Dire Straits: Deborah Wiles's ‘Countdown' revisits our nation on the brink of a nuclear disaster
RSS| Photograph by Gregory Campbell/Getty Images for SLJ |
It's 1962 and Russia is sending missiles to Cuba. Eleven-year-old Franny Chapman lives near Washington, DC-a prime target-and she's terrified that the crisis may lead to war. You and Franny are from military families. Are there other similarities?
I lived in that same house, between the ages of 8 and 15. I also used the same street, the same school, and the same town. It's not an autobiographical novel on the surface, because the story is definitely not the story I lived. But the emotional story feels very true to me.
As a girl, were you scared doing those duck-and-cover drills?
I definitely was. That's one of the key things that made me want to tell this story. We heard about the crisis in school, of course, and my dad would watch the news every night, just like Uncle Otts does in Countdown. I'd watch it, and it was scary. The Russians had put missiles in Cuba and President Kennedy was talking on television. This was a very, very dire time. We didn't know if we were going to wake up tomorrow-some people actually said that. I remember lying in bed with my fear and wondering what to do with it. And that's when I started writing these letters.
To Kennedy and Khrushchev, like Franny does each night?
Yes, almost every night I would fall asleep writing these letters. I never put them down on paper, but it was obvious to me as a young child why we didn't want to start World War III. It was just so obvious that this was a ridiculous thing to do, that it would destroy us all.
There's a lot of buzz that your novel is as groundbreaking as Brian Selznick's Hugo Cabret. Was it your idea to include the brief opinionated biographies and those powerful images and quotes?
It was my idea. I want to thank you for bringing that up later and not first. It is such a striking piece of the book and even though I really appreciate that, it's usually the first thing everyone talks about. When I first saw what Scholastic did with the images and quotes that I gave them, I was stunned at how powerful they were. Even my agent said, "This isn't just a book, this is an experience." When I first saw it, I thought, it's stunning, it's beautiful, the design is more than I could have hoped for-and then I thought, don't lose Franny. Wait a minute! Come back! There's a story here.
Spoken like a true writer.
Actually, I feel that the scrapbook sections are an integral part of the storytelling. I wanted so much to create Franny's world for the reader. I gathered a huge file of photos and quotes and songs and newspaper clippings and cartoons. They're the things I would have seen, the things that Franny sees.
Countdown is the first volume of a trilogy about the '60s. That's an ambitious project.
I was heavily influenced by the John Dos Passos trilogy, "U.S.A." I was so in love with that trilogy, and I had sort of forgotten about it. My daughter had the novels assigned in college and she brought home The Big Money and I sat down with it and I said, "Oh, my gosh. It's what I've been trying to touch." I was trying to touch that great swell of humanity on this Earth and how we live with one another and how we make connections and relationships and what it all means. I know those are grand, sweeping themes, but I wanted to be able to touch them for young readers, because I know they're ready for them.
Rick Margolis is SLJ's executive editor. To read a review of Countdown (Scholastic), see page 98.
