Jack Gantos: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
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TeachingBooks.net resources on this interview»»» Listen to Jack Gantos introduce and read from Dead End in Norvelt By Jennifer M. Brown, Curriculum Connections--School Library Journal It's possible to grow up with Jack Gantos. A child can learn to read with Rotten Ralph, befriend Joey Pigza a few years later, and then, as a teen, face some rough patches with the author in his memoir, Hole in My Life. In his latest novel, Dead End in Norvelt (Farrar, 2011; Gr 5-8), Gantos draws liberally from his childhood spent in a "subsistence homestead" community in southwestern Pennsylvania, created after the Depression by the U.S. government to aid families when the coal mines shut down. The town is dying out, "one old person at a time," as the town historian Miss Volker puts it. Jack's parents disagree about whether to remain in Norvelt or leave. In this interview Gantos sorts fact from fiction. Do you see a clear divide between fact and fiction in your work? What no writer can be certain of is what takes place in readers' minds. Readers can't see [my side of the rug], just as I can't see theirs. Give 10 people a copy of Wuthering Heights, and it will play differently for each of them. A book is a great facilitator, but it belongs to its readers. Empathy for both Jack's father and Jack's mother comes through in the book. They seem like the two sides of young Jack—one wanting to flee Norvelt, like his father, and the other wishing to stay but turn back the clock to the way it used to be, much like his mother desires. Did you have to work at keeping the loyalties balanced? Miss Volker made it cool to be a reader and a historian, vocations that she cultivates in Jack. Was there a Miss Volker in your life? The first obituary that young Jack writes himself—about the deer—displays a knack for writing. Would you say that Miss Volker encouraged a love of reading and a love for writing? Jack's father says something very poignant about war when he describes landing on the Japanese islands: "In real life, when you are eye to eye with the enemy, you'd rather shake their hands than shoot them." Listen to Jack Gantos introduce and read from Dead End in Norvelt TeachingBooks.net resources on this interview»»» Jennifer M. Brown is the children's editor for Shelf Awareness, a daily enewsletter for the publishing trade. Her website Twenty by Jenny recommends titles to help parents build their child's library one book at a time. This article originally appeared in School Library Journal's enewsletter Curriculum Connections. Subscribe here.
You've plumbed your life experiences for your nonfiction books and for your novels. What triggers your exploration of the different "chapters" of your life?
I think that at least one half [of each of my books] is taking place inside the characters—how they're parsing the emotional with the physical. When I seize on a story idea, it's usually one that allows me to get that kind of range.
Yes; I know what really happened and what didn't happen. It's my job to create a seamless world where readers don't know [what's] fact and [what's] fiction. Otherwise, they'd trip over something that doesn't seem appropriate, or plausible, or wouldn't fit the setting or the characters' language. So you have to be sure that, [thread-by-thread], it's all of a piece, like a great Turkish rug.
That question is fundamental to the book: Should we stay or should we go? My mother, of course, held the Norvelt values, the help-one-another values. We are one town and should behave like a village or extended family. My father was more of the mind that he wanted his piece of the American pie and it wasn't going to happen in Norvelt. I saw and liked both sides.
Miss Volker is based on a genuine character. She was brought in to be the nurse and take care of that town, which she did. She lived just down from us. She was unmarried, she was elderly, so my mom would often send me down to do chores for her. Her house was filled with books. [She showed me] the difference between reading a book as a story, and reading a book that would create a constellation of ideas on how you could live your life. She represented that reading spark, but more than that the idea of soulful reading.
[Miss Volker] launched my love of writing, in part. When she was standing there dictating, it was almost like a stage performance. The words were emotionally charged. Years later, when I went to Emerson College and got my MFA in creative writing, I wrote about the Russian poet [Vladimir] Mayakovsky. When I was writing about Miss Volker, I realized she was just like Mayakovsky standing and delivering before great crowds. They both turned literature into living, breathing material.
American soldiers hitting the beaches in World War II...[found it very difficult] to shoot someone directly in front of them. The officers had to threaten the soldiers to make sure that they killed the enemy. I wept at the thought—that men had to threaten people to [get them to] kill others. Contrast that with how Jack sees animals. His relationship with animals is always very pure and innocent and empathetic. When Jack writes the obituary about the deer at the end, it's the simplest bit of writing in the whole book. It's so pure and so clean.
