Pete is the Minnesota Author in the Spotlight for the month of April and I finally got the chance to ask him some questions. Read on for the back story on his new book. I dare you to guess how many books he has written before you get to question 4. Also, I'm wondering if you've read the YA book he thinks is must read for everyone. I hope you get a chance to read several of Pete Hautman's books because frankly, his books are worth it.
Hi Pete,
1. Tell
us a little bit about yourself?
Sure. I grew up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota with six younger
siblings on the edge of a 300 acre wood. Much of my childhood was spent in
those woods. In fact, it is the setting for a middle-grade novel I’m hoping to
finish later this year.
When I was a kid I thought I’d grow up to be either a lawyer
like my dad or an artist like my mom. Art won, because my mom seemed to enjoy
making art more than my dad enjoyed lawyering.
As a teen I wanted to be a comic book artist, and I
published a couple of comic books. But I liked figuring out the stories more
than I liked drawing the pictures, so by the time I left college I had
dispensed with the visuals and become focused on the words. Since I had no
formal literary training, it took fifteen years of being a closet writer before
I started showing my work to others.
I now live a few miles from where I grew up, and I still
visit what remains of the woods that were once an extension of my backyard. I
spend a lot of time in the outdoors hunting wild mushrooms, looking at birds,
and simply being alone with nature. I love it. I can sit on a log and just
watch, listen, smell, and feel. Yesterday I had conversations with a turkey, a
rufous-sided towhee, and a fox squirrel. The turkey was irritable, the towhee
was a showoff, the squirrel…I don’t know what
he was going on about. I have two dogs. They never shut up.
2. What
inspired you to write Eden West?
Several years ago I wrote a book called Godless, about a teen who questions his parents’ faith
(Catholicism) and decides to invent a mock religion worshipping the local water
tower. As I was writing Godless, I
was thinking about what it would be like to be a teen solidly embedded in a
faith, protected from the influence of the outside world. I wrote the first
lines of Eden West in 2002: I know that the World is a terrible place,
filled with wild animals and evil men and wicked women. Slowly, over the
next dozen years, I built a world for this boy, Jacob Grace: a fenced, twelve
square mile compound in Montana. I populated it with a few dozen devout
believers. I imagined what it would be
3. Usually an author puts some of his own life
experiences in the book. Did you do
that? Do you have anything in common
with your characters?
There’s a line in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun that I think of often: “That
we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.”
One of the things that drives me as a writer is this
question: Who would I be if I was not me? To some extent, all my protagonists are
me. In Sweetblood, for example, Lucy
Szabo is me—if I were sixteen, if I were a girl, if I’d had diabetes from age four,
if I were smarter, if I were an only child, etc. When I’m writing, I am that character. But what ends up on
the page is not me. In Eden West, Jacob
Grace grows up firmly believing in an apocalyptic near future and knowing
little of the outside world. He thinks he knows how his life will play out.
That does not resemble my childhood at all, but I’m in there somewhere, pulling
strings and trying to suss out his (my) situation.
4. How many books
have you written? Can you tell us why you decided to become a writer?
I think I’m up to twenty-five novels, or close to it. I keep
writing because it’s better than any other job I ever had. I can work in my
bathrobe, take a nap when I want, and write everything from goofy, fun, middle
graders to angsty, epiphanic teens. We are the sum of our memories; I choose to
explore that, and embrace it.
5. What advice do you
give to new writers?
I get asked this a lot. An honest and possibly helpful
answer really depends on the person asking. Is financial stability important to
you? Don’t quit your day job. Are you focused on a particular genre? Read other
genres. Do you crave fame and fortune? I can’t help you. Do you love what
you’ve just written? Revise it. Do you think that writing will save you? Then
write. That’s what I do.
6. Do you like to
read? What authors or books influence
you?
I read a lot, and to some degree I’m influenced by all of it.
A few writers important to my own journey were Elmore Leonard, Samuel R.
Delany, P.G. Wodehouse, James M. Cain, John Steinbeck, W. Somerset Maugham,
Gene Wolfe, Ian Fleming, and Patricia Highsmith.
7.
What are some of
the issues in Eden West that you hope
your readers will interpret as integral to the story?
All of them, I hope! Love, desire, faith, coming of age,
religion, our relationship with the natural world, separation from the tribe,
survival… But now that the book is written, it’s in the hands of the readers,
so who knows? The act of reading can be as creative as the act of writing.
Often, years after I’ve written a book, readers will tell me things about it I
never imagined.
8.
Name one Young Adult book that you believe is a must
read for everyone and tell us why?
I spent a long time trying to figure out how to answer this
question. I mean, you cannot read one YA book and know anything about what YA
books are about, or why they are important (they are), or why people other than
teens should read them (they should). The first titles that occurred to me were
standouts from the YA canon: The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, Ender’s
Game, Speak. All important books. I don’t consider any of them “must reads,”
even though anyone with an interest in YA literature would do well to read them
all. But one Young Adult book? I’m
imagining someone utterly unfamiliar with YA asking this question. Just to be
contrarian and irreverent, I’d probably start them off with Max Shulman’s The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, a
collection of humorous stories from a teen’s point of view, and the basis for
the first true YA television series. It
came out in 1951, the same year as The
Catcher in the Rye, and probably sold a lot more copies.
9.
In one sentence tell readers why they should read Eden West?
It’s a pleasant way to spend a few hours, and more
interesting than many other things you might do.
