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An Interview writer & storyteller Tim Meyers by Carol Peterson
CAROL: Thank you, Tim for hanging out with the Marbles. I'm very excited to interview you because we share a love of retold tales. How do you select a tale you'd like to rework?
TIM: Thanks for having me, Carol! And I have to say that "hanging out with marbles" is a great way to put it, and familiar to me—since during grade school, that's something I did a LOT of during recess.
As far as choosing a tale to retell, it's hard to put into words—as the Geoffrey Rush character in "Shakespeare in Love" puts it, "It's a mystery!" I think of it as akin to falling in love (though of course on a much smaller, less earth-shaking scale). I'm always reading, and because I'm a storyteller I'm constantly looking into folktale collections. So it's almost like a series of parties or whatever, and you keep meeting people, and at some point there's someone you met who stays on your mind. So I've read this or that story, and I find myself thinking about it—and voila! Usually I can trace the attraction, at least in part, to something specific. My "Tanuki's Gift," for example, very much reflects my struggle to understand Buddhism, among other things. But as to what finally goads me to actually devote serious time and energy to a re-telling—well, it's a kind of magic. I'd wager it's that way for you too.
CAROL: You have a new book coming out soon. Please tell us about it.
TIM: "Looking for Luna" is scheduled to come out from Cavendish in '09. It's my own story, a rhyming version of a father and young daughter out looking for cats. The manuscript began as my attempt to capture something of what my daughter Cassie and I experienced when we lived in Bakersfield, California, when Cassie was very young. Our walks were continually improved by our sightings of various cats. So I wrote about that, with a twist. I especially tried to make the language sparkle and pop.
CAROL: What was the book's publishing journey? Did it sell quickly or did it travel multiple roads before finding a home?
TIM: Not only did the story change over time—for example, it used to be called "Cat Chant"—but it was rejected by editors MANY times—something like 20 or 25 at least. That's normal. I used to believe that the whole "rejected many times and then successful" was a publishing fairy tale, unusual and so noteworthy. I now know that it's pretty much the way things are. My editor Margery Cuyler helped me focus it and make more of a story out of it—I'm very grateful to her!
CAROL: What was the revision process like? Is the final version fairly close to the original?
TIM: In some ways, the final version is much like the original—it's a very rhythmic piece, with lots of end-rhyme and internal rhyme, including heaping portions of alliteration and assonance. Like any poet, I love the sounds words make when they "chime" upon each other, so to speak. And much of the original wording is intact. But as I said, Margery pushed me to shape the story more specifically, so the plot line changed—well, it's more accurate to say that the piece moved from being a lyric poem to a narrative poem.
CAROL: How has your experience as a professional storyteller improved your writing craft?
TIM: I don't think I could over-estimate how important this has been for me. Any jump from one genre to the next will naturally create certain problems, of course; for example, I tend to write long, which doesn't always work for picture books. I actually think we could expand our vision about picture-book word length—a la perennially popular works like Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses" and the long poems of contemporary successful writers like Shel Silverstein. But longer works aren't exactly "on market" at this point, and I tend to write that way because of the natural expatiation allowed a storyteller. (It's also clear to me that I need to start writing longer fiction).
On the other hand, the pressure of standing before an audience and shaping a story to the immediate responses of living, breathing human beings, be they children or adults, is one of the most wonderful literary boot camps any writer could experience. You learn pacing, you learn economy, you learn the particular power of particular words and phrases—and far beyond that, you're in communion with some of the most profound wisdom the human race has produced. Yeah—it's good for you. I know it's been good for me.
CAROL: How can teachers use your books in the classroom?
TIM: I teach teachers here at Santa Clara University, and I was a classroom teacher for 14 years in the States and around the world—so I know from experience that there are endless ways to use literature in the classroom. My books, for example, usually have a specific rationale, often expressed right in the story. "Tanuki's Gift," for example, asserts the value of friendship over material things, including as a kind of thematic sidebar a meditation on Buddhist ideas about desire. "Basho and the Fox" is about being true to your own vision. "Basho and the River Stones" says straight out that "a good poem is more valuable than gold, and it lasts longer." Teachers could base units on particular themes such as these, using my and others' books, etc., to show various perspectives and applications of such values or character traits. And of course there are all kinds of possibilities for the wildly creative. My "Good Babies" is about crying infants who don't sleep—I wonder how much kids could learn by examining the very qualities they possess that make parenting such a challenge!
CAROL: Your books have received quite a few awards. Care to brag a bit?
TIM: Are you kidding? I'm a storyteller and of Irish extraction—bragging is as natural to me as breathing!
Seriously, I'm deeply grateful for the recognition I've received, such as it is—and delighted to share it, for my own sake as well as for the sake of that marvelous body of work that's sometimes dismissed as "children's literature."
Basho and the Fox made the New York Times best-seller list for children’s books and was chosen by Smithsonian Magazine as a Notable Book for Children. It also earned great reviews from Daniel Pinkwater on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” (who read it aloud, 9/2/00), The Horn Book, The Ruminator, Book List, Foreword Magazine and School Library Journal. It was a 2001 Honor Title Storytelling World Award, an Irma Black Honor Book for the Bank Street College of Education, a Children’s Book Council “Not Just For Children Anymore” choice, and an Archived Recommendation K-2 by PBS Teacher Resource, among other honors.
Tanuki’s Gift earned an excellent boxed review with art in the New York Times Review of Books, was a 2003 “Best Book of the Year” for Nick Jr. Family Magazine, an Irma Black Honor Book for the Bank Street College of Education, a PBS Teacher Resource Recommended Book, an Anne Izard Storyteller’s Choice winner, and won an Asian Pacific American Honor for Literature, Children’s and YA, in 2004.
Basho and the River Stones, a Scholastic Book Club selection and NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Trade Book 2005, was a Junior Library Guild selection and got excellent reviews in The New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and a starred review in School Library Journal. It's currently one of three books nominated for a California Young Reader Medal.
My “Rock Takes a Name" (Storyworks) was a Finalist, Distinguished Achievement Award, for Children’s Fiction Periodicals from the Association of Educational Publishers, and was reprinted in Glencoe's "Backpacker Reader, Grade 6, Book 1," an enrichment text for middle school literature program from Glencoe/McGraw Hill. Some of my other work has also gotten recognition, and my books are generally get strong reviews, I'm happy to say.
CAROL: You obtained a Masters in Literature at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Many writers weigh the pros and cons of further education versus a focus on writing experience. Do you have any guidance for writers about that?
TIM: I think this is a complex, fascinating question. My simple take on it is that any education—in school or out—is good for a writer. Not only because you never know what you might need to know or where a particular piece of writing will take you—but also because we come to realize, over time, that everything is attached to everything else. On the other hand, nothing teaches writing like writing. I'm constantly amazed and bemused at the way these two approaches both support and conflict with each other. Suffice it to say that the official education establishment, for all the great good that it does, often doesn't fully recognize or appreciate the simple power of doing and the crucial point of view such an approach will give you. My advice to writers is to take whatever you can from both sides, but that, ultimately, writing is what makes writers.
CAROL: How do you manage your writing time? Do you have a writing schedule or do you just catch time when you can?
TIM: My first answer is a wild cri de coeur—however I may be managing it, I don't have nearly enough time to write! Sometimes that's very difficult for me. I have a family, whom I love beyond words; that kind of love requires time. And I have a job, which is important and good, and it also takes much of what I have to give. But writing, being an artist, is the air I breathe. I'm silly enough to feel a certain resentment at the words of that silly John Denver song: "So I fiddle when I can and work when I should…" My most profound work is fiddling—I should be fiddling a lot more than I can now!
On the other hand, when you get a group of writers together, they usually start complaining about time. So I know it's par for the course, and I try to be patient. I know I'm lucky to have as much time as I do.
CAROL: If you had one piece of advice for writers, what would it be?
TIM: It's the strangest thing, the way clichés gather truth to themselves. And even though a cliché tends to over-generalize, there's something at the bottom of it that's so true—so deeply true, and so continuously true—that the cliché itself sounds like a great bell over a whole landscape. An artist must be true to his or her deepest self. This isn't easy. In fact, it can tear a person in half. And often enough, it doesn't even work! You can go down like a ship being true to yourself. But that doesn't change the imperative. For one thing, your own deep truth is all you've got. For another, you have to ask yourself a deep spiritual question: What is life for? If sales and awards are what you're after, fair enough—you'll shape your strategies accordingly. But is that really what you want? I don't think so—not in your heart of hearts. So being capable of intense self-criticism, being capable of the truest form of re-writing, re-writing yourself, is crucial. But for all of that, you have to cleave to the deepest meaning you yourself can ascertain. That's what the hero's quest has always been about, and it always will be.
Oh yeah—and be sure to learn your craft. Love it as if it almost was a person.
CAROL: Is there anything you'd like our audience to know that I haven't asked?
TIM: Heck yeah! I can actually whistle and hum at the same time—you should hear me! (Actually, it sounds really weird). And I think Mr. Reese was a genius, when he put peanut-butter and chocolate together to create the greatest invention in human history: the peanut-butter cup. (Funny how "chocolate" didn't make it into the title, eh?). And I'm planning to write a book called "The First Biography of Tim Myers by Tim Myers." And what sound do you get when you push a piano down an open mine-shaft?
Why, A-flat minor, of course.
Check ya later, dudes!
CAROL: Thank you for spending time with us, Tim. Good luck with your future projects.
For more information about Tim and his books, please visit him at his current webpage. Tim hopes to have a website up and running soon.
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