The House of Farmer

Although she grew up in Arizona, Farmer spent most of the 1970s and 1980s working in Zimbabwe and Mozambique as a scientist and later as a freelance writer. After she returned to the States in the early '90s, she continued writing, producing a short children's novel, Do You Know Me? (Orchard, 1993). Farmer's next book, The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (Orchard, 1994), a seriocomic tour de force featuring a take-charge teenager and an unforgettable trio of gumshoes, won a 1995 Newbery Honor award and brought the author to the attention of American readers. Two years later, Farmer earned a second Newbery Honor for A Girl Named Disaster (Orchard, 1996), a novel that charts the terrifying journey of Nhamo, a contemporary Shona girl who flees her village rather than marry a violent man. We spoke to Farmer, who now lives in northern California, in early December, shortly after she received the National Book Award.

What did you do before you became a writer?

I did a lot of things. I was working in Mozambique on controlling waterweeds in Lake Cabora Bassa. I had a lab at the dam wall, and my job was to go around and check water purity in little villages around the lake, and to check on people's welfare. Quite a few of the events in A Girl Named Disaster actually happened to me. After I left Mozambique, I went to work on tsetse fly control in Zimbabwe. The second part of A Girl Named Disaster takes place in Zimbabwe. I described the camp, Ruckomechi, where I worked. Some of the characters in A Girl Named Disaster are real people I knew at that camp. That's what I did until I was eight and a half months pregnant. To get to the camp, we used to fly into the bush. It was during the civil war and it was very dangerous. There was a cleared part of the forest there that we had to buzz to scare the antelopes and warthogs off so that we could land. Then we had to watch out to make sure there weren't any people waiting for us with machine guns in the bushes before we got to the lab.

How did you begin writing for children?

When I was pregnant, it occurred to me that this wasn't an ideal place to go into labor. So I decided to take time off to have the baby. I had had no experience with babies; I had never even picked one up. I thought, well, the African women put their babies on their backs and go back to work in two weeks, and I will do the same. Unfortunately, I was a lot older than most African women are when they have their first [child]. Once I [had my son] Daniel [in my late 30s], all these instincts kicked in. You absolutely can't take [children] out where they're going to get chewed by tsetse flies and blasted with machine guns. So I had to quit the job. For about four years, I did nothing but be a housewife—and went quietly insane because I was used to a really active life. One day I was reading a book and suddenly I was moved by a description in [it] and thought, "I can do this." I sat down at a typewriter, and four hours later, I had a short story. It opened up a brand-new world to me. It was just so pleasurable to write, that from then on, I wrote every opportunity I got. I didn't become a full-time writer until later when we came to the United States.

After you returned to the States, did you get published right away?

No, I didn't. I sent stuff out and it was rejected. Actually, in Zimbabwe, I realized I wasn't a good writer, and I sat down and trained myself. I got John Braine's book on how to write a novel, and Joan Aiken's book on writing for children, and read instructions from Raymond Chandler on how he wrote books, and I followed their advice. I also read Stephen King. Those were the four sources for how to write a novel that I used. And I just practiced and practiced and practiced. Eventually I had a short book called Do You Know Me? I [sent] the first 40 pages to the National Endowment for the Arts and got a grant, which helped a huge amount toward making me a full-time writer. It gave me breathing space. When I finished that book, someone gave me a list of editors. I really didn't know how to market [my work], and I picked the editor who was closest to me, which was Dick Jackson [who is now with Simon & Schuster].

Closest geographically?

Yes. He was down the road. So I sent him the manuscript, and he said, thank you, and sent it back and said it needed some rewrites. I just put in some more commas and took out a few words and sent it back to him. Then he called me up and he said, "I meant a real rewrite." He gave me some instructions on what I should be doing. So I followed them, and he bought the book. It was really pretty simple. I've been with Dick Jackson ever since.

Do you think you'll ever write a sequel to any of your novels?

There came a point at which the situation in Zimbabwe deteriorated so much that it was just too depressing to write about it any more. I didn't want to write about Africa. I was going to do a sequel to The Ear, the Eye and the Arm —and I may yet do it—but I just didn't want to get into it. So I went back to a happier time, which was my childhood in Arizona. I took a trip to Arizona and sort of soaked up the sunlight and the ambience and then set about writing [The House of the Scorpion].

Did you do a lot of reading about cloning before you began writing The House of the Scorpion ?

Yes, I've thought about the implications of cloning for years. The original source for the idea was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Then [in 1932], of course, it was totally a fantasy. I read a lot about Dolly the sheep, and discovered that out of 256 tries, I believe, only one succeeded. Some of the fetuses didn't develop, and some were born deformed. The question is: What do you do with the 50 deformed babies in order to get one perfect one? That's when the problem of cloning became real to me. This is something [scientists] haven't worked out yet. You can't just kill a baby like you can a deformed sheep. It's a huge problem.

I'm not actually against cloning as long as it's pretty near to flawless, because it's just like creating a twin. But at the moment, I think it's a really bad thing to try. Plus, why do people do it? It's a kind of vanity; it's the will to live forever.

What was your inspiration for the nation of Opium, a haven for narcotics?

I grew up in Yuma on the Arizona-Mexico border. The place that I describe [in Scorpion ] is sort of a never-never land somewhere on the border. What I was mostly describing was the Chiricahua Mountains. But I went back to Ajo [AZ] to look at it and make sure that I had been accurate about what I described. The inspiration is that area. Even when I was a child, there were problems with drug imports and illegals all along that border—and we're talking 50 years ago. This is an old problem, and I felt impelled to write about it.

Talk about the environmental issues in Scorpion. You describe some very polluted landscapes.

Some of it's based on real things. The pollution in the Colorado River is real. I read a book when I was doing research called By the Lake of Sleeping Children by Luis Alberto Urrea, about children who live in slums along the Mexican border—right around Tijuana and over toward San Luis. There are actually rivers that are so poisonous that they're dangerous to go into, and yet people trying to cross into the United States go into them.

Based on the two novels you've set in the future—The Ear, the Eye and the Arm and, of course, Scorpion —would you say that your outlook for tomorrow is pretty gloomy?

No. I think people are ultimately hopeful. I don't have a totally bleak view of the future, and I don't want to give that impression to children either. There are little pockets of happiness wherever you happen to live. In both of those books, although there are a lot of problems, there's the hope of ultimate happiness. I don't like writing a hopeless book, where it's all depressing. It's not really about showing a dystopia but about showing children who can work their way out of the dystopia and find a kind of fulfillment. The children in all three of [my] better-known books don't ever give up. They keep trying. It's all about the struggle and the will to survive and also to stay human and to be good to other people. It's ultimately a hopeful look at people, not a sad one.