On the road with "Werewolf Hamlet"

Looking back and remembering...

Tomorrow begins the California leg of the Werewolf Hamlet book tour. Thanks to my daughter, Lucy Lunsford, it looks like this, who worked her Canva magic to jazz up the dates and invites.

Lucy also created a beautiful slideshow that captures all of the inspirations for Werewolf Hamlet.

Werewolf Hamlet Presentation

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Last week, I walked on the Vulcan trail in Birmingham, fearing everything about my upcoming book launch. I worried about getting people to come, stressed about bothering people, and for a few panicked moments second-guessed everything about this book and why I wrote it—the works.

My last middle-grade novels, the Maggie Valley Trilogy, Gentle’s Holler, Louisiana’s Song, and Jessie’s Mountain (circa 2005, 2007, 2008), came out so long ago that I am now a debut novelist again. I was included in School Library Journal’s “Take Five.” (I’ll take it with heaps of gratitude.)

On Vulcan Trail that day, a little girl marched right toward me. With braids and beads in her hair, she looked like a younger Zora, the girl in my novel, Angus’s best friend, who occasionally talks sense into him.

The little girl was carrying a big stick, and she said to me, "Do you know why I'm carrying this big stick?"

"No, why?"

"It's to fight off all the werewolves because I am the strongest girl in the whole town. I am sooooooooooooooooo strong, and I can fight off the werewolves and then they won't get my dog, Toby." She aimed the stick at the woods around us on the Vulcan trail.

I said, "You are the strongest girl in town. What is your name?"

She smiled and said, "Aurora."

I didn't tell her the title of my book.

Her babysitter only said, "Nice to meet you. Come on, Aurora! Time to go home."

When I got home I looked up the name Aurora.

The name Aurora signifies the start of a new day and the birth of a new life. It can also represent hope, optimism, and renewal. In Roman mythology, Aurora was the goddess of dawn.

That child, Aurora, who came out of nowhere gave me such courage and light that day.

This ran in the Knoxville and Chattanooga papers yesterday. My old college roommate, Nicki, sent it to me.

Werewolf Hamlet is my ninth book.

When my first novel, Offsides, was published almost thirty years ago, my mother-in-law, Mama Frances, came to Los Angeles to help babysit the kids, Flannery and Lucy, ages five and seven. I flew to Texas where I picked up a rental car and drove to bookstores across the South and sometimes read to one or two coaches’ wives or clerks in cities where I knew no one.

In what is unheard of now, William Morrow paid for my book tour to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City. At a Books-A-Million in Bossier City, a young clerk asked me to read a section over the loudspeaker to drum up business. I read a chapter with a touch of profanity since swearing came as naturally as breathing to my Dad, who inspired the coach in the novel.

Afterward, the clerk said, “You oughtn’t should have read that part. Can’t be doing that around here. People around here shove ‘The Joy of Sex’ in the toilet.”

At another signing, an elderly lady approached me and said, “It means the world you’re here. I love your dad so much. He’s the greatest. I have followed him forever. He’s a great coach.” She started crying. “It just means the world to me you came all the way to Knoxville. I love John Madden.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her my father was Joe Madden, the unfamous Madden coach, so I just thanked her.

At my reading in Pittsburgh, Coach Johnny Majors got up from the audience and stood right in front of me after I finished reading, so he could field questions about Pitt football.

When my American Girl book, Writing Smarts: A Girls Guide to Poetry, School Reports and More, was published, I did a few local readings, but I didn’t have to promote a thing because American Girl was a publishing machine. I went to the headquarters once in Wisconsin on a wintry day, and it was like a Costco or Sam’s Club for everything dolls and doll accessories in the middle of the farmlands.

When Gentle’s Holler was published, I set up my book tour across the South myself with the help of my student, Rahni Sadler, an Australian journalist studying writing for children at UCLA Extension, and through her, I found Ernestine E. Edwards and the moonshiner, Popcorn Sutton. She came with me to Maggie Valley, and with Rahni’s help, I did free writing workshops in the Smoky Mountains where kids would not typically get to meet an author. I remember the day of my first workshop in Waynesville, NC, when about 100 kids were about to pile into the library, and the librarian asked me, “Ready?”

Overcome with dread, I wanted to say, “No, I’m not ready - I’m terrified. But I just faked it and nodded, and that was the workshop where a boy said, “Lady, I am not a ‘rider.’ My teacher made me come here.”

I said, “Well, what do you like to do?”

He said, “Fish.”

I said, “Could you write something about fishing? One of my characters likes to fish, and I don’t know anything about fishing.”

He asked, “I can write about fishing?”

I said, “You can write about anything.”

So the boy wrote a beautiful poem about fishing and bragging when he catches a big bass fish, and how a can of worms costs a dollar and there are ten worms in a can, so if you lose one worm, it’s like throwing a dime in the water.

That was also the book tour where I read at the old schoolhouse in Maggie Valley at an ice cream social for Gentle’s Holler, but next door the town council got into a huge brawl during my reading, so the librarian asked me to PLEASE KEEP READING so the kids wouldn’t notice the police cars circling to break up the town hall kerfuffle.

Each time I finished a chapter, she’d said, “How about another chapter, kids!”

I think I read four chapters that night.

During the fight, the mayor came over to give me the “Key to the City” but was so distracted with the backroom drama of the town hall meeting that she said, “Thank you, Cathy Madden, for writing about our mountains.”

That tour led to two more books in the trilogy - Louisiana’s Song and Jessie’s Mountain. Those novels came out like tiny cat paws in the world and slipped out much the same way, but by then I was friends with Ernestine and she let me use the cabin Popcorn Sutton built her to work on Jessie’s Mountain. Popcorn came up the mountain one day to build a fire for Norah, and as he was leaving he grabbed some jugs and said, “Don’t tell nobody where my still is.”

He did build Norah a fire. (Norah is now Bo but I have permission to use her name when writing about her as a child as she still loves her name, “Norah.”)

Ernestine, who became my mountain mother, told me a story of being “five years old and a big girl” and carrying milk to the Ramsey family in the holler since her mama had the only milk cow in Maggie Valley, and that eventually became Ernestine’s Milky Way almost fifteen years after I first met Ernestine at Joey’s Pancake House in Maggie Valley. The wonderful artist, Emily Sutton, from Yorkshire illustrated Ernestine’s Milky Way and it made me so happy that her last name was Sutton, although no relation to Popcorn.

I remember going on a book tour with my family to Ghost Town in the Sky for all three Maggie Valley novels in the summer of 2008 where I appeared with the Care Bears, the biggest upstagers ever, and the carnival barker yelled at me, “Introduce yourself. I gotta each lunch.”

I almost started to cry and then my sister-in-law, Tomi Lunsford, who’d created all the music for Livy Two Weems’ songs, whispered, “Hold it together! It’s show business!”

Here is Tomi singing “Buttermilk Moon” from the Maggie Valley Trilogy.

And “Ring of Seven Sisters” and “Floating Checks.”

***

After the Maggie Valley novels came Harper Lee and all the work that brought me to Alabama because of that biography, Up Close Harper Lee. Here are two treasured letters I received from her. The first was a response to an essay I’d written about Flannery and telling him the truth about Christmas called Leaving Santa Behind.

The next one was when she declined my offer to visit her in Monroeville, Alabama. No surprise.

When Harper Lee didn’t want to talk, I found Kathryn Tucker Windham, and that led to the Tin Man, Charlie Lucas, and another story, which Lucy illustrated - Nothing Fancy About Kathyrn and Charlie.

And lots of writing workshops that we did together for kids in Alabama.

For so many of those years, I was writing Werewolf Hamlet, which first began as “The Fifth Grade Life of Jack Gettlefinger.”

This is from the very first draft.

It began as a journal that Angus Jack Gettlefinger was forced to keep against his will.

Lucy and Flannery both drew the sketches below.

September 5…BUBBLY POISON LAVA

Fine. If my hand falls off, don’t blame me. It’s not normal to write that much at one time. When I was on my deathbed, my mother forced me to drink orange juice, laced with red Tylenol, (BUBBLY POISON LAVA) but she let me watch THE WOLF MAN, 1941, Lon Chaney Junior. I am not allowed to watch horror movies made after 1950, because I FREAK OUT, according to her, and she doesn’t need “HIGH DRAMA.” She also made me help her fold five baskets of LAUNDRY into towering stacks like the Leaning Towers of Pisa. She said AND I QUOTE: “If you’re well enough to watch THE WOLF MAN, you’re well enough to fold laundry.” [Enjoy this diagram of “Leaning Tower of Pisa” stacks of laundry]. It’s an old tower in Italy that looks like it could crash over any second. RRRRING! Is that seven sentences? Liam lets me watch anything when he’s babysitting us as long as it’s Dodger Baseball.

Yours truly, Angus Jack Gettlefinger

September 6… SPORTS, SPORTS, SPORTS…

Everybody in my family loves sports. Liam, age 17, loves baseball and wants to own the Dodgers. Tessa, age 15, plays basketball and throws shot-put, which is this HEAVY METAL BALL that she can throw thirty feet, but she’s embarrassed to be great at this sport. When I told her she was great at shot-put she said, “So? Why can’t I be good at something that matters?” I said, “Beats me,” and she got ENRAGED. I was trying to be EMPATHETIC, which happened to be two of our spelling words.

Sidney, age 6, loves soccer, ballet, and fairies. She’s always putting on ballet shows in the backyard for fairies. She makes our dog, Renfield, dress up in wigs and wings and sit in the audience with her stuffed animals. Once, Renfield drooled on her stuffed amoeba called “Germy.” Sidney went crazy. Germy goes everywhere with her.

My parents want me to find a sport too. They think every kid should have a sport., but I prefer movie make-up and scary costumes. I wish they would let me act in plays, but my mom is sick of driving and I QUOTE: “I’M NOT DRIVING ANY KID IN THIS FAMILY ONE MORE PLACE IN MY MINI-VAN HAMSTER WHEEL. I’M THE HAMSTER ON IT, DRIVING KIDS EVERYWHERE, AND I’M SICK OF IT!” I wish Liam could drive, but he’s not responsible enough, according to Mom and Dad. He disagrees. GREATLY. [Enjoy this diagram of a mother hamster driving a mini-van.

Yours truly, Jack Angus Gettlefinger

P.S. I did not mean to write this much. It was an accident.

September 7…????????

IIIIIII hhhaaaaaavvvee noooooooooo IIIIIdeeaa wwwhhhhhaaatttttt toooooooooo wrrrrrrrrriiiittttttteeeeeee bbbbbbbbbeccccaaaauuusssssseeee iiittttttttttt ttttaaakkes aaaaa whhhhilllleee tooo thinkkkkkkkk oooffff wwwhhhatt to wwwritte!

Fine. I’ve been a student at this school since 1st grade. I’ve done book reports on Abraham Lincoln and Gandhi and Marie Curie. I should know about courage and bravery by now, since I’m ten-years-old. So why am I scared to say that I want to audition for a play? My make-up as Gandhi was INCREDIBLE - brown body paint, wired glasses, slicked back hair with gel to keep it down. I watched the film and practiced his accent. I got an A on my oral report in 4^th grade as Gandhi. I hope we get to do oral reports on famous people in costume in 5^th grade too. Could “Hamlet” be considered “famous?” [Please enjoy this drawing of me as Gandhi and Nosferatu.]

Yours truly, Angus Jack Gettlefinger

Dear Angus,

Are you using your time wisely? Please see me after class. No drawing in your school journals.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Loudermilk

***

Anyway, that’s enough looking back for now. It’s time to pack for Los Angeles. I couldn’t have written Werewolf Hamlet without the inspiration of three incredible children growing up in Los Angeles a long time ago. I’ve set up the readings and signings as conversations on purpose with the help of Charlesbridge Publishing, Charlesbridge Moves, and Blue Slip Media.

If you’re in Los Angeles or San Diego, please come and say hello.

I will be speaking with Susan Kaiser Greenland on Wednesday night at Diesel Books in Brentwood. Susan wrote Real World Enlightenment and is a “mindfulness educator and bestselling author, specializing in distilling global wisdom traditions and scientific research into straightforward everyday practices.” She’s also a dear friend with the biggest heart.

And Paula Yoo at “Once Upon a Time” in Montrose on Saturday. Paula Yoo wrote Rising from the Ashes which is the winner of the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award and is such a beautiful writer and another dear friend.

And Chris Baron at “Mysterious Galaxy Books” on my late father’s birthday on March 5th in San Diego, and Chris is the author of the forthcoming SPARK and so many other fabulous children’s novels. I’ve never met Chris but I’m so looking forward to talking to him.

I’ve purposely set up these events conversations because after years of showing up solo (or reading over the loudspeaker in Bossier City to drum up business), I think it’s much more exciting to get to talk together about our books, our inspirations, and why we write for children.

See you on the road.

Love,
Kerry