Spotlight on Cynthia Rylant

Q: Why did you choose to set the book in Rosetown, Indiana in 1972?

College took me to Ohio, then I lived there afterward for many years, and when I became a children’s author, I drove all around the Midwest doing school visits. The flat land of the Midwest was beautiful to me and inspiring and soothing. (I grew up in the mountains.) The small towns are carefully designed and everything just feels right. I drove across Indiana a couple of times, stopping in antique stores in quiet old towns, and it felt very peaceful to me.

Q: Wings and a Chair Used Books is so wonderfully drawn as a refuge for kids and adults alike, with Flora’s purple chair by the window and a vintage section where Flora and Yury read to each other. How much fun did you have “stocking the shelves” of the bookstore with vintage titles? What were some of your favorite books when you were a child?

When I was a child, my mom gave me an allowance to buy Nancy Drew books at Murphy’s Department store in Beckley, West Virginia. Those were my favorites. I loved them. To “stock the shelves” of Wings and a Chair Used Books, I drove across the river here in Portland, Oregon to a neighborhood called Sellwood, which is known for its antique shops, and I searched the nooks and crannies of lots of shops and found the books Flora and Yury would read. It was really fun. Vintage books are wonderful.

Q: Flora and Nessy take piano lessons; this is a fantastic discovery for the particularly musically talented Nessy, whose tap dancing, swimming, roller-skating, and volleyball classes had never gone particularly well. Flora loves to write, and discovers that children can submit stories to magazines. Yury tries Scrabble club and bowling, and eventually thinks he’d like to be a “Search and Rescue person” when he grows up. Why do you think it’s so important for kids to try a variety of activities, even to establish what it is they don’t like? What were you trying to convey to your young readers?

Oh, I don’t think I ever try to teach young readers much of anything! Ha! What Yury and Flora and Nessy are interested in are the normal activities I remember doing or my friends doing when I was young. I was always trying something new, signing up for everything. You didn’t have to have much money to find new things to try.

Then, I lived in Kent, Ohio in the 1980s, raising my son, and there was an old music store—it was called Woodsey’s—where kids took music lessons. There was a comic book shop in town. There used to be a bakery called The Peaceable Kingdom, it had a great old screen door. There was a bowling alley not too far away.

When I was a girl, I took piano lessons from our landlady in Beaver, West Virginia, and she trained me mostly on hymns out of the old church hymnals. But when the Beatles came to America, I got distracted from that.

Q: Nine-year-old Flora’s voice brims with the sense of wonder, curiosity, concern, and discovery that resonates with children in all walks of life. Her friends Yury and Nessy are equally full of distinctive ideas and observations, and the support they give to one another is sweet and so important as they attempt to navigate the world around them. What do you hope Rosetown shows children about friendship? What do you hope it shows them about family?

Well, no real plan for how it might influence children on those things, but personally—I had a pal, a boy named Steve Meador, when I was ten, and we both loved all the same things, especially books and comics, and I think that shaped me in childhood, my friendship with him, we had a lot to talk about. And as for family, the parents in Rosetown are, I hope, sympathetic figures, as they try to figure out how to live life. I’ve made many twists and turns in my life, some were right, some were mixed up, a few were disasters, but that is what humans do.

Q: Rosetown is filled with animals—dogs, cats, a canary. What do you think children can learn from spending time with animals and keeping them as pets? Did you have any pets growing up? Do you have fond memories with them?

We had cats and dogs when I lived with my mom in Beaver—most would show up as strays or be part of a litter that had been born down the road and I’d ask my mom for one of the puppies or kittens. If a pet is gentle, a child feels safe with it, and safe to express affection, and probably the child laughs a lot if there is a good pet in the home. But I think for me, the true emotional bonding with pets happened in my adult life, and why, I don’t know, but I think maybe because I learned to trust animals when I was child. And when I was raising my son, we had many different kinds of pets—dogs, cats, a guinea pig, a parakeet, a tank of fish. But I drew the line at snakes and bugs! Though they deserve love, too!