
Jacqueline Woodson is the author of the memoir "Brown Girl Dreaming" and many other books for children and young adults.
Photo by: Carlos Diaz
Jacqueline Woodson is the author of “Miracle’s Boys,” “Harbor Me” and many other books for children and young adults. Her bestselling memoir “Brown Girl Dreaming” is written in verse and in 2015, the Poetry Foundation named her the Young People’s Poet Laureate. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2020. We spoke with Woodson in front of a small audience at Literary Arts in downtown Portland in 2019.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re going to listen back today to the hour we spent with the author Jacqueline Woodson in 2019. We talked in front of an audience at the Literary Arts Space in downtown Portland, ‘Read those poems in all kinds of American,’ one of Woodson’s characters says. He’s talking about different languages, English and Spanish. But the line is a great description of Woodson’s career. She has written more than 30 books in and about and for all kinds of American. Her characters are immigrants and biracial kids and Children of color. They’re being raised by one parent or an uncle or by their grandparents. They deal with prison and pregnancy with racism and resilience with family picnics and family separation with love and with death. In other words, Woodson deals with real life and she never ever underestimates her young readers. I could list all the awards Woodson has won, but then we would not have time to listen back to this conversation. In just the last few years, she won the National Book Award and was named the National Ambassador for Young Peoples’ Literature. We started, appropriately enough, with a poem called the Beginning. It’s from Woodson’s memoir in verse, ‘Brown Girl Dreaming.’
Woodson: I cannot write a word yet, but at three, I now know the letter ‘J.’ I love the way it curves into a hook that I carefully top with a straight hat, the way my sister has taught me to do; love the sound of the letter and the promise that one day this will be connected to a full name, my own, that I will be able to write by myself without my sister’s hand over mine, making it do what I cannot yet do. How amazing these words are, that slowly come to me, how wonderfully on and on they go, ‘Will the words end?’I ask, whenever I remember to. ‘Nope,’ my sister says, all of five years old now, and promising me infinity.
Miller: Was it as good as you thought it was going to be, when you got past that one letter and could actually write your name and write a couple words?
Woodson: It’s still amazing to me all of these decades later that letters form words, and words form sentences, and sentences form paragraphs, and that’s all there is to writing. You know, that the power of a single letter becomes the power of everything. So it still blows me away.
Miller: Did you get encouragement from your family early on to pursue this?
Woodson: Well, my family was part of the Great Migration. So we came to New York City from South Carolina, and for those of you who don’t know, the Great Migration was the journey where millions of Black people left, the really oppressive conditions of the South for places like California, New York, Boston, Philadelphia. It was a hard journey. And so my mom was a single mom, and I think when I said I wanted to be a writer, it made her very nervous, because she didn’t understand anything about an artist class. Right? It was the idea that you came to this new country basically, which was the country of New York, in that case, for better opportunity, and the opportunity was you were going to be educated. You were going to go out and you were going to get a job and you want a move, out of her house.
Miller: I mean, that’s what we’ve heard when we talked to Children of immigrants. So I didn’t bring you to America for you to be an artist, you should find some real work, not because, not to denigrate the arts, but because of the fear that you’re not able to take care of yourself.
Woodson: Exactly. And the whole journey was about survival and especially, in the case of us and in the case of Black people who are coming from a very unsafe environment. So my mom’s idea was like, basically you’re safe now and you have all of this opportunity. Again, it wasn’t, as you say about, derision of the arts, but about a lack of understanding of it. So, she saw writing as a nice hobby, but she had bigger plans like maybe, be a hairdresser.
Miller: Something crafty.
Woodson: I mean I started taking sewing classes when I was seven years old. Or even a teacher, like a teacher was way high up, which I completely agree with, in terms of how teachers should be elevated on that field, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Writing made me happiest...
Miller: Let’s go back a bit, before you and your family went to New York City. You wrote that the first time your brother said the word ain’t your mother got a branch of willow tree, stripped off the leaves and whipped his legs with it saying, ;You will never say ‘ain’t’ in this house, you will never say ‘ain’t anywhere. Other words that you say were forbidden were ‘Huh,’ ‘Y’all,’ ‘Git,’ or ‘Gonna.’ What was her reason?
Woodson: She wanted us to be able to survive in a country that didn’t speak our language. I mean, it was also, my mother was very well spoken and, I think she didn’t want us to be ‘mired down’ by our Southern Selves. I think it was the code switching that so many immigrant kids and so many Black kids and so many poor kids know - how, you speak a certain way inside and you speak another way when you leave the house. And again, it’s about opportunity and kind of going beyond, but also she believed in English spoken a certain way, and I mean like the list of words we were not allowed to say. It goes on and on, I stop it there. But she wanted us to speak ‘proper English.’
Miller: Did that help you, do you think, or hinder you, this official family prohibition on language? You became a writer?
Woodson: Yes, because when you’re kind of repressed, you find ways around it. And I think that’s the beauty of creativity. You learn other ways to say stuff. My son is 11 and he was writing some essay, and he wanted to curse in it, and I said to him, like that curse makes people feel a certain way, but it takes them out of the narrative, and it’s cliche - everyone understands it, but does it make them feel anyway? Does it make them remember something?
Miller: Such a different reason you gave for not swearing than your mom gave because this is the writer’s reason.
Woodson: Yeah, yeah, and it allowed me to have much more creative language. I still say y’all.
Miller: So let’s take a question from the audience. What’s your name?
Lubella [??]: My question is what comes, what makes you come up with the titles of the book?
Woodson: Oh, that’s a great question. Say your name again.
Lubella: Lubella.
Woodson: Thank you. Where do my titles come from? Sometimes I know the title even before I know what the book is trying to say. Brown Girl Dreaming. I knew that was going to be the title because I knew I was a Brown girl, dreaming and I wanted that in there, and I think some people were concerned about that title, that maybe it should be Girl Dreaming or something that could speak to a, quote unquote, bigger audience. I keep using the quotes because we’re on radio... you can’t see this…
Miller: When you say some people thought get rid of the ‘Brown,’ who was saying that?
Woodson: You know, readers, not my editor, my editor is so incredibly supportive, I could put any title on it, she’s like, that’s great. But I definitely had readers who are like, well, don’t you want to reach a bigger audience, and so, there had been reviews about it, questioning the title, ‘Brown Girl,’ and then there were reviews that understood why I said use the title Brown Girl Dreaming. So there were definitely titles I knew ‘After Tupac and D. Foster,’ was a title that took me a long time to come to. Whereas ‘If You Come Softly,’ I knew right away because I knew I love the poem by Audrey Lorde, and wanted that to be part of the title. So the titles come from everywhere. Sometimes I’ve had books where I’ve had to change the title because I thought it was one title and then there was another book in the world with that title. So, now I if I have a title in my head, I’ll google to make sure it’s not out there already.
Miller: We were talking a little bit about writing, but you’ve also written about your early years of reading, and then the early challenges you had. You wrote, when I read the words ‘twist,’ ‘twirl’ across the page, when they settle,It’s too late. The class has already moved on. What kind of reader were you, and what was it like for you to read?
Woodson: So, that’s funny, because I’m giving a ‘TED Talk,’ next week, and this is part of it. I was a very, very, very slow reader, and I still am a very, very slow reader. And I’m sure if I was reading today, I would probably get diagnosed as dyslexic.
Miller: They’re not necessarily the same thing, though.
Woodson: No, no, they’re not, but, I think people quickly jumped to...
Miller: Yeah, that would have been the diagnosis.
Woodson: I think that’s how, you know, sometimes people, for me, it was a deep, deep engagement with literature, in a time where that wasn’t necessarily allowed and not understood. And so, I’m talking about the seventies where we were being pushed to read faster and not necessarily deeper, or more engaged with the literature. So, I would be reading the sentences over and over again until they made sense to me, and made a very deep sense to me. By then, you know, the class had moved on, they weren’t reading the same way I was reading. I got in trouble for it. You know, I was being pushed to read faster, I was being pushed to consume more. That’s not how I wanted to read, and I didn’t know that that wasn’t how I wanted to read because I was already, at a very young age, reading like a writer.
Miller: How do writers read writers?
Woodson: Hopefully read with a deep respect for the narrative, and a sense that a book takes a long time to write. So we want to read it slowly, right?
Miller: If someone’s, because it’s almost a cliche now, ‘I loved your book so much, I read it in one evening;’ when someone says that to you, what do you say, back?
Woodson: Go back and read it again, because it took me three years to write. But it’s true. I want, I mean, even, with ‘Brown Girl Dreaming,’ there’s an intention to the white space, there’s an intention to the line break, and I think that it is really important to read slowly and to really engage in, you asked what I mean by reading like a writer, a writer reads to study the text, right? The text becomes a tool for learning how to write better. So when I read a book by a writer who I really love, right now, I’m reading a book by Ocean Vuong called ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,’ and it’s stunning and I just keep going back and reading because he’s a poet and now he’s writing this memoir to find out how he did what he did. And from a very young age I was doing that.
Miller: If you’re just tuning in, we are talking right now with the writer Jacqueline Woodson, who’s written more than 30 books, largely for young readers. But everybody can find something in them. We are coming to you, in front of an audience, from the Literary Art Space in downtown Portland. Let’s take another question from one of our young readers.
Ariara: Out of all the books that you have written, which one has the deepest connection to you?
Woodson: What’s your name?
Woodson: Ariara, I think the book that has the deepest connection to me is probably Brown Girl Dreaming because it’s my first memoir, and it’s the book that I had to do the most research and the most soul searching for. So I am, I pick it up and I see myself in it, whereas other books I’ve written, I only see a part of myself in it.
Miller: ‘Show Way’ comes to mind for me, as another book which is written, I guess a little bit before that, right, which is also deeply about your family story going back maybe five or seven generations. How did you decide it was time? I mean, because you had mined your experience, a lot of ways. I mean, even in the fiction, clearly there are bits of yourself and your experience, why was it time for you, four years ago or so, to write a memoir?
Woodson: So when I wrote ‘Show Way,’ because she’s the beginning of ‘Brown Girl Dreaming,’ right? My grandmother, who was always asking me, when are you gonna give me some great grandkids? When are you gonna give me some great grandkids? ...died, four months before I got pregnant with my daughter, Tosh, I knew I wanted to connect the two of them because they were not going to meet in this space. So I began writing ‘Show Way’ to trace the maternal line. When I started writing ‘Brown Girl Dreaming,’ it was after I had won a ton of awards and written a ton of books. I was trying to find out how I got from this place, of being this young person growing up in Brooklyn, who wanted to one day be a writer, to writing all these books and winning all these awards. So I just started at where I thought was the beginning. And as I was writing it, I figured, write down all I remembered, and then when I got to a point where I didn’t remember anymore, I’d ask my siblings, I’d ask my mom, I’d ask my dad, about halfway into writing it,my mom died, suddenly and that door closed there was, she wasn’t there to answer all these questions. So I knew then that the book was going to take a different turn, it was gonna be about how I got here through her. So then, I just knew it was the time to tell this story, and I didn’t know what it was going to be. I didn’t know if it was gonna be for adults or kids, young adults, because it was so out of the norm of what I had done before, and the book was falling apart, I was falling apart, and my editor was like, just keep writing. And it became a book for, and it became a book for so many people because I was born in the sixties, and it’s chasing history from the 19 hundreds, the 18 hundreds to present day. And so it was so different and so unfamiliar to me, and I felt so inclined to keep on writing it because I wanted to figure out so much stuff.
Miller: Let’s go back to you as a reader, as a slow, careful reader, trying to understand how words work, how books are put together. What kinds of books did you have access to?
Woodson:I had access to everything. I lived around the corner.
Miller: I wish our radio audience could see the smile on your face as you said that, actually recollecting the breadth of your library at your disposal.
Woodson: Yes. And it’s interesting, because we grew up with the Encyclopedia Britannica in our house and the Child Craft Encyclopedia. And those were our two sets of books. And we lived a block and a half from the Brooklyn Public library, Washington Irving Branch. And so my mother made sure - we were a very text based family, because we were also very religious. So my mother made sure we always had active library cards. If we brought back books that were overdue it came out of our allowance. So she was hardcore about that. But I don’t, I think I’m smiling because I didn’t realize at the time what a gift that was, that even if she was saying, you can’t be a writer, she’s saying here is the world of writing, right? And so I had access, I mean, I didn’t have access to everything because we had a very stern librarian there, and she wouldn’t let us go into the adult books. Like the Children’s section was the Children’s section, and never do you cross that?
Miller: That line?
Woodson: Yeah, So, but but in the Children’s section, there were so many um picture books and so many middle grade books. There were not a lot of books by and about people of color. And I feel like that became a part of why I’ve written 30 books because I’m trying to fill that hole, many years later.
Miller: What did that hole mean? How much did you see yourself, your family, your experience reflected in the books that you had access to?
It’s very little, and a whole lot. Right? So I think when you, I always talk about Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, who was a big proponent of, at the time, what was known as Multicultural Children’s Literature. What she wrote about was the importance of young people having both mirrors and windows in their books. So they had mirrors, so they saw reflections of themselves in the narratives, and they had windows, so they saw experiences into other worlds. I had a ton of windows, you know, and they were mostly white windows. So there was a lot of white people and their dogs and their kids and happily ever afters and very few mirrors. I say both, because what I ended up trying to do, often was find the mirror in that window. So, with someone like Judy Blume, her Margaret and I were both flat chested. So, you know, so I was like Margaret and, ‘Are you there, God, it’s me Margaret?’ As he hints in ‘The Outsiders,’ you know, the guys were coming from underserved communities. So was I, so I would find the places where I existed, but with a growing resentment that I had to search so hard, and then I came across writers like Nikki Giovanni. I remember my mother had an album of Nikki Giovanni reading Nikki Giovanni, reading her poetry and I was like, what is that? And it blew my mind. It had music in the backdrop and it was just beautiful, and then coming across Virginia Hamilton and Mildred Taylor’s, ‘Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,’ so slow, and James Baldwin and eventually Audrey Lorde. And I remember I was in about the fifth or sixth grade and I got a copy of the American Negro Poetry Anthology, and and then being introduced to all of these poets from the Harlem Renaissance through that book was just kind of amazing to me. I mean, there are other poets in there, but just the discovery of the Harlem Renaissance.
Miller: You said, that this has propelled you, this experience has propelled your career. It’s why you’ve written 30 books in the way you have, about the topics you have, and featuring the characters you have. What does it mean to you that countless thousands and thousands of young people of color, have read your books and seen aspects of their lives in them?
Woodson: It’s pretty mind blowing. I mean, you have a dream and you don’t necessarily expect it to happen, to come true, and you definitely don’t expect it to come true in the way that it does sometimes. So, I feel like I know Audrey Lorde said we should wake up, knowing we have work to do and go to bed, knowing we’ve done that work. And I feel like I have done that work. So I feel good about the work I’ve done and the people I’ve reached through my work and the way that young people of color and all people don’t have to walk through the world without mirrors, without representations in the literature that helped them feel legitimized in the bigger world. That’s really important to me. I mean, even when the white kids, I remember writing a book called, ‘I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This’ and about there’s a poor white girl named Lena in there. I was very intentional how I wrote her, and made her very strong, because I wanted the kids who came to that book and saw Lena in it, that they saw someone who was resilient and who was a survivor who could walk through the pain that she was going through in that moment. So, I do, I am intentional. No matter what, who the character is, I’m writing with the hope that you know, kids of color and all kids will find some part of themselves in the narrative.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name?
Page: Page.
Miller: Page, Go ahead.
Page: What made you choose the language in the book? It sounds like you’re talking to someone,
Woodson: Which book Page? Which book stands out for you? I’ll repeat your question.
Page: About Dreaming.
Woodson: Okay, ‘Brown Girl Dreaming. So for those who didn’t hear Page’s question, it was what made me choose the language in my book? It sounds like I’m talking to someone. I think I wanted to write the way I remembered hearing the language, and remembered my own self talking as a young person. And I also wanted to put it in verse, because its memory, and that’s how memory comes to us. IIt comes to us in these small moments with all this white space, all the stuff that we don’t remember around it. So, you know, when you think about writing a memoir, it’s not like your life is chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, right? It’s like I have this memory, and then I have that memory, and then there’s that memory over there. So that’s why I wrote it that way. I also wanted to, I didn’t want to sound like a grown up talking down to someone, I wanted to go back and this is how most people, right? I remember a writer saying when we write, we should write remembering the Children we were, because the essence of childhood doesn’t change. So I think I wanted to go back and remember the language of my childhood to put it on paper in that way.
Miller: How do you do that though? How do you tap into the mindset? Your own mindset of being young? I think for so many of us, it’s just, you know, our older versions of ourselves, they overwrite that, and even if we remember events that happened in our childhood, we’re remembering them from our 30 or 40 or 80 year old selves. How do you just happen into your young self in a real authentic way?
Woodson: I think I never left it. I think that one reason we leave a particular time in our life and shut it down is because it’s broken, our hearts were afraid to look back on it. It was too painful in some way, and I think closing those doors on our past, it leaves less for us to remember. And for me, I mean I can think of commercials from the seventies and songs and memories, and much to, you know, my mom’s, this may sometimes be like, how do you remember that? Or my friends when I start singing, like ‘Choo Choo Charlie Was an Engineer,’ or some of the early commercials. I think for me it’s all very important to hold onto and yes, compartmentalized, I go there and I choose a memory from when I was six, so from when I was 14 and sometimes they aren’t the greatest memories, but it does help me tap into my younger self.
Miller: It’s like you are made in a laboratory to be a Children’s or young adult author. I mean the mind of a writer caring about language and words in this careful way and then a memory of being young and then a heart to care about people’s stories. We have to take a break. We have a lot more coming up though, with the writer Jacqueline Woodson and our audience here at Literary Arts, stay tuned. From the Gert Boyie Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller, if you’re just tuning in. We’re listening back today to our 2019 conversation with the author, Jacqueline Woodson. She’s written more than 30 books for Children, young adults and everybody else, and has won countless literary awards, including the National Book Award, the Newbery Honor and the Coretta Scott King Award. We did the show at the Literary Art Space in downtown Portland, in front of an audience of young people. At one point, we took a question from a girl named Olivia:
Olivia: In your book last summer with Maizon]. Are there gonna be any more adventurous / storylines about Margaret? Amazing?
Woodson:” Hah. That’s a good question. So, it’s actually a trilogy. So there’s ‘Last Summer With Maizon,’ and then there’s ‘Maizon at Blue Hill,’ and then the final book in the trilogy is called ‘Between Madison and Palmetto.’ So, and now it’s over because by the time I got to the third book, I was sick of those girls.
Miller: Some authors, some Children’s book authors, especially in young adult ones, I mean, they spend careers, sort of, with some set of people. I mean, I don’t know if it’s because the market wants that or what?
Woodson: Nah...
Miller: That’s not... It doesn’t interest you at all?
Woodson: No, not at all. I mean, I think I’ve written ‘Peace...Peace Locomotion,’ then ‘If You Come Softly’ and ‘Behind you,’ but after that, no way. I mean, there’s so many other characters in my head, I can’t even imagine. And especially when you tell people you’ve written 30 something books, they’re like, oh, so what’s the name of your series? Like…? No, I can’t write a series, but I applaud the people who can stay with people that long. I mean, in real life, I can stay with people a long time. But on the page,...
Miller: Let’s take another question. What’s your name?
Mary Jane: Mary Jane. What advice do you have for people that, like, want to be other writers?
Woodson: So what advice do I have for people who want to be writers? I think first and foremost, right? Know that everyone has a story and everyone has a right to tell their story. I think it’s really important to show your writing to people you trust. When I first write something, I show it to my friend, Toshi and I show it to my partner and I say, tell me only what you love about this book, that’s all I want to hear, is everything you love about it. And it’s not until the second, and then the second time I ask him to ask me three questions, but I never want to show someone something and then to immediately tell me what’s not working, because that’s not gonna make me want to go back and write more. I think it’s important the way you learn to write is by reading. Read lots of picture books. and anything you love, read it more than once because you really do learn from other writers.
Miller: You know, we’ve gotten such great questions from the young people in our audience so far, but I want to ask you guys a question. Whoever wants answers, what has it meant to you to read the books of Jacqueline Woodson’s that you have read? If you can just throw your hand up and we’ll get the microphone to you…
Woodson: The adults can answer…
Miller: Or the adults, as well, and we are going to give our Executive Producer Stage a workout, as she runs, what is your name?
Cohen: My name is Marla[????] Cohen. I also, as a young child,was encouraged to read by my father and I read something called ‘Beck Cell Twins’ [????] back in the fifties, you can’t even find it anymore. But I’m just so, I just think it’s so wonderful that you have brought young women of color into your books. Do you continue to write about women of color? I like, I look at this row, this is amazing. And I want to hear and I want to read more. And are you going to do that? Are you gonna put in, you know, an immigrant from Mexico, a young Jewish girl that needs some identity.
Woodson: You know, it’s interesting. I mean, why wouldn’t I write about women of color? I think their stories, are stories, as legitimate as anyone’s. And I have written about Jewish girls. I have written about immigrant people. I have, I think that one thing that literature does, is what I was saying before, it is it gives people an opportunity to meet people they might not otherwise meet, they get to meet them on the page if maybe they live in homogenous communities or they just don’t have a diverse community, which always makes me scratch my head. I think that the world is so amazingly diverse. It saddens me that people aren’t engaging with people across lines of race and class and sexual identity and all the ways that we can have these conversations. I have no doubt that the young women of color in this room and all the young people have amazing stories to tell, and will hopefully write those stories and or speak those stories, or sing them, or play them on an instrument, or play them in a sport. But for me, it’s just really important that the world pays attention to the fact that we all have a right to be here and be fully human in the eyes of everyone else.
Miller: What’s your name?
Dion: My name is Dion, and I was thinking about how do you get past the problem of writer’s block?
Woodson: So Dionne’s question about writer’s block; there’s no such thing. Okay. I think the thing that we’ve made up the name writer’s block for, is fear, I think we’re afraid that people might judge us. I think we’re afraid that our story might not be good enough, that we might not be able to finish it. And, I think for me, when I get afraid, I listen to music all the time, like the minute I start writing, I put my earphones on, and I’m taken out of the world. One thing I always say is if, if no one was going to see your writing, what is the thing you would write? And so just get a piece of paper, get a pen, a pencil and start writing. That you can tear it up the minute you’re done with it. But what is that thing that’s keeping you from telling your truth? There’s a saying that if you survive kindergarten, you have enough to write about for the rest of your life. And I really believe…
Miller: ...And middle school gives you a couple of lifetimes...,
Woodson: You survive middle school, you can do anything. So but just just do that, and it doesn’t have to be a long piece, right? You look at ‘Brown Girl Dreaming.’ and it’s one image at a time that begins to tell a longer story. There’s a really great book by Anne Lamott called ‘Bird by Bird.’ It’s basically how to write, and it’s very short and it gives you some great ideas to help unlock the writing. So I never think it’s blocked. I think sometimes it might, it just might need some unlocking and that might just simply be sitting down and giving yourself space to do it.
Miller: Could you read us another poem from Brown Girl dreaming? This is about life in New York City after your family had moved from South Carolina.
Woodson: This is called Herschel Street. So we moved to Herschel Street, where Aunt Kay and Bernie lived upstairs and Peaches from Greenville lived below us. And on Saturday nights more people from Greenville came by, sitting and running their mouths, while the pots on the stove bubbled with collards and sizzled with chicken, and cornbread baked up brown inside Kay’s big black oven. And the people from Greenville brought people from Spartanburg and Charleston, and all of them talked like our grandparents talked and ate what we ate. So they were red dirt and pine trees, they were fireflies and jelly jars and lemon chiffon ice cream cones. They were laughter on hot city nights, hot milk on cold city mornings, good food and good times, fancy dancing and soul music. They were family.
Miller: Those are some of the positives that, that you brought from the south, but you’ve also written in the same book about riding on the bus with your grandmother in the south, and having her take you to the back of the bus, even though that particular civil right had been won, she said it’s easier than having white folks look at me like I’m dirt, easier to stay where you belong. What effect did that have on you, walking with her to the back and having her say that?
Woodson: You know, it was interesting, because my grandmother was going to the back of the bus well into the seventies and I think a lot of Southerners…
Miller: ...In New York City as well...
Woodson: No, the interesting thing is in New York, she never let us sit in the back of the bus because we always wanted to run to the back of the bus because you were on the wheel and it made you bounce and and it was just exciting, but she would never let us sit in the back of the bus in new york. But in South Carolina, the minute we got back down South, we had to go to the back of the bus. So my grandmother was born in 1917 and spent her whole life in South Carolina until she came to New York in the seventies. So she was so deeply conditioned and still quite afraid and you know, my mother and aunt were part of the civil rights movement, my grandmother wasn’t, I mean she was, by way that she was a Black woman in south Carolina, and the proximity to it, but it was it was a really interesting thing, and it just made it made me mad, like I didn’t understand the backstory of going to the back of the bus, like even though I heard of it and stuff, it was still kind of theoretical for me…
Miller: ...Mad at her?
Woodson: Well, I think I was mad at her for a long time and mad at the system that had made her the way she was. And I was a young child, so there was so much I didn’t understand. But I never let my kids sit in the back of the bus, you know, we live in New York City and they start moving to the back. I’m like, nope, come back to that.
Miller: They want to have the fun ride... it means too much.
Woodson: Yeah, Yeah. And I just don’t think they should. I think that part of not letting history repeat itself is remembering history. So,...
Miller: We’ve been talking largely about your books with more words, but you’ve written a ton of picture books as well. And over the last few weeks I have been reading two of them over and over and over to my 3 and a half year old, I’ve been reading ‘Pecan Pie Baby,’ and ‘We Had a Picnic This Sunday, Past,’ probably 20 or 25 times each.
Woodson: I’m so sorry!
Miller: No, no, because that’s the way little kids like it. Does that affect the way you write a Children’s book, knowing that it may very well hit, if it hits some spot in a kid’s head that the parents are gonna be dozens of times, maybe.
Woodson: Well, it’s interesting because when I’m writing, I’m not necessarily thinking about the reader because if I was and I would remember how much I didn’t like reading those books over and over to my kids, it might do something differently. But when I’m writing picture books, I’m, it’s like writing a long poem. So, I’m conscious of the line breaks. I’m conscious, when you look at something like the other side, it begins that summer, the fence that stretched through our town seemed bigger. We lived in a yellow house on one side of it and white people lived on the other and mama said don’t climb over the fence when you play. She said it wasn’t safe. So line by line, you get a picture in a slow revelation. You know first we are asking what house, what fence, you know, who’s speaking and then when we hear mama we know it’s a child and then we get introduction that something wasn’t safe, which makes the kids turn the page to find out what that unsafe thing was. So it’s very intentional how you move a picture book line by line. Where is of course a longer book is chapter by chapter. Line by line still, but a lot a lot more space. So,when I’m writing picture books it is really paying attention to the revelation that each line affords me and then what the end is going to be. ‘Pecan Pie Baby,’ is the story of a girl who doesn’t want to no longer be an only child,...
Miller: ... and she has her mom to herself….
Woodson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. For a long time. And of course it was inspired. My daughter is 17 and my son’s 11. So for the first six years she was an only child and then she wanted a baby sister. Then when she found out it was a boy, she was like, nope. Like when we were having a boy, she, was like, nah, I’m good, where I am as an only child. But it’s the repetition. I know that I myself like repetition, because it adds to the rhythm of the telling and like that summer, that summer or the ding dang baby, or show way, a way to kind of bring us back to what the narrative is trying to talk about.
Miller: Are most of these books... have you memorized most of these books?
Woodson: Not all,
Miller: But some. They’re just, they’re in your head. In both ‘Pecan Pie Baby’ and ‘We Had a Picnic This Sunday Past.’ So in ‘Pecan Pie Baby,’ your narrator is a girl who has a mom and no partner, no boyfriend or girlfriend, nobody else raising this daughter with her. She has a bunch of an extended set of uncles and aunts and friends. In the Picnic book, we never see any parents of the main girl. She goes to the picnic with the grandmother, her grandmother, and there is a huge extended family. How do you make that decision to show very different versions of family?
Woodson: So, then there’s ‘Visiting Day,’ where the girl is being raised by her grandmother because the dad’s incarcerated, there’s ‘Augracion,????’ where the kids are in familiar foster care,...
Miller: There’s another one, where the mom is up north to work during World War Two,
Woodson: ‘Coming on Home, Soon,’ the mom goes to work...
Miller: Or in ‘Harbor Me,’ your main character, she’s being raised by her uncle, there. Over and over. There are so many different versions of family...
Woodson: It’s what I deeply believe in.I think, that’s another thing I grew up with, quote, unquote, nuclear family - mother, father, sister, brother, and that is not the truth, right? There are so many families that are being raised, two moms, two dads and uncle, a grandmother, familiar foster care, raised by an older sibling, raised by you know, an uncle because of dad’s incarcerated. So there’s so many amazing ways that we have family. And I want young people to know this, because I want them to know their way of having family is not wrong. And I think the message they get if they are only constantly seeing one way that people have family, is that their way is not the right way. And I think there’s so much weird feeling outside of when we’re young anyway, to add that to the mix. It just feels like it would have been so deeply wrong of me to not investigate that and put it on the page for young people and all people.
Miller: You also and I mean, I guess there’s maybe an obvious answer for this in terms of Children’s books, because it’s not about exposition, it’s about concision and poetry and attention turning the page. But you don’t go to the trouble of explaining this. It is what it is, this is what the family is. Why is that important?
Woodson: Because, why should anyone have to explain? I was, so funny because I was at the end, we did the audio book of ‘Harbor Me,’ and my son, who’s 11, wanted to be one of the voices because my daughter plays one of them. And his reading is different. So he, it would have been very hard for him to read. And so I said, why at the end of the book, why don’t we just do a conversation and talk about how Mommy wrote this book? And so at the end of when you listen to the???? Book and you can listen to this conversation, I think free somewhere. I don’t know where, but I’m like, you know, and some people and we’re talking about families and I’m like, you know, some people have two moms, some people have two dads. And he’s like, well, what about gender nonbinary families? They exist too. I was like, oh my goodness, I’ve done my work. So, I think that is, you know, I love that the fact that for him this is this is it, you know, this is just it, and this is the world. And if someone is questioning it, then something is not right with them. It’s not about the family. Like how come you can’t see all the ways in which family exists?
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name?
Zero???? : What was the process for making the book,’Each Kindness?
Woodson: He wants to know about ‘Each Kindness.’ Yes. So, ‘Each Kindness’ is the story of a girl who cheats another classmate. A new classmate comes into the room and she shuns her, she just doesn’t like her and kind of gets all the other kids to not be that kind to her either. And this girl, Chloe is telling the story of what happened when she was unkind. The teacher eventually realizes this and brings a bowl of water into school, tells the kids put a stone and she’s like, this is what kindness does, each thing we do, goes out like a ripple into the world and eventually this new kid, Maya goes away and the Chloe realizes she’s missed this chance of kindness, and ends with, you know, and a chance of a kindness with Maya became more and more forever gone. So when I was writing that I was trying to figure out how to write about when someone had been unkind to me, and what that felt like, and each time all I could come up with was a time I had been unkind to someone else in my life. And so,I started thinking about it and realized that we’re, there was so much talk about bullies, but in our lives we can either be the bully, or be bullied,’ and we sometimes exist in both those places at the same time. There are times when we’re kind and there are times when we’re not kind. And so I began exploring that through these characters, and trying to talk about the impact of the assumption that you’re going to get another chance. It doesn’t always happen, right? So Maya moves away and then Chloe keeps coming to school hoping this will be the day that Maya returns and this will be the day I turn to her and smile, but that day doesn’t happen. So, I didn’t know that book was going to end like that after a bunch of rewriting, I kept thinking, oh, well, maybe Maya comes back, I’m like, no, she’s not coming back. So, but it was a book that I wanted to write about, the impact of kindness and how and the impact of guilt and remorse and how that’s, it’s harder to live with that than it is to live with taking a chance and being kind, you know? So, Khloe has that to live with for the rest of her life.
Miller: You’ve brought up your son and your daughter a few times in this conversation, aside from the logistical challenges of finding time to work, that come from becoming a parent, how has becoming a parent affected your writing in a deeper way?
Woodson: You know, I think I realized stuff that I thought I knew, I didn’t know, and I think I’ve changed some of my endings because of my Children. I think I always thought I was funnier than I was. And when they read my work, they let me know I’m not.
Miller: That’s painful.
Woodson: You know, it’s real. They keep me very real. I think I love being a mom, and I love writing and I love that my life is structured so that everyone leaves the house by 7:30 and I can…
Miller:Except for you...
Woodson: Except for me, and if they don’t leave they’re in trouble. But it had, it definitely has changed the way I look at the world. It has. I don’t know how much it’s changed my writing, because when I started writing, it was because of the hope I had for all kids. And my kids just fit into that continuum of it. I want to keep the world as safe for them as I want to keep it for all young people.
Miller: You used the word hope, just there, you are, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, a title I didn’t know existed until I read that you got it. What does it entail?
Woodson: It’s a lot of work.I left my medal in my bag. I always try to, I’ll put it on tonight, but I always try to carry it with me, but I always forget it. The National Ambassador, is me, is a person who’s chosen by the Library of Congress, and by the former Ambassador, who is Gene Yang and that the Library of Congress chooses someone who then chooses their own platform and goes around the country with that platform. The head of the Library of Congress is a woman named Dr. Carla Hayden, who was the first Black woman to be the head of the Library of Congress, which as we know, is the largest library in the nation. [She] works together with the CBC, the Children’s Book Council, to help that platform come to fruition. So my platform is reading you go Hope, Eagles Hope Times Change, which I believe, that when you read, it opens your brain, it opens your mind and it changes you. You’re different before you read a book and after you read a book depending on the book. I’m going into Title One schools and juvenile detention centers. Those are the audiences I chose to concentrate on because they’re too often the ones that don’t get to meet authors and have conversations and do writing projects with them.
Miller: What kinds of conversations have you had?
Woodson: Really interesting ones? I mean, these are young people who are being detained and again, they’re young people, so they’re interested in writing, they’re interested in the arts, they’re interested in popular culture, they’re interested in engagement and they’re also, very often traumatized in some way. So I remember I had just come from the E J I Conference in Alabama, the Equal Justice Initiative had a conference where they opened the anti-lynching museum and then a bunch of panels and it was a really amazing under Bryan Stevenson. And after that I went to a juvenile detention center in that area. I was really surprised that it was probably 75% white guys. And we talked about books, we talked about what they were writing, We talked about books that I had written, but a lot of stuff was triggering, because because of the reasons they were in for, and I know we don’t have a lot of time to go into it, but it was a really engaging and thoughtful conversation. They had an amazing library. I’ve been into juvenile detention centers where they don’t have a library. And the difference with having an amazing library is something. All these guys were, they were sweet boys. I mean, at the end of the day, they’re the really, really sweet boys who’ve had, sometimes a very, very hard life. And as I was leaving, it was all love and, you know, every white boy in that room threw out the white power sign. And so, I’m leaving, we’ve all just done out of responding and I’m like, you know, at the end of the day, I’m like, if this is all you have, I see you, you know, it’s it I didn’t feel like it was being like, cruel to me, it was all they had. And so I was like,...
Miller: What, what did you…?
Woodson: okay, I get it. I understand you. I see you and what I was like, I was like, it was great talking to you guys, you know, I see you, I know this is what you got and you know,they weren’t doing it and I think this is the complication of humanity, right? It wasn’t like they were giving me the middle finger, right? It wasn’t like they said we hate you, it wasn’t like they were like, you know, don’t ever come here again. They were like, you know, here’s a sign of white power. And it was complicated because it was like saying goodbye, right? You know, and so I think that it makes me a more thoughtful person in that I know the complications of humanity and the complications of the systems that we end up having to be a part of sometimes, by no fault of our own. And I know what it means to be so stripped of your humanity that you think this tiny thing is all you have. So, you know, I went to a juvenile detention center in California, that was all girls. We were, they had read ‘Visiting Day,’ and they were talking about, a lot of them were talking about as children, going and the oldest, I think we’re 16, so maybe between 13 and 16, the oldest was, they were talking about going to visit their dads in prison, as kids. and then this one girl who was about 15, started crying, she’s like, you know, this book makes me think of when I have to say goodbye to my four month old daughter every month. And again, it was something I hadn’t thought about, right, the impact that literature has, and the people, it’s impacting and the impact that we as individuals can have by just walking into a room and having a conversation. So it’s been a lot. I mean, I’m over on the, it’s over in December, and I’ll be happy.
Miller: Jacqueline Woodson, thank you so much for this hour.
Woodson: Thank you. Mhm. [Applause]
Miller: That was the writer, Jacqueline Woodson in conversation in 2019. Thanks very much to our audience and to all the good folks at Literary Arts who made those shows possible. We really look forward to doing them again. If you don’t want to miss any of our shows, you can listen on the NPR One App, on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Our nightly rebroadcast is at eight p.m. Thanks very much for tuning in to Think Out Loud on OPB and KLCC. I’m Dave Miller, we’ll be back tomorrow.
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