Interview

This is an interview with Laura Stevenson.  The angle of the interview was that she changed her writing and style due to things that were affecting her own life.  Her novels are based on Vermont settings modeling the families summer home that she had first been to at age five.  As she faces challenges in her own life, she realizes the importance of characters to experience some of the same or similar issues in her books.

Louella: Hello Laura, I’m Louella, nice to meet you (shake hands)

Laura: Nice to meet you too.  Louella is a very pretty name.

Louella: Thank you. I’m a writing student at Champlain College and I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about your writing, if you have time?

Laura: (grabbing her husbands arm says to him “stay here, she wants to ask me questions”) This is my husband, sometimes I need him for an interpreter

Louella:  Hello (I shake his hand) I’m curious what your inspiration was for writing the young adult book, All the King’s Horses?

Laura: Oh, have you read it?

Louella: No I haven’t but I’ve heard of it from your website and was hoping to buy it here but they don’t have it.

Laura: Three very dear friends of mine died of Alzheimer’s. Although I hadn’t heard from one in years, I received the news as I received a $10,000 from his will distribution.  It really happens quickly and is such a shame.  I wanted to be able to give back, do something to help end the disease.  You can order it on my website and I will even sign it and all the proceeds go to the Alzheimer’s Association.

Louella: oh good, I will do that.  Do you tend to write about real life situations in your books?

Laura:  I do and my style has changed as my interests and capabilities have changed throughout my career.  Starting out I really enjoyed history and wrote several books about the Elizabethan time period which I also taught classes in.  As I began to lose my hearing I had to use computers and microphones in the classroom and things got harder and harder.  I became more secluded.  I had just gone through a divorce and moved to Vermont where I was raising my two girls.  They were ten and eleven, at the time, and I wanted to write a book for each of them while also touching on some disabilities sense I was now becoming plagued by my own.  So I wrote All the King’s Horses on Alzheimer’s and A Castle in the Window on dyslexia.

Louella:  Have you noticed that your loss of hearing affected your writing and, how so?

Laura: By the time that I had my implants, hearing aides hadn’t worked for me in nine years.  So, I had nine years of total silence and I had some words with no understanding but they were afraid that I would have no understanding at all and basically have to learn meanings of spoken word all over.  It’s very odd.  I’ve written an article on it, it’s on my website.

Louella:  Is your recent book, Return in Kind an autobiography?

Laura:  My recent work, Return in Kind, is semi autobiographical, except, I didn’t lose my job.  At the time I moved to Vermont the Disability Act didn’t allow it.  In this novel some try to figure out who’s who.  Fiction is not cut and dry every writer borrows from other people’s lives around them, adding bits and pieces of fluff.  There is a debate on if this matters, if it’s not true or didn’t happen as shown, does it change the beauty?  So when asked if this is an autobiography, I say “well, yeah” but really some things did not happen that way entirely.  So this is a story that takes place in Vermont, its the world I grew up in.  Eleanor and her brother inherit the family farmhouse, along with 180 acres of land.  Eleanor, having recently been divorced, leaves all her belongings to Madford College, then moves to the farmhouse.  Her brother, without telling her sold his portion of the land for $800,000 and now that land, which is adjacent to hers, is being developed.  This is her realization of that and how she deals with it for a portion of her life.  The book opens in 1994.  So some of that is autobiography and some, I just expounded.

Louella:  It really sounds like your books are a timeline as you write about things that are at the fore front of your life.  Writing young adult books when your children were young adults and writing an autobiography when you were alone without hearing.

Laura:  That is true, I guess.  I wrote, in my college years about history, then I turned to disabilities as I addressed mine.  I guess the most recent was looking at myself as I went through my seclusion as a disabled individual.

Louella:  I want to thank you for your time as it looks as though they are motioning for you in the room.  It was very nice talking to you.

Laura:  It was nice meeting you.  Make sure you go to my website if you want a copy of All the King’s Men.