Eyes Wide Open

In writing about teens, Crutcher has gained insight from his many years as a child and family therapist and mental health specialist. Formerly a teacher, Crutcher, 54, started working as a therapist in 1982, after running an alternative school for inner-city kids in Oakland, CA. He grew up in the tiny town of Cascade, ID, and now lives in Spokane, WA. Both places have served as settings for his books.

In recognizing Crutcher's lifetime achievement in writing for teens, the Edwards committee cited six of his books: Athletic Shorts, Chinese Handcuffs, The Crazy Horse Electric Game, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, Stotan!, and Running Loose.

Why do you choose to write about teenagers?
Adolescence is often the first time people see that they have some influence over their world.... And that's a natural place to tell the story because, in my own memory, the heat was really turned up then. One of the reasons I write about older teenagers is that they're on the edge of having to live their lives themselves. Those initial decisions they make are really important. In my history I was lied to about what came next. I heard too many fairy tales

What do you mean?
I had a mom who didn't want me to feel bad. She wanted me to think everything was going to be all right because she wanted them to be all right. She didn't want me to have bad feelings or feel "less than." When I got out on my own, I had to take a look and say sometimes things don't turn out okay and sometimes there isn't a happily ever after, and all those things they tell you about marriage and relationships and jobs are sometimes not the truth.

That reminds me of Willie in The Crazy Horse Electric Game. He was protected at home, but that protection ill equips him to move on.
Right. And what happens then is that he takes that bus ride. There's no way in the world he's prepared to be hurt. That possibility doesn't exist in his imagination. I took him down hard and I did that on purpose. By the time he gets to the Oakland Bus Station, he might as well be on a different planet. The rules he's learned to live his life by no longer apply.

Are you saying it's not good to keep kids believing they are safe?
I don't think we should trump up the bad, but there's a world out there. There's a good chance at some time in your life you're gonna run into it.

Several years ago I read an article describing innocence as dangerous. Through interviews with child abusers and murderers, the author discovered that the one element that tied them all together was that they were drawn to innocence. Are we actually raising kids who are vulnerable to these kinds of folks when we think we're doing something else?
That's exactly right. We create the thing we are afraid of. We run around trying to protect kids from what we're afraid of, while teaching them to be afraid of it, too, therefore making it more likely to happen.... When my books are banned, they're banned because people are afraid for kids to know about something I wrote about. Now, how dumb is that? To want our children to be ignorant.

What's behind that kind of thinking?
We do it out of our own fear. It's risky business letting people have their own lives, particularly if they are our children. It's risky business giving up ownership, which, by the way, we never had in the first place. For me, the moral thing is to set up a structure that protects kids emotionally and physically and spiritually, which is to say, "When something hurts you, come talk to me about it. I will hear you and not punish out of fear. There's nothing you can tell me that will make me turn my back. But I'm not going to keep you in the dark about anything. I'm going to protect you from bad guys. I'm going to protect you from running out on the street. I'm going to protect you from eating poison. I'm going to do all those things, but my moral job with you is to be there and accept you and belong with you. It's not to stop you from falling, but to pick you up."

Tell me more about your own childhood.
It was generally good, though I had a pretty nasty temper, which is why I know so much about that kind of thing.... My mom was a pretty significant alcoholic through my junior high, high school, and college years, but she was mostly functional--she didn't start drinking until about four or five in the afternoon when almost everything she had to do was done. She quit stone cold about 17 years before she died and became way more functional. That's probably why I had an affinity for kids who needed help. I was kind of the caretaking kid.

And your father?
My father was a "teacher," though he didn't teach school. [He owned a gas station.] He was very deliberate and extremely patient, though he could also be a little hard to please. He always thought I was a little too frivolous, and I always thought he was a little too serious.... I probably had about the average number and severity of problems and was lucky in my adulthood to have rich relationships with both parents.

A comment I've heard about Running Loose is, "My God, Louie Banks calls his parents by their first names. I don't want kids to see that. There's no respect."
Last summer I was in New Orleans. They had just passed a law in Louisiana requiring students to call their teachers "sir" or "ma'am." My immediate thought was, as a kid, I'm going to call all the men "ma'am" and all the women "sir" until somebody clarifies that part. But what I really wanted to say was: "Do you have any idea what you turn loose in my imagination in terms of what I want to call them, particularly if they don't seem very sir- or ma'am-like to me?"
On the same trip, I met an educator who wanted to know my feelings about posting the Ten Commandments in the schools, to "return to our respect for the word of God." I said--and I've been waiting to say this--"Okay, I'm eight years old and I walk into the school office and there are the Commandments, and my eyes follow to 'Honor thy father and thy mother' and my father's been penetrating me for the last six years. I have just walked into a room, and a school, where it is not safe to tell what is happening to me. You've posted it on your wall."

It seems like your characters often are encouraged to seek help from adults, but these adults either fail them or end up abusing them.
The reality is that there are people out there, maybe without intent, who, for whatever reason, will hurt you. I work with this woman I started with when she was 16 years old. She's 31 or 32 now. She talks about how the protection community used to keep sending her back home and tell her to stop acting badly. At home she was being brutalized. She's one of the few who really made it. I took her on as a client when she punched out a therapist I thought needed to be punched out. That was a turning point for her.

One of the most interesting characters in Chinese Handcuffs is the stepfather [who is sexually abusing his stepdaughter]. He has an uncanny sense of what he has to do in order to keep from being found out.
I made him bad because I made him smart. I gave him knowledge of the legal system so he could stay ahead of it. I wanted him to be invincible. I worked on a case once where we couldn't get to the parents because they were so well established in town and had such powerful legal counsel. Their girl was on a 15-minute suicide watch in the hospital and ended up killing herself when she discovered she had to go back home. And we couldn't protect her because the adults involved were so smart.

How do you turn your experiences as a therapist into fiction?
What I do as a therapist is listen to somebody's story and look for that thread, the pieces that run through his or her life that have meaning; [I try to] find the truth and the lies and bring them to the surface. As a writer, when I'm telling a story, I do it in reverse. Rather than taking it in, I'm writing it down, but I'm looking for the same truths and the same lies. I never think I'm looking for a story when I'm doing therapy. I want to be nonjudgmental and I want to help [the client] look for a place to stand. When I tell stories, I need that same nonjudgmental stance so I can treat my characters with the same respect with which I treat my clients, and myself. I'm always better as a writer when I'm in the middle of some gritty stuff.

Do you ever get discouraged or burned out?
I used a line in [my novel] Ironman: "If you want to see how something works, look at it broken." I never get over the curiosity that goes with looking at things broken, and I never stop learning things about myself, and that's not just a gratuitous statement. I get burned out when we can't do anything to help, when agencies get in each others' way, or when we refuse to put up the money to do the work we know needs to be done. I never get burned out on the clients.

Even when you tell the most miserable story, you often write with humor.
Humor is an amazing healer. I tried to quit the job as chairman of the child protection team for a long time and they'd never let me leave it because they liked my dark humor. They knew we needed it to give perspective, and to be able to laugh while we were doing heartbreaking work.

How much time do you spend these days on your writing versus therapy and other things?
Basically, I try to balance my life between writing and working with kids and families, and traveling in relation to the writing. That doesn't leave a lot of time for recreation, but I hang out with the people I care about most, play basketball, and run and swim.

What kinds of things do you hear from readers?
I got a letter from a kid the other day who read Sarah Byrnes. She said, "I'm not on the outside [at school], I do fine, I have friends. But I think I'm one of those people who treated people [as badly as] kids treated Moby and Sarah Byrnes." And then she said, "I read your story and I don't want to do that anymore." That kind of letter spurs me on. If somehow a character becomes a friend, then the passion with which the writer tells the story translates into a passion for the reader to learn about that character, or be a friend with that character, or actually personify that character. I'm amazed at the wide range of kids who read these stories and love them. I'm absolutely humbled by it. I guess there's a part of me that wants to create an adult voice that kids want to listen to.