When I started writing the novel, the only things I knew about the new head who would replace Marjorie was that he was male, younger than his predecessor, both a good educator and financial manager, and he had a limited time to turn the situation around to save the school. I didn’t know whether he was savvy enough to understand the odds against him, nor if he would succeed. I didn’t even know his name. I had found that out by writing the story.
It wasn’t until I had him stand next to Marjorie that I thought Fred seemed like the right name for such a man, and I put him in a very unpreppy polyester suit. Then the other characters slowly revealed themselves to me as I built Fred’s story.
Q: A good part of the plot takes place miles away from the school—Francis’s trip westward, his experience with the aborted archeological dig, and then his return. Why?
A: To show Francis Plummer only on campus is to show the reader only those qualities that Fred Kindler can see. I wanted to put Francis out of Fred’s sight, into a much larger, unconstrained world than the hermetic world of Miss Oliver’s school that has consumed every minute of his adult life. I wanted the reader to understand and appreciate that the failed archeological dig on Mount Alma on the other side of the continent is, for all of its absurdity and failure, Francis’s legitimate, even admirable attempt to fulfill a vision quest at the same time as it is a sneaky escape from the responsibility to stay at the school and show Fred Kindler how to avoid the rocks and shoals that will otherwise surely undo him.
Q: I understand that the only type of independent school you didn’t work in was an all-girls school, and yet you set the novel in that kind of school. Why?
A: I wanted to charge the narrative with an extra dose of passion. So I gave the school a mission that inspires passion, the empowerment of young women. The name of the school is Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. That’s the reason it exists. It is a feminist organization, at war with systemic male dominance, where the operating slogan is “anything a boy can do, a girl can do better.” Anybody who messes with that idea is the enemy, and here he comes in the person of Fred Kindler, a male, from the outside, who everybody suspects will try to save the school by admitting boys, thus eliminating the reason for its existence.
Q: What does Saving Miss Oliver’s say about teaching as a profession and a way of life?
A: I am so passionate about education, so I wanted to show the reader how much of himself or herself a masterful teacher brings to the classroom day after day. You can see this in Francis Plummer when he’s operating in his classroom, adjusting minute by minute to the needs of each individual girl, needs that only the most fine-tuned antennae would pick up, as he leads the class to a full appreciation of Robert Frost’s “Home Burial.” The passion for his subject and the skill with which he purveys that passion is one model for the students of how to be authentic in the world. At the end of the class he knows that no one in this class will ever be the same. How many better-paid practitioners of other professions can make that claim?
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