Kit's Wilderness

by David Almond

  Writing can be difficult, but sometimes it really does feel like a kind of magic. I think that stories are living things—among the most important things in the world.

  —David Almond

  Photo © Alex Telfer Photography

  A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID ALMOND

  Q. Have you always enjoyed writing? When did you know you wanted to become a writer?

  A. Yes, I’ve always loved writing. As a boy I wrote stories and sometimes stitched them into little books. When I was a baby, my mother used to take me to my uncle’s printing works, and she told me that I used to laugh and point at the printed pages streaming off the rollers—so maybe when I was just a few months old I fell in love with print. I loved our little local library, and I dreamed of seeing my books on the shelves there one day. Like most English boys, I also dreamed of being a soccer player.

  Q. What do you most enjoy about writing books?

  A. Just about everything. Of course it’s wonderful to be able to work with the imagination, to explore language and narrative, to turn a few notions and images into a full-length story, but it’s also lovely just to be able to play with paper, pens, notebooks, paper clips, computers, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s wonderful to be able to make my living now from doing something that’s so engrossing.

  Q. You probably enjoyed reading as a child. Tell us about that. What were your favorite books as a teen? What do you enjoy reading now?

  A. I was a great library-goer, especially in my teens. I wasn’t particularly happy at school by then, and found most of my inspiration from the library. I loved myths and legends—especially the King Arthur stories as retold by Roger Lancelyn Green (a wonderful book that’s still in print). I enjoyed John Wyndham’s science fiction. T. Lobsang Rampa (a supposed Tibetan monk) wrote a series of books (beginning with The Third Eye) about his childhood in Tibet and I thought they were marvelous. Hemingway was a major discovery for me in my mid-teen years.

  Q. You were a teacher for a number of years. Can you tell us about your teaching experience?

  A. I became a teacher because I thought it must be the ideal job for a writer—i.e., long vacations, short days. Of course, once I began teaching I was simply so exhausted that I hardly wrote a word for three years or so. I also became fascinated by the job. I’ve taught all ages—primary, secondary, adult. For much of my career, I taught children (eleven–sixteen) with moderate learning difficulties. I wrote in the evenings, at weekends, during vacations. In 1990 I went part-time (three days per week), which was perfect: time to write and some salary to pay the mortgage. I left teaching and became a full-time writer in 1999, but I’m still involved in education—visiting schools, speaking at teachers’ conferences, working on educational panels. I suppose that my interest in education is apparent in my books.

  Q. Is there a difference between the reactions of American readers and British readers to your books?

  A. There seems to be very little difference, which is very heartening.

  Q. Your work has been described as being infused with magic realism. How would you define that term? What does magic realism bring to your novels?

  A. I’m often referred to as a magic realist, though like most writers I’m not too keen on being put into any particular category. I know I have been influenced by magic realists like Marquez, but I’m also influenced by apparently “nonmagical” writers like Raymond Carver. I don’t use magic realism in a deliberate manner. I suppose the style of my books naturally embodies the ways in which I think and the ways in which I view the world. I do think that the world itself is pretty magical, and that if there is a miraculous world, it’s this one. It could be that magic realism is characteristic of writing from Catholic cultures, so maybe my Catholic upbringing has had an effect on my style.

  Q. The Printz Award is named for Michael L. Printz, the distinguished young adult librarian. In the first two years of the presentation of this award, how does it feel to have won this prestigious honor back-to-back, first with Skellig as an Honor Book and then with Kit’s Wilderness as the Medal winner?

  A. Awards matter. They bring particular books and genres into public view and they stimulate reading and debate. It’s great that there is this new award for writing for young adults—a field in which so many fine books are being written.

  It’s marvelous for me, of course. It was a great thrill to get a phone call from across the Atlantic telling me that I’d won the honor with Skellig, then just a year later to get another call telling me I’d won the medal for Kit! And it’s a particular honor because I’m not even American. I do think that the award isn’t just for me as I am now, but it’s for the boy I was in my local library, and for the people I grew up with who gave me my language and my stories.

  Q. Kit lives in Stoneygate, an old coal-mining town, and your descriptions of the area are very vivid. Is that the kind of area you grew up in?

  A. I grew up in Felling-on-Tyne, a town that has a rich coal-mining past. By the time I was a boy, all the pits had closed down. As in the book, though, their evidence is everywhere. The local churchyard contains a monument to the Felling pit disaster of 1812, in which ninety-seven boys and men died. The monument simply lists their names and ages.

  The landscape of the book is very like the old coal-mining areas of County Durham and Northumberland. In less than a generation, these areas have utterly changed: pit shafts blocked up, pit wheels hauled down, pit heaps landscaped. And of course men no longer go deep into the dangerous darkness to dig out coal. But it will be many generations before the physical and psychic remnants disappear.

  Q. The themes of death and salvation, and how young people are affected by and deal with life, are threads that run through your works. These are key in Kit’s Wilderness. Can you talk a little about them in the novel? And how your own life might have influenced your writing?

  A. I come from a large family where children and adults of all ages were integrated. We even talked about those who had died as if they were still with us, or still thought of us and prayed for us. So it was always apparent that we’re linked closely with the people who have lived before and with the people who will come after us. I was also a Catholic, and so the themes of imminent death and the need for salvation were not simply problems to be worked out intellectually, but had a dreadful and fascinating emotional/physical/spiritual weight. So this personal background obviously has a bearing on my work.

  But also, writing for children just seems to involve dealing with timeless human dilemmas and finding stories or myths that help us to explore and to come to terms with them. In each of my books, children are exposed to terrible dangers, but they work together, often in darkness, to conquer their fears and to rescue each other and to bring each other back into the light.

  Q. Kit’s grandfather’s stories have such an impact on him. Was family storytelling part of your growing up? Do you have a favorite story or a special relative you can tell us about?

  A. There was always lots of gossiping. We had family parties with lots of songs and jokes and tales. I remember as a boy being both bored and fascinated by the chatter. My uncle Amos had a little printing works where he printed the local newspaper, and he wrote poems and an unpublished book.

  We weren’t a literary family, but there were, I realize now, powerful poetic and storytelling rhythms in the way that people spoke. I had aunts (especially the identical twins, Jan and Mona) who could talk and tell tales and jokes for hours at a time, and who had a gift for entertaining and for making people laugh. My grandfather (my mother’s father, who was a bookmaker, i.e., he took bets on horse racing) was quite the opposite: a quiet and rather stern man. I spent a lot of time with him in his garden and greenhouse, and I loved being with him. I think his silence allowed me the time and space to think and wonder and listen to the world.

  Q. The ammonite fossil that Kit’s grandfather gives him holds special meaning. Do you have any special treasures from your childhood? Have you ever found a fossil and wondere
d about its origin?

  A. As for most of us, my best treasures are the family photographs. I always carry a little prayer card that belonged to my mother. I once found a fossilized pigeon in a chimney I had to clear out: black as coal and hard as stone. It was beneath a heap of soot and beneath a number of other dead birds.

  Q. How would you describe your writing of Kit’s Wilderness? Was the book an easy one to write, as Skellig was, or a difficult one?

  A. Skellig came with great fluency right from the start, and at times it really seemed to write itself. This is an experience that will happen once in my life! Kit’s Wilderness was much more difficult. The sources of the story were very varied and I wanted to write a book with a broader perspective. So it was always going to be a longer and more complex undertaking.

  I wrote the first third of the book several times. At first it was called Quiet Michael and The Wilderness, because it had a major (I thought!) character called Quiet Michael. The book really began to take on its own life and momentum when Burning Bush gave the class the beginning of Lak’s story. Each time I came to a new section of this story, it really was as if Kit was writing it, and I just had to transcribe his words. The book moved quickly through the central section. As I wrote the sections about Kit’s journey to the mine and his night underground with Askew, I had a real sense of peril and was extremely scared. I didn’t know if Kit would ever come out again. I wrote the final “Spring” section with a feeling of great relief. After finishing the book, I was exhausted.

  OTHER BOOKS BY DAVID ALMOND

  Man, bird, or angel?

  Who or what is Skellig?

  Michael was looking forward to moving into a new house. It was all going to be wonderful. But now his baby sister’s ill, his parents are frantic, and Dr. Death has come to call. Michael feels helpless. Then one day he steps into the crumbling garage.

  What is the thing beneath the spiderwebs and dead flies? A human being, or a strange kind of beast never seen before? The only person Michael can confide in is his new friend Mina. Together they carry the creature into the light, and Michael’s world changes forever.

  Told in lyrical prose, Skellig is a mystery, an adventure, and a family story in which Michael learns about nature, poetry, and the healing power of love.

  We come into the world out of the dark. We haven’t got a clue where we’ve come from. We’ve got no idea where we’re going. But while we’re here in the world, if we’re brave enough, we flap our wings and fly.

  Running away from Whitegates is easy. After all, it’s not a prison. Erin and her running-away friend, January, do it all the time. This time is different, though. This time they’re going down the river. They’re looking for freedom, sweet freedom, however dangerous the journey. In the slithery mud of the Black Middens, they find the strange girl called Heaven Eyes. It is Heaven Eyes who will help these damaged children find the tiny corner of Paradise they’ve lost.

  Fusing reality with imagination and dreams, David Almond takes us on an unforgettable ride though darkness into the light, out of loneliness and sorrow into the warm embrace of family (wherever we may find it).

  This evocative, haunting look back at David Almond’s childhood has all the magic and insight of his novels.

  David Almond’s extraordinary novels have established him as an author of unique insight and skill. These stories encapsulate his endless sense of mystery and wonderment, as they weave a tangible tapestry of growing up in a large, loving family. Here are the kernels of his novels—joy and fear, darkness and light, the healing power of love and imagination in overcoming the wounds of ignorance and prejudice.

  These stories merge memory and dream, the real and the imagined, in a collection of exquisite tenderness.

  Thanks to the Hawthornden Trust for the award of a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1997, and to the Arts Council for a Writer’s Award in 1998.

  Published by Delacorte Press

  an imprint of

  Random House Children’s Books

  a division of Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1999 by David Almond

  First published in Great Britain by Hodder Children’s Books 1999

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  The trademark Delacorte Press® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Almond, David.

  Kit’s wilderness / David Almond.-lst American ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary:Thirteen-year-old Kit goes to live with his grandfather in the decaying coal mining town of Stoneygate, England, and finds both the old man and the town haunted by ghosts of the past.

  [1. Coal mines and mining Fiction. 2. Ghosts Fiction. 3. Grandfathers Fiction. 4.Old age Fiction. 5. England Fiction.] I.Title.

  PZ7.A448Ki 2000

  [Fic]—dc2l

  99-34332

  CIP

  eISBN: 978-0-385-72989-5

  v3.0