The Incomparable Wolff

It's a damp winter day, and Virginia Euwer Wolff is savoring the Hungarian mushroom soup at Old Wives' Tales, a popular Portland, OR, cafe. She's fond of this soup; it helped her quit smoking nearly 14 years ago. She had just turned 50. She had started taking violin lessons again, after a 30-year hiatus—and she had begun writing books for young people.

Wolff began receiving literary kudos with the 1988 publication of her first book for young readers, Probably Still Nick Swansen (Holt), a novel that the American Library Association's (ALA) Notable Children's Book Committee selected as one of the year's best. Four years ago, Bat 6 (Scholastic, 1998), Wolff's story of softball and post-WWII bigotry, was also chosen as an ALA Notable Book. And last November, True Believer (S&S/Atheneum), the eagerly awaited second installment of the Make Lemonade Trilogy, received the 2001 National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

Wolff seems uncomfortable discussing her many honors. She says it's probably because she's wary of people who bask in their awards. "I'm a farm girl," Wolff explains. "I can't bask." Besides, she adds, "it's not winning that teaches you—not winning is what teaches you." Wolff, of course, explored that idea thoroughly through the eyes of Allegra Shapiro, the gifted young violinist of The Mozart Season (Scholastic, 1993). When Wolff is asked what's the most gratifying thing about being a successful writer, she answers without hesitation: "Finishing something that was impossible to complete. One of the things I like about getting older is continuing to find things I cannot do—and then doing them."

I know that you grew up on a pear and apple farm and now live in rural Oregon. Yet Make Lemonade (Holt, 1993) and True Believer both take place in the inner city. Jolly, one of the main characters, is a single teenage mother who often does not know where her children's next meal is coming from. And LaVaughn, the heroine of both books, loses her father in a gang shooting. How are you able to write so convincingly about urban life?

I think that when I did live in the city, it had a stronger impact on me—maybe a heavier, more weighty impact on me—because I had come from so much fresh air. I lived in Queens, a borough of New York, when my babies were little. And the floor plan of Jolly's apartment, as well as the floor plan of LaVaughn's, is based on our apartment. Although ours wasn't as dirty, and we were not as downtrodden.

Still, I was a young married mom with two sloppy, drippy, adorable children in an apartment in Queens. The nightly news had an enormous impact on me.

LaVaughn reminds me of myself as a teenager. Do you see yourself in her?

LaVaughn seems to echo my kind of adolescence. Although I have to say, LaVaughn is not more contemplative than I was. But I think she's more substantial, more purposeful. Of course, she has somebody writing her, too, and she has only a certain number of pages in which she can work through whatever her problems are. But I think, in a way, what does bind LaVaughn and me together is the fact that she, too, lurches from mistake to mistake. Adolescence is not easy. Ursula K. Le Guin, in a book review, wrote this sentence: "Adolescence is exile."

Is that what your teenage years were like?

My mother got mad at me and sent me to boarding school when I was entering my junior year in high school—age 16. I suddenly had started reading; I suddenly needed glasses. My mom was mad at me and stuck me in boarding school. The boarding school that was available had a wonderful chaplain named Father Williams. He used to fly down the corridors of the school in his liturgical gowns, kind of humming, "You are old, Father Williams." It was wonderful.

He was 29, and he was so respectful of inquiry. I was angry, I was hurt, I was a mess as a teenager. We had church history and God stuff—we were required to take God courses and whatever I wrote in my papers, he was so delighted to have a student who was reaching for ideas, however cockeyed my reach was. I was reaching for huge ideas about existence and about God and about good and evil. Father Williams was one of my enormously important mentors. I was rebelling from religion, but just loving the man who was bringing religion to me. So, in a way, I wasn't rebelling from religion at all. I was just asking a whole lot of questions.

In True Believer , LaVaughn and her friends Annie and Myrtle explore a number of religious and spiritual questions.

I think teenage years are the years to explore religious questions. I don't remember Father Williams ever telling us we had to believe in anything. Just because it was an Episcopal school didn't mean that everyone had to be Episcopalian.

As I said, he was so fond of inquiry and he so wanted to nurture it in us girls. So he was a religious force. My mother was a religious force, she was a church organist and I went to Sunday school and church my whole childhood. I rebelled, of course, in my teenage years. I took one wonderful religion course in college, in Eastern religions, and later thought, "Oh gee, I could have majored in religion." It would have been fun. My son has a degree in religious studies.

But as for fundamentalist religion, where fundamentalists are different from others pursuing the religious quest is that fundamentalists are so sure they're right. Look at the Taliban. Fundamentalists of any stripe, in any part of the world, are absolutely convinced that they've got chapter and verse of how to live and why. That's what distinguishes fundamentalists of any kind. I'm not sure fundamentalists have much of a sense of humor. We who are less sure know it's okay to question. Whereas fundamentalists are absolutely sure they have the right answers. So Myrtle and Annie have one way of giving form to their religious questing, LaVaughn has another.

There's been a lot of speculation among librarians about the racial identities of the characters in Make Lemonade and True Believer . I pictured LaVaughn as black and Jolly as white. Have you received questions from young readers about that? And why did you decide to omit the characters' ethnicities?

Yes, I have had that question from young readers, but not as often as I've had it from grownups. I wanted the ethnicity of the characters to be the ethnicity that the readers needed. Kids seem to be a bit more accepting of that—understandably. I was much more accepting of stuff when I was a younger person. Why did I feel it wasn't necessary to identify the ethnicity? Dr. Martin Luther King said part of his dream was that there would be a time when his children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I was working with that idea. I wanted a raceless story; I wanted to see if I could do it. I kept wondering, is this one world that we envision possible? Is it possible to listen to a person's story and not know or care what race that person is?

Isn't it true that we all love and hope and are disappointed and fear and worry and hope again? Doesn't that link us all? The child born in the tundra, the child born in the savanna, the child born in the desert, the child born in the inner city—all those kids need some of the same things. Can I do this thing? And I thought maybe it was something that I couldn't do in the same way that I could not write it in funny-shaped lines. As long as I was writing it in funny-shaped lines, I wanted to try the non-ethnicity, too. Had I had a different editor, we might not have had the stories in funny-shaped lines. We might have had an ethnicity pasted onto the characters.

However, my editor, Brenda Bowen, said okay to both those things. I had to do some wrestling with my ego, because I was still caring about reviews. And I thought, reviewers will be very point-blank resentful of what I've done. I've written a story in funny-shape lines and I haven't identified the ethnicity of the characters or the city they live in. I haven't given any of them last names, which is less of an issue. But where is the city, what is the ethnicity, and why these funny-shaped lines? These are three offenses that I'm committing and reviewers are going to hate them.

Would you talk more about those "funny-shaped lines" that you use throughout Make Lemonade and True Believer ? Some reviewers have described the narrative style as free verse.

It has been called free verse; it's also been called blank verse. It's definitely not blank verse. There's not a bit of iambic pentameter in it. I'm a lifelong English major, I know that blank verse has to have iambic pentameter. So do you. But it's not free verse, either. I'm not trying to write poetry. That would be very arrogant of me. I'm not a poet. I am a prose writer and it's prose and funny-shaped lines. I wanted white space around the words, to feel more friendly to young moms who might not have time and concentration to read a lot of words all at one time…. It felt right and it still feels right for LaVaughn to speak that way.

It feels right for a teenager who's thinking about so many things so intensely.

We think elliptically. We have a lot of pauses in our intake of breath. I speak in a lot of dashes—dashes are my end punctuation a lot, before I embark on the next sentence, because the previous sentence didn't seem to be going anywhere. And LaVaughn doesn't speak in Emily Dickinson dashes. But she does speak in, I think, the length of a breath. And then she'll inhale and speak some more. LaVaughn, like her author, is never absolutely sure of what she's saying. And I don't think I've said that before anywhere to anybody but myself. But as I am feeling my way through a narrative, LaVaughn is feeling her way through life. I remember writing a section—I don't know what number it is in True Believer —she says, "I felt like a parenthesis."

I had had that in mind for months before it came to the place in the narrative to use it, because I have so often felt like a parenthesis. Everything else in the world seems sure and I'm not. And I know kids feel that way. I know adolescents very often feel, "I'm the only one in the class who doesn't get it. I'm the only girl who's not asked to go to the prom. I'm the only kid who wasn't chosen for the team. I'm the only one the college recruiters will not notice. I'm the only one who didn't hear the teacher say what page number." To feel like a parenthesis is a very common thing. The fact that I happen to feel it and I'm past 60 [means there] isn't much of a line of demarcation.

I was not surprised to learn that you play the violin. It seems to me that only a musician could have written The Mozart Season. Does music continue to influence your writing?

Every day, all day. I started violin lessons when I was eight, after one year of piano, so I knew how to read music when I got the violin. I studied till just about the end of college. Then I put my violin down for about 15 years before picking it up again. Haltingly, as I've done most things in my life. Haltingly and with an enormous pause, characterizing every motion. But when I was 50, I began taking violin lessons again. Now that's a gap of 30 years. It was one of the most humbling, horrifying, and ultimately rewarding experiences I've had. I was just doing my early writing for kids. I started taking violin lessons again, and I play all the time now. I play far more than I ever did.

Was The Mozart Season somewhat autobiographical?

The Mozart Season is not the story of me at all. Allegra Shapiro is a much better violinist than I was at 12. She's a better violinist at 12 than I am now. She practices a lot. She has a wonderful kind of dedication. But I knew girls like Allegra. I knew girls who were that gifted and who had those wonderful, enviable families. Somebody called that an over-functional family. But my mom was a wonderful pianist and she always played with me—piano and violin. We did that stuff all the time, played a lot in church. She accompanied me to recitals. So I had music in my family, too.

But Allegra Shapiro in The Mozart Season certainly is not me, but she's a very privileged child, in that she gets to live a life with music. I seem to be bent on pointing out that privilege has nothing to do with fancy cars and cell phones and electronic gadgets and possessions. Although she does have a violin that's valuable and a valuable bow. But privilege has to do with enjoyment of beauty and the opportunity, the freedom, to enjoy beauty every single day. That's what I mean by a privileged life.