Interview with Rosanne Parry

www.rosanneparry.com

First off, thanks so much for joining us for an up-close and personal interview for TeensReadToo.com! My name is Jen, and I’ll be your server today…oh, wait, wrong job! Anyway, thanks so much for taking time out of your writing schedule—which I’m sure is busy!—and answering a few questions for your readers and fans.

Thanks, Jen, glad to be here.

Let’s get some of the typical interview questions out of the way first. When did you first know that you wanted to be a writer?

I didn’t like writing at all when I was in school. I did not have pretty handwriting and I’ve never been a good speller. However, I always loved making things up. I was a story teller for years with my summer campers, students and my own children before I started writing my stories down.

Can you tell us a little bit about your road to publishing?

Years ago, I wrote a sonnet about my dad who was teaching my son to play chess. A few years later, I wrote for a short story about a grandfather and grandson playing a game of chess on a ranch house porch which eventually became the first chapter of Heart of a Shepherd. I sent “The Chess Men” off to a few contests and won a Kay Snow Award from Willamette Writers in 2003. I sent it out to a few editors. They all said this is good writing, but no thanks. Jim Thomas at Random House, who I had met at a writer’s conference said, “great writing, send me something else.” So I set the short story aside and worked on other things.

But something about that story and the relationship between the boy and his grandpa stuck with me, so I tinkered with it. By that time the war in Iraq was underway and the experience of small towns in Oregon losing their most valuable citizens to deployment was on my mind, so I added that as a framework for what I thought of as a collection of short stories that would be something like Graham Salisbury’s Blue Skin of the Sea, a book I admire very much. I wrote three more stories and got completely stuck. Fortunately, another Random House editor, Wendy Lamb, critiqued them for a conference and was warmly encouraging of my efforts. In the end, it took me almost two years to come up with a draft of Heart of a Shepherd I was satisfied with.

I sent it to Jim Thomas and he said, “this is the one I want”, on Sept 25th 2006: seven years and five months after I first wrote that sonnet about a boy and his grandpa playing chess.

Tell us a little bit about either your latest or upcoming release. If you could only tell your readers one thing about the story that had to convince us to buy the book, what would it be?

Have you ever made a promise you couldn’t keep? What if it was a promise you made to your dad right before he deployed to Iraq? That’s the heart of my story.

What, or who, has been the greatest inspiration for your stories?

For Heart of a Shepherd, my inspiration has been the military families I know who make enormous sacrifices for the soldiers they love. My other inspiration is boy readers who don’t get nearly enough books that tell the truth about their lives.

Let’s hear about your family, who I’m sure are thrilled to have a published author among them!

Lucky for me my extended family is the approximate size of my initial printing—and they’re all avid readers! I’m very grateful to all of them, from my own children who do lots of extra chores when I’m working on a deadline, to my zillions of cousins who ask for my book at their local bookshops and libraries.

Now for some fun facts. What’s your greatest comfort food?

Home-made bread! Yum. And dark chocolate.

What are the first three things you do when you wake up in the morning?

The first twelve things I do are roll over and hit the snooze button. The four things after that are get my children off to school. After that, listen to NPR, start the laundry, and address the mayhem left behind from the making of five breakfasts and four school lunches. Then I read what I wrote the day before and make a plan for the day’s writing.

If I came to your house and looked in your closet/attic/basement, what’s the one thing that would surprise me the most?

That my office is in my tree house.

Everyone asks the question about “if you could be a tree, which tree would you be?” so I want to know: If you could be a color, which color would it be, and why?

Green! Fir tree green, forest green, I’d just die if I had to work indoors all day long!

Who is your favorite cartoon character?

Do I have to choose between Calvin and Hobbs?

Which cartoon character is most like you?

Most of the time I’m more like Calvin, but sometimes I’m a bit like Hobbs.

If you could beam yourself to anywhere in the world (“Beam me up, Scotty!”), during any time in history, where and when would it be—and why?

I think it would depend on whether I could change history by being there. Assuming that I couldn’t change the past, I’d want to look into the future 50 years or so and then come back and make decisions now that would better for my future world.

So what’s your favorite type of music to listen to? Favorite musical artists? Do you listen to music while you’re writing?

I only listen to classical music when I’m writing but I like all kinds. This week I listened to Irish traditional music, reggae, zydeco, tango, Sting, Joan Jett, Etta James, Lyle Lovett, and Cascada.

Do you have any favorite T.V. shows? Movies you watch over and over again? What was the last movie you saw at the theater?

I can never remember to watch TV. There are plenty of shows that sound good to me. Apparently I’m not organized enough to turn it on. The most recent movies I’ve seen are City of Ember and Coraline. I liked the story line of City of Ember better, but Coraline is the most visually stunning piece of movie making I’ve seen in a long time. And it was filmed in my home town, Portland, Oregon!

You have the chance to give one piece of advice to your teen readers. What would it be?

Gosh, how about be careful who you take advice from?

Here’s some writing advice for those of you who find English hard and frustrating. It’s not your imagination—English is hard; it’s a vast, complicated and rapidly changing language that takes a lifetime to learn. However, mastery of this language will give you power you could never have without it, so in my opinion, it’s worth the effort.

One last question. What stories can we look forward to from you in the future?

My next book was inspired by one of my favorite movies ever: Stand By Me. I love the kids going off and having an adventure on their own aspect of it, so I got to thinking about what would make a group of girls go off on their own. I don’t think girls would go look at a dead body-- but an almost dead body of a person they could rescue? That’s totally a girl thing! And since you can’t possibly have an adventure with a cell phone I set the story in 1990, before cell phones existed. The other thing I needed was an interesting place to run away to because a swamp full of leeches was just not working for me. Girls would never do that—girls would run away to Paris!

I’m just beginning my first revisions for this and the book won’t be out for a year, but it has been fun, fun fun to work on!

Again, thanks so much for joining us at TeensReadToo.com!