Vera B. Williams on A Chair for Always
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By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 8/20/2008 2:10:00 PM
Children’s author and illustrator Vera B. Williams was recently awarded the 2009 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature, a $25,000 prize sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and World Literature Today that honors an accomplished contemporary writer or illustrator of children's literature. SLJ talked to Williams, 81, about her wonderful books and what she has in the works.
You were one of the first authors to write children's books that don't deal with very kidlike subjects. Was that a conscious decision?
I did want to put the kind of kids I grew up amongst in stories. We all lived in crowded apartments. Whether our parents whispered or hollered, we were smack in the midst of their worries; a job, war, the murder of Jews, the lynching of blacks. My reading friends and I also wept over books; Uncle Tom's Cabin, Nobody's Girl and Nobody's Boy, and also Children of the Soil, The Happy Prince, Heidi. They were wonderful adventure stories having lots to do with being really poor. My parents were communist leaning, active in trying to help the unemployed and the evicted, but devoted also to literature, music, art, nature. Mrs. Greiner is based on my mother and her friends.
Why do you think readers are able to connect so deeply with your stories?
I don't know exactly. But I get a deep satisfaction out of my feelings and knowing that both children and adults, even if inarticulate, share these feelings. It seems to me I was always in love, always passionate, always making things, and also making mischief, and kind of wild just to be alive....
Do you often hear from your readers and their parents?
I do hear a lot from kids. Once, when I was much younger than my present 81, I got a letter; "You are very smart even though you are very old.” Most of the children get right into stories as accounts of true life. They are not distanced enough to be critical, but they do think up improvements to the characters and plot. They want stories, like lives, to be ongoing. They want Rosa's father to be there in the Chair stories. They plan a wedding for Rosa's mother, whereas I, her author, plan to send the mother on to college! They are a satisfying audience, saddened by the sad parts, pleased by the happy... impressed by drawing skill, loving the colors and the borders and other little touches, mystified by how a book, which is after all a very satisfying artifact, gets made. I have enacted the four-color printing process for them by pretending to be a sheet of paper going through the press. I never forgot my childhood trip to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where I saw paper being made and a press in action.
Do you see yourself as an iconoclast, someone who decided to follow her own way?
My father tended to be anarchist. We celebrated what an individual could bring to the institutions of society rather than the other way around. We organized and marched in protests. I remember one to get penny milk for kids. I was always argumentative, full of improvements for my neighborhood and city...for the world. I adored the world, but sorrowed over its cruelties. I planned to fix it one day (as soon as possible). I think the young often have that drive. I stood for president of the G.O. at P.S. 4 in the Bronx. Our principal, an innovative man himself, vetted my little speech. He said I would have to wait till I grew up to quote Lincoln on overthrowing the government if it failed to respond to electoral change. I am not the hothead I once was, but I have continued to be active on many problems. It's part and parcel of the good life.
Are you working on anything now?
A Chair for Always, the fourth book in the series that began with A Chair for My Mother (1982) is on the fall 2009 Greenwillow list. They have done all my books. In this I have been lucky as it has been particularly satisfying. It has been eight years since my last book, Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart (2001), and it's exciting and a little daunting to be deeply into another.
