by David Almond
At the end of the novel, Erin explains to Maureen, “We run for freedom. … Just for freedom.” Do you think Erin, January, and Mouse find what they set out to find? Are there ways in which Heaven Eyes might represent freedom to them?
Prepared by Pat Scales, Director of Library Services, South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, Greenville
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 midteen 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 to 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 Gabriel García Márquez, 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 teenagers and 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. The main characters in Heaven Eyes, especially Erin Law, have dealt with loneliness and sorrow as orphans. Can you discuss what methods they use to cope with these feelings?
A. Erin has her cardboard treasure box, which contains relics and mementos of her life with her mum, e.g., the lock of her mother’s hair, her mother’s lipstick, the photograph of them together in the garden. Erin uses these objects to work magic. She arranges them before her, puts lipstick and perfume on, and brings her mother back, so that she’s able to talk to her again. Does this really happen, or is it all a figment of Erin’s imagination? It certainly brings Erin a great deal of comfort, and helps her to cope with life in Whitegates.
She’s also a girl who has a strong attachment to her fellow orphans. She expresses and shows her solidarity with them. She refuses to pass judgment on them. She realizes that they’re all in danger of being isolated, and she’s concerned to comfort and encourage them all. She has a healthy skepticism about the care workers who often show anything but care, and she’s scornful of many of the methods they employ.
She has an almost heroic capacity for happiness, a strong spirit that will not allow her to become downcast or depressed. She gains a great deal of strength from her friendships, especially that with January Carr. This friendship also helps January to cope with his own difficulties. He also has practical outlets for his frustrations, e.g., through planning escapes from Whitegates, and particularly through building the raft that will take them away downriver. In building the raft he’s also employing a kind of magic, which is reflected by the curse or spell that he paints across it. Like Erin, he refuses to bow down before his problems. He retains a resolute belief that his mother will come back for him.
Mouse’s magic is contained in his cracked photograph, which may contain the image of his father. He also has a powerful memento of his dad, in the tattoo scratched into his arm. Like January, Mouse respects and loves Erin Law. He also finds particular comfort in his pet mouse, Squeak. All of these children have memories that might be simply dreams, and hopes that might simply be illusions, but they are determined to explore these memories and dreams, and to share them with each other. Their journey together away from Whitegates is an act of courage and hope.
Q. Family seems to be a very important treasure in this book. What do you consider your treasures?
A. Yes, family—both the family I grew up in and the family I’m part of now. As a writer, I suppose my treasures are imagination, memory, the world around us, which is a real treasure chest of images, language, stories, characters.
Q. What does Heaven Eyes herself represent? Is she based on someone in your life?
A. She isn’t really based on anyone, though I suspect there are some connections with loved ones who have died. I suppose Heaven Eyes is a character who’s gone as close to death as it’s possible to go, but she’s come back again. Until Erin, January, and Mouse arrive, she’s living in a kind of half-life. The final act of bringing her back into the world of the living, of the here and now, is performed by her three new friends. They complete the process that was begun by Grampa when he rescued her from the Black Middens. She proba
bly has connections with characters or creatures from folk and fairy tales.
Q. There are many different uses of darkness and light throughout the novel. Can you discuss what you were trying to emphasize by this contrast?
A. The main thing I want to do is to absorb the reader into the story, so that he or she can see and experience the book’s fictional world. The primary purpose of the dark and light, then, is to help me achieve this. I hope it draws the reader in through visual effects, and through the senses. Beyond that, of course, the notions of darkness and light have many resonances that have been explored in story and myth right through history: death and life, sleeping and waking, the hidden and the exposed, the overworld and the underworld, interior and exterior. The book is a kind of journey into the darkness, the discovery of something that has been hidden there, and then a return to light and life again.
Q. You seem to be right in touch with the feelings of the main characters. Did any of their experiences come from your own life or the lives of children you have known?
A. I lost a parent and a sister when I was quite young, so that probably helps me to understand something of what the children are going through. I’ve also worked with children who have ended up in care homes. They’re very vulnerable, of course, and they can have huge emotional and social problems, but they often show astounding resilience and cheerfulness. Writing any book involves a leap of the imagination. You enter the minds and lives of characters who are not like you and you try to think and feel as they do.
Kit’s Wilderness
DAVID ALMOND
0-440-41605-1
Kit Watson and John Askew look for the childhood ghosts of their long-gone ancestors in the mines of Stoneygate.
Skellig
DAVID ALMOND
0-440-22908-1
Michael feels helpless because of his baby sister’s illness, until he meets a creature called Skellig.
Heaven Eyes
DAVID ALMOND
0-440-22910-3
Erin Law and her friends in the orphanage are labeled Damaged Children. They run away one night, traveling downriver on a raft. What they find on their journey is stranger than you can imagine.
Becoming Mary Mehan: Two Novels
JENNIFER ARMSTRONG
0-440-22961-8
Set against the events of the American Civil War, The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan depicts an Irish immigrant girl and her family, struggling to find their place in the war-torn country. Mary Mehan Awake takes up Mary’s story after the war, when she must begin a journey of renewal.
Forgotten Fire
ADAM BAGDASARIAN
0-440-22917-0
In 1915, Vahan Kenderian is living a life of privilege when his world is shattered by the Turkish-Armenian war.
Ghost Boy
IAIN LAWRENCE
0-440-41668-X
Fourteen-year-old Harold Kline is an albino— an outcast. When the circus comes to town, Harold runs off to join it in hopes of discovering who he is and what he wants in life. Is he a circus freak or just a normal guy?
The Giver
LOIS LOWRY
0-440-23768-8
Jonas’s world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear or pain. There are no choices, until Jonas is given an opportunity that will change his world forever.
Gathering Blue
LOIS LOWRY
0-440-22949-9
Lamed and suddenly orphaned, Kira is mysteriously removed to live in the palatial Council Edifice, where she is expected to use her gifts as a weaver to do the bidding of the all-powerful Guardians.
Both Sides Now
RUTH PENNEBAKER
0-440-22933-2
A compelling look at breast cancer through the eyes of a mother and daughter. Liza must learn a few life lessons from her mother, Rebecca, about the power of family.
Her Father’s Daughter
MOLLIE POUPENEY
0-440-22879-4
As she matures from a feisty tomboy of seven to a spirited young woman of fourteen, Maggie discovers that the only constant in her life of endless new homes and new faces is her ever-emerging sense of herself.
The Baboon King
ANTON QUINTANA
0-440-22907-3
Neither Morengáru’s father’s Masai tribe nor his mother’s Kikuyu tribe accepts him. Banished from both tribes, Morengáru encounters a baboon troop and faces a fight with the simian king.
Holes
LOUIS SACHAR
0-440-22859-X
Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys’ detention center, Camp Green Lake. But there’s more than character improvement going on at the camp— the warden is looking for something.
Memories of Summer
RUTH WHITE
0-440-22921-9
In 1955, thirteen-year-old Lyric describes her older sister Summer’s descent into mental illness, telling Summer’s story with humor, courage, and love.
Thanks for the support of Southlands School
Published by
Dell Laurel-Leaf
an imprint of
Random House Children’s Books
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Copyright © 2000 by David Almond
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eISBN: 978-0-307-56579-2
RL: 5.4
October 2002
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