If you’ve seen the movie Freaky Friday, you know that its premise is about change and growth through role reversal. For my Friday Blog entry I thought it would be interesting to interview aspiring writers; the same writers who spend lots of time reading the interviews of published authors and dreaming of the day when they might get their book on the shelves…
This week’s interview is with Hilary Sierpinski. Hilary and I have yet to meet face to face, but that hasn’t stopped us from getting know each other on Verla Kay’s Blue Boards and on Facebook. One of the things that has captured my attention with Hilary is her really cool blog The Bone Digger’s Underground , but more about that later.
Lets get started…tell your new fans a little bit about yourself.
I’m not one of those people who felt she was born to be a writer. I have a B.A. in Art History, a very writing intensive discipline but scholarly writing is very different than fiction writing but it was then I first started thinking about it. I minored in studio art, had great visions of myself as a painter but found I resonated with sculpture more, and in fact married a sculptor! I graduated and quickly realized that a B.A. in Art History wasn’t going to get me very far but a PhD wasn’t in the cards so I went back to school and got my graduate certification in Art Education. I taught in the public school systems about a year, learning that administrators frown on teachers that encourage non-violent forms of anarchy…or just about any kind of independent thinking. In other words, it wasn’t a good fit. I left public education to do Public Relations and Development work for non-profit arts organizations. During these years I decided I wanted to try my hand at writing, and specifically writing for kids.
When I found out I was pregnant with our little boy (Cole who is now six) I had not envisioned myself as a stay at home mom. Then something terrible and wonderful happened. The delivery was very difficult and while Cole, thank goodness, came through it all right, I had a long recovery. It was two years in fact before I could sit sans pillow! I had also had a change of heart once Cole was born. I wanted to be home with him, and was really too ill to return back to the job I had at the time, which was very demanding and required long hours. I may have not been the most comfortable during those years, but I had been given the gift of time, time with my son and time to follow the little voice in my head that said write and I’ve been writing steadily ever since.
This is a perfect start and by the way, we’re kindred souls. Before I stayed home with my boys, I was a Special Education teacher working with children with behavioral difficulties. I very quickly learned that non-violent anarchy is frowned upon. I was often frustrated because the “right” thing to do for a child wasn’t always the politically correct thing. When my oldest son was born I unhappily left my students behind, but happily left the job.
I’m going to jump right in and ask an unrelated question. I’ve peeked at your blog and it’s loaded with fascinating things about you and your writing. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
My writing. First of all I believe that “write what you know” is bad advice. I started off writing what I knew and while I was new to fiction writing, I wasn’t new to reading and it was bad. The idea for THE CIPHER OF ANU-K’AI came in a quiet moment where I literally asked “what should I write about” out loud. The answer came in a black and white image in my head, very detailed, of a Native American. My first thought was no, sorry, next please. It was unfamiliar territory, but I didn’t shut it out entirely. Later that day I was at the computer and felt compelled to google Chief Sitting Bull, and there it was, the exact picture I saw in my head earlier. How the story I wrote came to be fully formed in my head I can’t even remember, but I was definitely writing it down, not thinking it up.
That being said, my love for history and archaeology, art an artifacts informs how I write. I am fascinated by how little we know about the world around us, and how often what we thought we knew turns out to be flawed. The Sistine Chapel is a perfect example. For years Art Historians expounded on Michelangelo’s use of “sfumato.” And then they cleaned it and discovered his “sfumato” was smog. And what hasn’t been discovered? The devastating 2005 Tsunami in Indonesia uncovered an ancient port city…how many more are out there? I don’t think we have a clue how old, or interesting the history of civilization is on this planet, so even the most fantastical part of my writing is connected to our earth and it’s history, because I think there is enough magic and mystery right in our own backyards. Even the chapter book I’m tinkering with is rooted in science, so I guess you could say I’ve always got one foot in the make believe and one foot grounded in “reality” whatever that is!
I couldn’t agree more. I think there’s a nugget of “something you know” in everything you write. It’s the platform from which you push off of, but it’s only the start. The yearning to know and discover something within yourself creates the deepest and truest stories. I read the synopsis of THE CIPHER OF ANU-K’AI that was on your blog. You have to share a little bit of it with us. It sounds like Dan Brown meets National Treasure for middle graders. I already covet an advance reader copy for my boys-they would love it!
Well, after several years of trying to land an agent I think I’ve given up on CIPHER. I think I might suffer from what Steven King calls timid writing, so I’m starting from page one…same characters and going a little more Mulder and Scully with it. We’ll see! But I’d be happy to share my trials and tribulations with it as well! Thanks for your kind words and your interest!
I admire your tenacity. I think that fear lurks in the back of everyone’s minds. I’m glad you’re not abandoning it because the concept sounds really interesting. I’m looking forward to hearing about your progress with it in the future. It takes a lot of courage to reinvent your own story. For me, the initial sting of criticism, aka learning I’m not perfect is difficult but I’ve discovered that I really enjoy the growth that comes from revision. Having said that I have yet to restart from scratch, so I bow to your dedication.
Now that I’m getting to know you a bit, is their any chance that I’ll bump into you at a conference somewhere? Basically, the loyal readers of this blog want to know the best way to stalk you LOL!
I have never joined SCBWI if you can believe it. Being able to stay home with Cole and write means we can’t afford conferences and honestly, with Verla’s I never felt like I was missing out not being a member. So I guess I can be stalked on-line or in my local supermarket!
The Blue Boards are great that way. We love you Verla! I guess we’ll have to make do with growing our friendship on line. You may want to watch your back in the grocery aisle that stores the ice cream…I hang out there ;o)
Can you also tell us a little bit more about your blog and the other WIP’s?
I envisioned my blog as an extension of my writing, not a personal journal. The Bone Diggers’ Underground I hope, will one day serve as sort of a community meeting room for kids interested in the type of stories I post about, like a big newspaper of the unconventional that follows the Bone Diggers’ creed, “Question Everything. Unearth the Truth.”
It’s hard to talk about CIPHER now, because it is changing so much in my mind. I think I had already mentioned it is taking a much more agents Scully and Mulder turn…think Indiana Jones meets the X-Files.
The Chapter Book I’m working on gets the short end of the stick because I’m so caught up in CIPHER (or whatever it will be called now!) but essentially, BORISLAV THE TERRIBLE AND THE WAYWARD STINKBOMB is a humorous chapter book that follows Calvin, the most normal kid in school who finds himself in a heap of trouble ever since a mad scientist started to borrow his brain. Of course no one believes him, but we find out Borislav is a very real, renegade scientist who was expelled from CERN (the real life particle physics laboratory that houses the Large Hadron Collider) and has accidentally fallen into a black hole he blew open in his living room. Borislav, Calvin learns, lives just doors down from him and somehow part of the mad scientist got “stuck” to Calvin during the explosion. With the help of his friends, Calvin has to somehow find a way to get Borislav back before he unknowingly launches another rotten egg or projectile pizza in the lunchroom and gets himself expelled.
MOLLY BROWN is another work in progress about a little girl (named for the Unsinkable Molly Brown) who has just lost her mother to cancer and then her father as he disappears into his grief. On the morning of her mother’s passing, she escapes to the streets of Brooklyn and finds herself in a Vintage clothing store and becomes the unlikely friend of the old woman who runs. The old woman helps Molly sew pieces of fabric she cuts from her mother’s clothes onto vintage pieces. Molly, who had never had many friends but who was the whole universe to her parents, suddenly feels invisible and creates these clothes as a protective shell around her. But she soon finds she isn’t that invisible…at least not to animals, especially strays. Every day it’s more and more so that every time she leaves the apartment, she has in tow a parade of creatures, including a pigeon that she swears has her mother’s eyes. MOLLY is about a girl who has to learn to see herself through her own eyes. I’m playing around with it as a screenplay with a bit of a Royal Tenenbaums feel to it.
I’m a big fan Hilary. Between your creative ideas and your drive, I have a feeling it is just a matter of when. It wouldn’t be a Freaky Friday interview without your top five…
Top 5 books in no particular order. Thanks, Kim.
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, by Maurice Sendak. I never got sent to my room as a kid, but I did lie awake wondering when my room would become a forest. As an adult, I still rate this as one of the most perfect books of all time.
THE HOBBIT, by J.R. Tolkien. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole and that means comfort.”
Reading this was the first time I was immediately, and fully transported into a world that was not my own. And it was a wonderful adventure!
HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERERS STONE, by J.K. Rowling. When this book first hit the United States, I was teaching high school and had an early morning commute and always listened to NPR’s All Things Considered. One morning they ran a story about a little known author who was all the rage in England. They described her book signings where children were getting out of school to attend them and dressing as their favorite characters and I remember thinking to myself, what is this book? That night I drove to my local indie and bought the paper back. The first chapter blew me away, especially the ending lines. “…He couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: “To Harry Potter—the boy who lived!”
In that one short chapter, Harry Potter became “The Boy Who Lived.” Of course we were going to follow him to the bitter end right? The power of that chapter, the wonder of her story telling captured me as it did much of the world. And when I finished the book I felt so horribly green with envy, so jealous that someone could be this good and engage so many young minds, that I knew the jealousy was telling me that this was my passion.
THE POWER OF MYTH, by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. This book more than any other has influenced how I write. If you are not familiar with his work, Campbell was a comparative mythologist who coined the phrase “follow your bliss.” In this book, he expounds upon the idea of a collective mythos, that we are all part of this vast pool of stories that surround us and bind us together. He sights similarities between the story of Genesis and tribal creation myths from around the globe. It was after reading this book that I began to think of stories as real, tangible things that already exist even before we “think them up.” It shaped my understanding of archetypal characters and hero journeys, and has helped me to get out of the stories way. I’m still learning how to do this, but the more I listen, the better my writing gets.
CHARLOTTE’S WEB by E.B. White. Because Wilbur is “Some Pig” and because I cried my eyes out when Charlotte dies even though I have arachnophobia.
You just gave me chills and goose bumps with your thoughts on Harry Potter and Charlotte’s Web. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. It was a pleasure. Don’t forget to check out Hilary’s very cool blog The Bone Digger’s Underground and be sure to friend her on Facebook so you can reap the wisdom of her experiences with her re-write of CIPHER.
See you next week.
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Kimberly, awesome interview. There is so much here! Hilary, it's great getting to know you better. BTW, After reading what you said about stories existing before we 'think them up' I'm re-reading the Power of the Myth.
Thanks so much. I'm feeling pretty lucky to have the opportunity to get to know my old and new friends better. :o)