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| photo: Michael Lionstar | |
Cynthia Voigt won the 1983 Newbery Medal for Dicey's Song and a Newbery Honor for A Solitary Blue. Homecoming was a National Book Award Finalist. All three are part of the Tillerman Cycle. Voigt was awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1995 for the body of her work, and an Edgar Award for The Callender Papers. Her new book is Mister Max: The Book of Lost Things, the first in a planned trilogy. She lives in Maine.
What were the seeds of the idea for Mister Max: The Book of Lost Things?
"Seeds," plural, is key. Seed #1 is my first grandchild, Max. I called him Mister Max; it fits the ear. As soon as I named him Mister Max, a title came to me: Mister Max and His Flying Grandmothers. He has two local grandmothers who see a lot of him. But I couldn't think of a story to go with that title. Then, it's always particularly hard for me to write a mystery-style story, because I have trouble with plotting.
That's surprising. After all, you won an Edgar Award for The Callender Papers.
I'm not my most critical reader, in the sense of illuminating. I sense a weakness, and that's what I try to address. I sometimes read and sometimes enjoy books by Alexander McCall Smith, and I admire that he has characters that go from book to book and change from book to book. Since McCall Smith is what I consider a not impaired plotter, I looked to him. I had an ambition, and I had a name.
It came to me that Mister Max could be like a spy. I'm a fan of Zorro and The Scarlet Pimpernel. I came up with the question of Mister Max as a guy who goes out in disguises. He had to have disguises ready at hand. He could have a grandmother with a trunk full of costumes in the attic, but the idea I arrived at I liked better: he had a theatrical family. After that, it all started happening. I figured out how to get rid of the parents, and I started thinking about plots.
The "Lost Things" apply to things large and small--Max's parents being the large thing--to something as small as the Baroness's spoon, and yet the spoon's significance is large. Did you have fun coming up with what would be lost and how Max would "find" it?
I went about it not directly, because, as I say, I'm not a good plotter. Originally, the first paragraph of the first chapter read, "When Max was 12, he lost his parents." Then I thought about, "What does it mean to be lost?" You lose your mind, you lose your way, your sense of direction, your watch; you lose track, you lose an idea. I thought about the kinds of things you can lose and the variety of ways in which you lose them. Things like the dog that wasn't lost but ran away.
Did the way in which Max would solve the mysteries affect your choices about what he would have to find?
With things that are lost, you can always think of a circuitous way of finding them. Once I had the idea of Max being a theatrical kid and being left behind and needing to survive, what interested me was the solving of problems. How you can think around them, burrow under them, rather than being destroyed by them or spinning your wheels. I used to tell my students: in literature as in life, there are no right answers, there are only good questions. There's no way of knowing; you're just intelligently guessing. Any child that comes into my range, I'd like to plant that idea in their heads.
Sometimes you think you have the answers, but the answers change as you change.
You need to accept that, too, that the answers change as we go through life. There are so many things that any sentient adult wants to plant with kids, there's no room for them to think for themselves.
Max starts out as independent and self-reliant, even before he's left behind. We see that, at 12, he's already resourceful because his parents are so preoccupied.
The question of independence at that stage is ambiguous. On the one hand, you want to be independent and run your own life; on the other hand, you're not sure you can.
My sense of what childhood is comes from the late 1940s and 1950s. As a teacher, I got another 20 years' effective range. They haven't changed that much. It's a psychological state that we go through, no matter how many technological devices and certain new stresses come in. I think kids should feel independent, but I don't think adults are always trustworthy. Parents are telling you you're independent for the same reason they send you to summer camp--some send you because they think you'll experience independence, and others because they won't have to think about you all summer.
Did you conceive of this as a series?
I thought of it as three books to start with, then four, then I went back to three. I sent it first to my agent, who had her doubts. What Nancy [Siscoe, my editor] at Knopf, who I think is doing a really good job, insisted upon--and it made the revisions more arduous--was seeing all three [before she offered me a contract]. I had the second one written by that time. That's very sensible.
When you wrote Homecoming, did you know it would be the start of the Tillerman Cycle?
I knew at the end of Homecoming that I wanted to write Dicey's Song, and I knew pretty much how. Those books are seriously not plot-driven. They began with a single branch that starts growing out to become a new tree. Solitary Blue grew out of Dicey's Song. Once I wrote A Solitary Blue, I knew I could write The Runner.
Are there advantages and disadvantages to stand-alone titles versus series?
Yes--it helps to have characters and setting. There are a number of mistakes you don't have to make when you have characters in hand. But the danger is that you assume you know these things, so you don't ask yourself questions. Somehow, it seems to me I always know when I'm doing lazy work. Then there's the danger of a series going on too long. Anne of Green Gables should have stopped after book one.
A book that stands alone can make an impression that a series can't. And a series can enter your life in a way that a stand-alone book can't.
Max gets a lot of his ideas about how to approach a mystery--and even how to solve it--from the plays he has seen, especially Shakespeare. Do you think literature holds the key to a lot of life's mysteries?
Here's the kernel of the whole thing for me. That's why you want people to read. It broadens their world. It opens a dialogue they might not have at home or school. It's a lifelong sport. There was a teacher at the school I taught at--he was very good but burnt out. He dealt with students I knew in a hamhanded fashion. Now and then he'd say something so clear and wise that you weren't allowed to blow him off. He said, "The reason you want kids to read literature is not because of its present relevance, but to allow them to think about a situation that they're going to face." --Jennifer M. Brown