| Interview with Nancy Garden |
First off, thanks so much for joining us for an up-close and personal interview for TeensReadToo.com! My
name is Jen, and I’ll be your server toda…oh, wait, wrong job! Anyway, thanks so much for taking time out
of your writing schedule—which I’m sure is busy!—and answering a few questions for your readers and
fans.
Let’s get some of the typical interview questions out of the way first. When did you first know that you
wanted to be a writer?
I’m not sure when I first knew, but when I was eight I wrote a story outside of school for the first time, and
discovered what fun it was. From then on, I often wrote for my own pleasure. I also told myself stories
before I went to sleep at night. But even so, I wanted to be a veterinarian. Later, when I was in high school,
I wanted to be in theater--as an actress, a lighting designer and, a bit later, a director. By then though, I
also wanted to be a writer, and for a while I was worried about choosing between the two. For quite a few
years I did work in theater and I also wrote. Eventually writing won out.
Can you tell us a little bit about your road to publishing?
I started mostly by writing short stories for young children, and trying to get them published. After many
attempts, I finally sold a story to Jack and Jill and I was so thrilled I framed a copy of the acceptance and
the check, but the story was never actually published. I also sold a poem, and I think that was published.
Then I wrote a kids’ novel called A Place To Live based largely on my mother’s experiences growing up on
a chicken farm and being German-Americans during World War I. My mother or her sister or both--I don’t
remember which--were taunted by being called “German Spy” because of wearing the Girl Scout uniform
with the insignia “GS.” I included that in the book, along with many other stories both my mother and my
aunt told me. And when I finished A Place To Live, I entered it in a first-novel contest run by, I think
Macmillan. It didn’t win, and oddly enough, I don’t remember if I tried to get it published elsewhere.
I kept on writing and trying to sell what I wrote, and finally sold my first children’s novel, What Happened in
Marston, to Four Winds, and my first non-fiction book for kids, Berlin: City Split in Two, to Putnam’s. During
my first 10 or 15 years as a writer, I also worked in publishing, first for a company that called itself a literary
agency but was really mostly an editorial service, then for Scholastic Magazines, and finally for Houghton
Mifflin. I also had a few freelance editing and writing jobs.
Tell us a little bit about either your latest or upcoming release. If you could only tell your readers one thing
about the story that had to convince us to buy the book, what would it be?
I have to smile at that question, because at the time of this interview, my most recent new book is a
collection of stories and historical essays called Hear Us Out: Lesbian and Gay Stories of Struggle,
Progress, and Hope from 1950 To the Present--so I can’t really tell you about “the story.” The book is
divided into sections according to decade, and each section starts with an essay describing the gay rights
movement during that ten-year period. The essay is then followed by two stories that could have taken
place at the same time.
Along with Hear Us Out, my wonderful publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is also issuing a new edition of
my best-known novel, Annie on My Mind, in commemoration of its 25th anniversary in print. It has a very
pretty new cover and includes an interview of me by Kathleen T. Horning, Director of the Cooperative
Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
What, or who, has been the greatest inspiration for your stories?
That’s hard to answer, because a lot of books, authors, people, and events have inspired me! But since
much of what I write has to do with being gay, I guess I can answer pretty accurately by telling you that
when I was growing up as a young lesbian in the 1950s, I looked in vain for books that would help me
understand who and what I was. There was almost nothing available, but I did finally find The Well of
Loneliness, by English author Radclyffe Hall. Well was published way back in the 1920s, and it ends sadly
and is often melodramatic, but it’s honest and supportive, and closes with a plea for justice and
understanding. That made me vow, at around 16, to write a book for my people that ended happily. The
result of that vow, after a few false starts, was Annie, which was published in 1982 when there was still very
little written or published for kids about homosexuality, and even less that had a gay or lesbian main
character and a happy ending. Since Annie, I’ve publshed a number of books with gay and lesbian
content, along with other books.
Let’s hear about your family, who I’m sure are thrilled to have a published author among them!
They’ve always been very supportive of me, and without specifically intending to, my parents and my great
aunt--the aunt who brought up my mother and her siblings--helped me become a writer by reading to me
when I was little, by encouraging me to read, and by sharing their favorite books with me. My father used
to tell me marvelous stories, too. Although he wasn’t a writer himself, he had a great knack for making up
yarns. My favorite aunt was one of my most loyal fans, and during the time when Annie on My Mind was
burned, banned, and tried in Kansas, she was wonderful, as she was to anyone in the family who was
going through any kind of crisis. Most important of all, though, has always been my partner (and, in
Massachusetts, my legal spouse), Sandy Scott, who’s my first reader, an excellent critic, and my major
supporter in general.
Now for some fun facts. What’s your greatest comfort food?
Hmm. Well, for a long time whenever I had a crisis to deal with, I’d go for egg salad sandwiches and
chocolate milk. Mac and cheese serves as comfort food for me, too, as do chocolate chip cookies, almost
any kind of toast--and--oh, yum!--chai!
What are the first three things you do when you wake up in the morning?
I’ll assume you want me to skip the stuff that everyone does in the bathroom first thing in the morning!
After that, I do some stretching exercises, and twice a week I add a workout with free weights. I used to run
early every morning, but one of my ankles has made that impossible. Instead, I take a walk with our dog,
Loki, and after that, I have breakfast and read as much of the paper as I have time for before I settle down
to work.
If I came to your house and looked in your closet/attic/basement, what’s the one thing that would surprise
me the most?
General chaos, I imagine, except in the attic, which is very hard to get to and therefore has nothing stored
in it!
Everyone asks the question about “if you could be a tree, which tree would you be?” so I want to know: If
you could be a color, which color would it be, and why?
I guess I’d be green, for that’s my favorite color.
Who is your favorite cartoon character? Which cartoon character is most like you?
My favorite is the puppy in Bliss. I’ve always felt I must have been a dog in another life, so I guess that
puppy, or a grown-up version of him, might be most like me.
If you could beam yourself to anywhere in the world (“Beam me up, Scotty!”), during any time in history,
where and when would it be—and why?
That’s a hard one, especially because so many of the exciting times in history are also the most
dangerously turbulent. Then, too, during much of history, women, unless they were aristocrats of some
sort, led pretty boring lives. It might be fun, though, to go back to sufragette times either here in the US or
in England, and take part in the struggle for women to get the vote--especially if I could come back
afterward and continue to play a small part in some of the struggles here today.
So what’s your favorite type of music to listen to? Favorite musical artists? Do you listen to music while
you’re writing?
In general, I’m fondest of classical music, especially choral music, and that’s what I usually listen to when I’
m writing (although there are times when I don’t listen to anything then). Often, though, at certain points in
the development of a novel, I listen to a special song or piece of music over and over again, sometimes
classical, sometimes not. For example, when I was writing my long-ago second novel The Loners, I listened
to Simon and Garfunkel’s song “I Am a Rock” a lot, and also Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” sung by
Grace Slick. I like some of K.D. Lang and some of Melissa Etheridge, and I like a lot of 60s soft and folk
rock; I like folk music, and music from Broadway shows, too. Pete Seegar and Joan Baez are probably my
favorite folk singers and West Side Story and Les Miz are a couple of my favorite Broadway shows. As you
can tell, I haven’t kept up much with contemporary popular music. Although I do like some of it when I hear
it, I don’t hear it often enough to have favorites.
Do you have any favorite T.V. shows? Movies you watch over and over again? What was the last movie
you saw at the theater?
Pan’s Labyrinth is the most recent movie I’ve seen in a theater, or one of the most recent, and I think it’s
one of the best I’ve ever seen, both for its special effects and for the seamless way in which the script
meshes the real-life Spanish Civil war with the little girl’s fantasy life . One of my favorite movies, and one
that I’ve watched several times although not recently, is The African Queen. Actually, off and on now I’m
watching The Lord of the Rings again on DVD.
I don’t watch much TV except for news and special programming on PBS, but I love the British comedy
series As Time Goes By with Judi Dench, who’s just about my favorite contemporary actress. Because one
of our local PBS affiliates keep re-running it, I’ve seen the whole series several times.
You have the chance to give one piece of advice to your teen readers. What would it be?
Try to discover and be true to who you really are, and follow your own dreams.
One last question. What stories can we look forward to from you in the future?
I hope you can look forward to many more, but although I’m working on a new novel now, and plan to re-
work an already-written one soon, and have at least one other new one forming in my mind, it’s too soon
for me to go into detail about any of them. I’m always writing something, revising something, or working on
something in my head, and I hope I always will be!
Again, thanks so much for joining us at TeensReadToo.com!
You’re very welcome. Thank you for asking me so many interesting questions!
name is Jen, and I’ll be your server toda…oh, wait, wrong job! Anyway, thanks so much for taking time out
of your writing schedule—which I’m sure is busy!—and answering a few questions for your readers and
fans.
Let’s get some of the typical interview questions out of the way first. When did you first know that you
wanted to be a writer?
I’m not sure when I first knew, but when I was eight I wrote a story outside of school for the first time, and
discovered what fun it was. From then on, I often wrote for my own pleasure. I also told myself stories
before I went to sleep at night. But even so, I wanted to be a veterinarian. Later, when I was in high school,
I wanted to be in theater--as an actress, a lighting designer and, a bit later, a director. By then though, I
also wanted to be a writer, and for a while I was worried about choosing between the two. For quite a few
years I did work in theater and I also wrote. Eventually writing won out.
Can you tell us a little bit about your road to publishing?
I started mostly by writing short stories for young children, and trying to get them published. After many
attempts, I finally sold a story to Jack and Jill and I was so thrilled I framed a copy of the acceptance and
the check, but the story was never actually published. I also sold a poem, and I think that was published.
Then I wrote a kids’ novel called A Place To Live based largely on my mother’s experiences growing up on
a chicken farm and being German-Americans during World War I. My mother or her sister or both--I don’t
remember which--were taunted by being called “German Spy” because of wearing the Girl Scout uniform
with the insignia “GS.” I included that in the book, along with many other stories both my mother and my
aunt told me. And when I finished A Place To Live, I entered it in a first-novel contest run by, I think
Macmillan. It didn’t win, and oddly enough, I don’t remember if I tried to get it published elsewhere.
I kept on writing and trying to sell what I wrote, and finally sold my first children’s novel, What Happened in
Marston, to Four Winds, and my first non-fiction book for kids, Berlin: City Split in Two, to Putnam’s. During
my first 10 or 15 years as a writer, I also worked in publishing, first for a company that called itself a literary
agency but was really mostly an editorial service, then for Scholastic Magazines, and finally for Houghton
Mifflin. I also had a few freelance editing and writing jobs.
Tell us a little bit about either your latest or upcoming release. If you could only tell your readers one thing
about the story that had to convince us to buy the book, what would it be?
I have to smile at that question, because at the time of this interview, my most recent new book is a
collection of stories and historical essays called Hear Us Out: Lesbian and Gay Stories of Struggle,
Progress, and Hope from 1950 To the Present--so I can’t really tell you about “the story.” The book is
divided into sections according to decade, and each section starts with an essay describing the gay rights
movement during that ten-year period. The essay is then followed by two stories that could have taken
place at the same time.
Along with Hear Us Out, my wonderful publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is also issuing a new edition of
my best-known novel, Annie on My Mind, in commemoration of its 25th anniversary in print. It has a very
pretty new cover and includes an interview of me by Kathleen T. Horning, Director of the Cooperative
Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
What, or who, has been the greatest inspiration for your stories?
That’s hard to answer, because a lot of books, authors, people, and events have inspired me! But since
much of what I write has to do with being gay, I guess I can answer pretty accurately by telling you that
when I was growing up as a young lesbian in the 1950s, I looked in vain for books that would help me
understand who and what I was. There was almost nothing available, but I did finally find The Well of
Loneliness, by English author Radclyffe Hall. Well was published way back in the 1920s, and it ends sadly
and is often melodramatic, but it’s honest and supportive, and closes with a plea for justice and
understanding. That made me vow, at around 16, to write a book for my people that ended happily. The
result of that vow, after a few false starts, was Annie, which was published in 1982 when there was still very
little written or published for kids about homosexuality, and even less that had a gay or lesbian main
character and a happy ending. Since Annie, I’ve publshed a number of books with gay and lesbian
content, along with other books.
Let’s hear about your family, who I’m sure are thrilled to have a published author among them!
They’ve always been very supportive of me, and without specifically intending to, my parents and my great
aunt--the aunt who brought up my mother and her siblings--helped me become a writer by reading to me
when I was little, by encouraging me to read, and by sharing their favorite books with me. My father used
to tell me marvelous stories, too. Although he wasn’t a writer himself, he had a great knack for making up
yarns. My favorite aunt was one of my most loyal fans, and during the time when Annie on My Mind was
burned, banned, and tried in Kansas, she was wonderful, as she was to anyone in the family who was
going through any kind of crisis. Most important of all, though, has always been my partner (and, in
Massachusetts, my legal spouse), Sandy Scott, who’s my first reader, an excellent critic, and my major
supporter in general.
Now for some fun facts. What’s your greatest comfort food?
Hmm. Well, for a long time whenever I had a crisis to deal with, I’d go for egg salad sandwiches and
chocolate milk. Mac and cheese serves as comfort food for me, too, as do chocolate chip cookies, almost
any kind of toast--and--oh, yum!--chai!
What are the first three things you do when you wake up in the morning?
I’ll assume you want me to skip the stuff that everyone does in the bathroom first thing in the morning!
After that, I do some stretching exercises, and twice a week I add a workout with free weights. I used to run
early every morning, but one of my ankles has made that impossible. Instead, I take a walk with our dog,
Loki, and after that, I have breakfast and read as much of the paper as I have time for before I settle down
to work.
If I came to your house and looked in your closet/attic/basement, what’s the one thing that would surprise
me the most?
General chaos, I imagine, except in the attic, which is very hard to get to and therefore has nothing stored
in it!
Everyone asks the question about “if you could be a tree, which tree would you be?” so I want to know: If
you could be a color, which color would it be, and why?
I guess I’d be green, for that’s my favorite color.
Who is your favorite cartoon character? Which cartoon character is most like you?
My favorite is the puppy in Bliss. I’ve always felt I must have been a dog in another life, so I guess that
puppy, or a grown-up version of him, might be most like me.
If you could beam yourself to anywhere in the world (“Beam me up, Scotty!”), during any time in history,
where and when would it be—and why?
That’s a hard one, especially because so many of the exciting times in history are also the most
dangerously turbulent. Then, too, during much of history, women, unless they were aristocrats of some
sort, led pretty boring lives. It might be fun, though, to go back to sufragette times either here in the US or
in England, and take part in the struggle for women to get the vote--especially if I could come back
afterward and continue to play a small part in some of the struggles here today.
So what’s your favorite type of music to listen to? Favorite musical artists? Do you listen to music while
you’re writing?
In general, I’m fondest of classical music, especially choral music, and that’s what I usually listen to when I’
m writing (although there are times when I don’t listen to anything then). Often, though, at certain points in
the development of a novel, I listen to a special song or piece of music over and over again, sometimes
classical, sometimes not. For example, when I was writing my long-ago second novel The Loners, I listened
to Simon and Garfunkel’s song “I Am a Rock” a lot, and also Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” sung by
Grace Slick. I like some of K.D. Lang and some of Melissa Etheridge, and I like a lot of 60s soft and folk
rock; I like folk music, and music from Broadway shows, too. Pete Seegar and Joan Baez are probably my
favorite folk singers and West Side Story and Les Miz are a couple of my favorite Broadway shows. As you
can tell, I haven’t kept up much with contemporary popular music. Although I do like some of it when I hear
it, I don’t hear it often enough to have favorites.
Do you have any favorite T.V. shows? Movies you watch over and over again? What was the last movie
you saw at the theater?
Pan’s Labyrinth is the most recent movie I’ve seen in a theater, or one of the most recent, and I think it’s
one of the best I’ve ever seen, both for its special effects and for the seamless way in which the script
meshes the real-life Spanish Civil war with the little girl’s fantasy life . One of my favorite movies, and one
that I’ve watched several times although not recently, is The African Queen. Actually, off and on now I’m
watching The Lord of the Rings again on DVD.
I don’t watch much TV except for news and special programming on PBS, but I love the British comedy
series As Time Goes By with Judi Dench, who’s just about my favorite contemporary actress. Because one
of our local PBS affiliates keep re-running it, I’ve seen the whole series several times.
You have the chance to give one piece of advice to your teen readers. What would it be?
Try to discover and be true to who you really are, and follow your own dreams.
One last question. What stories can we look forward to from you in the future?
I hope you can look forward to many more, but although I’m working on a new novel now, and plan to re-
work an already-written one soon, and have at least one other new one forming in my mind, it’s too soon
for me to go into detail about any of them. I’m always writing something, revising something, or working on
something in my head, and I hope I always will be!
Again, thanks so much for joining us at TeensReadToo.com!
You’re very welcome. Thank you for asking me so many interesting questions!
