 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
 |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
 |
|
WALK TWO MOONS
- An Interview with Sharon Creech - Where did the idea for Walk Two Moons originate? Were the characters conceived before the setting and plot? Walk Two Moons had a rather bumpy evolution. After over two years of attempting a story whose first narrator was Mary Lou Finney, and whose next narrator was Phoebe Winterbottom, I rediscovered a fortune cookie message in the bottom of my purse: "Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins." The suggestion of a journey in that message sparked the third attempt, this time with Salamanca as narrator, and incorporating the two previous stories within hers. I read that when you were a child, like Salamanca, you took a trip to Lewiston, Idaho. How was you rexperience similar to and/or different from Salamanca's trip? It was similar in that we followed the same route that Salamanca does, and I was transformed by the experience of seeing our huge country and its beautiful landscapes. It was different in that none of the things that happen to Salamanca along the way happened to me! The characters in Walk Two Moons all experience loss to some degree. How can you so accurately express the emotions of such great loss? Perhaps because I've felt them. My father died just a few years prior to writing this book. But I was also drawing on another kind of loss as well. My daughter had recently left England (where we were living at the time) to attend college in the States, and I felt tremendous loss; I missed her so much! How does Bybanks, Kentucky, fit into your life? Bybanks is based on Quincy, Kentucky, where my cousins live. It's a beautiful setting, with hills and trees, and lots of places for a child to roam. We visited there often when I was young. What characters in Walk Two Moons, if any, are based on people you know? How are they similar? None were consciously based on people I know, but now that I have distance from the book, I can see that Salamanca is probably what you would get if you took me and my daughter and squished us together; and Gram and Gramps have pieces of m y parents, grandparents, and siblings. It is hard to accurately identify which pieces came from whom, though. You'd have to see us all together. Does a piece of you exist in any of the characters? How does that character reflect who you are? A piece of me exists in all the characters, I think. If you took all my characters (even the odd ones, like Phoebe) from all my books, you might have a good portrait of me. Like many of my narrators, I love the outdoors, have a big family, am sometimes stubborn, sometimes serious, and sometimes funny, etc. What did you learn about yourself while you were writing Walk Two Moons? I learned that I was fairly patient (to stick with that story through at least a dozen completely different drafts) and also a bit stubborn (I wasn't going to let go of that story!), and that both of these qualities are useful when it comes to writing. Do you think any of the characters in Walk Two Moons will resurface in another novel? They already have. Mary Lou Finney is the main character in Absolutely Normal Chaos. Salamanca gets brief mention in Chasing Redbird. Zinny (from Chasing Redbird) is alluded to in Bloomability, etc. I may reunite some of these characters in another novel some day. You never know … Many layers of understanding permeate your novel, and your use of a story within a story helps reveal those layers. How did you determine that this technique would work? It evolved gradually, and I didn't know it would work until I was finished. It was a bit like doing a huge puzzle, and that challenge intrigued me. How does this book's message compare with other books you have written? I don't think this book has one message, and if it did I'm not sure I could articulate what that was. Each reader finds something different in each story. One central motif, though, of putting yourself in another's place in order to better understand that person, recurs in many of my books. Perhaps this is because this is also the writer's challenge: to put herself in the place of her characters in order to better understand them. |
 |
