WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: Gary Schmidt

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Gary D. Schmidt is the bestselling author of The Labors of Hercules Beal; Just Like That; National Book Award finalist Okay for Now; Pay Attention, Carter Jones; Orbiting Jupiter; the Newbery Honor and Printz Honor Book Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy; and the Newbery Honor Book The Wednesday Wars. He lives in rural Michigan.He joins Emily Schutte on WRFH for a discussion. From 05/2025.

Hi, my name is Emily Shuddy, and I'm here talking with Gary D. Schmidt, author of the Newberry award-winning novel The Wednesday Wars. His other novels include The Labors of Hercules' Beal, orbiting Jupiter, Jupiter Rising, just like that, and OK for now, among many others. Today, we are going to chat about his books and the thought process that goes into the writing of these stories. So my family is just all, like, we all love reading. We love reading classics. I was classically educated and within the past year or so, my family discovered your books. So my, my oldest sister, Sarah, she started reading it based off of the suggestion of a friend. And then she introduced it to my mom, who then introduced it to the kids. And then my dad started listening. So we've been listening

to them on audio for the most part. But kind of on and off, both in the book form and audio. I did audio just because as a college student, I don't have a crazy amount of time to sit down for pleasure reading, unfortunately. Well, I get it, yeah. But I kind of framed my questions a bit to be about kind of along the theme of questions from a family of fans. I got a bunch of questions from myself and from my family, just like things that we wanted to know about your books and about yourself and how that's in front. to your writing. My first question for you is, could you describe for me what your writing process is? When you sit down to work on a book, what is your process? I wish it was more exciting than when I describe it. I work really hard at writing 500 words a day on whatever given projects I'm

working on. So if I'm working on a new novel, obviously that's 500 new words a day. And then I stop. I never go above that. So figure that's about a page and two-thirds, a page and a half, something along those lines, which is the pace that most American writers actually do work at. Jack London, who wrote more than any other American writer was 500 words a day. Hemingway, Steinbeck, they all wrote it 500 words a day.

And so early on, I thought there's probably a good reason for doing that and not going beyond that, but also making sure you do do it. So that means, for me, that probably it's a chapter every two weeks. Now there are other books as well, so I'm keeping several books going on, and those may be in a different place.

So yesterday I finished the umpteenth revision of a collection of letters, an epistolary novel. And that obviously means that I've been, I'm reading through it, and I'm making smaller revisions and large revisions and structural, blah, blah, blah. And that's very different.

And so that might just be, I got an hour or so today I can do that. that kind of thing. And then after this, I have to work on a whole new revision of a picture book that I'm doing with someone else. I'm doing the first draft of the revision. And that, of course,

that'll be 400 words in total. So for that one, it's really conceiving and going back and making sure the language is what we want and those sorts of things. So that, too, is a very different thing. But for the most part, when I think of my day,

it's going to be what's the next novel I'm working on and how can I get my 500 words done I don't plan it out I don't have an outline I think that makes it dull I mean if I'm just filling an outline that's not a very exciting day but if I can come to a piece and know where I'm going to start I usually have the first few sentences down and then I can follow where the story goes that feels to me kind of exciting because at the end of the day I'll be in a new place that I haven't even imagined. I don't know what that will be right now. So, yeah, it's not, I guess it's just sort of dogged.

Just sit down and get the words down. It may be that they'll be cut. It may be that this whole section goes, but it's still important to get the words down, even if it's only to eliminate a road that doesn't lead anywhere. So you said you were working on an epistolary novel of sorts. Could you explain a little bit about what that is?

Sure. It's a little complicated because it's two of us that are doing it. I'm working with a guy named Ron Kirchie, and we decided to do at first three novels. Now it's going to be four, and they'll come out in successive springs. And so for that one, it's 10 kids from Portland, Maine, and 10 kids from L.A. I wrote the LA one, I wrote the Portland ones, Ron wrote the LA ones. And they're being forced to do pen pal stuff. And it's with paper and pen, right? It's not with the computer at all.

But it's the old style. You put a stamp on it, that kind of stuff. And the novel, as soon as I said, it sounds like, oh, man. But the idea of it is how is it that we become vulnerable with each other? How do we create relationships? And so we've got these. kids and we tell us from both sides and we give those letters and they you'll all show or most of them show increasing empathy and understanding as time goes by and so you develop a

relationship in several different ways so i mean it was really fun to do um that won't be out until two years from now that's why we have some some good time the one that's next um and they're all different these are all with ron um the one that's coming out in a few days days is a set of short stories about a group of middle school kids on a beach. And all the stories are independent with small connections between the kids, just because they happen to walk by each other sometimes. And that one is just very different structurally because it's no longer back and forth. It's a set of 30 short stories.

And they're very short, four or five pages. And then the second will be a full novel, just a straight novel, pretty much. And then the fourth will be another different structure. We're not quite sure of it. In my head, it's a group of kids who go to a museum, and they see things that change their lives somehow. And I'm not exactly sure what that's going to end up with, but they'll be walking, pieces that talk about them walking through the museum,

pieces that are riveting about this thing which captures their attention and makes them different. and then bookends. But that's all I know. We've only just started that. You mentioned Maine, and you were writing the ones about the kids who were from Maine, and I've noticed this in several of your books,

I think all of the ones that I've read so far were based there. But I also know you're a current Michigan resident. I don't know if you grew up in Michigan, but why did you choose to write, like base your stories in Maine? Yeah, I love New England. I love the stories of New England. I love the history of New England. I love the landscape, all that.

I used to spend more time now than I do now, I should say. I always took out kids. I taught at Calvin University, so I would take out kids in January. 30 students and we would go to Maine first and then down into Massachusetts to Concord to study the literature of that period of the 19th century in that area. So I just have a lot of connections. My wife's family is from Maine. My family ultimately is from Massachusetts but I grew up in New York.

So there's all that sort of stuff that ties me to it. And you know you sit at a place, you sit at a desk, right, where with your typewriter and you're sitting down and you're working each day and it's sort of a little bit lonely. You've got your dog under the desk or whatever. But it's really nice to be in a place where you are imaginatively living in a place that you love. And so I can imagine, oh, in one of the books, this barn and the cows and this kid milking. I know that barn. I know that cow. And it's just a pleasure to think about that, on that place.

And that's true of most of the books. I just really enjoy the place that I'm at. Even the beach one is set in New Jersey. It's in a small town the way I don't call it this in the book, called Ocean Grove, just south of Asbury Park. It's because I used to go there when I was a kid for a week or maybe two weeks sometimes in the summer. And it was ecstasy. I mean, it was our vacation. It was a beachside town. There were too many meetings. It was a Methodist campground place. There were way too many meetings when I was a kid. But the ocean was right there and you sort of live right by the ocean. It was fantastic. So yeah, I think part of it is really choosing a setting that I'm just going to enjoy being in. The next round

book, the novel is set in Minneapolis St. Paul, where I taught every summer for quite a few years. And I really like those of the Twin Cities. So why not put your piece there? So a lot of it has to do. Plus, of course, if you know the place, it gives you all the advantages

of creating a setting that has some very similar to that people who live there will recognize it. And that's cool as well. It seems as though that place is something that inspires you in your writing. What else is inspiration to you as you're writing your stories? Like, how do you find your inspiration for the particular storyline? I am really, really, really interested in the complexities of middle grade life. I mean, it's the

only time in your life, I think, when you really are in two different time periods. So like a middle school kid, sixth, seventh grade, is simultaneously a 10-year-old, who has a 10-year-old childish instincts and who can be very immature and can even, you know, I don't know, the kid who eats a gallon of ice cream. And simultaneously, someone moving towards adulthood and wanting both of those two worlds. And we don't have anything in our culture that really announces that, okay, now you're an adult. That's not a moment when we say, okay, you are now an adult.

Maybe driver's license is 16 is an adult or in some places 14 and a half. something like that, maybe turning 18 and being able to vote, that might be close to it, maybe turn 21. Well, it feels like you're past that sort of cut off by 21. And so middle schoolers just have a built-in kind of tension in their lives. And we all recognize that. I can remember, on the one hand, doing things that seem pretty childish now. And yet at the same time, really looking forward to adulthood and everything that that was going

to mean. And becoming that person that finally begins to claim things for his or herself so that I believe this, not because my parents believe it, which is us as children, but I believe it because I believe it. And that might be a religious thing. It might be an economic thing. It might be philosophical. It might be social or political. Where you begin to make claims about things that you believe truly and deeply that might be different. from things that you held as a child and things that your parents even hold.

That's all the stuff that's going on in middle school. And if we think about that moment, when you finally come to a sense that, you know, I believe this independently of anyone else in my family, or I think it this way or whatever it is, that's a huge thing. And it never really comes again. It's always that I think once we get past that,

you are an adult, and then you, you know, maybe you're an old adult and an old fart, but whatever, you're still an adult. So I'm inspired by that wonderful tension. And if you're writing middle grade fiction, think of how wonderful it is to have the tension already built in just because you're thinking about that audience. It really works well that way.

So with that, of course, comes, I don't mean to ramble on, but with that comes, how do I have relationships with another person? And middle grade is when we begin to think about that. very, very seriously, awkwardly, with lots of mistakes, lots of little tips perhaps. But we're really beginning to think about those sorts of relationships. So all those things that are happening, I'm fascinated to watch a character.

The Beach Book, every four-page piece is really a kid coming to some new awareness. Someone who meets a great teacher. She's just walking along the beach and she picks up a shell. And, you know, she doesn't care. So she throws this kid, throws them down, just moves on. She's bored. She's been here before. Her parents are talking to some lot of people.

And she meets this person out who's just coming in from the waves with a conch shell. And again, it was sort of like, well, you know, why should you even care? She's a middle school kid. But the person who's coming in is a great teacher who begins to show. her the wonders of the shell of how amazing it is, how millions of years of evolution have brought us to the point, have brought this creature to the point where this beautiful, beautiful shell serves all these different purposes. And because she's a great teacher, suddenly this kid is fascinated.

It's fascinated by that shell. I love stuff like that because it feels like the beginning of a career, of a lifelong interest. all those things together make writing for this age level really interesting to me. You teach at Calvin University, you said, correct? So I have retired from that. So I'm only writing full time now. Okay. So you were teaching then at a college, which means you weren't teaching middle school kids, but did you ever teach middle school kids? Was that something you ever wanted to do? It's a really interesting question, and no one has ever asked me that.

I finished, I came into college with a bunch of credits, I finished pretty quickly, and so I had an entire semester where I didn't need to be there. But I loved, I loved being in college, I loved that time. And I thought, well, okay, what can I do with it? And education courses were not what they are today, and education requirements are not what they are today. So I just decided I would student teach for that last semester. just to see if I would like it really. And I was going to go on to graduate school. I'd have to teach there anyway.

And so I did it, and it was wonderful. I loved it. I loved the classes. I coached the tennis team. I coached the debate team. I drove all over New Hampshire, getting, doing debates. It was fantastic. I loved it.

And at the end, they offered me a job. And I almost took it. Almost said yes. But I really was pretty committed to the graduate school thing. I wanted to teach at college. It's getting married in several months. And it just felt, oh, maybe not. So I turned it down.

Sometimes I think, I wonder if I should have done that. But it was great. I love doing it. So now I get to go to a lot of schools. So I'm just literally back from Missouri, where I taught a bunch of us. middle school kids, and then three days in Georgia. Yesterday, I just got back.

And I don't get to do the thing like you do where you have your own class, right, where you close the door and you have your kids or your college students, and you know exactly what the semester is going to be like. But I do still get to go into a lot of middle schools and get to teach at that level. And now I don't have the college side of it, and I do miss it a lot. But I do have the other. I do still get to do that. So yeah, it gives you the opportunity.

I mean, there's some people who use that really well for language and for those for technology to see what a middle school kid is doing. I don't really do that so well. And I don't want to try and fake it. So I tend to put my stuff back a few years. But I still get a chance to be with a lot of middle schoolers. When you were teaching your college students, as a writer yourself, how did you teach them to write? What did you ask of them when you were giving them assignments?

What did you like to teach? And how did you do that? Yeah, I got to teach two different courses for upper level writers. So we had, that we don't know, a writing major. And so I got to teach the introductory course into that that you took in your sophomore or junior year depending on how quickly you could get into it. And where we touched on three or four different genres. And then I got to teach writing for children,

and I got to teach a writing for young readers, I should say. And then writing for just general fiction, like short stories and such and some novels. I think this, I hope that I think the thing I got to them. Of course, you do all the normal stuff, right? You do plot. You do character. You do setting.

You do meaning. You do tonality and language and all those things that you'd expect. But then I really hope that I instilled in them a sense that they needed to be reading, and they needed to be reading the best stuff, and they needed to be reading the new stuff. I mean, you can't write today unless you're writing. You're reading what new things are coming out. Otherwise, you're writing from your own past. And then I really want to instill a sense of how important it is to do this.

every day. So it was a Tuesday Thursday, Thursday, Thursday classes, and there were always assignments that were significant every single day. Every one of those class days. For me, to grade all that was the hardest point to get all that graded in time. But it also meant that for 13 weeks, everyone was writing pretty much every day. And I hope that that's the thing that I instilled more than anything else. Jane Yolen, who has written 500 books, no kidding, 500 books. I don't know how a human being can possibly do that. She says that her most important rule is butt on chair.

You're just sitting at the desk and you are working on your manuscripts, and you're not screwing around with it. You take it super seriously. These days, I mentor adult writers for a group called Whale Rock. They're all people who have published and who are writing four children. or writing for young adults or writing for young readers. And that's the same thing I do now. I really say I need a sense that you're writing every day.

And so I give them long assignments. And there's a lot of grading there. There's still a lot of editing, I should say. But I think that's the only way you get it done. Just a reminder that you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM and this interview with Gary Schmidt. I'm Emily Shuddy and we'll be right back with more from Gary on his book. in just a moment.

Welcome back to this interview with Gary Schmidt, where we have been discussing his writing process, his newest set of novels coming soon, his choices for settings, his choice to focus on middle school kids and his teaching style. You mentioned that you have them read the classics, good books, but also modern books, new books that are coming out. From my experience of reading, I think I had it in my head for some reason that there were just no modern writers. This is a little bit of a over-exaggeration, but that a lot of modern writers, they're just, you're going to have a hard time finding any good

books as compared to the classics, which is not true. I know that's not true, which is why I was just so excited to read your books because I felt them to be so beautiful, just beautiful prose, well-written, very interesting stories. I noticed in each one, though, that there was some classic book that you kind of shaped, you used it to shape the story, in a sense, and shape the education of the child.

Why, is there a particular reason that you chose to highlight certain books in these different tales? Yeah, I think it's, I mean, the large overarching thing, I suppose, in a way. Well, first I should say often it's because I love the book that I'm dealing with. And there's just, again, the pleasure of that. You got to have some fun as you're writing this stuff.

But I think the large overall, the big thing is that we now live in a culture where we are just discarding the humanities. We just are. And we should just admit it rather than pussyfoot around it. We should just say it because that's where our culture is. heading, where kids now are not reading, and this is such an old complaint, and I feel like such an old fart even making it, but when you have now kids reading Great Gatsby, by reading the first three chapters, entirely summarized, and then reading the last chapter, which is how

it's often taught now, I have to say, are you kidding me? I mean, really? That's that, that That's how it's done, and it is, that's how it's often taught now. And that's a very short book. I mean, Great Gatsby is a really short book, and they can't read that, or we don't even try. We don't even try to do that. So this, I guess my sense is I really do want to make sure that the arts are in the books. And I don't want to be the kind of, oh, dear reader, you know, you are in this situation in our culture now where no one are reading books or no one looks at paintings and blah, blah, blah. No one cares to hear that kind of complaint.

But I hope that I could, in the book, so encouraged someone to try something, to look at something that maybe that's a really sweet offshoot or another gain from the book. So I get notes all the time from teachers about how they read the Shakespeare plays or The Tempest when they do Wednesday Wars. It's why the next book that came after that,

or next book after, but one after that, has a lot of all of pain. in it so that we can talk about paintings. The third book was going to have music in it, and that just didn't work out. I was a book called Just Like That. I was going to have Merrill Lee study the harp, because I just think it's such a funny instrument, right?

I mean, it's crazy. It's like walking around with the piano. It's just so nuts. So she was going to, I was going to have a lot of fun with her just carrying a harp around. But that didn't work. It just got stupid. So I traded it for equestrian arts. She was learning how to ride a horse competitively.

And then that was stupid, too. It just didn't work. But in general, I want people in the books, I want characters in the books, to encounter other books that maybe we'll send other kids send some of the readers to those books. The one I'm working on, the letter book, for example, just has a whole exchange about Anna Green Gables,

where there's someone who really, really, really loves this book and, you know, really loves this book, and she meets a guy and she urges him to try it, and he can't stand it. He just can't stand it. She talks too much. And so, but it's an interesting thing to put them against each other because at least they're doing this amazing thing. They're talking about the quality of a book, and we don't do that enough. So, yeah, I mean, I really worked hard at making that happen, where there's some sort of thing, some classic book that's going to work. I don't put in most modern books.

There's a few references every so often. I put in a reference to a book called American-born Chinese. Have you heard of that one? American-born Chinese. I have not heard of that one. It is a brilliant, brilliant book by Gene Lewin-Yang. It's a graphic novel. And it's, I think, a stunner.

A stunner. Anyway, but mostly it's older ones because they're accessible and because they might not, I don't know, the others might fade away. But Emily, I want to show you this one. And I've got this on my desk because I'm about to start teaching a course in short novels, writing like an 80 to 100-page novel. Small things like these. And if you're looking for a new writer, it's a brand new, this is within the last five years.

This may become your favorite book of all time. It's now one of mine. Small things like these, Claire Keegan, it came out in 2021. And it's, yeah, I mean, as soon as you read this, you go, oh, my gosh. Every single word counts. She's set in Ireland, so she's an Irish Catholic writer, and it's set during the time, the end times of the modern kitchens, where young girls 15, 16, who got pregnant or sent, and their babies are either killed or are sent away. What was the crisis again? It wasn't a crisis for a long time in Ireland when a young girl got pregnant, no husband.

She would be sent to things like they were called the Maudlin kitchens. They would work to sort of expiate their sin as they called it. And then the children were usually taken away. Anyway, so it's happening. And this guy who brings coal to this church, this comment, opens the coal bin and finds one of those girls 16 years old. And her baby has been taken from her and she's being punished and they have put her in January in this coal bin. And this is a great writer. So at the – simultaneously, when he sees that, he opens the bin, he says, Christ.

And on the one hand, he's angry, right? So that's a curse. He's so angry. He uses Christ as a curse. But it is also simultaneously Christ in the sense of that here's the least of these and I'm responsible for acting. for acting for her at the same time. And you just go, oh my gosh, it's so unbelievable. I hope that someday she'll come, like, I don't know, to one of the schools around here. And I would love to meet her. I've never met someone whose books are so short, and they are really short,

can be so impactful, and where it literally is like reading a prose poet, poet where every single word, as it should always be, matters more than once. That's, it's quite amazing. She's got a line at one point where the family is on their knees in a cottage, and they're praying, that's family devotions. And the floor, I mean, this is Ireland, so it's the floor of stone. And he talks about the wind, the cold wind January, it's December, cold wind of December, coming underneath the door like a blade. As soon as you go, the word blade, it's perfect, isn't it? Because it gives its shape and it gives its sharpness. And it's so incredibly vivid. It's just on and on and on. Every page is like that. This is a question specifically

from my youngest brother, Isaac, who he is almost 14. We grew up doing a speech and debate club. So I think it's really interesting that you did, you helped out with a speech organization, a speech and debate organization. And he is doing an informative speech about Audubon's Birds of America. So he was just, it was so interesting that he was working on this as he was reading the book that you brought that into. And he wanted to know why you chose that specifically. You touched on that a little bit. And then my older. sister, Molly, wanted to know if you're an artist just because of the way that you described this book. Yeah, it's, well, you know Flint, Michigan, right? And Flint is a town which has had a lot of difficulty. But in the middle of that, there is this campus of, I think, an art museum, several museums and schools, and the main public library. And Flint has had so many difficulties. it doesn't have a lot of resources. But they have librarians there who are absolutely brilliant

in putting together various programs. I don't know how they fund them. But they're kind of amazing. They're amazing things. And they have such a strong commitment to bringing kids, especially, into the library and connecting them. There have been some summers where it is safer for a kid

to be in the library until closing than it is to go home. And they know that. They get that. And so they really work hard to cater, not cater, but to support that community. Anyway, one of the things they have is an early Audubon. It's not a first. So I was there, and there was this book there, and I'm walking around the library, and it's in a case, and it's, again, not a first edition. But it's a really expensive book.

It's probably a half a million dollar book. And some of the pages are missing, and the binding is beat up. But it's quite expensive. And I told them that. And they said, you know, if you sold, I said to them, if you sold us, you would have these resources. And they said, we want this. We know that.

They go, but someday Flint is going to come back. And we want this book to be here when Flint comes back. And I thought, you know, I wish you were my senator. I wish you were my congressman, that you would be that foresightful about how to use our resources. So I came back home and I wondered, you know, what would that be like? like what could this fit into a story and there used to be i think it was something like i don't know maybe your brother even knows this exact number but there were only something like

600 perfect sets of the four volumes and they're huge it's called an elephant folio i've seen three um and turned pages and three of them and it's probably one of the most beautiful books in the world and they're all different because they're all hand painted so no two are exactly alike but the reason that that they're so rare now is that they're so rare now is is that they are, because they are expensive, if I had a first edition four-volume set, I could sell it to you for $14 million. And that was a few years ago, it was probably much more. But no one had, well, I shouldn't say that, not too many people can afford $14 million for a four-bium set,

but a lot more people can afford one page. And so the books are being destroyed, have been destroyed by taking one page out at a time and selling them individually. At one time, it was $350,000 for a full-page illustration. And you can see, in the four volumes have 435 plates, if I can sell each of those for 350,000, I'm making a lot more than $14 million. I mean, a lot more. And that's why so many have been destroyed.

I think there's 118 left on the planet. So the obvious thing there is imagine a scenario where there's a town which has one of the volumes, maybe the whole set, and is cutting out pieces. not nefariously, but because they have needs. They might be really good needs, and they need to raise money. And so they've done this. And so a kid comes upon that, and he himself is so beat up, he wants just one thing on the planet that's perfect.

Just one thing, that's all he wants, that hasn't been beat up like he's been beat up. And so he begins to try and get those pages back, with no resources to get them back. And will he get them? Well, no. And I didn't want to make it like a hallmark card where everybody gets them all back. But he gets close, which is pretty cool.

So that really, really intrigued me. I am not an artist. I'm not even particularly interested in birds. But what I studied before I wrote the book was how would someone teach someone else to do art? Like how is someone who's a good amateur, Mr. Powell's an amateur. how would he teach someone else how to draw or what things to look for in a painting or what things to imagine and then all the interpretations there are my interpretations based on those sort of rules of teaching and again they're meant to be amateur i want them to be amateur i don't want mr powell

to be this you know really really really excellent guy and who knows every single thing about painting he doesn't but he can make him see help him to see paintings in certain ways that create narratives. And not all of them are right. So when, for example, at the beginning, he looks at the turn, the Arctic turn, and says it looks like he's falling into the water. He's all alone.

No, that's completely wrong. That's not the case that the turn is falling into the water. But what's important is that that's how Doug sees it. The images of the paintings, the birds, all allow him to project into them and to sort of articulate and understand, articulate to us what he's feeling about himself and about his world. By the end of the novel, when things have changed quite a bit for Doug, he's looking at that bird. And it's not he's falling into the water.

It's he can go anywhere he wants. And turns can't. I mean, they can fly around the planet. But that doesn't matter that it's factually correct. What matters is that we see something about Doug that's really, really changed quite a bit. So that's what's going on there. just for the sake of anybody listening to this interview, could you remind me the book that we're specifically talking about here? It's a book called OK for now. And it's, uh, you take a minor,

I took a minor character from the Wednesday Wars, Doug, and made him the narrative. And Doug was meant to be totally different from the character Wednesday Wars, who was pretty up. I mean, he's in a hard family situation, but hard in the sense of relationships, but not hard in terms of resources. Doug is hard in terms of relationships and in terms of resources and is at least somewhat abused during this time. So he's the one who comes upon this new town and who comes upon the birds or comes upon the Audubon. Why did you choose to have your characters experience just really hard things? Because it seems as though for the most part these kids are really dealing with kind of big life struggles, whether it be.

abuse or neglectful parents or deaths in the family. Yeah, you know, I guess I've never been, like I mentioned this before, I've never really been interested in writing Hallmark cards. I really think that if you have some sort of problem that's resolved in 21 minutes, then you're writing for a sitcom. Fine. I mean, we all watch sitcoms now and of that. But I think I don't want to be that guy. And I don't want to end it necessarily with they all lived happily ever after because that's such a false thing to say. I mean, no one that's happily ever after there's never any difficult in your life. I mean, that's silly to imagine that.

I do want to write about kids that are growing and that are becoming bigger, you know, not just more mature, but just bigger, bigger in their sense of the world, maybe, and their encounters with the world. And so in the stories, you do have various characters who come up against hard things and who then have to respond to that. and would see that maybe their own safety perhaps has insulated them from certain things. I think Holling finds that out. That their own circumstances are such that they are going to have to become more resourceful and independent. Doug finds that out.

Or that maybe they're going to have to... Their situations meaning that they have to depend upon a larger community that's going to step up. And that's Lavors of Hercules Beal. It's all about that. a kid whose parents have been killed, whose brother comes to be the parent, whose older brother comes to be the parent now, but who also finds that the larger community of the town is going to step up for him as well, which he did not expect. Yeah, and I kind of want to write about those kids who are in some sort of difficulty, some sort of trouble, and who have to grow and learn

and become larger. I must admit, I was very crushed when Holling died for the book just like that. I was very crushed. My brother Isaac was wondering why you killed him off. He was very disappointed. But also in relation to that, my mom was wondering, how do you have these redemptive conclusions without just leaving your audience distraught? Because they are dealing with tough things. And you don't end them in a hallmark way. Yet, like, I definitely cried at the end of several of your books. But then I wasn't left crushed. Yeah, I hope not. It's not, especially writing for a young audience, it's not really fair to leave someone and just like, oh, the world is full of pain. Go on to your next book. I mean, it doesn't feel to me like that's even authentic or it doesn't

feel like it's what I should be doing as an artist for this audience. I don't want to say that the world is easy because it isn't. Let's just say it isn't. And I don't want to, you know, manipulate towards why it's so easy every ending is going to be happy one because kids know that that's not true. I mean, many of them have gone through trauma is far worse than I've got here. Ordinary, I mean, orbiting Jupiter is based on two real kids that I met in a juvenile detention facility. They have been there for a year. They had seen no one in their family in that entire time. I mean, in that sense, these kids are, my kids are dealing with easier things. I do want it to be the case that they encounter these things and aren't themselves crushed by these things, and you get a sense that they're going to be okay, that they're going to move forward okay, at least okay.

So in orbiting Jupiter, I mean, the narrator Jack has lost the foster brother. I mean, Joseph dies. It's a really hard moment for him, obviously. He himself is a foster kid, and so he's found a really secure place with this family. but he also has tremendous love for this foster brother who's coming to love him too and yet suddenly he's gone so if I leave it there it's just like okay instead it ends with him taking his foster brother's daughter and they walk into the house together and you get a sense that he will have it's a very hard time but he has grown he's survived and he is now able

himself to create empathy for the next character. Her father, although she will never know him, has died too. And he brings compassion to that. And I hope that all of them end similarly, that the character is not only a survivor, but is growing in such a way that he will help others to survive, that he will be big on that too. And I think that's part of it. I think that's why you don't end up totally crushed, particularly in orbiting Jupiter.

It is the case with some of them. I mean, there was this kid. I had him for several classes. He was one of my advisees. The day before graduation, he's out on a car right outside, just driving down the road outside the college, this is the day before his college graduation. His car is stopped at a stoplight and a car smashes into him. His head snaps back, it's gone.

Just like that. Just dead. I mean, hours before he graduates. And it's so difficult to understand that. So hard to figure it out. A sweet kid, he would have gone to China to teach English. He would have done mission work. It's just so hard to figure it out.

And I think, okay, this is the world. This is the world we live in. Things happen that are really bad. So then what's our next response to that? It doesn't have to be, but it needs to be something about okay, this has happened now, how can I make the world better? How can I bring healing? And I hope that my characters end up that way.

I'm Emily Shuddy here interviewing Gary Schmidt on Radio Freehillsdale 101.7 FM. Be sure to stick around after this break for the last segment with Gary Schmidt. And we're back with this interview with Gary Schmidt to discuss his books and the thoughts that go into writing them. We've discussed his choices to frame his tales with classic books, myths, myths, and arts, the hardship of life he addresses in his tales, and some of his particular decisions with characters. So, Gary, my next question is, what are your thoughts on using literature as a means of teaching people to deal with struggles or, like, know of a way to deal with a struggle before it happens in their life, maybe as a means of coping with some of those hard things

that you're talking about? You know, I don't write for therapy, right? I think that's, nor do I write for self-therapy, which is really, I think, a real problem in books for particularly middle grades and young adult, when a writer writes for self-therapy and to handle her own grief or something. I mean, that's using your readers in ways that I'm very uncomfortable with. But I do want to create a sense that this is the way the world is, and this is, I want to be honest with you.

And it isn't puppy dogland. And I think in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, you're realizing that. I mean, how could you right now not realize that this is not, the world is in really bad shape? How could you ignore what's going on in Ukraine? How can you ignore what's going on in Sudan? How can you ignore what's going on in our cities? I think in middle grades is when you're beginning to get that. So do you despair and die or do you move on and figure out, well, what's my place in all of this?

And I do think that books for kids can be really, really helpful. I think of Jackie Briggs-Martin, who's writing books for really young kids. She's got this book about a creek. And it's based on a real story, actually. And it's this guy who buys a field, a large field. He's a farmer. And he looks at some old overhead shots, some of old photographs, survey shots, from long in the past,

and sees that this field that he's farming had a really vivid, vital stream that used to run through it. He never knew it. And he goes out to look, and he can just sort of barely see the contours of where that stream might be. And so it's the story of how he goes

and begins to dig it out. He digs out the contours of this stream to see what would happen. And true story, the water starts to flow. insects start to come back. The flora and fauna of that ecosystem start to come back. Trout are coming into the stream that he has recovered. Now, in the one hand, she's telling a really fun story, right?

But on the other, what an amazing message. I mean, she's essentially saying the world can heal. We can help it to heal. And maybe our role is to do that. That feels like it's an important message to send, but she's telling it is a great story. I think if she had reversed that and said, this book is all about the message. And, you know, you guys have been bad because blah, blah, blah,

no one reads that. But she tells a great story. And a kid will come away thinking, what an astonishing place I live in. I wonder how I can do that, too. That's, I think, how we can talk about books with any sorts of hardship. In several, a couple of your books, at least, I noticed this in the Wednesday Wars. And I've not yet read, okay, for now, it's on my list. But this is one that some of my family members have read. And so they noticed it in this one that there are a couple characters that you choose to not say their name for the first half of the book. So in Wednesday Wars, you don't say hauling sister's first name until the second half of the book. And then in, okay, for now, Doug's brother's name isn't said until later. What were you trying to convey by that?

Names are powerful. When you know someone's name that creates a connection. When you don't know that person's name, there is no connection. I mean, just watch a group of kids, you down the hall in a middle school. Watch how they yell each other's names out or don't. And there you see how they will walk past each other. And of course, we do this in our cities too, maybe everywhere. We just walk past each other because we have no connection. But if I know your name, there's no way I'm just going to walk by you on the sidewalk and ignore you. It's just, there's a, there's an intimacy. I don't say interesting. There's a relationship that's established just by the fact that you know the name. So in the book, Hauling in a Wednesday Wars really doesn't

have a relationship with his sister at first. And he doesn't have a relationship with Doug Switech's brother. Now, at the end of the book, he still doesn't have a relationship with Doug Switech's brother. And so you never hear his name in that book. But you do hear Heather, but only after they have a connection. And this is when he has sent her the money that I forget how much it was, $50 or something to get a bus ticket back home after what's happened with the guy. with a Volkswagen. She needs help and he responds. He's also there at the Port Authority when

she comes in on the bus. He shows up exactly when he's needed. And once you have that, then you discover her name is Heather because suddenly they have a relationship. And it helps that Heather is also the name of the street where the bus station is in Minneapolis. So that works too. And it's got the age thing going, you know, hollying, hood, hood, Heather. Once we have names, then you really, really do have a relationship. And okay, for now, it's a little different. This is Doug, who doesn't reveal his brother's name. And that's absolutely the case.

He just has no relationship with his brother at all. It's just enmity. I mean, there's nothing connecting to them until the moment when you see his brother reach out and pick up his older brother and carry him out of the bus and up the stairs later on. And suddenly, Doug sees his mother. middle brother as something more than just this kind of thuggy guy, that there's some real, real empathy for his older brother. And you discover that his name is Christopher.

So you took this, all of these myths of Hercules and just had this really cool, modern interpretation of them that really related to Hercules Beale's life. Do you, how did you do that? How do you, how do you take these classes? and just kind of give them this modern spin. Yeah, I mean, a good story, or a story that survives over many, many years, I think they survive because they have deep, if this is even a word, universality, a deep sense that something true is being said about humanity, about us as individuals and as communities.

And it might be a small thing and might be a large thing. But when it works, that means that you should be able on some level. to think about how would this play today? And I think it's why so often you see versions of the Shakespearean plays that are put on stage that are set in different time periods, I mean, even modern time periods, in some ways simply because you have this real central truth that's being told in the play.

I mean, why do we cry at the end of a Shakespeare play? You know, why we moved if this is only a story that was attractive to the Elizabethans? If that was the case, then it would just be a sort of set piece it's interesting to see what, you know, that period enjoyed. And that might be interesting, but it wouldn't move us as individuals. There's a moment, just as an example, there's a moment in The Tempest, when Prospero, the magician, is with Ariel, who's the fairy that he is controlling, who's enslaved, actually.

And he's watching his daughter, unbeknownst to her, fall in love with Fernando. Fernand? Maybe he's just Ferdinand, who's the first guy she's ever. seen outside of her father. And the two of them, it's not just her falling in love with him, Miranda, but the two of them are falling in love. He's watching that happen. And he's in this really, really strange moment where he realizes that he's the father, she will always love him, but he's no longer the only person that she loves.

And that's a really hard moment for the father, when you realize that your daughter, is now loving this other person and will love you, we'll love that other person more than you. That person will be more important than you are. And it has to happen, and it's exactly what you want to happen, but it hurts like hell.

And Shakespeare captures it. He gets that moment when he really shows that. And so in one production I saw, they're sitting together, and here's Ariel with Prospero, watching that happen, and Prospero is, exactly what has to happen, but it hurts so bad.

And Ariel turns to Prospero and says, Do you love me, Master? No? And there's a long pause. And you feel like he's considering it. What will he say? And he doesn't say yes, but he doesn't say no. But in one version I saw, this was in Stratford, actually, in England. They asked the question, Ariel asked the question,

Do you love me, master? And the no at the end of the line, do you love me, master? was the line that Shakespeare writes, is taken out and given to Prospero. So it now reads this way. Do you love me, master? And Prospero goes, no. And you go, oh my gosh.

But is him angry and he's going to take it out on this ferry? He's going to take it out on him. No. And it says it's flippant like that. And in the play, it's so brilliant. I just can't even describe it to. The whole time before that, whenever Prospero's on stage, he's up on his toes.

His heels never touched the stage. Try doing that for three hours. But from that moment on, his heels touch the stage. He walks different. I don't. I don't love you. It was really, oh my gosh. Now that Shakespeare can do that, you know, across 400 years, I think is quite amazing and wonderful.

So I felt like when I was working on these, that I wanted to find ways that they should sort of suggest something. I mean, Hercules and the old myth has, in fact, lost his family. They've died, and he's responsible for that. And so his tremendous unquenchable grief can only be fixed somehow, or at least dealt with, by this kind of, by these penance in a sense. I mean, these 12 labors, and the gods give it to him, these 12 hard, hard things, as his way of working through grief. So by the time he comes to the end, when he has to take the dog of hell out of hell and bring it to this king to show him, that's the worst.

But each one prepares for the one that comes harder and harder and harder. Even more grief at certain times. And so it felt to me like, okay, could I do that? And the hard thing of it, of course, is to find something that will match, that will kind of match, so that the two, the modern and the mythic ones will both be recognizable like each other. And it was difficult just because so many of the mythic stories, the 12 of them, are very similar. Find an animal, kill it, bring it back, or find an animal, bring it back, release it. There's a lot that are just exactly the same. So I had to find ones that are different.

I had to find ones that were recognizable to the originals. And then the most important thing is that each one had to, on some level, show growth. in Hercules, in my Hercules' Beal, that he had to be getting bigger, that he had in some ways be dealing with his grief. So at the end, when he questions, you know, why does he bring the dog of hell out and then bring him back? When he asked that question, that's an empathetic question. That is thinking about someone else even more. Even though the grief is yours, it's thinking about someone else. So I thought that that's what I mean that's what that whole thing is about

How does Kirk Louise Beal use to do the same that Colonel Hopper has given him to do To figure out how to deal with his grief how does he deal with it and as you get closer towards the end You see that the way he deals with it is first to recognize that community is formed around him And then to respond to their needs He has to get the trees I mean that's one of them with with mrs. Savage you know the the loss of those sculptures that she's done and how hard that is how can he help her with that? Well, by showing his own empathy and in fact by saving the one hippo, the most important one,

Ira. And at the end, you know, releasing the coyotes instead of shooting them like Mr. Moby wants to. And then learning that, I mean, when he says at the end of that particular chapter, what will they do like when they're released? When I open up the cage, says the guy, and he thinks that the coyotes will want to be. to rip their throats out. And the guy says to him, the guy who's going to take them up north, no, they'll be happy as, I forget what the line is, but they'll be, you know, really, really happy about it, happy as anything or something. And that's learning. He's learning from that.

He's going to grow from that. Empathy leads and to more empathy. So that was the whole task of it. How does he continue to grow? And you know by the end of it, I think, I think you know by the end of it, that this, he's going to be fine. He will realize that the grief that he feels is real, and that won't go away, but he'll learn how to live with that. He'll learn that he's not responsible like he thought, that guilt is not an appropriate response on his part. He'll learn to appreciate what his brother has given up for him, but his brother has also grown.

He'll be more, I mean, when Viola at one point says to him, no, you're not your baby brother anymore. He'll learn to be more introspective. He'll learn more to judge his own self better. He's just a bigger person, And that's why at the end, the whole thing, the nursery is going to expand, which is my way of saying solely. Things are bigger for him. Yeah, that was really hard to get all that together.

Hercules definitely had the impactful teacher in Colonel Hupfer. And I noticed that throughout true books, you have these really impactful teachers. And oftentimes there's either parents aren't in the picture because they died or they, they were abusive or just not present in whatever the case. What were you trying to convey through these really impactful teachers? And was there a teacher for you growing up that was really impactful for you that maybe inspired some of this, inspired you as you were working on these characters? Yeah, you know, and the two easiest targets for writers of middle grade and young adult books,

The two easiest targets are ministers and teachers. Ministers are often either total blunders or they're really bad people. Teachers are often just comic. And I really, and I think this is through most of the books, maybe all the books, I want to celebrate teachers. I want my teachers to be really, really important. And of course, when you think of it, I mean, if you think back on your own childhood in junior high or middle school and elementary school, I mean, probably a lot of the memories are associated with your teachers. I don't think I can do this anymore, but I used to be able to name every single one of them

all the way through high school, from kindergarten through high school, I can remember them really, really well. And I wrote to my fourth grade teacher until she died, which was only a few years ago. I think one of the great blessings of childhood is to find a teacher or some adult outside your family circle who is who cares enough about you to have a mentorship kind of role. There's some people that's going to be a coach, an athletic coach, who can do that. A lot of times it's going to be a teacher who will recognize a gift or an interest and will be able to cultivate that in you. Sunday School of Teacher, a neighbor who respects you as a person.

It's not necessarily a parent in that sense or even connected to a family, but who is able to look toward, able to look with you as something and help you to see it better, I suppose. There's a great definition of friendship and mentorship from C.S. Lewis where he talks about one kind of love is two people looking at each other. And another kind of love is two people standing shoulder to shoulder and looking at the same thing. And we know what that's like, right? So a coach presumably is someone who loves golf and who teaches you how to love golf. A teacher might be the person and you're looking at the same thing. A teacher is a person who, I don't know, maybe the art teacher who can look at a painting with you and say, do you see how these strokes are working

here and help you to love it more, give you more ways to love it? And that's the kind of person that appears in most of the books at some point, that person who's looking at the same thing with you and who helps you to see it better and to love it more because that person sees it and loves it more. It might be an art, it might be a skill. Cooking would be fun to write about Sunday except I'd have to learn how to do it. You know, things like that. I think that's a really important character to have to talk about. I mean, the opposite.

I don't know if you read Thomas Hardy novels at all. I really like his novels, but you have to read them with, I don't know, ice cream next to you or something. Or go watch Captain Kangaroo afterwards because they're so, I mean, they verge on the cynical. So there's a scene in a book called Jude the Obscure, and it's a brilliant novel. but this kid is standing on a log, Jude, he's a child, and he's got a book, but he can't read. And he's sitting on a log, and he's looking down the path and down the hillside towards the city,

which in the book is sort of like where you grow and where you mature, where you become a full person. And so he's looking down there, and he's holding the book, and the narrator says, this is the narrator, if someone had come along at that moment and shown him how to use this book, had begun him on the path towards reading. everything would have been alright.

But nobody came because nobody ever does. That's the line. Nobody came because nobody ever does. That's Thomas Hardy. I want to be the opposite. I want to be the guy that says they do come. They sit on the log. They open the pages with you.

And you begin. I think that's what I want my teachers to be like. That's really beautiful. Gary, thank you so much for your time and your thoughtful answers. I have learned so much in this, and I'm excited to share your work with others. To all of our listeners, check out Gary's books, especially at the Wednesday Wars. Just like that, the labors of Hercules Beal, orbiting Jupiter, Jupiter Rising, and OK for now, to name a few. Also, be sure to keep looking for those new novels coming out over the next few years.

Gary, it was such a pleasure to speak with you, and I look forward to reading more of your books. You've all been listening to an interview with Gary D. Schmidt. I'm your host, Emily Shuddy, here on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.