Monthly archive for October 2011

An interview with award-winning author Elizabeth Partridge

Welcome to the Mixed Up Files of Middle Grade Authors, Elizabeth, and congratulations on your new novel for middle grade readers, Dogtag Summer.

Elizabeth is the acclaimed author of more than a dozen books for young readers, including Marching to Freedom: Walk Together, Children, and Don’t You Grow Weary, as well as biographies of Dorothea Lange, Woody Guthrie, and John Lennon. Her books have received many honors, including National Book Award Finalist, Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Michael L. Printz Honor, and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award. Elizabeth is on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults.

Dogtag Summer centers around Tracy–or Tuyet, during the summer before junior high, as she struggles to reconcile her harrowing memories of Vietnam with her life in California. The novel asks–where is home when you’re a child of war, caught between two countries, two identities? When is love enough to carry you through what you’ve discovered about your past? About your father’s past?

Tracy, your protagonist, breaks stereotypes of Asian females—passive, calm. Instead, we find out that the first few days when she was with her adoptive family, she bit her father.  And then later when her best friend Stargazer first met her, she had stolen a baloney sandwich. How did you create Tracy’s personality?

This question gets at the heart of my fiction writing process. First, I did a ton of research on the Vietnam War. I read books and interviewed Vietnamese who were refugees here after the war. They had vivid memories of their time in Vietnam during the fighting, and what it was like for them after the war. They were dislocated from their homes, often from family. Perhaps the most difficult position of all would be to be someone like Tracy – pulled away from everything you knew as a young child, with no one able to explain what was happening to you.

I knew Tracy had to be a really tough kid to have survived everything she had already gone through, and to meet the new challenges she faced in America. She knew adults could be dangerous, so she fought and bit if she had to. She’d known real hunger, so of course she would steal food.

After immersing myself in research, Tracy sprung into life. She started showing up in my dreams and my daydreams. Her actions and reactions came tumbling out of my fingers as I wrote. This is a hard state to get in as a writer, but isn’t it what we long for?

You chose to make Tracy’s adoptive family, a working class, struggling family. Why did you choose to make them struggling versus a more suburban middle class setting?

Dogtag Summer came from a conversation I overheard many years ago, in the mid-eighties. An electrician, Jim, and my husband, Tom, were doing some rewiring at Tom’s family ranch on the Northern California coast. Afterwards Tom and Jim, a Vietnam vet, sat by the fire and talked. Tom asked him what it had been like to serve in Vietnam. Stories came pouring out of Jim. How he always walked point, because he’d learned to hunt as a kid and he wasn’t going to trust his life to a city boy. What it was like to fight. What he saw, and heard. And the fear, always the fear he carried with him.

 Tracy has a hippie best friend, Stargazer. Why did you choose to make Stargazer from a hippie family?

I liked the contrast of Tracy’s working family and Stargazer’s hippie family.  It was sheer fun to write about Stargazer and his family. No research required. I was raised in the San Francisco bohemian art world, a precursor to hippies. And probably I was a hippie myself. I just loved Stargazer’s family, and honestly, I loved exposing some of the contradictions in Stargazer’s father, Beldon. He was all about peace and love, but he could be a scary, angry person in defending his idea of peace and love.

Your setting seems to be very important; you have the vivid setting in Vietnam by the river and then the setting in Northern California by the Pacific Ocean. How did you choose your settings?

I love setting. It so totally informs everything – who the characters are, why they react the way they do, where the story goes. I have always traveled to where a book is set, fiction or nonfiction. It helps me to see how things relate to one another geographically. I like to smell the air, feel what the rains feel like on my skin, see how people move in their environment. In Vietnam I spent time by the rivers, at the markets, in small villages, talking to anyone who would talk to me, soaking up stories. In Da Nang I visited an orphanage.

 You used a series of vivid and emotional flashbacks that unravel the mystery of Tracy’s story. Why did you choose to structure the book this way?

Tracy starts having flashbacks that give her increasing bits of information about her early life, which she had totally suppressed. I put them in as she was remembering them. It’s almost a feeling of vertigo, which PTSD sufferers have told me about.  These images or sounds or smells come at them in pieces, at difficult, vulnerable times.

 Tracy’s best friend Stargazer is intent on making a funereal Viking sailing vessel. Why did you choose for Stargazer to focus on this project?

Every year on the fourth of July our extended family makes Viking funeral ships out of wood and paper-mache, with cloth sails. We fill them with flammable stuff like pine needles, bark, and twigs, and haul them down a steep cliff to the Pacific Ocean. Just as the sun is about to set, we set them on fire and launch them into the water. It’s a spectacular sight as the sun falls into the ocean and the burning boats rise and fall on the dark blue waves. I just had to write about it. Also, Stargazer is so beautifully oblivious – he’s busy making a ship that commemorates dead warriors with someone who has actually lived through war. I liked the irony.

 There are several symbols in this book. But the dog tag really resonates. What do you want middle grade readers to take-away from that symbol of the Vietnam War?

This was a highly personal symbol for me. I had read and thought a lot about dogtags – they are so loaded. While I was working on the book, a friend and I were cleaning out an old, unused burn barrel on the property of our summer cabin, a few miles away from Tom’s family ranch. She dug her shovel into the ashes and something shiny came up on the shovel. “What’s that?” she said, and held the shovel out to me.

It was a dogtag belonging to Jim, the Vietnam vet. I held onto it the whole time I was writing the book, often wearing it on a chain around my neck. When I finished the book, I called him (I hadn’t seen him since the fireplace talk) and told him I had his dogtag. His response: “No you don’t.” I read him his social security number, second line on the tag. Silence. “Yes,” he finally said. He came to my cabin to pick it up.  As a kid he’d learned to hunt on our property with his father, and later was friends with the guy who owned it before us. Jim had no idea how his dogtag had ended up in the burn pile.

I was trying to figure out for myself all the complicated ways people survive, and love, and do their best.

This story is set not too long after the Vietnam War. Why did you choose to write about this period of history?

I thought this was a perfect way to explore how the war had affected everyone who was caught up in it, and how it kept reverberating in their lives.

Thank you for asking me such interesting questions!

Hillary Homzie writes books about tween girls because she has three sons and a husband and has to get girl time in somehow! To find out about Hillary and her books go to www.hillaryhomzie.com

The Making of an Audio Book

I have loved audio books ever since I was a kid, so when I heard my first book Heart of a Shepherd would be brought out in audio I was elated. When the audio book producer from Listening Library, Dan Musselman, called me to ask if I’d read the author note for the audio book of Second Fiddle, I was over the moon, although I had no idea what to expect.

Because I did speech and debate in high school, I did know enough to print out my pages double spaced in 20 point font, so I could read without losing my place. I practiced the whole author note aloud several times and then took out a pencil and marked each place where I should take a breath. Then I went back through and underlined where the emphasis should fall in each sentence. And then, because I know I tend to mumble, I highlighted words where I needed to be attentive to articulation. A dozen more practice runs through the 5 page author note, and I felt ready.
I got in touch with Mary MacDonald Lewis here in Portland who is a very well known voice artist. If you have On Star, that is her calm and reassuring voice telling you what to do. She’s also a director, a dialect coach, and a great teacher. Taking a voice class from her before I did my first book events was one of the best investments I’ve made. Mary Mac has a recording studio in her home, so we got together and she taught me how to use a studio microphone. Mary asked me to speak standing up with my mouth only an inch or so from the screen, which felt very awkward at first. And she insisted the most important thing was to smile, because people can hear it when you’re not smiling. I was sure she was making it up, so we recorded a few sentences, smiling and not, and guess what? I could hear it!

Then we got down to the work of the reading. I read as carefully as I could, but I still needed to stop a dozen times and back up when I misspoke or made a funny mouth sound or shuffled my feet. Also, dropping the page on the floor is a lot louder than you think it is! Maybe the biggest surprise of all was that it took me more than an hour to read 5 pages out loud. I was so relieved that the entire book was someone else’s responsibility.
When I thought about writing this post I know my experience was just a tiny piece of the whole audio book experience, so I was delighted when my voice artist Bri Knickerbocker agreed to be interviewed.

Bri Knickerbocker grew up in Pittsburgh, PA speaking in silly voices and singing, creating and performing plays and writing countless books about black cats. Now she lives in LA, acts on camera, voice acts and writes novels. To learn more, visit her here for writing: http://briknickerbocker.blogspot.com/ and here for voice over: http://brisoundslike.com/ You can follow Bri on twitter @briannanoellek.

How did you get interested in voice acting?


I was originally attracted to voice acting because I love animation and anime; I’m a kid at heart and anytime I get to sound like a 6 year old girl I can’t help but smile and giggle.
I’ve got some anime fans in my house, and those voices do sound so young—even younger than the animation looks. How did you get started?


I booked the first voice over job I ever applied for, which was some goofy animated commercials and it took off from there. Voicing book trailers, video games and audio books– all appeal to my love for dramatic story telling, getting emotionally involved and bringing characters to life through my voice.

Did you take specific training for voice work?


I actually haven’t. As cliché as it may sound, voice acting has always felt natural to me. In that sense, I’m self-taught. But earlier this year I did start taking on camera improvisation and film classes and both of those have only helped me grow and open up emotionally to be a better, fuller voice actress.

Wonderful! I love it when I can squeeze in classes. I took a poetry slam workshop this summer that was a blast! I always come back to the page with fresh ideas when I do something a outside my comfort zone. Can you describe how you got the part for Second Fiddle?

Really funny story, I found an ad on craigslist that stated an audio book company was looking for a voice actress with a British accent. As instructed on the ad, I called the number posted and left a voicemail in a British accent. When Janet Stark (from Random House) called me, I kept up the faux accent, totally unsure if I should let her know I’m not really British. I came in to audition for the project and met Dan Musselman, immediately confessing that I’m just an all American girl from Pittsburgh, PA and he decided to have me audition in my natural voice. I didn’t book that particular project. But a few months later Dan emailed me telling me they’d like me to voice Second Fiddle. It was my first audiobook and a dream come true for me!
That’s so exciting! When Dan called me to ask if I’d read the author note he told me how delighted he was to find just the right book for a promising young voice actor. ☺
What is the process for recording an audio book?


Dan mailed me the hardcopy manuscript straight from LA (I was in Pittsburgh for the holidays at the time) and I read the novel over and over again. First, simply reading and enjoying the story. Second, I put together a journal of all the dialogue and words in foreign languages and dialects, then looked them all up online, except the French, which thankfully I remembered from high school! I flew back to LA and recorded at Random House with Tony Hudz as my director and foreign language consultant/specialist.
I was wondering if you got help with the foreign languages. Dan was kidding me about that.
“Did you really have to put in all those languages?”
“What!? They live in Europe!”
“But Estonian? Really!?”
“Sorry!”
He was kidding. But it’s true that made it a more challenging than a book in just one language. How long did it take to make the recording? Because I was a total slow poke!

It took two days to complete and one more trip to the studio for just a few pick ups.

What happens if you make a mistake?

When I made a mistake, Tony or I heard it right away. Then, I’d simply restart voicing from the last sentence.

Did you have a favorite part of the process?

My favorite part was reading your story, and emotionally involving myself in it as I voiced it, hopefully bringing it to life and doing it justice! Losing myself in the story to be Jody and travel through her suspenseful adventure was magical and exciting and so rewarding.

Gosh, thanks! You’re a writer yourself. Can you tell us something about your work-in-progress or your favorite genre to write?


I’m currently writing an edgy young adult paranormal romance about ghosts and dark ones (demons) and my most recently finished work is a contemporary young adult novel with magical realism. Writing is related to voice acting for me, because they’re both complex storytelling, with three dimensional characters that I have the power and responsibility to bring to life. I get very involved with the story and characters in both mediums; I don’t want to let any of the characters down! It’s up to me to give them their voices so other people can hear what they have to say.
Do you remember a favorite middle-grade book book you’ve read recently?

I recently read a middle-grade novel called Sea, by Heidi R. Kling and The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall—I recommend both!
Wonderful! Thanks so much for spending a little time here at the mixed up files.
Readers, do you have any questions about audio book making process? Have you read a good audio book lately? Let us know what you think in the comments.

At the end of the day I’ll have a drawing from everyone joining the conversation for an audio book of Second Fiddle and you can hear Bri’s voice work for yourself.