Q & A with Maureen Johnson

By Kate Pavao, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 5/8/2008

Maureen Johnson says that as a child, she loved books “about large families that lived together in confined spaces,” like Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family. So it’s little wonder she’s penned Suite Scarlett (Scholastic Point, May), about a girl growing up in her family’s rundown New York City hotel. Scarlett’s summer of hotel servitude grows more interesting when she gets caught up in helpinga dramatic hotel guest and her actor brother pull off an offbeat staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Maureen Johnson. Photo: Heather Weston.

Definitely. At one point, I said we had rehearsed in everything but the bathrooms at Columbia: closet spaces and places behind the boiler, horrible, asbestos-lined places. You just got used to doing anything. None of this stuff I wrote is very far-fetched at all. I had multiple occasions where fires broke out during shows.

Did you ever perform in a parking garage, like your characters plan to?

No, but I once saw a full performance of Shakespeare in a storefront that sat five people. It was absurd. The cast far exceeded the number of people who could be inside, and the rest of the people had to sort of press their faces up against the window.

Your stories often feature lots of adventure. Girl at Sea, for example, takes place on the Mediterranean. How do you research your books? 

For Girl at Sea, I took a scuba lesson, which was ridiculous. I tend to be fairly terrified of underwater-ness. I was in a pool in England and I was clearly out of my depth in four feet of water. I was just sort of standing there, the most pathetic scuba student ever, with this huge tank on my back thinking, “This is for the book.” In Suite Scarlett there’s a lot of physical comedy. I have a circus clown contact—I talked to someone from Ringling Brothers and he told me a lot about how certain things are done and how you fall down.

I noticed you have a Web site and a Facebook page. What kind of responsibility do YA authors have to use these tools?

Readers expect a lot more in terms of being able to reach you and talk to you. A lot of times they put the book down then they turn and write you an email five minutes later saying, “I love this book and here’s what I like about it and here’s what I need to know about it, here are all my questions.” They’re used to contact.

You also keep a blog on your Web site. What made you decide to do that?

I guess I’ve always been doing it in one way or another. When I worked in a theater company I would just write weird stuff and tape it to the wall, stuff that personally made me laugh. I can’t seem to write anything short on my blog. Some people are like, “Here’s what I am doing, and here’s a picture of a book I am reading,” but I don’t seem to be able to do anything less than 2000-word statements on nothing. 

Not always nothing. One of the things you blogged about last year, was a challenge made to your book, The Bermudez Triangle, which features a lesbian relationship. Has that experience changed you at all?

Not at all. That was one school in one place. I worked as a school secretary in college, so I was sort of used to these inner-school politics, where some parent makes a noise and you have to scramble and do something crazy just to shut this one person up. Basically one parent looked at it, read it, or read parts of it—I don’t even think she read the whole thing, because some of the stuff she said in her complaint wasn’t in the book. And based entirely on that, they pulled the book.

I got embroiled in this whole small-town story—which was fascinating—of who said this, who said that. Everybody was reporting to me, including the sister-in-law of the person who made the complaint. I felt like I was in some southern gothic story. The long and short of it is we made enough of a stink where at least they stopped what they were doing. The book was put on a special shelf where you need a parental permission slip to check it out. Which is crazy, but that’s where it sits now.

What’s next for you?

Right now I am working on the sequel to Suite Scarlett. When I thought of the story, it was clearly too big to all fit into one book. I said, “Series!” and my editor said, “Great!” I wish I’d known about this earlier—you get to use all of the same characters. Of course, it’s not done. I haven’t been to the ugly stages yet, where you cry in the dark of night and pray for your own death.

Suite Scarlett by Maureen Johnson. Scholastic/Point, $16.99, 978-0-439-89927-7 ages 12-up