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Welcome to Season 2 Episode 3 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 1 of Penny’s recent conversation with Deborah Wiles.
Season 2 Ep 3 Show notes
This episode is Part 1 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 the book Love foundation Podcast. I'm Penny Kittle. I'm in the mountains of New Hampshire, where we have a snowstorm predicted for tomorrow, eight to 12 inches, and every teacher in the state is chanting, snow day. We can only hope. This week, we're bringing you my conversation with Deborah wiles. She's the author of revolution, which was a National Book Award finalist, and it's part of a trilogy that centered on the 1960s a combination of primary source documents created as collages and a two Narrator fictional story that follows two kids, 11 year olds in Mississippi as they negotiate the freedom writer's arrival. Now, if you've seen me present in the last few years, you've heard about this book. Deborah Wiles is my spirit animal. I really believe this because I love collage and I love scrapbooks that capture so many parts of an experience in one visual collection. Deborah Wiles is masterful at creating scrapbooks to explain historical times, and that's at the heart of what happens in this conversation I have with her. She talks about how she creates those scrapbooks, how she plans them, how she assembles them, and how they breathe life into this period of history. Sit back and enjoy Deborah wiles.
Moderator 1:44
Support for the book Love foundation podcast comes from book source 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 use booksources Free classroom organizer to keep track of your classroom library books and digitally organize and inventory every title in your collection. Create your free classroom organizer account and start organizing your classroom library today@classroom.booksource.com
Deborah Wiles 2:26
I was 11 years old in 1964 during Freedom Summer, and I was in Mississippi, as I always was every summer. My mom and dad are both from Mississippi. My grandmother and her mother still lived there. Bunches of cousins, aunts, uncles, and we would go there every summer, the way people go to the home place. And I just remember that summer of 1964 everything closed. We were in a tiny rural town. But even in that little town, they had all these little towns had put together their money and had built a roller skating rink and a pool, and there was a restaurant across the highway from that, and all three of those things closed. And in the next town over, which was the county seat, Bay springs. This is in Jasper County, Mississippi. In Bay springs, the movie house closed the lyric theater, the public library closed the cool dip, closed where we used to get ice cream. I couldn't understand what was happening, so I asked, you know what's happening, and no one could explain it to my satisfaction, and I couldn't understand it. And actually, it really wasn't even explained to me. It was just sort of sloughed off. So I began to pay attention myself. And I often say I became a writer that summer. Even though I hadn't written anything, it would take me 35 years to write Freedom Summer, which was my first book, which is sort of like a picture book, and it's a precursor to revolution. And even when I wrote Freedom Summer, which was about the pool closing, I didn't understand what Freedom Summer was. So all I knew was the passage of the Civil Rights Act had caused so many places to close, some of them never reopened. And so I went to investigate it, and that's how revolution was born. I actually had written this proposal for three books of the 1960s for young readers, three novels of the 1960s and I wanted them to be full of primary source material and pictures and photograph song lyrics, newspaper clippings, all kinds of stuff that I wanted young people. I've been in schools at this point for about 15 years, working with young people and teachers, and I it was clear to me that there was a huge disconnect in teaching history along with language arts and what what actually happened in the world. During that time, we tend to teach history as dates, places and people and events, and there's just so much else swirling at the same time. And so this was really kind of my way to understand Freedom Summer, to make it a stand in in the 60s trilogy for the civil rights movement, and to go back and try and figure out for myself what actually happened that summer. I was 11, and so that's what I did. And I learned a lot. No kidding,
Deborah Wiles 5:32
I learned a lot.
Deborah Wiles 5:34
I had so much material, I had no idea how I was going to organize it all. So I started out making a timeline. I knew it would be about the summer. So I started the summer happened to be the summer solstice, the first day of Freedom Summer. And it also happened to be the day that Schwerner Cheney and Goodman were killed, three volunteers for Freedom Summer, and I ended it with the Gulf of Tonkin on August 4. So I knew that I had the span of time, and I just began to hang the plot on the dates that were really important to me. And I set the book in Greenwood, Mississippi, because that was the headquarters of SNCC in the biggest town in Mississippi, aside from Jackson, the state capital, and it felt to me really important to be there where the headquarters of SNCC was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the other organizations that formed cofo and led Freedom Summer so and Bob Moses was there, and he was really the architect of Freedom Summer. So I started there. I'd never been to the delta, even though I'd grown up in Mississippi all my life, in my summers and holidays, the delta is totally another country. It's it's another part of Mississippi that I didn't know. And so just learning the geography of that place was really a challenge as well. Wow.
Penny Kittle 7:04
You know, you have answered so many of the questions I had for you, just in that little explanation of your process as a writer, I just was so curious, as I was looking at it like, how would someone organize a book like this? And there you go, talking about hanging things on dates and creating the plot around these big events. It's just fascinating.
Deborah Wiles 7:26
I'll give you one example was once I decided to go to Greenwood, and I went there five or six times on research trips. There happens to be a fabulous independent bookstore there called turn row books that had befriended me already with previous books, where they'd all been Mississippi stories, and I'd gone there to sign books, so I knew Jamie and his wife in called them and said, I'm going to do this particular thing. And would you be willing to help connect me to people in Greenwood? And then a teacher I had worked with in noon in Georgia happened to be from Greenwood. And she said, Hey, I hear you're doing this and you want to go. I know everybody there. And so Marianne Richardson and I drove off to Greenwood one January day, and as I did, my weekend trips there and back and forth with people on email after that and telephone, I met people, and I understood dates so much better that I had, for instance, I think it was July 16, was Freedom Day all across Mississippi, where everyone was going to go to the courthouse and register to vote. And all these freedom workers, these volunteers who had come south, were going with the African American community, and standing in line at these courthouses all day long to try and register to vote, to have their their folks registered to vote. And that was a hugely important day in Greenwood, especially, I mean, all over Mississippi. But in Greenwood, 108 people were arrested and put in jail. And I didn't know a whole lot about this, except it felt very important. But when I started interviewing people in Mississippi, I stumbled across through the graces of turn row and other folks, the attorney the city, not the city attorney, but the prosecuting attorney for or defense attorney, I'm sorry for Greenwood, and his name is gray, Evans. He has since died, but gray and his wife, Tricia, welcomed us into their home and told us all about freedom day from their perspective and how they actually got these kids out of jail. Most of them were kids, and all the black community that had been jailed with them. They actually did all their behind the scenes work to get them out of jail. So I knew that was one of my dates. And then I knew there was also a date at the theater. There's a scene in the theater in revolution, where there's, there's a violent scene there, and they have to spirit out these kids through the back doors. And that's an actual happening that gray Evans took part in and told me about, and came and got those kids and got them out. So those were the kinds of things that I just hung dates onto a big calendar on the wall and then began to create my plot from there. It was amazing to see how that worked. It was just it was a gift to have all those dates.
Penny Kittle 10:21
How long did it take you to write this all together?
Deborah Wiles 10:25
I'd say it took two full heavy writing years, and I was researching for a couple of years before that, searching for my story and just I used Pinterest. This is when I really started using Pinterest. And if you go to Pinterest and find my boards there Deborah Wiles or Debbie Wiles, they might be now you'll find you'll see what went into that that looking for the story, there are so many boards that are just AP photos, Getty photos, songs that are possible, and all kinds of historical documents that are all archived at Pinterest. I use it as an archive place. So I was doing that for a couple of years, and then Sonny sort of walked off the page and said, Well, you know, you might as well write about that pool, because that pool still haunts you, and that pool is still there in this town in Mississippi, it's been abandoned, and no one has swum in it for over 50 years, and I still go there every year and take pictures and just wonder how it is that it just sits here in the middle of nowhere, empty with pussy willows growing in the deep end When it rains and the concrete cracking and the diving board gone, and the roller skating rink next door to it, with all the windows broken out and the glass everywhere, it's just a it's a haunting, haunting place.
Penny Kittle 11:53
What a beautiful description of that. I remember that scene so well, too, and it's so interesting to me that the courthouse as well the there's so many memorable places in this book that have, I've shared with kids. One of the ways I book talked it, and that's a, you know, a teacher strategy to get kids interested in the book, is we, you know, give them a little bit of it. I have used the music. And it was because of your Pinterest boards that I got really interested in the songs that you were thinking about. And I started coming into class, and you have excerpts from songs across some of these scrapbooks. And so I would show the collage on the document camera, and then I would say, Okay, now listen for a second so you can hear the song. And there is, has never been a student who knows the music, and so it comes across to them is like, wow, that's kind of interesting. And sometimes I've even gone on YouTube to find the original band playing or the singers, you know, because everything is grounded in this context of how different it was. And you know that the power of the images you chose. When I went to your Pinterest boards, I was struck by how many other amazing photographs there were that you didn't use.
Deborah Wiles 13:04
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there was just so much. You know, it's interesting, because when I wrote countdown, which is book one of the 60s trilogy, it takes place in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, there's a lot of resource material for that, but nothing like with revolution, because countdown took place. There was a lot happening in Cuba during that time. And with revolution 1964 in Mississippi, we had just so many photographers descend upon Mississippi, and not just that, the other civil rights areas, movements and events that were happening. There were so many pictures to pick from, and so many documents and letters home and, oh, it was amazing. It was just I didn't, yeah, it was hard to pick, but each of those collages or scrapbooks tells part of the story. So I have them very deliberately placed where they're placed, and each item is very deliberately in the order I want it in, and each song should highlight that particular area of the story. And I'm sure that you already see that.
Penny Kittle 14:14
So it is like looking at a really intricate quilt.
Deborah Wiles 14:18
Oh, that's interesting. I like that analogy
Penny Kittle 14:21
a lot for one picture in particular. There's a group of Freedom Riders getting ready to get on the bus. One of them is actually on the bus, and it says, going to build a brand new world. Do you remember this picture? Oh yes, oh yes. So it's one that I have used with students so many times to get them to write in their notebooks quickly, and I have them look at the picture and choose one of the Freedom Riders, and tell what they think that freedom riders thinking about as they get ready to get on that bus and head to Mississippi amidst all of the violence and the fear and the trauma that was in our country at the time. And always have not only loved doing this, I write choose one and right next to the kids and but then I went up. To Winnipeg in Manitoba, and I had a group of kids that were doing research on the Chinese workers that built the railroad, and they were doing it from photographs. So I did the same thing with them, even though they know little about the Civil Rights Movement, just writing next to a really vivid photograph. They all got engaged, the teacher got engaged, and then they transferred that same thinking to these photographs of the building of a railroad. It's the marriage of fictionalizing, imagining within these historical photographs that I think is just so powerful
Deborah Wiles 15:34
that's really an interesting way of looking at it. Are you familiar with the CRM vets.org website? No, that's a wonderful website of oral histories of the young people and the people who lived in Mississippi who give their oral history of that summer. And when you talk about those kids standing outside the bus getting ready to go south, I think about all those oral histories, and how many of them I read, and even giving those to your students, and then having them take, pick one of those people standing in front of the bus, and write from their perspective. I mean, I'm just thinking of giving them as much context as possible.
Penny Kittle 16:20
I love, love that I'm going to definitely check it out. One of my questions for you is that I know you teach teachers how to teach writing as part of your work, and I'm really curious the kind of advice you would give teachers about teaching writing.
Deborah Wiles 16:38
Oh, well, first of all, I always start by saying, I'm a writer, and I'm not a teacher, and I don't have the tools you do, and I don't have the education that you do, and and I bow to you. I mean, I'm really that's not that. It's not my strength. My strength is the story. However, because my strength is the story, I begin there, and what I do is talk about personal narrative writing being the backbone of everything else we write, and the better we know our own personal stories in little snippets and long memoirs in whatever fictionalized way they may be, pictures, snippets of, you know, all kinds of ephemera, collaging whatever, The better we know our personal narrative, the better any kind of writing we do is going to be, or storytelling of any kind. And I also am a very big proponent of making lists to begin by connecting with my story. Say I show them a lot of slides, and we talk about how everything I write is personal narrative turned into fiction everything. So I take a little slice of what I know or what I felt or what I imagined, and I turn that into a story. And I asked them to do the same thing. I was just in Miami yesterday, actually doing the Glaser Lorton writing Institute with teachers, and I had them do this very thing. And they made lists with me, and from those lists, you circle the one that's pulling you at your heart, because all writing comes from what you know, what you feel and what you can imagine, and the one that pulls you is the one that you'll invest in at that moment, another moment, another story. And then I have them tell it out loud. I have them focus it by saying I'm going to write about the time that and making it one very short little moment. And then I have them tell each other the stories out loud and listen to them and ask questions before they ever write. And it's interesting what that brings up. So I guess I'm just a real proponent of sharing your stories, sharing them with students, and do writing with your student. You do this too. I know you do because I've heard you, yeah, and so I'm really just preaching to the choir here, and I learned everything I know from you. Penny. It's a mutual admiration society, really. And everything I do is basically just organic, you know, I think I have, I've gone and I love your your heart maps, and the maps that you make with the hands, and you know all that kind of stuff. I don't know your terminology this well, like you do, but I love what you do in finding those moments to write about. And that's really what we do like because we are stories. We are stories, and so we navigate our life through storytelling. So the better we know how to do that, the better we know how to navigate our lives. So I guess it's really kind of what I do. In a nutshell,
Penny Kittle 19:30
yeah, preach sister.
Deborah Wiles 19:35
We should take our show on the road.
Penny Kittle 19:37
Oh, I love it. I don't know if you know. I'd love to do that. Oh, no, kidding, I'm in. Do you know Tom newkirk's work?
Deborah Wiles 19:47
I don't. Should I?
Penny Kittle 19:48
Well, he wrote this amazing book called minds made for stories. He's an English professor at the University of New Hampshire, now retired, but he was my editor for book club. Of and he is, one of his central claims is that narrative is not a Text type, as it was called in the Common Core, but it is the foundation of all of our thinking. I agree, and that narrative is, you know, it's the central genre from which all things come, and that everything's a story that you weave within it all these other parts. And I think that you would love his work. It's a very short book, but powerful.
Deborah Wiles 20:29
I wrote it down. In fact, he remind you, remind me of a quote that I start off with all the time by Richard Rhodes. Story is the primary element human beings use to structure knowledge and experience.
Penny Kittle 20:43
Oh, I am going to write that down.
Deborah Wiles 20:47
Use it wherever you like. I have it on a slide, and I just start with that. It's just so powerful. And that's exactly what Tom Newkirk is saying,
Penny Kittle 20:56
exactly. And, you know, I the other day watched Anne lamott's TED Talk band. She's always, I haven't seen it yet. Oh my gosh. Well, she's always been one of my go to people and that, you know, powerful writing voice and the stories that she so bravely shares. But in it is this quote that I think you'd enjoy. It says you're going to feel like hell if you wake up someday, and you never wrote the stuff that's tugging on the sleeves of your heart, your stories, memories, visions and songs, your truth, your version of things in your own voice. That's really all you have to offer us, and that's also why you were born.
Deborah Wiles 21:35
I agree with that totally. It's also everything you have to offer. It's just it's everything. It is why I think it's why we're here, because I think that's how we navigate. I think it's how we understand. I This is one of the reasons I wrote. I it was interesting to me to even write this proposal and have it so wildly accepted. I was like, Really, they do. Okay, let's go. No idea what we were doing in the beginning. Just no idea. I was just stabbing in the dark saying, I want to do this and this and this and this, and then when I had to actually do it the way I and this is back to what we talked about in the beginning. This is why I envision sunny doing the scrapbooks or the collages. This is why I envision the adult Sonny doing what she calls opinionated biographies, because they certainly are, and because I needed a narrative, I needed to have a narrative thread to go through it. So that's what we do. We tell ourselves stories, and they become our truths, and sometimes we're really not willing to look at any other truth and or entertain any other version than the one that we tell, which is another reason I wanted to write this, the 60s trilogy, because I wanted us to look at non revisionist history. I wanted us to be able to read many different opinions, and not just one. You know, history often will tell us it was this way. Well, not necessarily, and not for this group. And in Mississippi, there still today are so many different viewpoints of how it should be, quote, unquote. And I wanted to represent all of those, and I wanted to let you see Byron della Beckwith walking down the sidewalk. Who the man who killed Medgar Evers. I wanted you to have some interaction with him and feel that that mindset in your heart. And then I wanted you to see Jamie, who's Sonny's dad. I wanted you to see his conflict, and I wanted you to see annabelle's assurance that we need to change. And I want you to see Sonny's like, well, what am I supposed to believe here, you know? And I wanted you to feel Ray's anger. And I wanted you to really know that it was all of these ways of looking at that same event, that same summer, were valid, and they're all we often will take some of those those viewpoints and say they don't count, but they all do, because they all make up the the fabric, or the quilt, as you've called it, of of the whole entire story, and they all need to be heard. Does that make sense?
Penny Kittle 24:12
Oh, it's, it's so makes sense. And I, when I first read revolution, I was so struck by the way you did that, and the importance of those two central narrators and then the other voices that join the chorus of what this is and the power in my I teach a course called The Art of story, and I have three sections of it this fall with I'll probably have, you know, 90 kids or so, and one of their tasks is to try to tell a story With multiple narrators. It's incredibly challenging. Oh, it is, but it's also so powerful to have to shift the lens of what's happening in a story. When I modeled it the first time in front of my class, I could just feel this energy. I said, here's the story I want to tell you, but what I'm wondering is, where's my mom's voice in the story? Where's my sister? Voice, and as I tried to map out, what would they say, the story takes on an entirely different shape.
Deborah Wiles 25:07
Yep, and that's so true of our lives, and when we can, I'll tell you, I think writing like that from different viewpoints changes us. It did me. It changes us because it forces us to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and to try and think honestly from their perspective, the first draft of revolution had no Ray, and it suffered. It just suffered, and I hadn't finished it yet. I just knew that it wasn't something was wrong, something wasn't working, and I went on this little writing retreat with a bunch of women that we've been sort of meeting for years, sometimes online, sometimes in person in Maine. And I was sitting there reading the first chapter, and I thought, we need to see this from this kid in the pool. And I went and wrote Ray's first chapter, and the book was just, it had life. It suddenly just was it scared me to death. Actually, I didn't really know what to do with it. I wrote two chapters in Ray's voice, using the voices I had heard growing up in Mississippi, and I sent them to David. David Levithan is my editor, and I sent them to like the first five chapters or so. I sent to David with Ray's two chapters in there, and David just wrote me back and he said, keep going. You know that this is it. And they came last because I had so much already of Sonny's story, and I needed to figure out how to thread ray in there in a meaningful and powerful way. And also Ray's story is a true story, in some ways, because one of the people I talked to as I was researching and also on that CRM that's website, is his story is Silas McGee. Silas McGee is Ray, and he was older. I think he might have been in his early 20s, but he was shot, and he did live, and he still lives today, and he would not let me interview him before the book came out, his family was very protective of him all the McGees I called in the phone book in Greenwood, Mississippi, and none of them knew who he was. But after the book came out, I took it to Greenwood and went to a Greenwood High School, and was there in the cafeteria, and one of the cafeteria workers was looking through the book, and she recognized some people from the Greenwood scrapbook of Freedom Day. And I said, Really, the person I want to talk to is Silas McGee. And she said, Oh, I know him. I'll call him for you. And she called him, and he came to school, and I got and it was just like the most amazing moment. And he was very gracious. He was just very humble, and he doesn't he didn't want to make any noise, and he'd hardly talked about that time. But he and Ray are just their kindred spirits. Ray is younger, and Ray is angrier, but Silas McGee did stand up. He and his the McGee brothers were really and their mother were really instrumental in being very, very courageous in the black community during Freedom Summer. So these, these connections that you make, I never would have known that story if I hadn't done that research and gone there and found people and kept going, and people were just opening their minds, opening their hearts, and saying, Come on in.
Penny Kittle 28:37
She's pretty amazing. You got to admit thank you for joining me for part one of this conversation. In part two, we talk about the relationship she has with her editor, David Levithan. Now you must know David's work as well. I can't imagine anything more intimidating or exciting than working with him on developing my writing. You're going to hear all about that in our part two of this podcast with Deborah Wiles
Moderator 29:02
support for the book Love foundation podcast comes from booksource as a leading distributor of authentic literature for K 12 classrooms, booksource makes it easy for educators to build, grow and organize classroom libraries that engage readers with a newly updated booksource reading level chart, you can see at a glance how the various leveling systems correlate to one another. The new book source reading level chart is easy to print and share as a handy reference, and now it's interactive too, so you can easily shop for books at your desired reading level with just one click. Visit booksource.com to see how the new book source reading level chart can help you match students to texts they can read with success. The book Love foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions, connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.