: And you were good at it. (Turning to the camera) She’s not gonna tell you that.
Laughter
Jerry Spinelli: But I have never in my life, and I have seen the best athletes in the world, seen anybody run as gracefully as you.
MC: Really? Oh my.
Jerry Spinelli: This is no flattery, it’s no lie. When I saw you run for the first time in a grade school track meet, I was astounded.
MC: Do you think that I’ve chosen the wrong career path?
Jerry Spinelli: You may well have. Yeah, absolutely.
Laughter
MC: Well, running was a great thing for me. I remember realizing that I could run, and it was an amazing turning point for me in my development as a person. At Blessed Virgin Mary grade school where I was going to school someone decided that we should have a girls’ track team, I don’t even know how it was decided, and they gathered all the kids into the school yard and told us to run, and I remember that each time I ran, I was coming out ahead. And they would get us back together again and it kept coming down to a smaller pool and I was still ahead, and I was left with two other girls who were the fastest runners. Just, it was, a turning point for me to realize that, wow, I didn’t know that I had, is there something special here? I run fast, I just thought, but that’s what I always do, I run fast, but maybe there’s something to this.
Getting back to the elemental nature of track and field, I experienced as a very sensuous thing the feeling of the gravel, the ground, the gravel, it’s not a pavement, it’s not a rug, it’s not a wooden floor, it’s a very specific kind of surface that a runner runs on, and you don’t want to fall on it because it will rip up your skin! It makes you feel more like when you’re on the track, you’re like a horse, you’re back to something elemental. And something almost primal.
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah, it feels to your feet, very much like running along railroad tracks. The cindery feel of it
MC: …mmm, the cinders…
Jerry Spinelli: As a matter of fact, a former world record runner in the 100 yard dash, Houston McTear, a kid from the south, Florida, I think, or South Carolina, and that’s how he used to run, running in his sneakers along the railroad tracks.
MC: What do you think is the difference between the bourgeois penchant for jogging and running?
Jerry Spinelli: It’s a perversion.
Laughter
MC: I was thinking about how I’ve tried to jog as a middle-aged person, and, ooh, it’s just not a happy experience for me. For me.
Jerry Spinelli: I walk.
MC: Ok, you walk, well that’s more elemental again, the fast walk.
Laughter
The aesthetics of track and field, you’re making me remember, I really loved, were you in a relay race and that sort of thing when you…?
Jerry Spinelli: I never participated in a relay race myself, but I love to watch relay races. My favorite track and field event is one that most people have never seen, and most people have never even heard of…
MC: And what is that?
Jerry Spinelli: It’s called the shuttle hurtles…
MC: …the shuttle hurtles
Jerry Spinelli: …it’s a race that combines hurtling with relays. Penn Relays is one of the few track meets where you’ll ever see such a race. Each runner runs a 110 meter high hurdles, the runners run down, meanwhile at the other end, 8 runners are in the blocks waiting to go, back the opposite direction, over the same hurdles
MC: Cool…
Jerry Spinelli: …and as soon as the first flight of runners comes down and taps his teammate on the back, that teammate takes off in the opposite direction, and back and forth they go, four times, like any relay race, and it’s just the coolest thing to see.
MC: I’ve never heard of this…but the tapping would be hard to measure though, right? I mean wouldn’t this be an issue? Did he tap? Did the person take off before he was tapped?
Jerry Spinelli: Well, yeah, you have hawk-eyed officials
Laughter
MC: …digitized
Jerry Spinelli: These are the kind of guys that determine that the long jumper’s foot was a quarter inch beyond the board on his take off and he raises the red foul flag. These guys have good eyes.
MC: Ok…then the things you learn that, I don’t know, that are sort of life lessons from athletics too, I’m thinking again about the relay. It was so important for me to learn the timing that was involved, learning how to pass the baton, learning how to receive the baton, and knowing to hear your friend runner, your teammate, their coming toward you, and to know to be ready to not to lose a moment, not lose a nano-second, and I loved the whole experience of catching the baton in one hand, moving it to the other hand, speeding off and delivering it to the next person. It’s a really beautiful thing.
Jerry Spinelli: And ideally your strides will come together so efficiently that no time is lost. That’s the ideal. Actually, no matter how well you run, some time is lost, it has to be lost because of the exchange, but the point is to try to get as close to that ideal as possible.
MC: I remember learning that from the coach, you know, he taught us the timing almost as though our arms were second hands, and to swing them in a particular way, almost like learning how to bowl, to have each of those movements timed and calibrated. And in fact one of the memories I have from track and field was the one day that our coach showed that he was angry. He very rarely expressed anger, and he threw the baton. I’ll never forget it because the baton had a sort of iconic, it was sort of a sacred object in a way, and he threw it (laughter) into the gravel, and I thought, wow, he must really be mad.
Jerry Spinelli: Well, at the Penn Relays they call the major championship races Silver Baton series.
MC: Silver baton series. Beautiful.
Jerry Spinelli: And when they give a prize or a lifetime achievement award to someone, that’s what they give them, a silver baton.
MC: You know you mention having your medal, and you have it out, and right now you’re moving I understand so maybe it’s packed away, but normally you keep it out.
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah
MC: And I’m wondering what do we do with these medals that we get in life? Medals that are conferred upon us. In my book, I talk a little bit about getting a medal, one of my track medals…
Jerry Spinelli: Do you still have yours?
MC: I do, but I don’t have them out, I do have them.
Jerry Spinelli: Apparently you don’t value yours as much as I do
Laughter
MC: I do, I do, I value them, I value them. I framed them when I was a child, I’ll never forget, I found some felt at the 5 and 10 cent store, and found a little frame and made my own sort of frames for them.
But I have a sort of uncanny relationship to the medal. It’s not an entirely, I won’t say it’s an unhappy one, but there’s a kind of hauntedness to me. You’re a child, you don’t know quite what it means to have this thing sort of attached to you, pinned to you. I experience it a little more in terms of this question of what it means that it’s telling us that we’re a part of something, you’re a part of something, you’ve done something well, you’re being acknowledged, you’re being seen, at the same time, I think I often felt kind of isolated as a child, so for me it has a kind of double-edged feeling, not quite sure what it means to get it, and at the same time being happy that you get it…
Jerry Spinelli: Mary, you’re so deep. You make me feel like such a simpleton.
Raucous Laughter
Jerry Spinelli: Here I took my medal, you know, and I went out to the playground during recess the next day, you know, and showed it off to my girlfriend, and I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t more impressed, that’s what it meant to me.
MC: Let’s talk about girlfriends.
Because I remember when I was a child and we had such good times together, and the mentoring you did for me, of me, and I remember that one day you wanted to introduce me to your girlfriend, and I really didn’t want to meet her.
Laughter
And you know when I think back on it now, it makes me feel like I was a character out of a Carson McCullers play, like The Member of the Wedding or something. She’s going to interrupt our fun! What’s this about. What is this about?
Jerry Spinelli: I’m sure I wasn’t aware of the sparks…
MC: You weren’t aware of the sparks…?
Jerry Spinelli: Probably not. If there was any tension or disapproval on your part, I was probably too dense to even notice.
MC: At any rate, I don’t know about that, but I remember we went for a walk around the baseball field, and she was a very attractive woman, and she talked to me like I was a child, and that’s what I didn’t like about her, oh boy, I have to talk to this person who’s talking to me like I’m a child, well, Jerry likes her, so I should try to like her.
Jerry Spinelli: Now it comes out
MC: But you didn’t talk to me that way
Jerry Spinelli: No, no
MC: And I want to hear you talk about your relationships with children, with young people, and the way that relationships between adults and children are mandated in certain ways to take certain forms in our culture, so that often we’re only sort of allowed to have relationships with adults in institutionalized settings like the classroom, or on the sports field, but god forbid, you befriend an adult, and that person has meaning in your life and I think that some people certainly are better at it than others. And I wonder what your thoughts are on this subject
Jerry Spinelli: And that’s become even touchier as the years go by…
MC: It does seem to be the case, doesn’t it…?
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah, to the point where you have to be so careful, you don’t even want to lay a finger on a kid for fear of getting charged with something
Yeah, I don’t know maybe it was because I just had one brother, spent a lot of time roaming around the west end of Norristown by myself, not having gotten married til late
MC: Late? How old were you?
Jerry Spinelli: Mid-thirties
Before then having very little to do with little kids, uncomfortable with babies, and inexperienced with little kids, so that maybe for those reasons I never did much practice on relating to kids, to little kids, so I kept my own way of expressing myself, and when it came time to start writing about kids because I felt like writing about this kid in junior high school, I guess my inclination was to simply just keep on talking, and behaving and presenting myself the way I normally did to the world rather than editing myself for little kids or something like that.
I remember when I wrote my first published book, Space Station Seventh Grade, I didn’t write it for kids. I just wrote it because it interested me, and to the extent that I was audacious enough to imagine an audience, I imagined it as an audience of people like you and I, looking back on those days, and I thought it was kind of interesting remembering those junior high school days, and I figured well maybe other people would find that interesting too, so I just went ahead and wrote it, imagining that there would be an audience, if it ever got published, of so called grown-ups. And as it turned out, my agent sending it around to publishers was being told everywhere it landed, well, this is a book about a kid, this belongs in the juvenile department
MC: Fascinating
Jerry Spinelli: And so she told me this after a year of trying that, and she said, so, what do you think about my showing it to the juvenile departments? I wasn’t crazy about that idea but I said yeah go ahead, and that’s where it landed, and that’s how I accidentally became this thing known as a children’s writer.
I don’t consider myself a children’s writer. I don’t write for kids, I write about kids.
MC: Henry James writes about kids, I’m thinking of the Turn of the Screw, and of course Mark Twain…
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah, sure, well, the publishing industry is much more categorized these days, and specialized, and cubby-holed.
MC: It’s partly about the creation of a readership too, certain consumer groups that need to be identified for the book
Jerry Spinelli: I guess so, yeah, yeah
MC: But it sounds like it’s also a symptom of what we’re talking about which is a kind of gap or gulf that gets invented, that must always be in place between the adult and the child, the adult and the young adult
End of Disk One
BREAK TO CHANGE VIDEO DISK
BACK TO INTERVIEW
MC: We were talking about the fact that you didn’t conceive of your novels as for a young adult audience, and that they’ve been marketed that way and that that seems related to the question that I started with which has to do with these divisions that are drawn, culturally, between adults and children. Clearly, I mean, I’m not saying that there isn’t a distinction, but that there are ways in which we create pretty firm boundaries between the spheres that adults and children operate in, and I think to both of our, it does a disservice to both, adults and children.
Jerry Spinelli: I think so, yeah, ever since that first book, I have lobbied and encouraged publishers to at least investigate the possibility of crossing over with some of my books, because there are books of mine that if I were asked to prepare an adult version, I wouldn’t do a thing, I wouldn’t change a thing.
I remember once I was described in a newspaper as a purveyor of “kiddie lit.”
MC: Oh wow
Jerry Spinelli: And I wrote the writer a nasty letter. It’s the kind of thing that makes me bristle. But that’s, but ya know, that’s what all too many folks out on the street think, that’s how they think of so-called children’s writers, that this is the sort of thing that we’re contending with, they think that “oh you’re a children’s writer, isn’t that cute.” And when children’s writing comes to mind, what they think of is “see Dick throw the ball,” “see Jane run,” it’s the old Dick and Jane stuff.
MC: Well it seems to me that one of worst implications of this is that it seems to denigrate children in the process and child consciousness.
Jerry Spinelli: Oh yeah, oh yeah
MC: I mean, I often find that in social situations that the children are the people I most want to talk with, they’re the people I have the more interesting conversations with. I’ve been in many social situations in which I’ve preferred having conversations with the children than with the adults in the room. They’re doing the more interesting thinking, they have the more interesting things to say.
These sorts of things should be obvious, and yet they’re not. This assumption that if you’re writing for children, for example, then somehow it must be simple-minded.
One of the things I work with in my book actually is the matter of precociousness in children, what children are allowed to know, and the assumption that a child who knows too much, or knows beyond her years, is considered precocious or a prodigy, and that these words actually have, etymologically, quite negative connotations, you know, a prodigy is a monster. I think all of this is related.
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah, sure. I think it very much is.
MC: Do you think there’s a relationship between the writer’s imagination, between those of us who write, and being in touch with children, whether one is writing consciously for a child audience or an adult audience, whatever that would mean, I want to keep coming back to this kinship, that I think exists for you as a person, I know it did because I experienced you as an adult when I was a child, a kinship that inheres between adults and children, that should, and that might continue for those of us who are writers and not for others perhaps.
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah. I suppose, ya know, we fall into our roles of successive years as they go by. A kid may not necessarily, particularly feel like smoking, but he discovers when he gets to a certain age that this is the thing he’s supposed to try to do and so he does it. And that kind of falling into sequential patterns sort of follows a lot of people through life, and the way it might play out in a case like this is that what you wind up doing is leaving all the trappings of your childhood behind, and just giving it all up, and moving on to successive so called ages, and for whatever reason, maybe people like you and I just don’t give it up, in effect, in a way that is just as true as it sounds humorous, we don’t totally grow up.
MC: I’ve been in school all my life as you know.
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah
MC: The choice to live a life in school
Jerry Spinelli: There you go, sure, I rest my case
MC: Every semester I go back to school again, every September. Indeed.
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah, so, I mean what’s so great about growing up? You know, we are at least in part who we were. I remember I gave my, the first talk I ever gave, it was my second book had recently come out and I was invited to Indiana, Pennsylvania, home of Jimmy Stewart to the university there to give a talk in the auditorium before the public, and there were questions afterwards, and I remember somebody stood up, a man stood up, over here in the left part of the audience, I remember, and he said, you know, he said, you seem to remember an awful lot of when you were a kid, how do you do that? And that was my first inkling that apparently I was doing something that maybe was not as run of the mill as I believed, because it never occurred to me that my recollection and my ability to recreate moments and times when I was a kid was anything more common than breathing, but apparently it was, and the tip off was that man in the audience rising to ask me that question. Suddenly I realized that apparently everybody doesn’t do this, and that surprised me because to me it’s no big deal.
MC: I think it’s a shape-shifting bedrock for a lot of writers, childhood. I think it’s all about revisiting, constantly rearranging the metamorphoses that took place then, the forgotten moments, the significant moments.
Jerry Spinelli: Maniac Magee, almost nobody knows this, I mean, I began reading reviews when it came out and I was told that this was a book about homelessness and racism and so forth and all those things are true I suppose…
MC: I think it’s existential myself, but we’ll get to that…
Jerry Spinelli: Thank you…operationally, functionally, from my perspective, as I was writing it, what it is is a book about childhood recollected
MC: Ok
Jerry Spinelli: It’s how, you know, everybody has this experience, of going back to your home town or to someplace from your childhood and discovering that something that you thought was huge and grotesque turns out to be kind of insignificant and small. That something happens with the passage of time and the application of memory that transforms the life that we led as a kid some thirty years later into something that is practically indistinguishable from Homeric myth
MC: I see…so, so for you this book is really about scale
Jerry Spinelli: …that’s why this book has a mythic legendary tone to it. That’s why. That’s why.
MC: So it’s about this way in which what felt insignificant was hugely significant, or what was hugely significant now feels insignificant? These sorts of ways in which our memory operates on the past…
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what it’s about to me
MC: I see
Jerry Spinelli: Now in the 15 years that it’s been out, I’ve never seen anybody or heard anybody point that out.
But that’s ok too because as you know a book often has an unseen scaffolding, it’s something that allows you to climb up the edifice of the book during its building to place the bricks and the mortar and so forth, and then when the book is finished you take the scaffolding away and the book remains. But there was that supportive idea, construction, that helped you write the book that by the time it’s read is unseen.
MC: I experienced Maniac Magee as an extended prose poem. It’s very poetic. And also I think it has unsettling dimensions.
Jerry Spinelli: Sure, it should.
MC: I think that it’s dealing with this sort of vortex of displacement. Not exactly the loneliness of the long distance runner but something a little bit like that. The kid who is compelled to keep looking and not finding, and not knowing where and who. All of that is at work.
Jerry Spinelli: And it’s looking at it from both sides because on the one hand there is his fitful attempts to get an address, however you want to apply that word, and on the other hand it’s almost as if he has no place, on the other hand, there’s a suggestion that ultimately one would like to think that he has every place. It’s the reason why at one point he goes and he sleeps overnight on someone’s porch, and I believe I say in there somewhere that on another occasion, finding a back door open, he actually goes inside and sleeps in someone’s kitchen, or something to that effect. And that’s kind of what I’m trying to say there, to expand the idea in universal brotherhood even beyond blacks and whites together, to a family of man, it feels embarrassing just to utter such a cliché but something like that is what I was after.
MC: Well I think there’s something like that going on in Stargirl also
Jerry Spinelli: Oh yeah. Oh. Yeah.
MC: I hear two things operating here that I want to draw attention to, and one is, well, this question of darkness and working with material, as I said, that there’s an unsettling quality to this book for me, and there is something existential about it, you know, the nature of being, of being alone and being displaced, and how do we find our place. And I wanted to hear you talk about your decision to write a book that dealt with the Holocaust (Milkweed).
And then on the other hand, on a far remove perhaps from this, I want to get back to the question of play, and what we’ve been starting to talk about concerning the relationship between adults and children. I would love to know if you like to play, and how do you like to play?
Laughter
What form does play take in your life?
Whichever question you want to begin with.
Jerry Spinelli: Milkweed-wise, I don’t have a very impressive or profound answer for the genesis of that book, and so forth, serious and disturbing as the material may be. The simple answer to why I wrote the book is simply that I followed my own advice and that is, to write what I care about.
As you know, aspiring writers and kids and so forth are forever asking if you have any advice. That’s my own personal goal, it’s a little variation I guess of the old English class cliché “write what you know about.” I say, “write what you care about.”
It seems to me if you write what you care about, you’re giving yourself the best chance to touch a reader.
And I think that’s where it begins. And that’s what I simply did with Milkweed.
I was looking at my father’s history books when I was a little kid on the living room floor. I was four, five or six years old, the Second World War was recently over and here were these history books, and I’m looking at pictures that I kept turning them one way and another, I couldn’t understand, I was looking at mountains of bodies, and it made no sense to me, and ever since then it’s been something that I cared about, the victims, and the event and so forth. And so I just gave myself permission to go ahead and write it even though I myself am not a Jew and I myself did not take place in those events, and I was barely alive then, and as more than one person has told me, the last thing this world needs is yet another book about the Holocaust. For all those reasons not to do it, they were trumped by my own advice to write what I cared about, and that’s what I cared about.
So ultimately the simple answer to why I’ve written anything, my 25, 26 books, they’re simply indulgences.
I’m not writing so that I can have an interview with you…
MC: Really? I thought that’s what it was all about…
Laughter
Jerry Spinelli: This is a happy bonus.
I can get together with you without a camera.
I’m just indulging myself, I’m writing what I want to, and hoping, and trusting that readers will come, and that good things will happen, and that stories will have been heard…
MC: And they do and they have
Jerry Spinelli: And they have, and it’s like a dream
MC: Yeah, it’s tremendous.
Jerry Spinelli: You know, but all I am doing is doing what I feel like doing.
MC: There are differences between these three books. You’ve written so many books, and I’ve only chosen three to sort of focus on. Maniac Magee, Stargirl, and Milkweed.
And as I experienced them, the difference for me, had to do with the narrative focus. They are very different kinds of books, and I love that, I love that, you say that you’re doing what you care about and what you want to indulge, but obviously not only is there a range in terms of the subjects that are compelling you, but the forms that you find yourself taking vis a vis the material.
I was interested in distinguishing the three books in terms of their aesthetics. From my point of view, Stargirl seems to me to be motivated by the crafting of a character, the idea of a truly special kind of girl; whereas Maniac Magee really works with the genre of legend, and I love the way the book opens by bringing legend to the fore:
“They say Maniac Magee was born in a dump. They say his stomach was a cereal box and his heart a sofa spring./They say he kept an eight-inch cockroach on a leash and that rats stood guard over him while he slept./They say if you knew he was coming and you sprinkled salt on the ground and he ran over it, within two or three blocks he would be as slow as everybody else./They say.” And then later on that same page, “the history of a kid is one part fact, two parts legend, and three parts snowball…”
Milkweed, on the other hand, it seems to me, is oriented around the crafting of an image. I was really taken in the book by these distilled images, which are drawn more from a poetic arsenal, so, the crafting of an image of milkweed, this image that moors the children in the midst of chaos. And I’ll read from the book:
“Janina pulled something from her pocket. It was milkweed pod. She must have plucked it from the plant in the alley. It looked empty. She blew into it. Three or four puffs rose into the air. They sailed up and out of the grave, past Mr. Milgrom and into the rectangle of gray sky and the black failing teardrops of bombs.”
I would also say that milkweed of course is one of the central images, but I’m just as compelled by the image of the pickled egg in the book, very moving, and very singular and distilled, again, it says so much, this image of the pickled egg and the boy trying to piece one together for Janina.
Milkweed of course is also dealing with the idea of the naïve witness, I think-- “come and look. You won’t believe your eyes.” The question of what the children see of the incomprehensible violence that is perpetrated by adults.
So these are the ways that I understand the different forms that these three books have taken, and I guess what strikes me most particularly is that Milkweed, the more recent book, is a bit more of a history lesson, it seems to me, insofar as it requires, by the end, that the reader has to grasp a relationship between past and present.
And Maniac Magee and Stargirl, I think, take us into a more enchanted time/space.
They seem to me to be more about suspension.
What happens if we enter the fictional world, the world created by Jerry Spinelli, where we can be in a different relationship to time, a magical relationship to time, I can be temporarily lifted out of time as I know it?
So I guess I wanted to hear your thoughts on how you time your tale-telling, and what led you maybe to move from what I call a more iconic kind of time-telling, where time is stilled or suspended, toward a diachronic time-telling, where, it is important, that this book, Milkweed, moves from the past to the present?
Jerry Spinelli: Functionally speaking, that kind of perspective and description comes into play at a time like this, afterwards. When I’m moving into a book, before a word is ever written, it’s a little different for me. It’s a more practical matter of beginning the process by interviewing the story.
I have a story in mind. And what I do is take it out to lunch, and I sit down, and I buy it lunch, and I talk, and I ask it questions, and I interview my story the way you’re interviewing me, and when my story begins to talk back to me and give me answers, then I’m on my way.
And the thing I want to know most from it is “how do you want me to tell you”? It took me the better part of 34 years to get an answer from Stargirl. Because I first conceived the idea of a story about a kid who lives underground, maybe in a subway or sewer. And that was in 1966. The book that finally came out, that finally arrived from that idea, came out in the year 2000, 34 years later with the title of Stargirl.
But a lot of that was trying to figure out how best to tell that story. And I didn’t settle on the point of view of the boyfriend narrator until very late in the process, because after all, Stargirl is very dominant. You can’t have the story without her. She dominates it like Hamlet dominates Hamlet.
And so the temptation of course was to tell it over her shoulder or through her eyes, but then I, decided, for whatever reasons, that it might actually be a little more effective to put her at a distance, and let her be seen through somebody else.
MC: It is so much about him, about her effect on him and the transformation he undergoes.
Jerry Spinelli: Oh sure, no question.
MC: In fact I was sorry that she has to disappear at the end, but now you’ve got a sequel.
Jerry Spinelli: Now we’ve got a sequel, it’s coming out in the Fall, yeah.
MC: So people must be dying to know how she’s going to reappear.
Jerry Spinelli: Well, I’ll tell you, the sequel is from her point of view.
MC: Oh, how interesting.
Jerry Spinelli: Love, Stargirl is an extended letter, in effect, back to Leo a year later.
MC: Oh, I love it. You could do another sequel from the point of view of her best friend. I know she seems like an insignificant character.
Jerry Spinelli: Dori Dilson?
MC: I just love that there’s this girl on the fringe who is...
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah, I tell you sometimes people come up with better ideas than the writer. I have Dori the way she is there a kind of little mousy type girl, and among numerous screenplay treatments of what will probably become a movie that I’ve seen, one of the screenwriters has Dorrie as a kind of Goth punky type of girl, and I really like his story better than I like mine.
MC: Ok…
Jerry Spinelli: It makes her a perfect foil for Stargirl. It’s great. I’m just sorry I didn’t think of it. But, we’ll see if she winds up that way in the film.
But those considerations were in play for Stargirl.
With Maniac Magee, I wrote 80 pages, threw it away, I wrote 100 pages, threw it away. I was trying to have Maniac be a hero type kid who was a hero to everybody. He was everybody’s answer, and it just was too scattered, too unfocussed. It wasn’t working. So I think at that point I decided to zero in in a more concentrated way on the black/white business. And I was still having problems, and I remember I decided, what I need here, after all these false starts, is a break.
And so I decided not to think about it for a few days. And an interesting thing happened: as soon as I turned my back on it, and stopped thinking about it, I had the only documented visitation I’ve ever had from the Muse. That part that you read “They say, “Maniac Magee was born in a dump,” that came to me one night in Phoenixville. And I just wrote it down, and I went and showed it to Eileen, who had seen the other failures, and she said, “my god, this is it.” And I went ahead and wrote the book.
MC: How wonderful.
Jerry Spinelli: So that was that one.
Milkweed, as I’ve said, really it was just a matter of obeying my own advice to write what I cared about. I had recently met a Holocaust survivor whose first memory is of finding himself probably at about the age of 3, or 4, or 5, he recalls, somewhere around Warsaw probably, he recalls himself crouching by rubble, the rubbled ruin of a stone wall, just crouching there all by himself, that’s all he remembers.
And I realized that to write this book with any sense of fulfillment, personal fulfillment at all, I had to try to do something that hadn’t been done a million times before, and it came down for me to a point of view.
Since I had a few so-called kid’s books under my belt, I thought well let’s take it all the way back. And what I like to do is to go back to the essentials as much as possible, and be as simple as possible, that’s why I often go back and start with running.
And in this case what I went back and started with was a clean slate, the blank blackboard that is a kid’s experience. Let’s take a kid who we will just presume has been orphaned, abandoned, and almost literally finds himself born at the age of 7 or 8 or whatever he is in the beginning, finds himself almost literally born in the middle of this situation. It’s when his consciousness comes to light.
That’s why the book begins, “I was running.”
“That’s the first thing I remember. I was running.” It’s the first thing he remembers. And in effect, his life begins. His life didn’t begin at day one, out of his mother. His life began while he was running that day somewhere around the age of 7 or 8. That’s when it began.
So let’s see what the Holocaust looks like from the point of view of a kid who was born into it. And who knew nothing else. So my interview with that idea produced the suggestion that here’s how I want you to write me. I want you to write me from the point of view of a kid, maybe a gypsy kid, because they were persecuted just as much. And let’s take it that way. I said “ok, thanks a lot,” left the tip for the lunch with my ideas interview, and on we went.
MC: And this is very different kind of running than the kind we were talking about earlier..
Jerry Spinelli: There are as many kinds of running as there are words for snow among the Native Canadians.
BREAK TO DISK 3
MC: So we’ve been talking about the way that you orchestrate your books, and I love this idea of taking the idea for the book out for an interview and having this conversation with it, and hearing back from it how to begin, and the ways that things take form out of that.
We were talking a little bit earlier about a writer’s relationship to his past, to his early childhood, and I wanted to get back to the fact that we share a past, and what that means, and what aspects of that you remember, that you might talk about a little bit.
One of the things that has me going back there again is having the opportunity to sit here and look into your eyes, to be honest, which are so beautiful, and you’re reminding me that my grandmother loved your eyes,
Jerry Spinelli: wow, yeah…
MC: …my blue-eyed grandmother, my blue-eyed Italian grandmother from Campobasso…
Jerry Spinelli: …yeah…yeah…
MC: Rose Arcaro, “ooh, that Jerry Spinelli and his blue eyes.”
I had an experience recently that frightened me a little bit. It was that I came upon a photograph of my grandfather in the Munier Mandolin and Guitar Society that he had founded, and I suddenly didn’t recognize him. Certainly, partly I didn’t recognize him because this was not a man I knew, he was a younger version of my grandfather, but I just had a moment of, wow, it’s been a while since I’ve thought about my grandfather. Certainly my grandfather figures in everything that I write, and is so fully a part of me, I could never forget him, but it was that encounter with the detail of the factuality of the photograph, the vivid rendering of the face and thinking, for a split second feeling, I didn’t know him or I’d forgotten him.
So I guess I’m thinking about the way that being with people who have been part of who we were so significantly, that we need each other to help each other remember as well. So the writer goes back, but he also…
Jerry Spinelli: It’s a relay race. Passing the baton.
MC: Passing the baton. Uh-huh.
So I don’t know where the question is in all of that.
Jerry Spinelli: I don’t either but that’s your job! That’s your problem!
Laughter
MC: That’s my job, ok, that’s my problem. Hmmm…I wondered if you wanted to take a moment…
Jerry Spinelli: Are we going somewhere Jungian, past, shared memories here?
MC: No no no no no. No. I wondered if there was anything you wanted to say about what you remembered about our shared past for the sake of today’s conversation, and our finding ourselves here together now, 20, how many years later? 30?
Jerry Spinelli: 30
MC: Well, I’m 46.
Jerry Spinelli: 30. More than 30.
MC: You look the same. I think I probably look a little different.
Jerry Spinelli: No, no. Oh no. You’re not quite the spindly fawn that you were at that age
MC: Tell me about it! Don’t I know that!
Laughter
Jerry Spinelli: As I was saying earlier to our esteemed photographer, it’s an interesting experience to have known a little kid, and then to be back together with that kid, and it’s hard to, every time you open your mouth, and every time you write one of your wonderful sentences, there’s something, there’s a little resistance in me that has to be overcome. There’s a little moment, instant of surprise, that “little Mary” can be saying this.
Laughter
But it’s a phenomenon, and we could live to a thousand years and that would still be true because we will always have that relationship to each other. And so I find it very interesting but all the more useful because it means that there are things that we can share, as well as things that have been different with us, and things that we couldn’t talk about when you were 12. Now, everything’s fair game, and there are therefore discoveries to be made.
MC: I love that. That’s lovely.
…Play.
I wanted to hear you talk about the form that play takes in your life. I remember playing with you as a child. Playing tennis. Great time, playing tennis,
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah, I still play tennis
MC: Learning how to perfect a stroke
Jerry Spinelli: Yean…yeah…I still enjoy tennis, and when you say, it’s a form of play, as a kid, I was just a typical boy. I mean I’m out in the back alley, shooting people and dying, and all that stuff.. And it’s just disgusting how I fell into the stereotype. And yet I use myself as an example. I like to think that I’m a peace-loving bloke, and a humanitarian, and a fairly sensitive creature. And yet there I was with my little green soldiers and my tanks and shooting up everybody. I think, ya know, you fall into stereotypical roles sometimes, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s gonna project into who you ultimately become…
MC: Obviously it didn’t in your case
Jerry Spinelli: When you were running your races, at that time, I wanted to be a professional baseball player
MC: Really?
Jerry Spinelli: I never had any intention of becoming a writer until I was halfway through high school. I didn’t even read books. I tell people don’t be like me. That’s why Maniac Magee carries a book with him everywhere he goes. It’s me doing what little I can to go back in time and do it right. And if I had it to do over again, I’d read more.
MC: There’s a wonderful Russian film, I think it’s called The Italian, it’s fairly new, in which a boy is trying to find his way back to his birth mother. Really beautiful, really powerful, painful to watch. And a girl tells him to carry a book with him because no one will disturb him then, he’ll be protected. I love this image of carrying the book, if the boy carries the book, then somehow people won’t assume he’s alone, people won’t assume he’s an orphan. He’ll be able to make his way. The book as a kind of talisman, and shield, and protector.
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah, yeah.
MC: I don’t want to push the thing about play too much, but I guess I was thinking, also wondering about how play manifested in one’s adult life, because I think that on a continuum with what we’ve been talking about in terms of the relationship between children and adults, and writing, or not, for young people, is the question of how we play as adults, and if we’ve forgotten to.
How we take pleasure, and what we take pleasure in.
I mean, writing, I would say, is a form of play, there’s no question.
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah. Boy, it’s really a hard word to define, isn’t it? Play. It’s hard to see and think of play without the word pleasure.
MC: absolutely
Jerry Spinelli: It’s doing something pleasurable. There’s also a sense that it’s inconsequential, at least in terms of your intentions. It may turn out to be very consequential, but you don’t intend it to be. So it has everything to do with the attitude with which you approach whatever it is you are doing. Maybe it’s the attitude that is the essential ingredient.
MC: I think of play as having invention attached to it, too, though, if we’re playing with each other, in the best sense of the word, not manipulating each other
Laughter
then there’s something spontaneous that’s happening, there’s something inventive, there’s something to do with wandering. And there’s something fundamentally joyful.
Now in our “playtime” together, I want to draw attention to a lesson that I describe in my book, a lesson that you gave to me, it was after a tennis lesson actually. And I want to use it to demonstrate your particular form of playfulness, which, in my memory, has to do with asserting something serious and then balancing it not exactly undercutting it, but balancing it, with something funny, or ironic, or light. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to find that place in the book.
This is just the tailend of a very short section called “anxious,” and it goes like this:
“A now-famous writer of fiction for adolescents,”
Oh, I’m sorry that I called you that
Laughter
Jerry Spinelli: Correct that
MC: “…and family friend, gave me a tennis lesson or two when I was ten. The racquet was my first purchase in a second hand store—a thrift store called “Divine Sales”
do you remember that place?
Jerry Spinellil: No, where was it?
MC: In downtown Darby
“Divine Sales, run by a group who taught TM, transcendental meditation, and were followers of Father Divine, in Darby, Pennsylvania. The racquet was wooden and green, and complete with press, cost fifty cents.”
Laughter
“To reach back to that memory now, the store was creepy, all long fingernails and pointed beards. One day after a tennis lesson, I don’t remember the context—my teacher friend explained to me, ‘other people can sometimes throw us off and make us lose our balance,’ and then, as we continued to walk, as if to counter the seriousness of his words, he said, pointing with his tennis racquet at a pile of dog shit, ‘That, Mary, is poop.’
Jerry Spinelli: I said that? That’s pretty good.
MC: But “certain people throw us off and make us lose our balance.” It’s reminding me too of the way that children, of course, hear the things that adults say to them, and the way that they stick, and adults often aren’t aware, of course, of the profound effect that what they are saying is going to have on a child, the things that the child remembers. That was such an important thing for me: I love that the lesson, in retrospect has a physiology to it as well as a psychology to it. We were on the court together, and of course one has to know how to balance, and not be thrown off balance in any sport, but you were talking about something to do with relationships between people, something psychological, in talking about being thrown off balance: it helped me to hear that sometimes people can do this to us, but then to follow it with, let’s get down to the basics here, let’s talk scatology!
Jerry Spinelli: Well, the measure of my regard for you, little kid that you were, is that I would have said something like that to you. I don’t mean the poop, I mean the other stuff. I would not have gone around saying that to just any kid. And I’m impressed and delighted that you remember, because I certainly don’t remember having said it.
MC: Well I remember, getting back to track and field, do you remember the things that your coaches told you about who you were?
Jerry Spinellil: Yeah, yeah, yeah: “take a lap”!
MC: Who you were. What you were good at. You know, “You, Spinelli, you are…” fill in the blank.
Jerry Spinelli: Yeah, one in particular when I failed to go after a ground ball that I had bobbled and it squirted through my legs and behind me, and I just stood there sulking, while the runners were running around the bases as the ball trickled out into the outfield, and I went back to the bench, and the coach, and I expected the coach to sympathize with my error, and instead he climbed all over me and hollered. He said, “Don’t you ever act that way again. When you miss a ball, you go after it. And stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
MC: There’s a life lesson there…
Jerry Spinelli: I’ll say.
MC: I remember being told by my track coach that I had “endurance,” and it was a curious thing to be told because I didn’t think of myself as a long distance runner, ever. And of course a sprinter has to have a particular kind of endurance too—to build up the speed by running long distances, that was part of what the training was about—but “endurance”—and it seemed like such a sophisticated word, a word that should apply to adults, and I didn’t quite know what it meant, but it seemed important, and it really did stick, and I think it is a characteristic that I like to be able to say is true of me.
I guess I want to close by asking you about something that appears on this idea that has emerged out of the novel Stargirl, and how to start a Stargirl society, and I found this on your website, there are a number of different paths that you suggest that girls can take who want to carry a Stargirl society out. But I was struck by two things I wanted to hear you talk more about:
“Discover enchanted places.”
And
“Visit a planetarium or observatory.”
And I thought it would be nice thing to end on a note of enchantment with you, by asking you,
What’s the nature of enchantment? What enchants you? What’s your most enchanting tale? How can literature enchant?
Jerry Spinelli: Boy. Yeah. First of all, let me say that these suggestions, most of them come from Stargirl Societies that we have observed, particularly one out in Kent, Ohio. Fifty girls from high school and middle school meet once a month and do this kind of thing, they have an inner beauty pageant and so forth.
I’ve always loved the idea that Iceland has officially sanctioned enchanted places. I think that’s pretty cool.
Who’s to say what’s real and what’s not?
Sometimes I think that our senses are as much blinders as they are revealers, and I like to think that just beyond the edge of what we can see, and where we can reach, are other things, and it’s just trying to get in touch with those other things, that one writes in a way that we come to call poetry, or enchanting, or whatever, but that’s all it is, and for me it probably comes into play more with Stargirl than with any other story, because I see Stargirl, as Maniac Magee, for the most part, is not identified by others except by me as a story about childhood recollected, Stargirl, is, in my view, about someone who is perhaps a throwback to the way we were, or maybe, I see it as an almost evolutionary story, as someone who is one half-step perhaps ahead of the rest of us, and someone to whom the rest of us hopefully, someday, will catch up.
MC: Maybe that’s a good place to close: imagining ourselves trying to catch up with Stargirl.
Jerry Spinelli: I like it.
MC: Ok, alright, Jerry, and I like you, I love you.
Thank you for doing this.
Jerry Spinelli: Thank you, kid.
Kiss, Hug, End