The Root Cellar

by Janet Lunn

  LD: Who therefore had to explain themselves to each other.

  JL: They had a hard time understanding how each other thought. There were quite a few misunderstandings. But I was telling their story with the firm belief that, underneath those surface differences that growing up in different time periods would create, they would all be the same. I am quite sure that if we could go back in time one hundred, two hundred, two thousand years, once we’d gotten over the startling differences in clothing, language and cultural attitude, getting along would be not so different from the encounters we people from so many cultures have every day. Despite the sometimes very great differences, once they’re overcome we always find that while we may think differently, we don’t feel differently. We all hurt when we stub our toes.

  LD: Is that why stories about travelling through time fascinate you?

  JL: Partly, I suppose. Partly it’s because I really want to know what it was like to live during those periods I write about. Partly it’s the pure romance of the idea; I would love to go back in time.

  LD: I know from working with you that your research is always very thorough.

  JL: As thorough as I can possibly make it.

  LD: Even the language and conversation. For example, Joe Haggerty, the soldier, speaks in a particular way that you researched carefully.

  JL: I got his dialogue from a Civil War diary. I can still remember sitting in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., reading that diary. (What a wonderful library that is. The huge, round reading room is so beautiful!) The diary was so engrossing that I felt, when I had finished reading it, as though I really knew this poor foot soldier whose wife had left him because he hadn’t been paid and he couldn’t send her any money. I felt I just had to give him even a small part in my story. Finding a diary like that is like striking gold. To be able to actually read what somebody felt and wrote, at the time and in the actual situation you’re writing about, makes you feel as though you’ve heard his voice speaking to you.

  LD: Language has its own characteristics of place and time; it grows and evolves just like people, with recognizable traits. It’s a special joy of the novel that you reproduce how people spoke in different places and different times.

  JL: I think the accuracy of dialogue is terribly important. Without the echo of real speech, it’s very hard for a reader to make his or her way into a story. Rose is a twentieth-century, middle-class New Yorker; Will and Susan are farm kids in rural Ontario in the 1860s. They couldn’t possibly speak in the same way. I won’t have it exactly right, of course. It’s very hard to get right. When I was writing Shadow in Hawthorn Bay about Mary, whose native language is Scots Gaelic, I had to really puzzle out how to give her voice. I didn’t want to write dialect; I don’t like dialect, and it’s hard to read. I settled for the cadence of Gaelic-influenced English. That’s more or less what I did with Will and Susan’s nineteenth-century speech. I don’t think speech patterns changed all that much between the 1960s, when Richard and the kids and I went to live in Prince Edward County, and the 1930s, when Richard grew up there. And I don’t think there were great changes in a specific locality between the 1930s and the 1860s, either. There used to be more significant differences between towns as close as fifty or sixty kilometres, but those are now largely erased because of television and radio.

  LD: When you began writing The Root Cellar, did you imagine it would be the first of three books that would draw on that landscape of your farm and Prince Edward County? That the story of the Morrissays would spread out from there like the spokes of a wheel, encompassing Scotland and Vermont and New Hampshire?

  JL: Oh, no. I was only thinking about that particular story. When I write a story, I am there in that story. I live in it. I never think about what I will write next. Do you remember how it was when I was writing The Root Cellar? I was so involved. I remember coming to your office at your publishing house of Lester & Orpen Dennys on Charles Street one morning, and I read to you the scene where Susan and Rose find Will after the war. We sat there, the two of us—

  LD: —with the tears pouring down our faces!

  JL: I never do read that part out loud when I am reading the story. I don’t want to cry in front of an audience!

  LD: One of the things that is, of course, so marvellous, so great about your writing, is the quality of the storytelling. The storytelling is embedded in worlds that are historically fascinating, and are filled with historical detail and the language of the time, but the heart of it all is the richness of the storytelling.

  JL: Story is why I write for younger people. Story—in the way that Aristotle defined it, as a conflict rising to a climax leading to a denouement—isn’t important to contemporary fiction for adults. So many adult novels today are more like beautifully written case histories.

  LD: Of events, as well as characters?

  JL: Oh, sure. And the events are interesting, the characters are often strong; the narratives are, in fact, most often character-driven. I like a lot of contemporary novels because of the good writing and because I care a lot about character. But I do love story.

  LD: And why do you think it’s necessary, during the writing of a novel, for you to keep going back over and over a story until you’ve got it right? Has that always been a part of your writing? Do you think it important to good writing?

  JL: I really can’t say for everybody’s writing. As you know, I’ve worked as an editor, and I have found that the stories of writers who are unwilling to rewrite often fall short of their potential. I think I probably have to rewrite more than some people have to, but if I feel something is wrong, I feel compelled to work through as many as six, seven or eight drafts. I’ve rewritten some chapters in my books fifteen times.

  LD: Working with you editorially, I have seen how you move from one draft to another in great imaginative leaps.

  JL: My husband once told me, somewhat crossly, “You always think out loud.”

  LD: I think it’s more than that. You have a very good ear for hearing or listening to a story, as well as gauging the effect of a story on your readers or audience. You write the story, and then you wait to hear that story or the response to it, and then you release it a whole jump ahead. When we work together, we work first in large, general terms, and then subsequently line by line. In the first stage, you absorb all the general comments that deal with the flow and logic of the story, and truth of situation and characters; you may move new characters in, or even completely change the story in terms of direction. You take great leaps—you are enormously responsive to ideas and suggestions. I am always amazed at how you take such great strides in the story, using me editorially almost as a sounding board as you move along.

  JL: I do think in layers. And I need to take time. I think I understand things slowly. Maybe some people need to write fewer drafts because they see the whole in the beginning. I don’t. I have to come to it slowly, layer by layer. I guess I discover it as I go.

  LD: Our editorial relationship in that first stage is very much one of me as Reader, a lover of stories, saying, “I want more of this!” or “I didn’t understand this part,” or “I am lost,” or “Can I know what is going to happen next, please?”

  JL: Which is so valuable! This is what I’ve said to other people about editing. If you don’t listen to your editor’s questions, you’re not serving your story well, because those questions are what a reader wants the answers to. It’s especially important for a kids’ writer to have an editor who loves a story. Good editorial questions are rare, and they’re so important.

  LD: Rose’s Aunt Nan is herself a writer of stories for children. Young readers are always asking whether Aunt Nan’s character is based on you.

  JL: Only in that she’s a children’s writer. Also, I have one daughter and four sons, so giving Aunt Nan all those boys is a reflection of my own life. Otherwise we aren’t at all the same.

  LD: How many grandchildren do you have?

  JL: Ten altogether, plus three
great-grandchildren. And another on the way!

  LD: Love is also something that threads its way through all of your writing. The Hollow Tree and The Shadow in Hawthorn Bay are, both of them, love stories. In The Root Cellar, Rose at least is thinking of marrying Will!

  JL: Well, Rose is younger than the heroines of the other two books, and so there is actually only the suggestion of a love story between Rose and Will. Rose herself discovers that the love story is really between Will and Susan. It isn’t a big problem for her. In The Root Cellar, friendship between the two girls is really more important—or the survival of friendship (often as tricky or trickier than the survival of romantic love). In all three of these books, friendship is tested, and sometimes found wanting.

  LD: You are someone who is a pacifist by politics and by nature, but war, in fact, figures very strongly in your novels.

  JL: I want to show something of the pointless-ness and the horror of war. But also, to be perfectly honest, so much is revealed about human nature in wartime. If my boys had been young men at the time of the Second World War, they would have all gone—and would likely have wanted to go. The idea of war is so exciting to young men, so glorious. My husband left school to go to war in 1943. Boys have usually had great leaders in battle for their heroes. Isn’t King Arthur, at least in the English world, the ultimate hero?

  LD: I think I loved the sadness of his story most of all.

  JL: I think that’s so for a lot of girls—and girls fall in love with Arthur. I remember being so angry at Lancelot, who I didn’t like at all.

  LD: The girls in your novels have a different attitude to war.

  JL: Very few girls dream of the glory of saving their country by going off to fight in a war. They’re more apt to dream of nursing the wounded soldiers. I do remember in my own teenage years that I longed to be old enough to be a nurse in the navy, but I have to say that it was as much because I fancied myself in the uniform they wore as for any of the actual work; being a nurse was never a dream of mine. Rose is a child of a later generation; she isn’t as likely to have such dreams. And the Civil War, for her, is just a bit of history with no emotional pull. As for Susan, she doesn’t have Will’s connection to his mother’s family across the lake, and so has no reason to be filled with patriotic fervour. Will doesn’t really have that either. He hasn’t spent a lot of time dreaming of the glory of war. He goes because he is so strongly influenced by his cousin Steve.

  LD: Will is a gentle person, a lover of song and music.

  JL: But he’s unhappy at home; with his mother’s depression, it’s a pretty dispiriting place. Steve is the one who is chafing at the bit for the adventure and the glory of it all. He talks Will into going with him.

  LD: We readers, too, are fascinated by war and conflict in fiction. Do you think that might be because it is to some degree a macrocosm of our daily lives—the conflicts in our daily lives—writ large?

  JL: Isn’t every human being fascinated by death? And war is a clear life-or-death experience. A story writer always writes about conflict, and the closer to a life-or-death moment the conflict gets, the more eagerly the reader clings to the story. Survival is the quintessential conflict. But there are others just as powerful. In The Root Cellar, when Rose and Will and Susan are on their way home, there is a huge storm on the lake—and the threat of death is right there, as it is again when they are crossing the flooded creek in the dark, fighting the wild wind and rain.

  LD: And they are not so different from the conflicts that we have every so often at home or in the schoolyard, whether physical conflict or surviving an argument. We are always being tested or are testing ourselves.

  JL: You might not actually be in danger of your life in the schoolyard, but when you’re very young you don’t always know that; there is always the fear that you might be killed when someone is physically attacking you. But stories where psychological death is at stake can be equally powerful. As well as being in physical danger, Rose, during her adventure in 1865, is in psychological danger. She’s lost, she doesn’t know who she is, and if she can’t find out she will spend a lifetime as a lost soul.

  I’ve learned from readers that it is Rose most people identify with. For many reasons, I suppose, but maybe especially because they are caught up in her fight for psychological survival. As in The Hollow Tree, where Phoebe is being tested, this kind of survival is crucial, as it is, too, for Mary in Shadow in Hawthorn Bay. And as it is for Rose in The Root Cellar. In a way, the fight for survival is what the great journeys of myth and fairy tale are all about.

  JL: The Hollow Tree isn’t really about the trek through the wilderness, although it certainly plays its part. It’s about conflict among the humans on the trek, about trust, about friendship, about loyalty.

  LD: In The Root Cellar, you had to get Rose down to the Civil War as quickly as possible.

  JL: I wasn’t thinking like that when I wrote it, not at all. When I began writing the story, I didn’t even have the Civil War.

  LD: No, I know! It was a major change. At what point did you decide to build the Civil War into the story?

  JL: I can’t remember. I only remember that suddenly I knew that war was part of the story. The whole novel is really a voyage of discovery; the war is almost only a catalyst to make that possible. Do you remember that, in the beginning, Rose is convinced that she isn’t a real person and that, in the end, she knows that she is?

  LD: And the element of discovery as we journey is important to you in many of your books, even in your early retelling of the fairy story The Twelve Dancing Princesses, illustrated by Laszlo Gal.

  JL: Yes: discovery, surprise, a touch of wonder. Do you I remember what fun you and I had working on that book? I do love taking an old story like that one and finding new meaning in it.

  LD: In a way, it is the same meaning we discover in The Root Cellar, which is the importance of finding out who we are, and where and with whom we belong.

  JL: Two worlds. We all live in two worlds. We live in this external world where we are sitting here talking, and we live in the worlds that go on inside our heads. For us storytellers, that second world is always forming itself into a story.

  LD: Do you always tell yourself stories?

  JL: Yes, I’ve told myself stories all my life, long before I could read or write, even. How else would I get to sleep?

  LD: Did you tell your children stories?

  JL: I was more apt to read to them because I wanted them to know the stories I loved so much as a child, and I wanted us to find new ones together.

  LD: What are your favourite children’s stories?

  JL: The Secret Garden, which I gave to Rose as her favourite story, so she could have it too. That’s my lifelong favorite. I still read it about once a year. When I was little, I loved books about dolls, and I especially liked Rachel Field’s book Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, the one about the little wooden doll. I was passionate about E. Nesbitt’s stories. If I could go back to the library in Rye, New York, where we lived right after we moved from Vermont, I could find with my eyes closed the Nesbitts on the shelves, provided they hadn’t been moved. I loved Heidi too. I’ve found, alas, that it doesn’t bear re-reading the way most of my other childhood favourites do, but I sure loved it when I was ten. It was those Alps! And I loved all of Louisa May Alcott’s books.

  LD: The Nesbitt stories also take us on strange journeys, with the same excitement in adventure and magic.

  JL: “The veil between this world and the other”—that’s how Nesbitt described what lies between our world and the world of faerie.

  LD: And Mrs. Morrissay is a part of that thin veil between this world and the other. Do you think there is a thin veil between this world and the other? Do you have a sense of another world beyond?

  JL: Yes, I do, but I think I am too prosaic to get there, so I have to do it for myself in stories. I think some people do slip easily from one to the other. Then there are ghosts. I don’t see them either, whatever
they are, but as I said earlier, I know people who do.

  LD: What do you find most satisfying in being a writer?

  JL: Writing. I find the act of writing enormously satisfying. I even like rewriting. During the last rewrite of The Hollow Tree, I got up to make tea one morning and I was suddenly overcome with feeling. I stood in the middle of the living room and the words just came rushing out of my mouth: “I love what I do!” It isn’t that I think that anything I write is a work of genius, it is just that I love doing it.

  APRIL 2001

  ALSO BY JANET LUNN

  Shadow in Hawthorn Bay

  WINNER OF THE CLA CHILDREN’S

  BOOK OF THE YEAR

  and

  THE CANADIAN YOUNG ADULT BOOK AWARD

  Born in the same week in the Highlands of Scotland, Mary Urquhart and her cousin Duncan had always been united by a wild joy for the land and for each other. Mary knows that Duncan’s heart is always with her, even after he has left to seek his fortune in the raw wilderness of Upper Canada. Four years after he has left, Mary hears Duncan’s cry for help across the great distance that separates them. Now, equipped with her strange gift of “second sight,” Mary knows that she must leave behind all that is dear and safe and cross the ocean alone to find him.

  SEAL BOOKS / ISBN: 0-7704-2886-x