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A Chat with Karen Cushman
Last fall, I had the opportunity to sit down, have a cup of tea, and talk with author Karen Cushman at her home on Vashon Island, Washington. Cushman is the author of The Midwifes Apprentice (winner of the 1996 Newbery Medal), Catherine, Called Birdy (a 1995 Newbery Honor Book), The Ballad of Lucy Whipple (winner of the John and Patricia Beatty Award), and several other novels for young people.
Your new book Alchemy and Meggy Swann is set in England during the Elizabethan period. I'm curious (maybe because I'm a librarian) how you researched this book. Were there any gold nuggets that you discovered in your research that really excited you, that you wanted to make part of Meggy's story? Or was Meggy more of a concrete character that you had in mind before you researched?
Cushman: I think Meggy herself was pretty much a concrete character before I started. The fact that she is lame came later. Her father is an alchemist and is in the business of transformation. And I wanted her to want him to transform her. So I started thinking, what does she want him to transform about her? What is about her that she doesn't like that she wants changed? And I started thinking about what they referred to as "being lame" at the time, and how if she thought he could turn base metal into gold, and also discover the secret to eternal life, that he could also fix or cure her - which of course he can't, and she has to come to terms with that.
The "nuggets" that I found had to do with my research into alchemy. Some of it was just fascinating. I would say about 90 percent of it I didn't understand, and that was deliberate because the writings were obscure and arcane; there were secrets, and they didn't want to spill any of those secrets and get everyone involved, so they purposely wrote them that way.
A lot of the writings were spiritual or mythological, and I didn't understand that. I did find a couple of books that were very down-to-earth, including a book that was an introduction to chemistry, because a lot of the procedures and...