Private I

The protagonists in Lynne Rae Perkins’s Newbery-winning novel are shy, talented, and extremely thoughtful—kind of like the author

By Barb Barstow -- School Library Journal, 3/1/2006

Ask folks in the tiny community of Suttons Bay, MI, to describe Lynne Rae Perkins, their suddenly famous friend, and the first word you’ll hear is “humble”—somebody who absolutely shuns the limelight. But the 49-year-old author/illustrator may have to get used to it. On a frosty January morning, Perkins discovered her novel Criss Cross had won the Newbery Medal, the nation’s most prestigious prize for kids’ books. The very next day, Perkins appeared on the Today Show, telling anchor Ann Curry that she “got very wobbly” in her knees and elbows when she received the good news.

As Perkins’s many fans know, this isn’t her first brush with success. Two of her picture books, Home Lovely (1995) and Snow Music (2003), are Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor Books, and Perkins’s debut novel, All Alone in the Universe (1999, all Greenwillow), was named one of the year’s best books by the American Library Association. In Criss Cross, Perkins brilliantly captures what it’s like to be 14 as Debbie, Hector, Lenny, and their friends search for acceptance and romance in a small Pennsylvania town. Not only is the novel gorgeously crafted, but it’s a daring piece of writing, mixing narrative, haiku, song lyrics, and even a question-and-answer dialogue.

Perkins grew up in Cheswick, PA, near Pittsburgh, majored in printmaking at Penn State, and attended grad school at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She moved to Leelanau County, MI, in 1987 with her husband Bill, a furniture maker, and now lives in northwest Michigan with their two children, Frank, 14, and Lucy, 12. We spoke to Perkins about her first break (meeting Greenwillow’s former art director, Ava Weiss, 13 years ago) and how she became an artist and a writer.

What inspired you to write Criss Cross?

I had this mental image that isn’t in the book of four people riding in different cars to the same event. And maybe, just based on what they were listening to on the radio, having a completely different experience. This might have something to do with when I was in grad school. I took an introductory filmmaking class, and one of the things that the professor said that was just so interesting to me is you can put any sound track to any film, and your mind will make it work. Your mind will find connections because it wants to. So I just liked the idea of having these four characters come together, maybe even just having driven down the same stretch of road, but in completely different mind-sets.

I have to think about how that plays out in the book. But I know it was one of my original motivations, which kind of happens in the chapter with Lenny and Debbie. She’s in the backyard reading and he’s in his house, and there are parallel columns of the same 15-minute period. That’s just an interesting idea to me. It wasn’t a goal of mine to write in different styles, I just had different thoughts or ideas that I wanted to present.

How did you create the story?

I have this period of time, every morning, where my mind is working at its best. It’s a couple of hours. It’s my window of opportunity, and I go and I sit at my desk, and I start with something that’s there—it might be a story idea or it might be a language idea. What makes it fun for me is that what’s happening now in my current life works its way into it and connections are made.

Can you share an example of that?

In the chapter on homework where Hector is writing, he’s working on his totally fine song, and that was a song that—I don’t know where it came from—I made it up driving in the car. I would sing it, and my kids would sing along for awhile, and I wanted Hector to write that song.

Debbie is one of my favorite characters, and she appears in both All Alone in the Universe and its sequel, Criss Cross. Do you have a special bond with her?

Debbie is an alter ego for me. She’s me, but I think what’s different between Debbie and me is she’s a little bit smarter than me. She’s a little bit quicker. Things that I didn’t figure out till I was 19, Debbie figures out when she is 14.

As I read both of your novels, I kept thinking that you have a wonderful ear for dialogue. Does that come from your childhood, growing up in a small town near Pittsburgh?

Yes. I lived on a little street where all of the houses were built at the same time, and everybody moved in pretty much within a year or two. All the trees were just little sticks tied to the ground. It was a great place to grow up because there were a ton of kids and we were always out in the street or out in the yard and our parents were sitting on the porch at night. I think that in a lot of places, that doesn’t happen as much now. I think people stay in their houses, with air conditioning.

I remember summer nights on the back porch, just listening to the adults talk. And maybe we would be playing cards or maybe we would just be sitting around. My mother is quite a talker, and our next-door neighbor was quite a talker. So I spent a lot of nights listening, which meant as a child, I didn’t talk a lot myself because I never really needed to.

That’s interesting. There are a lot of quiet and very funny moments in your stories.

My dad was a very quiet person. I think that a lot of my sense of humor comes from him. Often we would be doing something together, and it would be very quiet for the most part. Then he would say something and it would just strike me so funny that it would stay with me for a long time.

After grad school, you worked as a graphic designer in Boston, where you met your future husband. How did he persuade you to move to a remote part of Michigan?

He was from Michigan. It was easy to convince me because I was in love, and it seemed like a good idea. So we moved to a little cabin. My husband had bought land to grow Christmas trees on, and he had built this tiny cabin that he was going to camp out in while he worked on the trees.

Our first year there, we had nothing. We had no electricity or running water or telephone. Then we started getting those things, one by one. It was our goal to live as inexpensively as possible, which we did.

Did that help you grow as an artist?

Part of our goal was to have time to do the things we wanted to do. So I spent a lot of time in those first couple of years drawing and painting. Then, after I had our first child, I did some humorous drawings about being a mother. At the same time, somebody that I had grown up with back in Pittsburgh was designing software for a bilingual coloring book and needed somebody to do the drawings. I sent her copies of these drawings I had been working on, along with a letter, and she signed me up for the SCBWI [Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators] conference in Pittsburgh, which included a portfolio review with Ava Weiss [of Greenwillow].

What was in your portfolio?

[My friend] told me that what I should do is take a well-known fairy tale and do six drawings about it to prepare for the interview. I didn’t have a fairy tale that I wanted to do right then. For some reason, I had been running into little girls at the Laundromat and at the local lake, park, Target, whatever, and they always seemed to be about nine years old, and their names always seemed to be Tiffany, Brittany, or Nicole.

So I made up this character called Tiffany Brittany Nicole, and I decided that that’s what I would do drawings about. I spent about three months preparing for the portfolio review with Ava Weiss, and a big part of my portfolio was these drawings of this little girl who I decided would move into a trailer with her mother.

Then what happened?

I wasn’t a member of SCBWI, and a couple of days before the conference, they called my friend Cathy and said, “We’re going to have your friend show her drawings to someone local, because she’s not a member and we’ve had so many people sign up.” She said, “You can’t do that! She’s pregnant and she’s driving 600 miles to be here!” So they said, “Well, OK. We’ll make extra time.”

What was Ava’s reaction to your work?

She was extremely encouraging. She asked me if I also wrote. In the portfolio, I had included little bits of the story about Tiffany Brittany Nicole. So maybe that’s why [she asked me]—although she [later] said she generally does ask [artists] if they also write. She said, “Send us your ideas.”

She handed me her business card, and it seemed like a magic ticket to me. I went home and I had been thinking about this story [Home Lovely] for so long while I was doing the drawings that it almost wrote itself. I sent it to them, and they wanted to publish it.

Has winning the Newbery turned your life upside down?

I’m still waiting to see how it’s going to change my life. I’m a pretty private person, and I have left my cocoon reluctantly. It would be so easy to just become a professional speaker, and I know that there are things that I need to do. I know that I can’t just crawl into a hole. But writing and drawing are really important to me—they’re what I do. If I stop doing them, I’ll lose my center. I’m going to have to learn how to pick what I’m willing to do and then find really nice ways to say, “No, thank you.”