Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Female Speaker: What makes the festival amazing are the attendees, that's all you guys, and, of course, the authors. And our next speaker is pretty amazing: Patricia McKissack. Pat has authored many, many books for young people, including a number -- excuse me -- with her husband, Fredrick, who is also here today. Yay. [applause] Female Speaker: They are acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction and most lend the African American experience. As a child Pat was enthralled with her grandfather's stories. She loved hearing her mother recite poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and she grew up to pen her own lively tales, rich in rhythm and word music. Some of Pat's titles include "Goin' Someplace Special," "Mirandy and Brother Wind," "Let My People Go," "The Dark-Thirty," and one of my favorites, "Porch Lies." Pat's books have garnered prestigious awards, such as the Newberry Honor, NAACP Image Award, and Coretta Scott King Award and Honor. In 2011, Pat has two new books; a picture book entitled "Never Forgotten" with illustrations by Leo and Diane Dillon, and "Cyborg," the second book in her Clone Codes science fiction trilogy. Pat is also one of the writers of the Exquisite Corpse Adventure hosted online by the Library of Congress and recently published as a book. So, if you'll join me in welcoming the amazing Patricia McKissack. Thank you. [applause] Patricia McKissack: Good afternoon. Audience: Good afternoon. Patricia McKissack: Oh, come on people, we can do better. Good afternoon. Audience: Good afternoon. Patricia McKissack: I like the sound of that a whole lot better. My name is Patricia McKissack and I am from St. Louis, Missoura. Now, notice I said Missoura. A lot of people think I've said it incorrectly when I say Missoura, because most people think that Missouri is the correct pronunciation. But we weren't born in St. Louis. Fred, my husband, and I were born in Nashville, Tennessee. That's where we grew up, graduated from the same high school at different times and Tennessee State University at the same time. After college we married and then moved to our new city and we heard people saying St. Louis, Missouri, and St. Louis, Missoura, and we wondered, okay, what's the correct pronunciation of our new state? Well, instead of asking around we decided the best place to go to get correct information is the library. And so that's where we went and we found a book about our state, "The Missoura's." The Native American's known as the Missoura's lived in our area. They were traders who went up and down the waterways trading. In fact, Missoura means "people of the big boats," and they were known by these large trading boats that they used. Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau were two Frenchmen who came down up the Mississippi River and they heard and spoke words they heard the French way. So, they heard Missoura and in their tongue it changed to Missouri. Missoura became Missouri. Now I ask you, which one is right and which one is wrong; the French pronunciation, Missouri; or the Native American pronunciation, Missoura? There is no right or wrong answer, they're just different. How do you tell Native Americans you're wrong for saying Missoura? How do you tell the French you're wrong for saying Missouri? They're both okay and I don't feel wrong when I say Missoura. I'm just pronouncing it a different way, if you say Missouri. And you know I'm asked a lot of questions about writing and why I write. That's why I write. I write to tell the different story. One perhaps you have not heard before, one that people have drawn conclusions about, very often wrong, ones that have fallen through the cracks, all kinds of reasons. I love to go find those stories and to tell them. When I was growing up, I grew up listening. Long before I was a writer I was a good listener. My grandmother used to tell hair-raising ghost stories. She would start at the hour we used to call the dark-thirty. We had thirty minutes before it got all the way dark and the monsters came out. And we would ride our bicycles like crazy to get up on the front porch within the circle of light and it was about that time she would say, "They're used to be a woman who would appear there under that street light. Oh, and she would walk in front of our house until she got to that street light. Now wait a minute, she didn't have a head. Did I forget to tell you that?" [laughter] Patricia McKissack: "And when she'd get to this street light she'd just vanish." And then she'd turn to me and say, "Pat, would you go in the house and get me a drink of water?" [laughs] [laughter] Patricia McKissack: So, I had to go in that old creaky house to bring her a drink of water, but I loved being deliciously frightened by her stories, and it was her stories that gave me the idea to write "The Dark-Thirty," "The Dark-Thirty Southern Tales of the Supernatural." It was my grandmother that gave me that book. Another question I get asked is, "What was your first book?" My very first book was "Paul Laurence Dunbar." Come to that front porch again and I am sitting with my mother on the front porch and she's doing Dunbar poetry from memory. "Little brown baby with sparkling eyes, come to your pappy and sit on his knee. Whatcha doin, sir, makin sand pies? Why look at that bib, yous as dirty as me and look at that mouth that's molasses I bet. Come here Maria and wipe off his hands, bees going to catch him and eat him up, being so sticky and sweet. Goodness lands." When mama would finish doing Dunbar, I would beg for her to do it again. Please, please one more time. She would do it again and then I would say one more, one more. That's all, just one more. And she would do it again. And when she'd finish I'd say, "What?" "No," she'd say. "Go to bed now." So I'd go to bed reluctantly with the sounds of Dunbar's poetry on my ears and on my heart. So naturally when I grew up and became a teacher I wanted to share Dunbar with my students and there's one here today who is my student. Raise your hand where you are. Okay, maybe she didn't stay. But anyway, she was my student in eighth grade and I wanted to give her Dunbar. I wanted her to know about Dunbar. They'd never heard of him, as I imagine some of you have not. But when I went to the library there was not one single book about Dunbar in the library. Not one. So, I complained. You know, it's a shame they don't have a book about Dunbar in the library. You know, I know why they don't have a book about Dunbar in the library. You know, there ought to be a book in there about Dunbar. And instead of whining and complaining about why I hadn't done something that I needed, I decided, write it yourself. Well, I'd never written a book before, but I practiced and I went to Dayton, Ohio, to make sure that I had researched his life and Fred and I read his poems from cover to cover and I made my first attempt at writing, not for publication, but just writing for my eighth grade students. I gave it to my students that fall. They read it. "Ms. McKissack," one of my students said, "Who wrote this? It's a mess. What? It's boring." [laughter] Patricia McKissack: And I said, [unintelligible]. I didn't want them to know that I had written something that bad. So, I learned the first principal in writing and that is first you have to tell a good story. If you don't tell a good story, no matter what you're trying to write about, young readers will just turn it off. They want a good story and I didn't have one. So, I had to go find some Dunbar stories and I did. He walked to school with Orville and Wilbur Wright. I didn't know that. They lived around the corner from each other and they had a printing shop and they printed Dunbar's newspaper that he did for his church called The Tattler. Now there's beginning a story instead of he was born. [laughs] All right, so after many years of working on it, my students got to the place where they enjoyed learning about Dunbar. When I became a writer, I wrote about Dunbar and that was my first book published by Children's Press and I was delighted. It came from my mother on that front porch. Then, my grandfather would take the stage and he told stories about little girls who outsmarted foxes and captured the wind, and those stories became "Flossy and the Fox," "Mirandy and Brother Wind," "Goin' Someplace Special." So, my background actually is in picture books and fictional novels and biography and I had never -- but when you ask, what's the favorite thing you enjoy to read, I would always say science fiction, and the kids would always ask, but you don't write sci-fi and I go, "No, I don't. I write another kind of book." Then it hit me, why don't you try to write a sci-fi? Never had I given it a thought, but I was an original Trekky. I saw the very first Star Trek that came on, I think in 1964 or 1965, and I've been a Trekky ever since. My sons and I can quote whole scenes from Star Trek. [laughs] [laughter] Patricia McKissack: And so I enjoyed it, enjoyed it a lot. And then I read in the newspaper about a Supreme Court case and it's called the Diamond versus Chakrabarty case, and it opened the door for me for a lot of what if-ing the future. They said that someone had manufactured some creatures made of organic material that ate the oil slicks and they would not give them a patent because it's organic. The Thirteenth Amendment is about organic people called slaves. Organ, organ, okay. So, we said boy, did they just open the door, when they approved that, to future slavery, slavery of a different kind? Well, how do you have slavery of a different kind? And then I started reading the newspaper about cloning. Okay. What does that mean? Do they have second generation cells if you're taking cells from another person and then created another? What? Who? What do you call them? Are they human beings? I thought, okay. But then I started really thinking about our space probes that are going out and they come back with some creature that doesn't look like us, doesn't speak like us, doesn't move like us. Let's say, for an example, it looks like a rock. What would we do with that rock? Would we give it rights and privileges of citizenship? We would look at those things in a different way, I'm thinking. In the year 2171, we're getting ready to go into deep, deep space. We're ready now to go to the stars. We've got the spaceships built. We're able to bend time so that we can go through space at a much faster rate by 2171, but we are approached by the O, and the O are the gatekeepers of space, outer space, and they come to us able to see the past, the present, and the future. They exist in circular time and so they are able to visit the past and the present and the future all at the same time. I've always enjoyed time stories, because time is a fascinating subject, and it's going to mean so much to us in the future and I believe it's going to have a great deal to do with our space travel. So, I put all those elements together and envisioned what 2171 would be like, and now we have a world where clones are created by the Topas Corporation, they're created and they are called seconds, because they have second generation cells. They're color-coded and they're bald and by just looking at them they look like robots, but they aren't robots. But they have been trained to work within one specific area, and they do adult cloning, not allowing youth to grow and have a young life. There is no young life. As a clone you're born fully grown, fully developed. Okay? And that's just the way it is and you have clones, color-coded clones. Blue ones work for hospitals. Pink ones work with children. Yellow ones work in mechanics. And so all the various color-coded clones work for various corporations for nothing and when they reach a certain age, 11 years old, when most clones dysfunction, and so they decommission them. In other words, they just kill them off. And then they have created a series of clone codes and I'd like to share the clone codes with you. All clones are to be identified by number. The use of names is restricted, so we would not call a clone Alice or Mary. They're either 747, 898, 946, just depending upon what group you were made in when you were created in. Clones have no rights under code of law and are recognized solely as property. Now, the way I built the clone codes was to go back and find the slave codes that were used in the south during the slave period. Okay? And it was quite easy to reconstruct that with clones. Groups of clones in excess of three are not permitted without direct human supervision. That was a slave code, as well as now a clone code. Attempting to educate a clone beyond its work model specifications is forbidden and punishable in accordance with Article 3C74. The manufacturer of a clone in the likeness of a child is a capital offense. A capital offense. Imprinting the ability to mimic human emotions into a clone's behavior pattern is forbidden. A clone that disobeys a direct order must immediately be taken to a processing center for decommissioning. Instructing a clone to lie is restricted. Since clones are not citizens, they may not participate in any citizen rights. And so if you are a clone, that's what happens. That's the restrictions you have to live under. Well, the O has come to the earth and visited the past, the present, and future at the same time and said, "You are not ready to come out into space until you take care of this issue. And you also have cyborgs and you also have entities among you that you need to know about and learn how to deal with, because you're going to see so much more when you come out here." And so, the three books, the trilogy, are about the three principal characters. The first one is Leanna, who was born. She's an infant clone. She was a baby. They have found a way to give clones a full life rather than the 11 years. So, they go back and they clone her as an infant and she grows up like any child. She's not been programmed by the Topas Corporation. And so she grows up and when she reaches 12 they know that it is working, because she has not gotten sick. She has not begun to break down or disintegrate. So, they know that you can now clone an infant and they can grow up like any other child. She's just as smart in school and is doing beautifully, but she's been discovered. She's been ratted out. She told a friend and that's the last thing you do, is to tell a friend that you're a clone. And, so here she goes, her whole life now is one chase after another. She is now part of the Underground Railroad, because I've pulled that forward to the 21st century, 22nd century. Leanna has a good friend that she just met and his name is Houston, and Houston is a cyborg. He was created, because he was on a fishing trip with his parents and was horribly wounded and was going to die. And where he was they could not treat him, so he was given artificial limbs. Three or more artificial limbs gives you a cyborg. You're three-fifths of a human being and so you are a cyborg. So, clone codes then lead into the second book, which is "Cyborgs," which leads us to the third book, "The O." So now I'll ask, are there any questions? Any questions? Any questions at all? Female Speaker: When is "The O" going to come out? Patricia McKissack: In January of this year, of this coming year. Female Speaker: Okay. Patricia McKissack: Let me ask you this. How many of you have read the first one, "Clone Codes?" Okay. Well, I hope you discover it and read it. I think younger kids might enjoy it as well as teens. I think fifth and sixth graders will enjoy it as well. In fact, I get a lot of letters from fifth and sixth graders who read it, too, and so that's 12, you know, early teens, 11, 12, 13. Okay. Any other questions? Question? Female Speaker: Yes. Patricia McKissack: Yes, right here. Female Speaker: [inaudible] Patricia McKissack: Okay. Female Speaker: [inaudible] Patricia McKissack: Okay. The boat capsized and it was on the rocks and his mother came in to save him, but he was beaten up on the rocks. Yes. Female Speaker: [inaudible] Patricia McKissack: The Clones? I wrote it because I was a sci-fi enthusiast. I've enjoyed it all my life, but I never wrote a sci-fi, and at a conference much like this, the kid asked, "Well, if you like sci-fi so much, why don't you write one?" And I said I'd never really thought about it, but I went home and thought about it and writing you just don't do, go home and write it. You really have to study the genre and I had looked at a lot of sci-fi and read a lot of sci-fi. I love Ray Bradbury, but I never really studied how to write one, so I had to spend a lot of time analyzing how other writers write sci-fi and how they try to make it interesting and try to create a whole world that doesn't exist is not easy and keeping it all straight. So, we had a big -- I had a huge poster made and I dated it and made a calendar of when things happened so that I could keep up with it, because it's not easy. Yes. Female Speaker: I had a question, too. Knowing that your husband, Fred, is here and that you write books together, could you talk a little bit about the process by which you collaborate? And also share a little bit about what you might be working on together now. Patricia McKissack: Okay. People who ask that question usually are not asking how do you work with your husband. They want to know, do you fight? [laughter] Patricia McKissack: How do ya'll write together? My husband and I can't get in a car at the same time. [laughs] [laughter] Patricia McKissack: Well, we don't either. And yes, we do fight, but it is never about my idea is better than yours. It is what's the best way to say this for young readers? What is the best way to convey the message that we want and not look like a message or not get preachy and didactic, and if Fred can show me that his idea is better than mine, then I let him win. [laughter] Patricia McKissack: But we've been working together 27 years. We've been married 47 years, so, we just work together. [applause] Patricia McKissack: We don't have to send memos when you're married to your co-author. We can wake up in the middle of the night and say you know, I got it. We'll get it in the morning, all right? [laughter] Patricia McKissack: The book that we're working on right now is the trilogy to this, the third book, and it's in final copy, final copy edit, and we're so pleased that the last book is done in this series and it really does work. We're delighted that the series worked, because when you start off you have no idea of how you're going to make all this work. It's really frightening. So, Fred and I, even though my name sometimes carries the book, I'm the only person on the book, Fred helps me to write, even my picture books, because he's the one that does all the research. Fred is not comfortable -- I'll write, "it was in the spring," and that's good enough for me, but Fred will say no, and he'll go off and he'll find that it was a Friday, October 12, 1826, where it took place on the something, something, and it was raining that day. He is a genius when it comes to finding little bits of facts and where to go to get them. We rarely go to places -- rarely there's a library involved that he hasn't called and talked to them at one time or another. That's how we work. Oh, and John, too. I've got three sons and all of them grew up working with us. Well, they're engineers and newspaper writers and special education teachers, but they all write as well, and John was the last one who said, wait a minute everybody's written someone with mom and dad except me and so we brought him into the sci-fi, because he is 100 percent my partner. I enjoy him so very, very much, because he's got tech knowledge that would have just gone right by me. But he understands the technical. By 2171, we should have conquered that. You don't want to do that. You don't want to go that way, you want to go this way, maybe. Or, we should have this in place by that time, the way progress is going. So, he was able to keep us from dating. Have you ever seen a sci-fi and you go look, they're using telephones instead of cell phones? Or they're using the huge computers, the big A-frame. Okay? Someone else? Yes. Female Speaker: Did you find it difficult, oh I'm sorry, please go ahead if you were here first. Female Speaker: How did you get Jerry Pinkney to draw the pictures? Patricia McKissack: I didn't get Jerry to do them. Jerry Pinkney was selected by my publisher. I live in St. Louis. He lives in Croton-on-Hudson in New York. I would not have known Jerry Pinkney if he walked right up and said how do you do? I never met him. But my publisher, my editor and the art director said we would like him to do your "Mirandy and Brother Wind," and I thought, well, that's wonderful, but I don't know Jerry Pinkney. They said you don't have to know him, we need to know him. So, I'd never met him until after "Mirandy and Brother Wind" was done. And then I met him and we've been friends ever since, and he's done other books of mine. And it's very interesting when Jerry is talking about his books and Jerry says, "And my book 'Mirandy' and I'm sitting in the chair going, my book "Mirandy"? "Mirandy" is mine, but no, it's a shared project between the author and the illustrator. Female Speaker: I'm sorry. Did you find it difficult to switch from the mindset of writing a picture book to the mindset of writing a much longer work? Patricia McKissack: Yes. Let me give you a case in point. One of the things that you have to learn is in a picture book is that you don't overwrite the artist. "Mirandy and Brother Wind" began, "It was spring and Brother Wind was back." That's how it starts, but when I wrote it I wrote, "It was spring in Ridgetop and the wisteria was bloomed and all these plants that bloom in the spring on Ridgetop," I was careful that they didn't bloom at different times but at the same time. And mama had taken out the blankets to air and the quilts to air and she'd beaten the rugs to get the dust out, and it just went on and on and on about it being in the spring. Well, my editor took her pencil, her little blue pencil, and she scratched all of that out and went "It was spring and Brother Wind was back," and all that was taken out. But if you open the pages to "Mirandy and Brother Wind," the first page has all the wisteria blooming, got the quilts on the line, mama's beating a rug. All of that I wrote about was on that first page. The artist knew to do that. He didn't need my words to tell him that this is what he needed to illustrate. That's where we get into trouble and why they don't let artists work with illustrators -- or illustrators work with authors because we want to tell the illustrator what we want them to illustrate, and you shouldn't do that. It's up to the illustrator to bring his or her genius to the project. And if you're a new author and you're just coming into it, don't send art work. Don't send art work. It's the badge of a beginner. They will choose the proper illustrator for your work. Well, we've got five more minutes. Yes. Male Speaker: My sister wants to know what your favorite book is that you've written. Patricia McKissack: Okay. She wants to know what's my favorite book that I've written. I have three sons, five grandsons -- no, four grandsons and one granddaughter. Tah-dah. We finally got her. [laughter] Patricia McKissack: But that's like asking which one of them I love the most and no, it's not my granddaughter. All the books that I write are my favorite. The one I'm working on is the one that calls for my attention and so that's what I'm doing now. Any other questions? Yes. Female Speaker: [inaudible] Patricia McKissack: It's woven throughout, but I want the kids to find it. It's in there, but I don't like to be preachy in my books. So, they may not get it right away, but they'll go oh, that's not right because that was like in that book. They would have forgotten the title. They would have forgotten it, but when it hits they'll go, oh, that's coming to no good. So, yeah, I hope I plant a seed. Yes. Female Speaker: [inaudible] When I came in you were talking about illustrators. My son was one of your illustrators. My son attended Suitland High School in Maryland and he became one of your illustrators after he graduated from the School of Visual Arts, and so we're very excited to see you and very excited to be here, and we have some of your books that he illustrated with us. Patricia McKissack: What's his name? Female Speaker: Gordon James. Patricia McKissack: Oh, okay. Sure. Yes. Thank you. A proud mama? Female Speaker: Very proud. Patricia McKissack: Proud mama. That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. Female Speaker: The books you wrote were for the younger children, and I'm also an elementary school teacher, and they are fantastic and covering the part of the history that younger children might be missing in such a way that they really get it and I've used it in my classrooms as well and I just really appreciate what you've done. Patricia McKissack: Thank you so much. That's beloved. [applause] Patricia McKissack: Those were my beginning readers. Well, they were young first novels and they're just -- thank you again for that. Boy, it's good to know. We've got two minutes, people. So I can take another one. I'll leave you then with a story. You know, I love stories and storytelling is what I enjoy doing the most. But sharing a good story is a way of bringing people together. You know, whenever you're by yourself in a situation and it's uncomfortable or people are being fidgety or whatever, just think of a very, very good story to tell. Many years ago my husband and I sat at our favorite place, called The Waterfall in St. Louis Forest Park. I was crying and he does not like to see me cry, but I was being -- as it was corporate where I worked, and I was kind of being pushed out of my position. I saw so many things go on and I didn't want to stay and continue, but I was afraid of doing anything else. I was afraid. I didn't want to go back to teaching, so Fred was in civil engineering and he had his own construction company and he, too, was kind of out there. So we went to our favorite place and he said, "Well, Pat if you could do anything in this world, don't worry about money, don't worry about place or time, just if you could do anything the rest of your life, what would it be?" I said, "I'd like to write a book for children, just one." And he said, "Okay. You go do that and I'll help you." That was 27 years and 100 books later. [applause] Patricia McKissack: And here publicly and quite open, I'd like to thank my husband for being right here with me all those years. Thank you. [applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. [end of transcript]