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Welcome to Season 2 Episode 4 of The Book Love Foundation Podcast! And thank you for joining us in this celebration of teaching and the joy of learning. In this episode, Part 2 of Penny’s recent conversation with Deborah Wiles.
Season 2 Ep 4 Show notes
This episode is Part 2 of a two-part conversation Penny had recently with Deborah Wiles.
Deborah Wiles is an award-winning author of novels and picture books whose work is loved by readers of all ages. She is a two-time National Book Award Finalist, and you can learn more about her at her website.
Deborah’s novels include Love, Ruby Lavender (2001), Each Little Bird That Sings (2005. National Book Award Finalist), The Aurora County All Stars (2007), Countdown (2010), and Revolution (2014. National Book Award Finalist).
Her picture books include Freedom Summer (2001) and One Wide Sky (2003).
From the conversation:
“Story is the primary vehicle human beings use to structure knowledge and experience.” – Richard Rhodes
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Book Love Foundation podcast. The Book Love Foundation is a non-profit 501 3(c) dedicated to putting books in the hands of teachers dedicated to nurturing the individual reading lives of their middle and high school students. In the past five years, we have awarded $223,000. If you can help us in our mission, visit booklovefoundation.org and make a donation. 100% of what you give goes to books.
– Penny
Thank you for listening to the The Book Love Foundation Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a colleague or two.
Creators and Guests
Host
Penny Kittle
Guest
Deborah Wiles
What is The Book Love Foundation Podcast?
Celebrate the joy of reading with the Book Love Foundation podcast. This is a show filled with information and inspiration from teachers and leaders across grade levels, states, and school systems. We interviewed authors and educators for the first five years and now turn our attention to leaders in public, private, and charter schools. Find out more at booklovefoundation.org or join our book-love-community.mn.co of 2500 educators from 28 countries. We sustain joy together, one kid and one book at a time.
Penny Kittle 0:00
The book Love foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions, connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.
Penny Kittle 0:16
Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Deborah Wiles, author of revolution, a National Book Award finalist that is focused on 1964 in Mississippi. I love this book so much as many of you know, and what I love most about it is handing it to a kid like Owen. Just a couple weeks ago, he was looking for a new book, and I said, Oh, these books back here were all part of the book clubs that my seniors just finished. And I said this one right here revolution as I handed it to him, he immediately opened it the way kids do, and he started flipping through, pausing again and again at these two page spreads of primary source documents. And he didn't say much to me. He just turned and went back to his seat. One of the greatest gifts we give kids is the right book in their hands at the right time. I don't know if this is going to be his right book, but he was all in today, and there's nothing like looking across the room and seeing that engagement, watching a kid sink in with huge thanks to Deborah Wiles for her conversation with me over last summer in our summer book club. I bring you Deborah Wiles part two of our conversation.
Moderator 1:33
Support for the book Love foundation podcast comes from book source, a leading distributor of authentic literature for K 12 classrooms, booksource believes that engaged reading is the key to a brighter future, and that creating better readers has the power to create a better world when students have access to a rich and varied classroom library and the ability to choose books that explore their personal interests they Enjoy reading and spend more time doing so visit booksource.com to discover how booksource can help you foster engaged reading in your classroom by getting the right books into the hands of your students.
Penny Kittle 2:15
You know, when I found revolution, I didn't even know about countdown, and I was immediately enamored with it, so in love with this book. And then when I gave it to kids as a book club choice, and watched what they were doing with it and how they were reading it, engaging with it, and thinking about history in a way that my students were not prior to that talking about history, it was so exciting.
Deborah Wiles 2:37
Oh, this is good to hear. That was my goal. Part of my goal anyway, I really wanted it to be useful and meaningful and fun as well. You know, interesting, a good story that also had value in other ways.
Penny Kittle 2:52
Oh, I certainly see that. And it's funny because 2/9 grade boys I talked to in their book club, one really closely read the collages, and he talked about how the story was less interesting to him. It was really about those collages. And then the other one sitting there at the table said, Oh, it was the opposite for him. He would skim by the collages to get back to the story and then go back to the collages.
Deborah Wiles 3:18
Oh, that's interesting. I wish we had figured out a way. And collage is a great word, but I wish we had figured out a standardized kind of way to talk about the structure of the book and what we were calling it privately, because now I call it different things, and people also call it different things, and collage works really well. I also use the word scrapbooks, and because I think of the those collages as like, for instance, in revolution, I think of them as sunny scrapbooks. It's what Sonny's putting together during that time. And then I think of the biographies, what I call opinionated biographies. I think of them as being written by the adult Sunny. So that was my thinking. And yet, it's not really out there in the world that that was what we were thinking, because we really didn't know how to even talk about it. When countdown first came out. In fact, we didn't know what to call what we had. David said, Well, what is this what is this thing? I said, I don't know. It's like, it's a hybrid. It's it's fiction, nonfiction and biography. And he said, Well, can we call it a documentary novel? And I said, that sounds good.
Penny Kittle 4:29
I think that's a great word. I tell my students that it's multi genre. Ish, to me, you know, it's that way of a an author saying, I'm choosing this particular form to tell my idea because it fits with how I want you to think about it, but you have really blown my mind saying that you were thinking of those, what I call collages or scrapbooks as Sonny's collection. I didn't see that, or think of that.
Deborah Wiles 4:54
Well, you don't have to. It's okay if you don't, because I don't think that takes anything away to know that. And it doesn't lessen your experience at all. It doesn't it just that for me, as the creator of the books of these stories, I needed to have a structure in my mind that would make sense to me and that just held together as one large arc for me. You know, like the arc is here Sonny's story. She's putting together these scrapbooks, and she's having this experience, and later in her life, she's writing these biographies of what she thought about that experience. So I just put myself in her shoes. I put myself in her her mind and in her heart, basically, and saw how it changed over time.
Penny Kittle 5:40
Love that perspective. You realize I am now going to be rereading it yet again to figure out through that lens how it changes for me. But I will also confess to you that I had to go steal it from my husband's nightstand because last night, a book Love Foundation Board member was over here who just finished reading it, and was telling my husband how much she loved it. And so he grabbed it off my desk and took it, and so we're gonna be fighting over it a little bit.
Deborah Wiles 6:04
Oh, what a nice confession. Thank you. That's such an honor. I feel very humbled to hear that.
Penny Kittle 6:13
Yay. You know I have been dying to ask you about David Levithan for the entire time I've been talking to you, because not only do I love his books, and my students love his books, you know, what is it like to work with him as an editor?
Deborah Wiles 6:30
Oh, it's powerful. David is not afraid to tell you what he thinks I had written a different narrative for Book Two was a book I had started years ago, and it took place in 1966 and I thought that's what I would do for my civil rights book, the middle book of the trilogy of the 60s. David did not like this book, and he didn't he wasn't afraid to tell me, and I love this particular book. So I put that book in a drawer, and I went back and said, okay, at first I wasn't going to write about 64 again. I'd already written Freedom Summer, this picture book, and I thought, I'm not going to repeat myself. But on the in, in the end, he pushed me to rethink, and that rethinking gave us a much better book. And so I still have that other book in a drawer, and maybe one day I'll get to that and it'll end up being something but I wasn't willing to to chop it up and make it something different, so I just started over again. But David is very he's very meticulous, and he's very he I'll tell you what he does is he sees the big picture. So well, he sees it better than I see it, which is, I guess, is an editor's job. But he was able to tell me things I didn't understand that I was doing, like, oh, when you wrote countdown, you were writing about something outside the Cuban Missile Crisis is out there somewhere, and the effect that it has on a family living near Washington, DC. However, when you wrote revolution, it was right there in front of us the whole time, and that creates a different microcosm of how you tell the story. And he was absolutely right, but he sees these things, and when you see those things, it helps you to it's like writing a focus sentence. When you're writing an essay, which I often do, I'll write a focus sentence because if I get off track, I know how to come back, because I remember my focus. He helps me with that. He really is so good at not only that, but thinking about little things like titles and what we need to do next and what's left out. And it's gratifying. It's really great. And he's there. You know, when you need him, he's there. And that's what's the important thing about an editor, I think too.
Penny Kittle 8:44
Oh, I agree. But you know, lover's dictionary, yeah, yeah. I know it still one of my favorite books, because of its creative energy and just that, you know, like, where's the mind that created this book? So I love that he can create a book like that. He can write a book like every day, and then he can help you create this incredible National Book Award finalist, I just might mention, piece of history and narrative. It's like, that's amazing, the collaboration between you two,
Deborah Wiles 9:16
well, it's a good collaboration. And he, I'll tell you, he edits bunches of folks so and they're very, very different. I mean, Maggie, Steve fader and I write very different things, and he's both of our editors, and also Jude Watson, better known as Judy Blundell, wow. So he's very He's capable across a wide spectrum of things. I just turned in a new Aurora county novel to him, and this is for much younger readers like fourth grade, and yet he's there.
Penny Kittle 9:47
So, yeah. So everyone is dying to know when the third book in the trilogy is expected to be revealed.
Deborah Wiles 9:56
I'm just starting back on that. I. I'm I took I when I wrote this new Aurora county novel, which is a companion to love Ruby, lavender, each little bird that sings, and the Aurora County all stars. I wrote it almost as a palette cleanser. We laugh about that, but we talk that in that language, because it's so extremely dense and intense to write a documentary novel, and so I've sort of skirted around book three as I've written this other novel. And I've got several, I guess, two years now, worth of research, and I'm ready, and I've got several chapters done too, but I'm hoping to have a full draft by the end of the year, just it'll be a crummy draft, but that means we might have a book out in 2019 which would be the 50th anniversary of 1969 which is when the book takes place. And I've already got a title. The title is tribe, and everyone was looking for a tribe in 1969 and the musical hair even calls itself a tribal rock musical, and it will be. It'll center around the Vietnam War, the counterculture and rock and roll, basically. And I think it's a road trip novel, at least it is right now. It doesn't change. So we've got some kids in the VW bus, or maybe it's a school bus, I haven't decided going across the country to San Francisco, so we'll see Forrest gumpion. Maybe, I don't know.
Penny Kittle 11:32
Okay, so I'm so intrigued that I want you to hurry up and get this written.
Deborah Wiles 11:35
Oh, thank you. I do too. Are you kidding? I really do. I want it done.
Penny Kittle 11:40
I cannot wait to see the musical connections to this one.
Deborah Wiles 11:44
Oh, well, now this is when we're really having fun. I am having the best time. Well, you can actually see what I'm doing up on Pinterest, because I have several boards already with possible songs and playlists and photographs and primary source material of what I think I'm doing with it. But, yeah, the Rock and Roll is great.
Penny Kittle 12:03
Oh my gosh. You know, it's such an intriguing thing to be able to peek at your process like that. I'm thinking about, you know, assigning students historical fiction, having them create their own boards of music, etc, is such a beautiful way to get kids immersed in the research. But in research, they're truly engaged in.
Deborah Wiles 12:21
The more you're engaged in what you're writing or what project you're working on, the more energy you have for it, and the better it ends up. So that's I just think that's really important too. Yeah, I think getting Pinterest is really useful. It's really, really in that way, it's really useful. I have a few other things on there, like stuff with my grandkids, or something recipes. I have recipes on there somewhere, but they're way, way down at the bottom. You don't have to go down there. I usually, I really started using it as a resource. So I do have all those boards up top so and I'll go back and I'll add some for the other books as well. But I really started doing it heavily with with revolution, because I was so desperate to have some place to put all of this that wasn't just a Word document that had links in it with hyperlinks in it. I needed a place to see it. I'm a very visual learner, and that's another reason I really wanted to create this documentary novel when I was a kid, I always read books. I read everything, but I loved especially books that had pieces and parts, like the Reader's Digest Treasury for young readers, and the book of knowledge and stuff like that. I loved pieces, so I write like that. So that's I needed a place to put it
Penny Kittle 13:37
absolutely so I have a, I have a suggestion for you. Okay, next time you're going to your writing group in Maine, do you know I live in New Hampshire? Yes, you need to come visit.
Deborah Wiles 13:49
I would love to do that. Oh, let's make it a date.
Penny Kittle 13:53
Yes. Open invitation whenever you're up here where I am.
Deborah Wiles 13:58
Well, you come through Atlanta. I hope you're going to now call me and tell me you're here. I'm going to take you out for grits and callers.
Penny Kittle 14:07
Oh, my word. I'm in.
Deborah Wiles 14:09
We'll go. That sounds so good. Penny. I just so appreciate this. It's such a pleasure to talk to you, and I'm just so happy to be partnering with you. Thank you.
Penny Kittle 14:19
Oh, you are so welcome. I appreciate your time today, because this was a big chunk of time, but you cannot imagine how much you've taught us with all of this thinking about not only how you write, how you create, how you work with an editor, but the connections to the book that are going to be so valuable for us to use with kids when we talk about the book.
Deborah Wiles 14:41
Well, thank you. I hope so I I, I hope that they love it. That's what I want. I want them to take it to heart and and love those characters, really, who are very much just young people going through an awful lot of change in the world and trying to feel their way through it and figure out who they are. Here, and what is it they can affect and not affect, what they can change and not change, and how to grow up, you know, because I think we're all still growing
Penny Kittle 15:08
up, I agree. Such a pleasure to talk to you, and I will see you soon. I hope.
Deborah Wiles 15:17
Okay. Thanks so much. Bye. You.
Penny Kittle 15:25
I thank you for being here. When I started recording this tonight, the sky was just a little bit dusky, and now it's pitch black, littered with stars. This time of year when the days are short, we all need energy, and I get energy just from knowing that there are teachers out there working every day to put great books in the hands of kids who will learn from them, who will experience something new, and who will come to know more about themselves and about the world because of reading. Thank you for being those people, it means so much
Moderator 16:05
support for the book Love foundation podcast comes from booksource as a leading distributor of authentic literature for K 12 classrooms, book source makes it easy for educators to build, Grow and organize classroom libraries that engage readers, discover expertly Curated Collections designed to match your curriculum and support guided reading, reading and writing workshop, summer reading, stem and more or work with a book source literacy expert to develop a customized list of titles based On level, genre, content area, topic, theme, whatever you need. Visit booksource.com to request a custom book list and grow a classroom library that engages readers today. The book Love foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions, connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.