VERMONT VOICES with Katherine Paterson
- Megan Demarest
- 1 day ago
- 13 min read
STORY BY MEGAN DEMAREST
Katherine Paterson is the beloved author of more than 40 books, including 18 novels for children and young people. She has twice won the Newbery Medal, for Bridge to Terabithia in 1978 and Jacob Have I Loved in 1981. The Master Puppeteer won the National Book Award in 1977 and The Great Gilly Hopkins won the National Book Award in 1979 and was also a Newbery Honor Book. For the body of her work, she received the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1998, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2006, and in 2000 was named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress.
She is a vice-president of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance and is a member of the board of trustees for Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is also an honorary lifetime member of the International Board of Books for Young People (IBBYP) and an Alida Cutts lifetime member of the U.S. section, United States Board of Books for Young People (USBBY). She was the 2010-2011 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. She’s also a mother of four, a grandmother of nine, and has been an inspiration to young readers for the past several decades.
I had the honor and privilege of sitting down with the award-winning author for a chat about her career, her family, and her move to Vermont 38 years ago. I asked Katherine what she wanted to talk about first. She pointed to her most recent book sitting on the table in front of us: Jella Lepman and Her Library of Dreams: The Woman Who Rescued a Generation of Children and Founded the World’s Largest Children’s Library, published in February 2025 with illustrations by Sally Deng. Having just finished reading the book myself, I thought it was a fitting start to a meaningful conversation.
Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1891, Jella Lepman was a Jewish woman who fled the Nazis and later started a children’s library in post-World War II Germany, when the country and the world were still reeling from its devastation. She wanted to restore the childhood that had been denied the children of Germany who had grown up experiencing years of conflict and violence. She thought the best way to accomplish that was through books, and she then reached out to publishers all over the world asking for donations to create a library. Against all odds, she succeeded.
Katherine: Jella is a woman I’ve known about as long as I’ve been involved with the IBBYP. Of course, she’s the patron saint, the founder. I never met her. She died before I became a writer, but she overcame such odds. Everybody I talked to that knew her said, ‘she accomplished great things, but she was a difficult person.’ And I thought, that’s who gets things done! She sacrificed niceness for accomplishment. She truly loved those children, and she fought for them to come into the library when everybody said, “they’ll mess up everything.” She knew they wouldn’t. She had a lot of trust in and an immense love for children. Adults, not so much!
Megan: How did you first learn about her? I was a little embarrassed that, as a trained librarian, I had not heard of her before.
Katherine: One reason I want the book to be widely read is because most people have never heard of her.
Megan: That’s true for so many important women who have done amazing things throughout history.
Katherine: Exactly. I can’t ever say I was a persecuted woman. My father had four daughters that he was always proud of and was happy with whatever we accomplished. I married a man who promised me he’d never stand in my way of accomplishing anything, and he was my first editor and biggest supporter. I had four children; two boys who have married women of accomplishment, as well. I haven’t lived a persecuted life, and I’m very grateful for that. I know so many women for whom that’s the story of their lives.
I was invited to go to a meeting of the USBBY. That’s a section of the IBBYP, which Jella founded. I became curious about her, and I read her book, which is kind of a memoir, but she does not talk about her early life. She focused mostly on what happened after World War II, when she went back to Germany.
Finding out about the details of her early life was hard and I’ve wondered about that, because it must have been very painful. When she first started working, there would still have been people in Germany that she would have had hard experiences with.
Megan: It was really inspiring to read her story. When she started writing letters to publishers to ask for books, I thought nobody would respond, or it would take a long while to get a response. And people responded.
Katherine: I think she really expected people to respond. And when Belgium said, “No, we can’t,” she said, “Oh yes, you can.” That was because of her concern for the children, that if they didn’t have something besides Nazi propaganda, there’d be nothing. I really wish I could find out which of post-World War II Germany’s leaders were influenced by that library, because I can’t help but believe that she made a difference. Those children who came to the library and were trusted and knew that she was fighting for them and getting those books for them, I can’t help but believe it made a real difference in their lives.
Megan: Let’s talk about the illustrator, Sally Deng. As I was reading through the book, this illustration of some of the children made me stop, because their mouths are missing. It’s very powerful. I wondered if the two of you ever talked, or if she just read your words and this is what she did?
Katherine: Publishers don’t like writers to talk to illustrators, because we’re bossy people. And I think it’s very wise. I would never, never have dreamed of this illustration. To me, the illustrator is another voice, another vision. I’m just so grateful for what she did, and for the art editor who somehow managed to incorporate the photographs with the original art. When they told me they were going to do that, I thought, “Is that going to work?” It’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I’m just so grateful for the way it turned out.
Megan: When did you start working on it?
Katherine: At least 15 years ago. I’m slow on the original, but very fast on revisions. And I love to revise. I’ve been very blessed as a writer. I’m one of the very few people, maybe the only one, who had the same editor for 40 years, Virginia Buckley. She often reminded me when she sent her 8- or 10-page, single spaced letter responding to what I sent her, “Remember what you said about ‘revision’?” My quote on revision is that “It’s the only place where spilt milk can be turned into ice cream.”
Megan: I watched a speech of yours, in which you talk about Virginia and her response to Bridge to Terabithia. She asked you if it was about death or friendship. You thought it was about death, and you went and did some revisions to make it more about friendship.
Katherine: Virginia told me that what I had sent her was not good. And I was aware of that. As soon as I mailed it, I thought, “No real writer would ever send this to an editor.” I was sure she was going to say, “You know, it’s been nice working with you, but you’ve lost all your ability!” She didn’t know I’d had cancer or that my son’s best friend had been killed. She didn’t know any of those details that had gone into the writing.
Megan: There was some personal life experience in that story.
Katherine: Oh, yes.
Megan: I like that you don’t shy away from the tough things that happen in life. Just because you’re writing a children’s book doesn’t mean that you sugarcoat everything.
Katherine: The thing that gets me is that so many adults have forgotten how intensely they felt things as children. I was at a gathering of adults, and one woman got up, and she was furious with me. She was talking about The Great Gilly Hopkins, and she said, “This book is too intense for children, how dare you?” I had just gotten a letter from a teacher enclosing a book report by the “bad boy” in the class, and he said, “This book is a miracle. Mrs. Paterson knows exactly how children feel.” Yes, because I felt that intensely as a child. That child is still a living part of me. I feel so sad for adults who have thrown away or hidden that child.
It’s something of a miracle to ME that the deepest part of me can connect with the deepest part of someone else. That’s the great privilege of being a writer, and so I never want to give less than the deepest part of myself. I have often said that I feel like books can be a rehearsal for what you’re going to meet in life. When people say, “I’ve given your book to a child who’s grieving,” my first reaction is, “too late”. I want the child to have the book and be able to remember how Jess felt and know that it was all right for them to feel that way.
When I go into a classroom, I say, “Now, your teacher may have told you the message in this book, but that’s not really the message. You’ve got to remember what she said for the test, but what you need to know is, if there is a message in this book for you, that’s fine. If there’s no message, that’s fine too. You get to choose.” My job is to write the best, the truest story I can, and the reader’s job is to decide what to take away from it.
Megan: Do you find that there’s some piece of your personal life in all your books?
Katherine: My raw material is always myself. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be something like my son’s best friend dying or me having cancer, or in the case of Gilly Hopkins, my husband and I were asked to be temporary foster parents, and the book came out of that. Where else am I going to find anything that really matters, except within myself? Very often, it’s a question that I’m tackling for myself as I write the book.
Megan: Was it surprising to you when people started relating to your work?
Katherine: Oh, yes. The first book I ever wrote, I was asked to write by the Presbyterian Church. The reason I wrote it was because one of my professors in graduate school stopped me one day and asked, “Have you ever thought of being a writer?” I’m a reader. I graduated with a degree in English literature, so I know what good writing is. I was appalled at the idea that she thought I should be a writer. I said, “No, I wouldn’t want to add another mediocre writer to the world.” She said, “Maybe that is what God is calling you to be.” I didn’t become a writer then, but she eventually got me that first writing job for the church. I didn’t know I was going to love writing.
Megan: What is your writing process, or do you even have one?
Katherine: When I go to schools, very often, they’re taking writing very seriously, and the teacher has explained to them the process that real writers go through. By about question number 3, I have to say, “Let’s face it - whatever real writers do, I don’t!” When I started writing seriously, I had tiny children. There was no way I was going to be able to have any block of time for writing. If I had five minutes to write, I became quickly aware that your subconscious is always at work. I would write down what I’d been given as fast as I could in the five minutes I had. When I was really trying to do something, I would just get up before anybody else was awake and before my “critic” was awake, because your critic is your worst enemy if you’re a real reader.
What I want aspiring writers to know is that you have to play. If you take it too darn seriously, you’re clutched. It’s like making mud pies. You can always revise, but you can’t revise something you haven’t written. Just write whatever you can, however you can. Send the critic off on vacation and make your mud pies. When you can release yourself to have fun with it, it’s not going to be what you want published, but you have to start. Some writers just write, not knowing where they’re headed. I’m not that way. I sort of have an idea of the end of the book before I really start working on the beginning of the book. I believe that each book teaches you how it needs to be written, and you have to listen to the book itself.
Megan: What were some of the books that impacted you when you were growing up?
Katherine: I was born in China. We lived in a city where there were, of course, no English bookstores or libraries. So, the library was in our house. We had a wonderful fairy godmother who had sort of rescued my father when he was an ambulance driver with the French in World War I. She always kept in touch with my parents, and every year or so, she would send a box of children’s books to us in China. We had all of A. A. Milne, Kenneth Graham, Beatrix Potter, Robert Louis Stevenson. We had all the great English books in the Golden Age of children’s writing. The Secret Garden was the first book I remember reading to myself; I was probably 9 when I read it.
Megan: I’m guessing that once you became a parent, books were still an important part of your family.
Katherine: Oh, yes. I tried to be at least a “C minus mother,” but I did love them all, and I did read to them.
Megan: Bridge to Terabithia is turning 50 in a couple of years. Why do you think it is still relevant for children - and still a beloved classic?
Katherine: I ask myself that question. I really do, because I wasn’t even sure it’d be published. It was such a personal story. The fact that it is understood and loved by people all around the world who don’t speak my language, who do not live in my country, who do not have the same religion I have, and no obvious connection with me, is astounding. I think it’s a matter of readers bringing their own grief to the book. It still sells more than all of my other books put together.
Megan: Two of your books have been made into feature films, including Bridge to Terabithia. Your son, David, was a co-screenwriter for that one. Did that make you feel more comfortable knowing he was involved?
Katherine: Oh boy, yes. He told me that he stood in front of a table full of executives and said, “See these last 28 pages? This is why the book is loved around the world. You can’t change the last 28 pages of this book!” They didn’t think they were going to make any money, but it was a big moneymaker. The weekend after the movie came out, they began calling for the sequel.
Megan: The holidays are fast approaching. What are some of your holiday traditions with the family?
Katherine: Years ago, before we moved to Vermont, my husband said that nobody wants to hear a sermon on Christmas Eve. He asked, “Would you go to the library and find me a Christmas story to read?” I went to the library, and every story I looked at turned my stomach. I can write better than that. Had I written fiction up to that point? No. So, I wrote a story, and it got to be a terrible tradition. I had to write one every year. (She laughs.) I don’t do it now, because fortunately, I don’t have to!
Since I was married to a minister, I had to stay home for Christmas. We had our own traditions. When my children grew up and had families, I thought every family should stay home for Christmas, because kids don’t want to go to their grandparents. I had that privilege, we always got to celebrate in our own home. They should have that privilege. Last year, my son John asked me to come for Christmas, and I had a lovely time with them.
Megan: Your creativity is not limited to writing. I understand you did some acting when you were in college, and when you were little, you thought about being a movie star. You’ve also written some plays.
Katherine: I saw National Velvet, and thought I looked exactly like Elizabeth Taylor. I loved acting! I was asked to do a stage version of Bridge to Terabithia. I had no real experience writing plays, but my friend Stephanie Tolan had done plays, and her husband was a theater producer. Stephanie wrote it with me, and we had so much fun. We’ve done five plays, and a lot of them have music.
Megan: You grew up in a missionary family, that’s why you were in China. You then became a missionary in Japan. Did that experience inform your writing?
Katherine: Absolutely. Coming from China in wartime, you’re a total outsider, and outsiders tend to be observers. My first three books are set in Japan. I eventually wrote one set in China. I think it does good things for your brain to be bilingual early.
Megan: Are you working on anything right now?
Katherine: I’m working on a book of essays, mostly they’re speeches I’ve given. There’ll be some essays from out-of-print books, and I’m still giving speeches now.
Megan: It must feel good to keep writing.
Katherine: Two things happened very close together. My editor of 40 years and my husband of 51 years died. Those were my two main supports as a writer. I thought, that’s fine. I really love to read. I’ll just read. I don’t have to write anymore.
But then a Cuban friend of mine invited me to Cuba. I learned about the Cuban literacy campaign of 1961 from Mary Leahy, former Senator Pat Leahy’s sister. 700,000 volunteers, young women between the ages of 12 and 18, taught farmers and their families how to read. After one year, the United Nations declared Cuba the first fully literate country in the Western Hemisphere. I thought that was astounding. When I came back, I was telling my friends about this - and one of them said I should write about it, so I did. I had forgotten how much I loved to write—until I wrote that novel.
Megan: You moved to Vermont in the early 1980s. What brought you here?
Katherine: In 1986, my husband came to be the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Barre, and I just followed along. I said, “Okay, one more move, but this is it.” I’d been coming up to Lake George, New York, since we got married in 1962. John visited there as a single, young pastor, and then brought me here on part of our honeymoon. We often would take the summer ferry to Vermont with the family for special meals and sightseeing. That was my introduction to Vermont, over 60 ago, never dreaming I’d live here. I have a wonderful apartment looking out at the mountains. It’s lovely.
Megan: You were true to your word, that was your last move. I find the natural beauty of Vermont to be inspiring, has that been your experience?
Katherine: Yes, of course. I began writing books set in Vermont after I moved here. I’ve lived here now for 38 years, and I have plenty of friends. People have asked me, now that I’m retired, would I move some place warmer? No, I love it. I don’t want to go anywhere else!