 |
 |
Between the Lines |
 |
|
Interview with Bruce Coville |
|
The Monster's Ring and The Magic Shop Books
Bruce Coville
Bruce Coville's The Monster's Ring introduced readers to the world of Mr. Elives' Magic Shop, where boys hatch dragons, toads talk, skulls spout Shakespeare, and the heroes and heroines of Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, Jennifer Murdley's Toad, The Skull of Truth, and next year's Juliet Dove, Queen of Love find enchantment, adventure, and insight. Now available in twentieth anniversary editions, each of these modern classics has been given a new afterword by the author and stunning new jacket art by Tony DiTerlizzi.
|
|
Biography |
|
Bruce Coville is the bestselling author of dozens of books, including The Monsters of Morley Manor, Armageddon Summer (cowritten with Jane Yolen), The Skull of Truth, Jennifer Murdley’s Toad, and Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher. He lives in Syracuse, NY.
Bruce's website is www.brucecoville.com and also visit www.fullcastaudio.com for Bruce's audio books and a free audio download of his story "Clean as a Whistle."
|
|
Interview |
|
Q: The Monster's Ring was one of your first published books—it is still in print, and more popular than ever with the release of the repackaged Magic Shop Books. How did this initial success influence you in pursuing this genre?
A: I always wanted to write this type of story—ever since I was nineteen. As you can probably tell, Halloween is my favorite holiday. I would always be in the library "haunting" the shelves looking for just the right book to read on Halloween. And I never found it—I found a lot of great books—but never just the right one. Really, what I was trying to do when I wrote The Monster's Ring was write the book that I wanted to read when I was eleven and it's not perfect either which means I get to try again.
Q: You've told me that many people have come up to you and said, "this is the first book my kid, my son, this kid in my class, ever read." How does this make you feel?
A: Oh, it justifies everything that I went into writing for.
Q: Besides the addition of Roxanne and Jerome, the talking rats, what else needed to be changed to update the version and how did you manage to do this without changing the story?
A: I really work hard on trying to make the books timeless in that, especially in this kind of book, I don't do much with technology. The kids aren't watching TV (probably because I don't do anything that promotes watching TV), and this was before video games. Now kids are probably out playing video games but I don't want to promote that either. Basically, I don't write about that aspect of the character's lives, so that didn't need updating. I also try not to use current slang because current slang changes so fast, in about five years the book would be really outdated. I would rather invent a pet phrase for the children to say so that the book stays current.
The book was very tight but I wanted to deal a little bit more with things that were going on with the parents—and I did this in the revision. I never think that a book is perfect as it is and I'm always willing to go back and work to make it better.
Q: Are you writing more of The Magic Shop books?
A: I'm scheduled to do another one for Harcourt next year—Juliet Dove, Queen of Love. It's about a girl who gets Helen of Troy's necklace and finds she's irresistible. It's not necessarily the best thing in the world to have everyone falling in love with you. And the kindergartners trailing you around gets a little tacky.
Q: The kid characters in your Magic Books stories are not superheroes. Their classmates beat them up, they make mistakes, situations carry them away, and they are all intrigued by magic (which usually causes even more trouble in their lives). Is this representative of the typical child in this age range or a small percentage of people who don't quite "fit in?"
A: I don't know that there is a "typical" child in this age range. There are tens of millions of kids in the United States and more in the rest of the world so to think any "one" would be typical is one of the problems with the way we think as a culture. The books do represent a certain kind of kid—maybe not the majority—but certainly the kind of kid that others can empathize with.
Q: In Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, Tiamet is the name of the beautiful child dragon that Jeremy must raise. But, when Jeremy, who has many pets, complains about how many chicken livers she is eating, Tiamet sends him an image of "a plateful of gerbils, lying on their backs, their little paws stiff above them." Do kids think this is funny? Or is it sick and wrong?
A: I assume they do. And who's to say something can't be both? I wouldn't put something in a book for kids that I thought was "sick and wrong." I think the comments are funny. I have a taste for dark humor but I don't get carried away.
Q: In another Magic Shop book, The Skull of Truth is a human skull with an unusual personality. At first he can be very frightening but then he becomes quite annoying, really. Did you pattern this character after anyone you know?
A: Well most of my characters have parts of me in them. I'm an incessant wisecracker and I'm sure it's annoying to some people.
Q: You are a prolific writer and your books have huge appeal—they are entertaining, clever, written from a child's perspective, and never patronizing. How do you manage to write so much and from this younger perspective?
A: I think that people who write for kids write for one of two reasons—at a very deep level they write either to heal a wounded childhood, or to celebrate a happy one. I'm celebrating. I enjoyed being a kid. The first time I saw Peter Pan on TV, I thought, "Peter's got the right idea." People would ask me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And I would think, "You know, I'm having more fun than any grown up." I don't see what the big hurry is. Lots of people have to escape childhood to be comfortable with it—but I was always comfortable with it!
I'm a parent and I'm a citizen but there's nothing to say that you can't have the adult part and have the kid part still there. I've worked very hard to keep the celebrating, having a good time, isn't the world wonderful, part of me alive too.
Q: Do you think that our society is forcing kids to be adults too soon—with starting their own businesses and other pressures?
A: There's nothing wrong with a kid starting a business. There's a double-pronged situation here. Kids are being pushed into a catastrophic premature maturity in terms of their sexuality, their wisecracking, and their pseudo-wisdom. The media "image" of what a kid should be pushes them out of being kids way before they should. This takes a very enjoyable part of life away from them and I think it's evil. The other side is that at the same time we are urging them to grow up early, we are forcing them to stay dependent for an extraordinarily long time. We've moved society to believe that virtually everyone should go to college, which is silly. And now, most people are moved to go to graduate school. So, these "kids" don't enter the real world—that is the working world—until they are 24, 25, 26 years old. That's problematic—kids want to be useful and engaged with real things, and instead they are being held back by our culture.
Q: As you know, there has been a lot of social controversy about exposing kids to reality vs. fantasy. What are your thoughts about the social implications of "magic" in the lives of our children? Is the use of "magic" in your books just fantasy, just fun?
A: Sometimes kids do a much better job at telling the difference between fantasy and reality than a group of adults. Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher has been taken off the shelf in one school district for what they called "satanic content"—the presence of the dragon, the chicken livers, the silver gleam, and the use of black and red colors here and there in the book. It went back on the shelf after a protracted discussion and once I got involved in the issue. But I can't address magic across the spectrum because different people have different feelings about it. I can only say that, for me, fantasy is a way of telling an amusing and engaging story and fantasy fiction sometimes addresses important issues at a deeper level than realistic fiction does. C. S. Lewis said "Sometimes the best way to tell the truth is to tell a fairy tale."
|
|
|
