LSBBT PROMO AUTHOR INTERVIEW + GIVEAWAY: Journey of the Pale Bear by Susan Fletcher (Middle Grade)

“…a stupendous coming-of-age-tale stuffed with adventure and laced with deeper questions… A richly satisfying story saturated with color, adventure, and heart.” –Kirkus, starred review

“I simply adore this novel. It has it all: gorgeous prose, fascinating history, riveting adventure. But it’s the unlikely tender friendship between a lonely boy and a polar bear that makes this a story to cherish. A lovely little miracle of a book.” 

–Katherine Applegate, Newbery Medal-winning author of The One and Only Ivan

“I loved every single thing about this large-hearted and riveting medieval adventure.” —William Alexander, National Book Award-winning author of Goblin Secrets

I didn’t become a reader until I was in third grade.  It’s not that I couldn’t read before that.  I mean, I definitely wasn’t one of those people who teach themselves to read at age three and are halfway through The Lord of the Rings before they’ve retired the pacifier.  But I could read. 

What I couldn’t do until third grade was forget that I was reading. I couldn’t drop down inside the world of a book and live in that world instead of mine, wandering through ancient forests and medieval castles, though Saharan dust storms and leech-infested swamps, inside the skin of someone else, someone mostly-else, someone created by the author but with whom I shared those imagined experiences and the emotions that arose from them.  But in third grade…I could. 

Magic! 

And I still feel that magic today, when I read.  But when I first experienced it, back in third grade…wow, that was something.  And so I want to do that for kids. I want to make it possible for them to take part in that magic…with books that I planned to write for them.

Well, there were a lot of hard parts (there always are, for me!)  But one particular challenge was the issue of anachronism. In other words, when you’re writing about the past, you don’t want your characters to be 21st century people dressed up in the costumes of earlier times.  You want your characters’ attitudes to be “of their times,” and yet accessible to young readers of today. 

This meant that Arthur (the protagonist) should not be sensitized to issues of animal rights…because that really wasn’t a thing in the 13th century.  On the other hand, I did want Arthur to come ‘round to the modern understanding that keeping a polar bear in a small cage is just flat-out wrong.  So Arthur had to change, in this way, and I struggled for quite some time to make it a believable change.  

In my last novel (Falcon in the Glass) the protagonist was a boy, and I kind of wanted to switch to a girl protagonist after that.  But when I thought about the historical era and the events of Journey of the Pale Bear, especially the parts on the sailing ship, I realized that a girl protagonist would stretch credulity too far.  So I happily settled in with Arthur!

This was trickier!  Nobody knows if the real, historical polar bear was male or female.  My first thought was that the bear in my book should be a male. I had in mind a kind of guys-on-a-road-trip vibe with Arthur and the bear.  But young male polar bears are some of the most dangerous animals on the planet. The more I thought about it, the more I began to feel uneasy about my decision.  I had actually written about three-fourths of the book with the polar bear as a male. But I changed my mind and went back and changed the bear to a female. 

And it actually worked out really well.  For example, I had already written several scenes in which Arthur hums to the bear.  I later found out that bear cubs sometimes sort of hum to their mothers. So instead of the guys-on-a-road-trip vibe, the now-female bear relates to Arthur sort of as if he were her cub.

So many authors have influenced me, both directly and through their work!  So I think I’ll comment on just one—Eloise McGraw. Eloise wrote a raft of wonderful novels for young readers; she had three Newbery Honor books.  Her work, itself, is inspiring. Even now, when I pick up one of her books, it makes me want to try harder to raise my standards—though I’ll never be as good a writer as she was.  (Moorchild is my favorite of Eloise’s books, followed by The Striped Ships.) But Eloise was a friend, as well, and she taught me so much about the writing life.  An example: Once, when Eloise was struggling with the beginning of a novel, I told her that it surprised me that she was having trouble because she had already written so many great books.  She told me that each book teaches you how to write that book, but not necessarily the ones after that.  This was kind of discouraging at the time! But later, it was very helpful.  Because each book I’ve written has been hard in one way or another—and Eloise taught me to think of the struggle as just part of the job of being a novelist. 

Here’s one that came from another bit of advice from Eloise McGraw.  Years ago, whenever I got stuck, I would just push my way through the story.  But, more often than not, I’d have to throw out most of what I wrote when pushing through.  One day, Eloise told me that when she got stuck, she waited.  She would write down a question about what was stalling her, and she would read that question every day, until one day she just knew the answer.  So I put a pretty ceramic bowl in my study.  When I get stuck, I take out a little slip of paper and write down a question about what is stalling me.  I fold it up and put it in the bowl. And I take the question out and read it every day until I know the answer.  Sooner or later, the answer always comes!