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It may surprise some to discover that Kathryn Lasky, the Newbery Honor author of more than one hundred fiction and nonfiction books for children and adults, was designated a "reluctant reader" as a child growing up in Indianapolis, Indiana.
"The truth was that I didn't really like the kind of books they had you reading at school - the 'See Dick, See Jane' books. So I made a voluntary withdrawal from reading in school," Lasky explains, "But I loved the books my mom was reading to me, books like Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."
"I loved to make up stories in my head. I was a compulsive story maker, she continues, "I say story maker because I never told anyone or showed anyone my stories."
Lasky first
realized she could be a writer when she was about ten years old,
and her family was driving at night in their car with the top
down. "The sky looked so interesting - you couldn't see the
stars because of these woolly clouds. And I said it looked like a
sheepback sky. My mom turned around and said, 'Kathryn, you
should be a writer.' When my mom said that, I thought, ‘Wow,
maybe I will be.’"
After majoring in English at college, Lasky did some writing for magazines and worked as a teacher. It was while Lasky was teaching that she wrote her first published book. Following a grandfather and his grandson on a typical weekend day, the book was called I Have Four Names for My Grandfather and featured photographs by Lasky's husband, Christopher Knight.
Since then, she has written a variety of books from historical fiction to picture books to nonfiction - including Sugaring Time, a Newbery Honor Book; The Night Journey, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Children; Pageant, an ALA Notable Children's Book; and her first Blue Sky Press novel, Beyond the Burning Time, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. She has also received the Washington Post-Children's Book Guild Award for her contribution to children's nonfiction. Lasky says she loves writing all different kinds of books. "To me," she says, "the whole point of being an artist is being able to get up every morning and reinvent the world."
Lasky especially loves writing for adolescents. "I feel the same vulnerability that young people feel. I have adolescent children. When I was young, my mother used to tell me, 'People will say this is the best time of your life, but it's not. It's the worst.' Adolescence is a time of pain and anxiety, and stories come out of that tension. It's a time when kids are trying to define themselves. I seem to connect with that feeling pretty well."
And Lasky remembers her childhood days, when the history and informational books at school bored her "I didn't like nonfiction as a kid - the nonfiction books were really dry back then," she says. "But then I realized that you can make the characters in nonfiction as fascinating as those in fiction."
The Salem Witch Trials were one historical event that fascinated Lasky, and she wrote about them in her acclaimed novel, Beyond the Burning Time. "One day I found myself wondering what it would have been like if your mother had been arrested for being a witch and had been condemned to death. I was interested in a personal point of view - a young person's point of view. That, to me, is always the line - the string that draws me into a historical period," she says.
Lasky also enjoys exploring the little-known truths and details of history. In her recent Blue Sky Press novel, True North, she explores the Underground Railroad. "History was so poorly taught when I was in school," she explains. "'The Underground Railroad was always misrepresented."
Lasky and her husband Christopher Knight live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Accordingly many of her books are set in historic New England. One such book, A Journey to the New World, follows a young Pilgrim girl as she sails on the Mayflower and settles at Plimoth Colony
"In Boston, we are absolutely drenched in history;" she says. "There is so much to mine here, it's almost inexhaustible." When doing research for a book, Lasky usually begins in the children's room of the public library She also relies on talking to friends who are historians as well as calling librarians and historical societies. "I love doing research," Lasky says. "It's really fun. It's like a treasure hunt. I want young readers to come away with a sense of joy about life. I want to draw them into a world where they're really going to connect with these characters."
Kathy and Christopher's two children are very grown up now. Max, who graduated from Dartmouth College works in New York for Hotjobs.com, and Meribah, who loves to dance jazz and hiphop, is a student at New York University. Having an empty nest makes for more time aboard their 48 foot sailboat named Alice.