Patricia and Frederick McKissack

From teaching and construction to writing

Patricia McKissack: And when I was teaching, I realized that there were a lot of books that had not been written about great African Americans, the African American contribution to the growth and development of this nation. And so I decided, "Hey, I'll write one book, and then I'll go back to teaching, perhaps, or go do something else."

Well, that was almost 22 years ago, and I haven't gone back yet. But I still think of myself as a teacher. I still think of myself as helping young people to read and to enjoy, and to learn as they read.

Patricia McKissack: Teachers can use my books in many different ways. And one, I would hope, is that it opens doors for readers who, perhaps, do not know a lot about the African American experience in this nation or some of the contributions made by African Americans to the growth and development of this nation. So, that's one way in which they can use them. And I hope they don't wait for Black History Month. Use these books K through 12, September to May.

And when you have African American children in your classroom, it is so good for them to see themselves. If you see yourself in a book, you'll be more likely to pick it up. And if you pick it up, you'll read it. And if you read, you'll read more. And if you read more, you read better. And, of course, that all leads to success. We're emphasizing literacy so much here lately, but literacy is something that I've been interested in since my teaching days.

And one of the best ways to get young people to read is to get them to, first, open the book – to reach out and pick up a book. That's the first step. And then when they open it, of course, you have to catch them with a good story. But leading them to a good book – that's why, when they see themselves on that cover – an African American child, an Asian child, a Native American child – when they see themselves in a book, then they say, "Wow. What's that about?" And then other children from other cultures can read, and then you have an interaction between the cultures, and that can break down so many barriers that we build up a lot of times because of lack of knowledge.

Fred McKissack: Well, for quite a long while, I owned a construction company in St. Louis. And I sold my interest in construction and Pat at the time was in publishing. She found herself on the outside looking in. And I asked her what she would like to do. And she said she wanted to write maybe one or two books especially for the African American child. There were so few books at the time.

And I just said, "I'll help you." We both expected within six months to go back to our old way of living, our old jobs. And we didn't. After we wrote the first two, we wrote, I guess, another 30 or 40 more books. And time passed, and I guess I saw the importance.

One thing that's always kept me going is sort of a missionary type idea, in a sense the importance of a story and what it meant to a child's development. And I think it's one of the most seemingly important things that you could do. It's not readily seeable when you do see it, but what a wonderful world it really is.

The importance of reading

Patricia McKissack: Reading is very, very important. It was important to me. It saved my life, really. Growing up in the segregated South, you're up against so many odds, so many negatives that could cripple your spirit. But when you can attach to reading, that opens up a world beyond where you are in the moment. You can pick up a book and, suddenly, you're in Alaska. Pick up another book, and you're in South America. Pick up another book, and you're in Japan. Pick up another book, you're in Nigeria. So, you can be a world traveler long before you actually get there.

And the more you read, not only are you reading words, but you're reading ideas. And the world is just a collection of ideas. And that's what the library is: a collection of wonderful ideas. And the more you read, the more ideas you get. And you realize that, "Oh, this is the way this person solved a problem," and "This is the way this culture solves a problem." And so that gives you more choices in your decision making and problem solving skills. So, reading opens up that for you as a young reader.

It helped me to escape. I could go anywhere I wanted to go and meet many people. I could go to the past. I could go to the future. Just where else could you go and do all of that?

Even though I was a teacher and all of that, and a good mother, there were no books with my children in them, no books with me in those books. I kept looking for African American stories, and there were none. So, even though I was a reader, I longed for a book with a little girl in it who could outsmart foxes and dance with the wind and, you know, do all those wonderful things – catch a million fish. But there were none.

So, that's why I was led from reading to writing – because I said, "There's a need." And that's why I write.

Fred McKissack: The need is great, too.

Patricia McKissack: The need is great.

Favorite stories from childhood

Fred McKissack: My father read to me Brer Rabbit. And as I got older, sort of through an informal investigation I found out that Brer Rabbit was really from maybe Nigeria. And he came through from on the slave ships over to Haiti.

I guess the second favorite book was The Iliad and The Odyssey. I always loved Ulysses – and today, he might be called James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise. But they're the same type of stories. And I find myself watching stories of that genre.

Patricia McKissack: My favorite stories came from fairytales, myths and legends also, but my favorite story of all times was The Ugly Duckling. And I loved that story so much, because it parallels my life and my culture; you know, I was cast aside and told that, "You're not as beautiful as" and "You're not" and "You don't have anything to offer."

And then I said, "One day, I will have my day to shine." And, indeed, we, as African American people have come full circle and are continuing to grow and to develop.

I always loved the poems of Langston Hughes. His "I, Too, Sing America" just kind of parallels that Ugly Duckling story. And "Mother to Son" – I think that's one of my favorite of all times: "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair," because that's my mother's story, and how she used to read poetry to me as a child. I grew up listening to Dunbar and Countee Cullen and some of the Harlem Renaissance poets.

And I always loved history. I loved to read history – nonfiction history. I loved to read biographies.

Fred McKissack: And we also love to watch stories – children's stories, especially – play out. Here in Washington often, there's "The King's New Clothes" played out in different forms. "The Little Red Hen" – quite often we see that. And maybe "Midas' Gold" and "The Boy who Cried Wolf." Children's stories are quite important in the way we think and what we think about.

Patricia McKissack: The way we solve problems and make decisions. Your stories that you get in childhood help to shape your adult thinking processes. And so it's very important that we give our children a variety of stories, so that here's one story where the main character wins and the huntsman comes along and kills the wolf. Well, over here a child uses her wits and her mind to outsmart the fox and allows the fox to keep his nature. It is the nature of the fox to steal eggs. So, we don't want to rob the fox of his fox-hood, so to speak, but we do want to get through the woods safely. So, we teach the child to use his or her wit, her thought, her thinking to outsmart the fox, rather than to devastate the fox, or to kill the fox.

And, again, this is differences in the way we solve problems. And the stories that we give them teach that.

Writing fiction and non-fiction

Fred McKissack: I think, first, that the line is not really a line. It's a gray area. Fiction and nonfiction are very, very close. And you can easily slip out of one into another. And I guess, in a sense, what you get out of anything is maybe the spirit of something.

The science fiction that I read in the early fifties is now reality. And so one has to be sort of real careful about the things that – the ideas that we dream of that we can create.

And one great importance is to tell a good story. If you don't tell a good story, nobody will read it. And so it sort of dies on the vine, no matter what the ideas were behind it. You must tell a good story.

Patricia McKissack: Is it real? Is it true? All of my stories – fiction and nonfiction are real. They may not always be true in the fiction, but I try to make my nonfiction read like fiction and my fiction read like nonfiction. And that's where that gray area comes in. Whenever I write nonfiction, I pay close attention to details and make sure that all my facts are accurate. But like Fred said, you have to tell a good story.

So, we dig and dig and dig for stories – at least Fred does. He finds these wonderful books and wonderful reference materials and brings them to me. And we glean as much story as we possibly can. You can go to a good encyclopedia and get the date of birth, date of death, where they grew up, where they went to school, the degrees they have, etc. You can get that from an encyclopedia insert. But it's the person's favorite color, favorite meal, something they did at camp, something they did with a best friend when they were nine years old. These are stories you have to dig for, you have to find. And we like to dig for those stories to make the reading more interesting.

And then when I'm writing nonfiction, I take some of that same thought and try to bring that reality – "Is it real? Is it true?" It may not be true, but it's real. It's real to the place and the time and the setting. Like when I wrote Mirandy and Brother Wind, Ridge Top is a real place. Now, they didn't have a junior and a senior cakewalk there and, you know, Mirandy did not really exist and whatever. But can you catch the wind? Well, my second graders, my first graders and kindergarteners and preschoolers all say, "Yes! Of course you can." And they go about telling me how to catch the wind.

Suddenly, we get in third grade, and they go, "Oh, no. That's not real. You can't really do that." But then I remind them that, "The world was flat at one time, you know, and everybody knew that. And if you sailed too far, you would sail off the edge."

They go, "That's not true."

I go, "I know. But who knew it at that time?"

And if a woman wanted to be a doctor, she couldn't be; because women didn't have the sensibilities to be a doctor. But we all know Elizabeth Blackwell did become the first female doctor in the United States.

And then, of course, if man had been intended to fly, he would've been given wings. But we all know you can fly today. A century ago, people thought that was a weird and strange idea.

So, what is impossible today, or what can't be done today might be able to be done tomorrow. So, let's not speak in terms of "impossible." We can't do it now. Let's just say that.

How they write at home

Patricia McKissack: First of all, we work in our home. For many years, we did not work in our home. We had an office. And we would get up every morning and go to work – the way people get up and go to work. People think because you're a writer that you sit around in your housecoat all day long and, you know, don't go to work; and that they can call you all hours of the day, and that you'll sit around and talk.

You can't do that. You get up, and you go to work, just like people go to their offices to work. But we go downstairs on our lower level, and we have an office and a library. Our library is our major asset to writing – other than our word processor. But our library is very important to us. That's where we develop stories. That's where we research the stories that we're going to do. We have an extensive library that we have collected over the past 22 years.

I work every day from about 9:00 to about 3:30 or 4:00. And I'm pretty much wiped out after that. But, now, if I'm trying to meet a deadline, I can work from nine to nine – you know, a straight 12 hours, if I have to. I try not to get myself in that situation.

Fred, as I said, does most of the research. He's gone most of the day. I work at the word processor, drafting… Let's just take chapter one. I'll work on chapter one, and I'll say, "Fred, I'm missing this, this, this and this. I need more information about this time frame," you know, "what this organization was and what they did." And he either goes up on the Web to find it, or he goes to the library to find it, or he calls the library to find it. He calls the organization. I mean he does all of that kind of work. He loves doing it, because he loves the details. I don't. If I get within the century, I'm okay. "It was in the early 1900s when such and such happened."

And Fred will say, "No, no, no. We can do better." And he'll find the month, the date, the time, the day of the week and check the weather reports to see what kind of weather it was that day. So, that kind of detail I have in our books, and the kids often comment that they really like knowing that it was snowing on the day this happened, or it was a thunderstorm the day this happened, or whatever. And they like that. They really like the detail. So, I have Fred to thank for that.

Fred McKissack: It's so important for a writer to have some sort of library. Library and writing go together. And I guess we started out early. Electronics have changed writing so much in the last 20 years. Now we have a Macintosh computer, and the world has completely changed. And the information that's at your fingertips has changed so much.

Where their ideas come from

Fred McKissack: I guess probably the most famous case with us is we were doing a history of the Civil Rights Movement. And we had books all over the office. We had books on the floor, books in the chair, books on the bookshelf. We had papers everywhere. We had coffee cups and diet soda cups and hamburger wrappers… We had to get through with this book, because the publishers were calling seemingly every hour, saying, "When you going to get through?"

And then the cleaning lady came in, and she just said, "Messy Bessies! Look at this office!" And we started looking at her, and we started laughing. And we got together, and we cleaned up and straightened up the office and threw out all the trash and became respectable again.

But after the cleaning lady went out, we said, "Messy Bessey! That sounds like a children's story." So, that night we wrote Messy Bessey. We wrote it just as a fun story for kids about being messy and about cleaning up your mess.

But I guess a couple months later, after it had been illustrated and sent back to us, there within that story was a universal principle. And the principle is that anytime you start to be creative, you'll probably make a mess. Expect a mess, control your mess, and life will be much simpler.

Patricia McKissack: Fred calls them by two names, the Athena idea and the mustard seed idea. The Athena idea is born like the goddess Athena, just springs forth from the head of Zeus, fully grown. Well, some ideas are like that. They just spring forth, fully grown. You know, it takes you about 45 minutes, like Messy Bessey, to write. The first book took us about 45 minutes to write – very simple, very easy. Just came right up up and out of us.

And then there's the mustard seed idea. And the mustard seed idea starts very small, sometimes with an idea, sometimes as simple as a word and like It's the Honest-to-Goodness Truth, it started with the word "truth." And you heard so much – especially in this town – about "who's telling the truth?" And I thought, "Well, what is the truth?" You know, that ancient question, "What is the truth?" We don't know very often when we're looking right at it.

And I said, "What is truth?" and how do we teach children to tell the truth? And a lot of children do tell the truth, no matter how much it hurts other people.

And so that idea came like a mustard-seed idea, with just a word, not even a thought; just a word, "truth." And then you grow and you water and you take care of it and you nurture it, until finally it becomes a full-blown story, and then you can write it.

We never write until we have the whole story in mind. I never put a word to a piece of paper until I have thought that story out: beginning, middle, and end; my character, action, setting and idea. They're all in place, and then I write.

Now, a lot of writers write, and it comes to them as they write. I cannot do that. I walk around with a story in my head sometimes for a whole year, and I just noodle it and noodle it. And noodling is mental doodling. And I noodle and noodle and, you know, work it and massage it.

And I change the character's name two or three different times, and sometimes I move the setting from place to place until I find a place, or we go someplace and I go, "Ah! That's where this story should take place." So, I never write anything down until I have it pretty much organized in my head. For nonfiction, you don't have that luxury. I mean you have to get going.

Favorite stories they've written

Patricia McKissack: I don't have a favorite book. All of mine are favorites, because they all come from me. It's hard to carve out one book. Like, do I love my heart more than my liver? I love all – and so all of these books come out of me, so it's very hard for me to carve out one and say, "I love it more than the rest." They are me. That's my work. That's my life, sweat and blood. I can't say which one's my favorite.

But I will say this – that Goin' Someplace Special came directly from my core. And the love of that child for the library, the love of reading, willing to go through whatever it took – and she had to go through quite a little bit to get to that library – it was important enough for her to get there. And I wanted young readers to know that, while I was dealing with segregation and Jim Crow signs, they might be dealing with a health issue, family problems, a social problem. Whatever the problem may be, the library is a place where you can go, and you can find peace. You can find some sense of belonging. You can find your space, and you can find your people there – people who think like you. You can find somebody in a book who thinks like you and who can maybe give you the encouragement to keep going.

So, while I don't have a favorite book, Goin' Someplace Special is truly a very important book to me.

Fred McKissack: My favorite book is maybe Joe's Friends by Patricia McKissack and illustrated by Scott Cook. I guess it's my favorite book. I like the illustration. I like the story line. It's one in which friends help friends, and in due time. Trying to help each other is about the best we can do in life. And I think children should know that early. It's a beautiful story, and so that's my favorite book.