Q&A With the Author

The following interview with author Elizabeth Rusch was conducted by 13-year-old Haley of Portland, Oregon, for a class project.

What was your childhood like and how does it influence you today?

I was the middle child in a family with six children. As kids we pretty much ran free and explored our house, yard, and neighborhood in Greenville, South Carolina, with very little interference from scheduled activities. (Few music lessons, art classes, sports commitments.) I loved books, and read everything I could get my hands on, even books that were not really written for kids. I remember hot summers finding a cool spot near an air conditioning vent and reading all day long. I also had a rich imaginative life, with our back yard becoming Fern Forest, the field behind our house being a pioneer farm, the creek, a dangerous river to navigate. My best friend Karen Andersen and I made up plays (The Carter Girl Detective Series) and recruited my brothers and sisters to act in them. I think these experiences instilled in me a creative spirit and a love of telling stories.

How do your experiences and memories of childhood affect and show themselves in your writing?

Let's see if you can see for yourself with two books that will be published in 2007. In one, A Day with No Crayons, a girl explores (on her own) her neighborhood and discovers color in the world around her. (Can you see the parallels in freedom of exploration and self-expression?) The other book is called Will It Blow?: Become a volcano Detective at Mount St. Helens where I turn volcano science into a detective story (my first stories, plays, were detective stories...)

I am also VERY much influenced by everything I read. I love books, and still read voraciously. Even though as a child I didn't study how books were written and put together, I think the very structure of storytelling sunk into my pores.

What is your family like, and how do they influence you in your writing?

My family now, my husband and kids, definitely influence my work. My husband's sense of humor is very much apparent in one character in the middle grades novel I’m working on called April Fool. My son Cobi's fascination with volcanoes inspired the volcano book Will It Blow?. My kids' exploration of making art with things they found at the park inspired A Day with No Crayons.

It seems like your main genre of expertise is nonfiction, informative writing, but do you write any other types of stories?

Yes, A Day with No Crayons is fiction. I have several other fiction manuscripts for young children and I'm almost done revising a novel for middle schoolers called April Fool. I’m also working on a chapter book called Muddy Boy, about a boy who gets superpowers from mud. I like to tell stories, both true or imagined.

Are there any authors that particularly inspire you and why?

Oh yes. The nonfiction author I like best is John McPhee. He writes nonfiction so well and so creatively that it reads like fiction. When I'm writing nonfiction I challenge myself by saying: How would John McPhee organize this information? What story would John McPhee tell to get the information across? Of course he's not telling me how to do it, but his creativity in presenting information in a gripping narrative is something I aspire to in my nonfiction writing.

How would you describe your voice in your writing?

Wow, that's tough. Do I have a voice? Or do I have many voices? For instance, the main character in my novel whose name is Apple Snyder has a distinct voice — dry wit, a little sarcastic, wise and observant but with a little temper. It's not really my voice. But it's a voice of a character that I have developed and that feels like it exists independently of me.

Several of my manuscripts feature a wise, witty voice, so that might be something that is part of my voice.

My writing tends to be clear, with simple uncluttered language, and an occasional witty turn of phrase. I tend to be dramatic — even in my nonfiction writing I want the story to be dramatic. Editors have called my style lyrical — which means that the words sound nice together. I like for my writing to sound good in the ear or in the head — with nice rhythms and alliteration.

How much do you think style in writing is a result of the themes, language, literary devices, and other technical aspects of writing (punctuation, grammar etc.), and how much of style is the author's background and personality?

I think it’s both. The novel April Fool is about humor so the writing literally has punch lines (a device). I consciously tried to end sentences, paragraphs and chapters with a punch line or zinger.

Word choice is very important. When I rewrite, I deliberately seek out a weak word like "He walked" and substitute in more powerful, vivid words like "He sauntered" or "He shuffled." I hate clutter in my writing, so when I edit I try to cut out everything that is not essential to the story (so my writing is more lean than flowery).

My background and personality drive what I want to write about, what themes interest me, what stories and details I want to include, what questions I want my work to pose. As a child, I wanted to be taken seriously, not talked down to, so I try in my writing to be more subtle than obvious, to show things without stating them outright, to trust the reader to figure things out.