Mystic Man

British writer David Almond's debut in the world of young people's books has been almost as magical as the novels he writes. Skellig (Delacorte, 1998), his first novel for young people, captured both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award, two prestigious British honors, and was selected as a Michael L. Printz Honor Book by the Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association.

This past January, Kit's Wilderness (Delacorte, 2000), Almond's second novel, earned the Michael L. Printz Award as the year's best book for young adults. And Heaven Eyes (Delacorte, 2001), his just-released novel, is already receiving glowing reviews. (See last month's "starred" review on p. 245.) During the past year, Almond also found time to write his first children's play, Wild Girl, Wild Boy, which recently premiered in London.

Thanks to the success of his young people's books, Almond, a former postman, brush salesman, and teacher, now writes full time and frequently visits schools and libraries to talk with young readers. He lives in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, not far from his childhood town, with his wife, Sara Jane Palmer, a sculptor and ceramist, and their three-year-old daughter, Freya. We spoke to Almond in February.

For many years, you wrote solely for adults. Why did you decide to write for children?

It wasn't a decision really. I'd written lots of short stories for adults over a number of years. I wrote an adult novel that was rejected by everyone and had a couple of collections of adult short stories published. Then I wrote a whole series of stories based on my own childhood, which has just been published over here, called Counting Stars (Hodder, 2000). While I wrote those, I found I was working more and more from a sort of mind-set of a child. When I'd finished them, Skellig just happened to me; it really did just come out of the blue as if it had been waiting. And as soon as I began writing it, I realized it was a book for young people, for children. And I got very excited.

It's never entirely clear who or what Skellig is. Is he part angel, part bird, part human being? Can you trace his origins?

I suppose some of his origins come from mythological creatures that go right back into the depths of time. You know, they found very early paintings and pictures of beings like us with wings. Also, the idea of angels—you know, I was brought up as a Catholic—so the idea of angels was very common to me…. His name comes from two islands which are off the southwest coast of Ireland called the Skellig Islands, which are very barren and rocky, but which had been occupied by a religious community in the Dark Ages hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

As you wrote the story, did the angel-like creature Skellig surprise you?

When I began the story, I knew that Michael [the story's young protagonist] was going to find something when he went into the garage. I didn't quite know what he was going to find. And then when he did find something, I didn't know what it was that he found. Skellig really just grew with the book. He was a constant surprise to me, and I felt as if I discovered him along with Michael.

It seems as if many books portray boys in a one-dimensional way. Yet Michael is emotionally alive. I was interested in doing that when I was writing Skellig and Kit's Wilderness and Heaven Eyes, as well. When Skellig came out, it was amazing to me that a couple of reviews pointed to the fact that here was a boy in a book who actually seemed to know something about emotions. And then another review said how amazing it was that here was a man writing about a boy who could actually deal with emotions. And I thought, Well, why the hell not? I think boys are maybe often subject to a good bit of prejudice about what they're supposed to be like. They are much more multidimensional than they're often given credit for.

I read that you said Mina, the neighbor girl who befriends Michael, is the story's most important character. That surprised me.

I didn't expect Mina to be in the book. When Michael comes out of the garage and Mina sticks her head above the wall, that was her first appearance for me, as well. And I thought, Oh, goodness me. Who's this?

And then… it turned out [Mina] was home educated and she was really fascinated by William Blake—she was very imaginative but also very knowledgeable. I think she brought a… sharpness to my way of thinking about the book as I wrote it, which was really helpful. I think without Mina the book could have been quite a sentimental tale about a boy and an angel figure. But Mina is quite stern with them all. Mina is the one who points the finger and says, You must do this; you must do that. But also, in the process of being stern, she directs Michael to see some amazing things. She's a balance to Michael. She's a bit overconfident in lots of ways. Michael, maybe, needs a bit of her strength. And she learns from Michael, as well. I think she learns something about tenderness from Michael.

In Skellig, the setting plays a relatively minor role. But in Kit's Wilderness, the landscape is integral to the story. Where does that rough landscape come from?

I grew up in a town which was an old coal-mining town. So where I played was on the surface of the earth and underneath there were lots of old coal-mine workings. We had a monument—and there was an old graveyard—to a pit disaster which had happened in 1812: there was just a list of boys' names. So all of that began to work and work as I sat down to write the next book.

The landscape of moorland and ruined mines comes from county Durham, which is very close to where I used to live. So the landscape was very, very important. It's an image, really. And also, I think, after writing Skellig, which is quite an intimate, very localized book, I wanted to write something on a bigger scale…. With Kit's Wilderness, [I] began with the landscape and with a memory of some children's game that I played in a school I went to.

Are some of the story's characters, like Kit's grandfather, also from your childhood?

Yeah. I had a very close relationship with my own maternal grandfather, but he was a very different kind of man. He was a very silent man. I think one of the things that I did want to do in Kit's Wilderness was to present the strength of those old men. And also the tenderness that they have.

One of the things I remember from growing up was the men who had worked in heavy industry and coal mining, ship building, and steel working…. There was an outside view that these were hard, rough-tough men. And in some ways they were, but one of the things that I remember most of all about them was their real, deep tenderness. And I wanted to work with that.

Kit's Wilderness has a lot of imagery—darkness and light, plate tectonics, the whole Ice Age thing, which we loved. There's even a story within a story, when Kit writes about Lak, a boy who lived during the Ice Age. How did you juggle all of those elements?

There was a point when I thought, I can't do this. I remember walking; I was actually in Scotland at the time; I wrote a lot of it in a castle in Scotland. And I was walking through the grounds of the castle and I remember saying, I can't do this, this is just too much. This was the point when the story of Lak had come in, which I hadn't expected. Kit was writing the story about Lak [for a school assignment], and I thought, Gosh, I can't write this book.

But then I thought, Well, I can…. Once I had made that decision and gone back to the book, it really did just take on its own life. It was a bit like when I said that Mina helped me to write Skellig. You know, Mina was a very powerful force for me. Kit writing the story of Lak in Kit's Wilderness really helped the story for me. It was as if each time I came to pieces of the Lak story, I'd say, Oh, Kit can do that. So Kit was writing that bit, and I was writing the other story.

In all three of your novels, the children eventually help save one another. In Skellig, for instance, Michael and Mina are concerned about saving a baby's life. In Kit's Wilderness, Kit enters a dangerous coal mine to rescue his friend John. And in your new book, Heaven Eyes, three kids (Erin Law, January, and Mouse) try to save a mysterious girl named Heaven Eyes. What's that about?

All of the children that I've written about so far are very brave people who challenge themselves to do something really dangerous in order to do something that's very important—to rescue one another, and to bring one another back together into the light, and to save one another. I think children are like that; I think children are very brave and perhaps see the world in those terms.

For Heaven Eyes, you created a very haunting, atmospheric landscape. It seems as if the setting is playing a greater role in your fiction.

I am getting very much into place. Heaven Eyes is set on the river that flows through the town where I live, the river Tyne. [In the story] I don't name it as the Tyne. You know, historically, it's always been a crucial part of this part of northeastern England. There's the river and the bridges and also there's lots of regeneration going on in the keys down here. But there's still areas of dereliction, which is a very haunting thing, because in my lifetime it's changed from being a place where there were lots of workhouses, lots of warehouses…, lots of cranes, lots of boats on the river, to being a place where there are [shops and everything is] well lit….

I wanted to send the children down the river. It's almost like a journey into the past, into the darkness, for them to discover something left behind before everything becomes changed and [turns into a] clean, new city.

The children run away from an orphanage and get stuck on a muddy bank called the Black Middens. Does it actually exist?

There is a mud bank called the Black Middens on the river. I moved it upriver so it fit [the story] better. It's actually down at the mouth of the river, but I moved it up closer to the city so that they could land on it. I used that because it's such a lovely name.

What does "middens" mean?

A middens is a kind of a rubbish bin, a waste area.

At the beginning of the story, Erin, January, and Mouse—the children who live at the orphanage—see themselves as "damaged" because of the way adults have labeled them. That's a very painful idea.

Yeah. It happens so easily. I think one of the things I wanted to do in Heaven Eyes was to write about happiness. Erin keeps saying, "I'm happy, I'm happy." In the home, Maureen [the therapist who runs the orphanage] says, "How can you be happy? How can you possibly be happy because you seem to have nothing to be happy about?" But I think children are capable of having happiness despite the circumstances, which often they're not given credit for.

Heaven Eyes, like Skellig, is a pretty mysterious character. She's has webbed feet and hands and a very strange way of talking. Where did she come from?

I'm not sure…. There are lots of stories in Europe about medieval saints who would be dug out [of the ground] when they were supposed to be dead. And when they dug [the saints] up again after years and years and years, they would look as if they were sleeping. They were kind of rescued from death by being dug up. With Heaven Eyes, I almost got the feeling she's a bit like them as well. It's almost like she had been right to the point of death, she almost died with her family, and has come right back again from the shores of death…. So maybe it's something to do with resurrection or going as far as the frontiers of death and coming back again.

In your fiction, you create very realistic worlds that are infused with magic. There's often no clear-cut boundary between the ordinary and the transcendent. Do you think that's how children view the world?

I think it often is like that for me and for children. Being brought up as a Catholic, I was sort of taught to believe there's this world and then there's the other world, which is a beautiful, heavenly world. But actually this world is miraculous. If you look at certain things in this world, it's actually amazing what's in this world. So I'm not interested in a separation between a heavenly, miraculous world and this sort of ordinary, fallen world. I think our world's got everything we need. And if there is anything bigger or greater than is actually in this world, then maybe we can get closer to it, and maybe children can get closer to it, through acts of courage and acts of imagination.

When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?

I always knew I wanted to write; I was writing when I was very young. I used to write little books when I was a kid, and right through my childhood I wrote—obviously just bits and pieces, fragments, but it was always what I wanted to do.

As a child, were you a reader?

Yes.... I loved books and I loved our local library. I came from a small town on the banks of the Tyne and I loved going to the library. I dreamed about going one day and seeing my books on the shelves. Some of my favorite stories were old legends, particularly things like... King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable, which I just loved. When I was a teenager, I read quite a lot of science fiction, again mythology. In my midteens I got to read Hemingway; Hemingway had a big effect on me when I was a teenager.

When you were a teacher, what ages did you teach?

I taught all ages. I taught in a primary school, which is like 10- and 11-year-olds. Then I taught adults. For most of my career, I taught kids with learning problems. I taught, part time, special needs kids with moderate learning difficulties, which was probably the most interesting kind of teaching I ever did…. One of the things I came to see more and more was that a lot of these children, I think, had learning problems because they had never really been told stories when they were young. They had never kind of shared in stories. So most of the world was just fragments of information to them. I spent a lot of my teaching career working on stories with children who had special learning problems. And I saw the power of stories to really help them to enjoy school, to enjoy learning.

What has writing for children taught you?

One of the things that I found about writing for young people was that there really did seem to be something elemental about it. And I think the best children's books, the best books for young people, have got some kind of mythic dimension that a lot of adult novels just don't seem to have. And it has something to do with the directness of writing for young people, and the seriousness of young people's minds. They're very playful, obviously, but also there's a real seriousness about young people and a desire to think about the great themes of life, like death, darkness, and light. Were do we come from? Where are we going? Writing for young people takes you into that kind of mythic field.