Transcript from the Allen Say interview

Note: Highland Park students' questions appear in red:

Welcome to this room!

MODERATOR>Today's interview with Allen Say will begin shortly.

Guest22>When you were younger and thinking of being a cartoonist, did you ever think of being an animator?

SPEAKER_Guest29>No. That came much later. When I was growing up, there was no such thing as animation. I'm a war child, I was a war child. War was going on. There was no television. Movies were utter luxuries. I was 8 years old when the second world war ended. I had probably seen 3 or 4 movies. Animation came much later with Walt Disney and Popeye. So the answer is no.

Guest35>Do you sometimes write in Japanese? Do you write any adult stories or chapter books? Why do you usually write about your family? Are most of your stories true?

SPEAKER_Guest29>Yes. Not often. I have tried to write adult stories, in the past. But not since I've been doing children's books full times. I've never had the desire to write books for adults. Adults are beyond saving.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Which means that I've never grown up.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Write what you know is what I've learned. Also, I suppose in a way my family was dysfunctional from the word go. You always like to imagine it otherwise and based on what I remember of it, I try to put it together in a way that I would have liked to see it.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Yes and no. I always say this to children, there is really no such thing as a true true story. Once you put in on paper it becomes fiction. History is a big fiction.

Guest26>Do you think it's important that your readers know something about you personally -- your own heritage and history -- when they read your books?

SPEAKER_Guest29>None whatsoever. I always resent this. I think the person is entirely superfluous. For that reason, I really think that my work will be appreciated much more when I'm gone. Then I think my books will be read for what they are. The reader doesn't have to make the association between the book and the author, the person that thought it up. I think it is completely unnecessary. I'm vehemently against the celebrity and personality cult.

Guest26>Even though you write picture books, some of the themes are a little more adult. Who do you think about when you are writing?

SPEAKER_Guest29>I never think of children. If I ever think of an audience, it has been my great mentor, the great cartoonist, Noro Shinpei who died on the 20th of February of this year. So I'm truly a "ronin" a masterless samurei, or somebody without a job, an unemployed person. Or Walter Lorraine my editor, they are the only ones I used to think about.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Walter is a legend.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Walter and I have this agreement that I can do anything I want, so often I don't show him my work in progress.

SPEAKER_Guest29>It's a deal we made long ago.

Guest36>How did you come up with the idea for Home of the Brave?

SPEAKER_Guest29>In the epilogue, I was honored with a retrospective show of the Japanese American Museum in LA, which opened in July 2000 ran for several months until February of the following year. For the opening I kept going (I live in Portland, Oregon), I kept seeing the ongoing exhibit of the internment camp at Manzanar, I kept seeing these photographs and artifacts, suitcases that people used to take their belonging. Each person was only allowed to take 1 suitcase. I had already began a book and had the f

SPEAKER_Guest29>and after about the third time I was down there, something just took over. And I just completely went off in another direction with the same story I was currently working on. I'm describing the mystery of creation, I don't quite understand.

SPEAKER_Guest29>It just happened after seeing this exhibit several times. It wasn't a conscious effort on my part.

SPEAKER_Guest29>I had ever right first. I start out with paintings.

SPEAKER_Guest29>I paint a picture. There isn't one single reason for these things. In the process of painting a story emerges, which in turns suggests the following image, frame 2.

SPEAKER_Guest29>And then I follow that process. I had the first four frames finished when I suddenly went off in a different direction.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Home of the Brave, had initially started out as a love story. That was the intentional part that I was aware of, after seeing the photos and artifacts from the internment camps that is when the story changed.

SPEAKER_Guest29>The picture of the two girls (which is in the book) was a family portrait that I copied from a photograph taken in 1942 by Dorothea Lange. Dorothea Lange snapped the picture of this family.

SPEAKER_Guest29>I kept looking at the picture of the two girls in the photo, and I was very much haunted by these two girls, it occured to me to lift the two girls out of the photograph and introduce them into my book.

SPEAKER_Guest29>I can make that transition because i was an advertising photographer for 20 years. I decided to use the two girls in my book, and the story evolved.

SPEAKER_Guest29>I had the first four frames. Dorothea Lange was in California when she took the photo, the name of the family is Mochida. They were a big time farmer.

 SPEAKER_Guest29>They lived near the bay area. It's a photograph that Dorothea took when the family was just being bussed out to an internment camp and they are wearing name tags. SPEAKER_Guest29>The two girls in the picture, and their family came to a signing of my book (Home of the Brave). Miyuki is the older girl, and Hiroko is the younger girl.

SPEAKER_Guest29>They are "normal" American people. They are seemingly very happy, they do not seem to display any anger or resentment. It is just something that happened to them.

Guest36>Home of the Brave seems like a nightmare, as a result what is the best way to share it with students?

SPEAKER_Guest29>Read it and discuss it. Talk about it. This is an introduction to recent American history, which so many people don't seem to know. It is astounding.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Steve Wasserman, editor of Chief for LA Times Book Review, he posed 3 questions. One was, Do you worry that this story is too nightmarish for children?

SPEAKER_Guest29>That question really upset me. Here was my answer, "My handling of this subject is mere intimition of the nightmare that real children were forced to watch and endure."

SPEAKER_Guest29>However, after the editor read my response, he then edited his own question and changed the word "nightmarish" to the word "difficulty."

Guest36>What are your own experiences of World War II?

SPEAKER_Guest29>Running all over Japan, trying to avoid the bombs falling on us B29s (the flying fortresses). My mother kept her American citizenship. I have attended 7 grade schools, which is due to constant moving around. I was born in Yokohama. We moved to Yamaguchi Prefecture, near Hiroshima.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Grandfather's Journey, Tree of Cranes, and Tea with Milk forms a trilogy, which was unintentional it just happened.

SPEAKER_Guest29>They are fairly accurate stories of my mother and grandmother (on my mother's side). My father was a Korean orphan and never knew his parents.

SPEAKER_Guest29>My mother was born in Oakland, California. Her father, my grandfather (the protagonist in Grandfather's Journey), was a very gentle and privliged gentleman he never had a work a day in his life. He discovered steam ships

SPEAKER_Guest29>, he travelled all over the place and came to California, including South America. One day

SPEAKER_Guest29>he received a letter from his father "Get home and marry this woman we've chosen for you or else."

SPEAKER_Guest29>Otherwise he would've been disowned and there was much to inherit, he was the second sun. He rushed back to Japan and married my grandmother, and

SPEAKER_Guest29>took her to Oakland, California, put her up in an apt.

SPEAKER_Guest29>My mother was born, obviously was a disappointment because women couldn't inherit in those days. It had to be a male heir.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Five years later my grandparents had another girl, who was a clone of my grandmother, a miserable horrible women. They quit trying to have sons.

SPEAKER_Guest29>After my mother went to high school, to proper Japanese parents, America wasn't a place to bring up a proper lady and dragged my mother back to Japan at the age of 18. This is the story of Tea with Milk.

SPEAKER_Guest29>They hired tutors to mold my mother into a proper Japanese young lady, and my mother rebelled.

SPEAKER_Guest29>She got herself a job at a Daimaru Department store in Osaka (it still exists).

SPEAKER_Guest29>She was not elevator girl, which she is in my story. She worked in the office doing translation. She met my father at the store, he was a customer. She ran off with the first man who spoke English to her. My father

SPEAKER_Guest29>spoke with a British accent because he was reared by an English family in Shanghai. My poor mother was very impressed with that.

Guest26>Do you usually do a lot of research for your books? Was Home of the Brave different in this way?

SPEAKER_Guest29>Yes I do. Probably not as much some.

SPEAKER_Guest29>I didn't travel to the Southwest to view Kivas, I rely heavily on photographs. I read up Indian mythology, whatever I could find to learn more about kivas.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Underground caves

SPEAKER_Guest29>Some of the internment camps were built on Indian reservations.

SPEAKER_Guest29>When you think about it, they were all built on Indian land, and I wanted to make that connection (in Home of the Brave). Nothing is resolved in my book, it is a comment on history.

SPEAKER_Guest29>History is cyclical, ongoing.

Guest35>Konnichi wa! We just read & enjoyed several of your books, & we do a 9-week unit on Japanese culture here in Austin, TX, & we would like to know what you like to read, & who are your favorite authors?

SPEAKER_Guest29>I'm very eclectic in reading. I read fiction, nonfiction. Frequently I read 3 to 4 books simultaneously. I don't read for the plot or story. My editor finds this strange. I do a lot of rereading.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Some stories I've read over 10 times. I usually open a book anywhere, and if I don't like it, i skip pages. Or i'll start a new book.

SPEAKER_Guest29>I'm a very slow reader, I don't believe in speed reading. I'll frequently read a passage over and over again, to find the mystery and meaning.

SPEAKER_Guest29>I have a fear of the English language.

SPEAKER_Guest29>I've always felt like an imposter using it. It's a very precise language compared to the Japanese language -- which has a very loose form.

Guest39>Do you write the story or draw the illustration first?

SPEAKER_Guest29>I do the illustrations first, draw first. Almost always, except for the one I'm doing now. It's rare when I know the story beforehand.

SPEAKER_Guest29>The story I'm working on now is biographical, it's about an 84 year old woman.

SPEAKER_Guest29>My book, El Chino, is also a biography. This new book will be in that style.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Based on a true story.

Guest26>Which of your books was the easiest for you to write, and what was the hardest? Why?

SPEAKER_Guest29>There are all difficult and painful. There is no such thing as an easy book, if it was easy I would toss it out. It is probably no good.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Writing isn't fun, painting is fun at times.

SPEAKER_Guest29>I'm in the position where I write something and it goes out into the world, and I'm opening myself up and all these reviewers will say whatever they want (often wrong).

Guest36>What advice do you have to inspiring artists?

SPEAKER_Guest29>If you write something and it seems pretty to you, toss it out. Chances are it's cute and no good.

SPEAKER_Guest29>Same thing with painters.

MODERATOR>Thank you for joining us today as we interviewed author Allen Say. Check back in a few days. A transcript of today's interview will soon be available onScholastic.com.