It's the book club for kids.
The book club for kids.
It's the book club for kids.
It's the book club for kids podcast.
It's a bonus edition of the book club for kids.
I'm Kitty Felde.
You know, we talked to a lot of writers on this show, but we only seem to be able to fit a portion of those conversations into our regular episodes.
So, in addition to the other bonus shows, where we'll hear from you what your favorite book is, we can also start introducing occasional longer conversations with some of the writers we meet.
Last week's episode was Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos.
Today we will hear more from Jack, including what it felt like to get 36 rejections at the beginning of his career.
Yes, it hurt to be rejected.
But yes, it was really good that somebody took the time to show you what was wrong with your work.
Ouch.
But let's start at the beginning.
This is a conversation we had with Jack Gantos at Mitchell's Book Corner on Nantucket Island during the Nantucket Book Festival.
The main character's named Jack Gantos.
So what are we supposed to make of this, fiction or fact?
Well, yes.
Yes.
There's a lot of fact to it.
And there's just a tiny bit of fiction to it.
And the tiny bit of fiction is mostly the plot line.
But the facts are really pretty solid.
I am from Norvelt.
I was born in Mount Pleasant because Norvelt did not have a hospital.
So it was the town next door at the Frick Memorial Hospital.
My grandfather was a coal miner and worked in the mines, double shifted.
One shift digging coal, one shift taking care of the mules.
My grandmother was just a lovely woman who had a big garden.
And my parents were married and we lived in Norvelt and I started school in Norvelt.
Norvelt was a town built and named after Eleanor Roosevelt, of course for out-of-work farmers, miners and other people that, during the Depression, had lost their housing, had lost their jobs and were really at odds ends.
And so they needed a place to live.
Eleanor Roosevelt who had the biggest heart of anybody in the country.
I love Eleanor Roosevelt.
I admire Eleanor Roosevelt, and I wish there were more of her.
But she looked out at the country when FDR came in and said, we have to help people.
And so they started this homestead program.
So they bought the Hearst Farm and they designed a community of 250 houses with a community chicken hatchery, a community farm, a community factory and everybody could sign up and get a house and have it built.
On script.
They didn't even have money.
You worked for me for two hours doing electricity.
I worked for you for two hours doing plumbing.
And they built these houses, and they're still there and still intact.
And These communities grew, they thrived, they had a school, and people moved forward.
They did not sink below the poverty line and become a drag on the economy.
They became great citizens of the country, thanks to Eleanor.
But talk about how that town formed you.
That was a town where a person helped another person that needed help.
And so we called it a helping hands town or a community benefit town.
For instance, my mother had a garden.
Now my mother's whole job in life and her whole community interest in life was growing crops, which she did, harvesting crops and then cooking those crops and feeding the elderly.
That's my mother's entire thrust in life, was helping.
It was a giving back town.
My grandmother was much the same way.
I worked with my grandmother on her garden.
We had chickens, we had turkeys, we had a whole garden.
And of course, the town was built on the Jeffersonian principle that Every person in America should have a house and enough property to have a garden that, if things went bad, you could feed your family.
That was the Jeffersonian principle.
The Hamilton, which I know is a great show on Broadway.
Hamilton was the Fed and that was a whole different system.
We went with the Jeffersonian sort of agrarian system as opposed to the Federal Reserve financial system.
And so I grew up as a person that thought that community meant that one person helped another person, that helped another person, and that we all joined hands and joined forces to create a community and helped those people in the community that could not help themselves.
Now we know, generally, that 10% of the community will never be able to pull itself together.
That's what's the tithe.
That's why the church had the tithe, the 10%.
And so did Norvelt have a tithe.
So that's why everybody pitched in and helped out. to those people who could not help themselves.
People in Norval who could not help themselves, never thought of themselves as a drag on the community, never thought of themselves as incomplete citizens.
They just thought they were there and surviving well and were part of the community as best they could do, and everybody helped them.
So the fictional Jack Gantos has a very interesting relationship with his mother in the book, which is both terrifying and amusing at the same time.
How true to fact is that relationship with the real life Jack Gantos and his mother?
Well, I do love my mother.
I love her very much.
And she's still alive.
And she lives in the town next door, Greensburg, in elderly housing.
But Norvelt's just down the street.
My uncle Bill still lives in Norvelt, her brother.
We still have a lot of relations in Norvelt.
But my mother, my mother was one of those people, like her own mother, that thought that community was a very important aspect of one's social life and one's moral and ethical development in life.
So she wanted to stay in Norvelt and just help out.
She would have been totally satisfied with that.
I believe she would have been.
My father, well, my father had been in World War II.
And you know, when you go off in World War II and join the Navy and fight in the South Pacific and get shot at and run landing craft on landing invasions And boy life is tough.
I mean, that is not easy.
My God, I can hardly imagine the fear and the courage it took to be him.
But when he came back to Norvelt, a helping hands town growing crops to feed the elderly was not exactly what was promised after World War II.
So he wanted to move on.
My mother, on one hand, had the ethic of helping out the town.
My father, on the other hand, had the ethic, which is very American, of taking your family and moving it forward, making money and creating a life that would be more beneficial to your children.
I ended up somehow sympathizing with my mother and, at other times, respecting my father.
Talk to me about how you made the transition from teaching to writing, or were they concurrent?
I went to Emerson College in Boston in 1972.
I had paroled from prison to college.
Pretty shocking, really.
Please, whoever's listening to this, don't feel too terrible about it.
I made some mistakes.
They weren't awful, but nonetheless, I was a bookish kid.
I made a mistake, and then I went bookish again.
I went to Emerson to get a BFA in creative writing, and so I started writing books when I was an undergraduate.
So I went to Emerson College in 1972 and started to write books when I was an undergraduate.
Now, I always liked children's literature.
It had always made a big impact on me as a young reader.
And I always thought that the characters in children's literature were so fabulous.
So I had met Nicole Rubel, who was an illustrator at the Museum School of Fine Arts.
I was writing books. children's stories.
We combined, and we started to put together picture books.
Now we didn't know what to do much beyond that, but there were three publishers in Boston Little Brown, Atlantic Monthly and Houghton Mifflin.
So, we started to take our books around, and we wrote 12.
I wrote 12 books.
She illustrated all 12 books, God bless her, and they were all Rejected.
36 rejections to our faces.
But it was like a graduate course because they would point out what was wrong with the character, what was wrong with the theme, what was wrong with the storyline.
And so you realized in one sense that yes, it hurt to be rejected.
But yes, it was really good that somebody took the time to show you what was wrong with your work.
So we actually got better.
And then we wrote Rotten Ralph.
And that was the first book that really was accepted by Houghton Mifflin.
Walter Lorraine was the editor, and great editor.
And we published Rotten Ralph.
I was a sophomore in college and Nicole Rubel was still at art school and we just couldn't believe that we had created this book, and it was published.
And you still get joy, you know, however many years later.
You still get that kind of joy.
I watched you with patrons signing books, talking about books, talking to other writers.
I mean, it seems that there is the joy has not gone out of it for you, the joy I don't think will ever go out of it for me.
It started, of course, before I wrote, when I was really a teacher.
I was cut out to be a teacher.
I loved my students.
I would do anything for my students.
And I worked endlessly for my students, editing manuscripts, working with them, meeting with them one-on-one And, to me, being a teacher was really one of the greatest joys and really one of the greatest jobs that you could possibly have, that you were adding to the world.
It was sort of like a Norvelt job, that you were really contributing to the community.
And I loved it.
I loved it deeply, dearly.
But there came a time, there was a schism, where you realized that you were either going to continue teaching or you were going to write books.
And it was really hard because I was falling behind on all my writing projects.
And so I had married.
Now, I never thought I would get married.
I didn't think I wouldn't make enough money to ever get married.
And teaching didn't give you really a lot.
And I lived in a rooming house.
I lived in a rooming house for 20 years.
20 years. on Marlborough Street in Boston.
And I met my wife.
She said, where do you live?
I wouldn't tell her because I was so embarrassed because I lived in a rooming house.
Now, I didn't mean to fall in love.
I did not mean to even think about getting married.
I did not even consider having a child because I thought well, you know, given my values, that To have a family meant that you had to support a family, and I did not really think I could support a family.
Teaching was not really the most rewarding position.
It was rewarding emotionally, but not financially.
At any rate, I met my wife, and I thought, I'm absolutely madly in love.
I must get married to this fabulous person.
So I did, and then I was full-time at Emerson.
I was tenured at Emerson as a creative writing professor.
And my wife had said to me early on, she said, we want one child.
I said, oh, sure.
Well, the year came, one year came, and she said, remember?
And I said, oh, yes.
Let's have that child.
And I said, you know what?
I need to start writing more books, too.
So we made a cataclysmic change.
I quit Emerson College, resigned my tenured creative writing position and we moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, which was cheap cheap, cheap.
We bought a house for $110,000 and had the bathroom fixed up and a couple other rooms.
My wife got pregnant.
We had our daughter Mabel, and I would get up at four in the morning and sit in the garage and write.
Those two years in Albuquerque, I wrote four novels, and then we moved up to Santa Fe.
I wrote four more novels and then we woke up one day and went oh my God, we have to move back to Boston.
So we grabbed Mabel when we moved right back to Boston.
And then I just continued hammering away at the books.
And book by book, contract by contract, award by award, things started to get better.
And so I began to transition from teaching to writing, which is what I wanted to do.
I never regret. the 20 years I put into teaching.
Teaching taught me more than maybe I even taught my students.
And it certainly informed my writing.
If you haven't heard the kids' discussion of Jack Antos' book Dead End in Norvelt, it's episode number 36, available on iTunes or our website bookclubforkidsorg.
In fact, all of our episodes are there, available for your listening pleasure.
And of course, they're free.
Book Club for Kids is funded in part by the D.C.
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I'm Kitty Felde.
Thanks so much for listening.
