 The San Francisco Public Library presents Author Talk, an interview program featuring library staff in conversation with some of today's most fascinating authors. On today's program, middle school liaison librarian Susan Harlow talks with Joe Cottonwood, author of The Adventures of Boone Barnaby. Hello, I'm Susan Harlow, middle school outreach librarian for San Francisco Public Library. And today on Author Talk, we're very lucky to have Joe Cottonwood with us. He's the author of two highly acclaimed books for middle school readers. One is Danny Aint, and the other is The Adventures of Boone Barnaby. Now I know that when I first read The Adventures of Boone Barnaby, it had a starred school library journal review. And Danny Aint was just listed as a distinguished book for the Association of Children's Librarians in the Bay Area. And what to me shines through in these books is your tremendous respect for kids. Well, thank you for saying that. I try to be respectful of kids. That's one of my goals as a writer. I think it's so many books you read, it seems like they're written down to the kids. And I don't know what this says about me, but I think I just naturally write at a level that's right for them. I used to write adult books, and I found that most of the people writing those books, I mean reading those books, were younger. Like it was a book for adults, and it was advertised in the regular adult media. But it turned out it was 18-year-olds and 17-year-olds who were reading it. And then I started writing for children, and I had to make a decision, am I going to write down or am I going to not? And I figured, I think there's something in me that just speaks to that level anyway. So it seems to work for me. I think the best books for children write to them. And you have your own children, right? Yes. And is that what prompted you to begin writing for them, do you think? Oh, yeah. My oldest child was about in fourth grade when I started writing my first children's book. And basically, he was in my mind, I was writing it for him in a way. Whenever an episode was in my mind, I would just think, how would Jesse like this? How would he react to it? And he was my test case. I don't do that anymore, and in fact he's now about to go to college, and it wouldn't be very appropriate. But I've gotten the hang of it now, and I don't think I need that. But that's what got me started, and I was reading to my children all the time. It sounds arrogant to say this, but I was reading a lot of books to my children that I didn't like. They'd picked them out of the library, and it was, you know, the Care Bearers and all this garbage. And I thought I can do better than this, you know? And I say it was arrogant because I've since discovered there's hundreds of wonderful books for children, and I just didn't know about them, and now I do. And if I'd known about them then, I may not have ever gotten started writing, so maybe it's a good thing. So I'm glad you didn't there. I think something that struck me too in these two books particularly, my thought is they're placed in La Honda where you live, that that is a loosely disguised La Honda, that the town that they're from. And that there seems to be such a strong sense of ethics that these kids themselves have. In Danny Aint, it seems that Danny is about making choices in his life and knowing the way to be in a world where he has no adult supervision, where he's alone because his father has had to go away. And in Boone Barnaby, it seems that Boone is trying to figure out also what is the right path to follow. And it seems to me each of your characters faces those kinds of choices. Could you talk about that a little? I think that it ends up that way because that's what's most interesting to me and I think that's what growing up is all about is learning to make choices and hoping that when these kids get older they'll make the right choices. But to me growing up is just a series of moral dilemmas and learning how to handle them and that's what life is really. And it's most interesting to me when kids are just learning that and I try to dramatize that. And I remember when my son, I said, my son was in fourth grade when I started writing Boone Barnaby. He had a teacher that year who used to say, life isn't fair because the kids were always saying, that's not fair, you know, that kids do. And that was his answer. And so I just took that as a starting point, you know, is life fair or how do we make it fair or should we make it fair, sort of Boone's rallying cry from the beginning. And his soccer coach, I remember, in Boone Barnaby is the one who says life's not fair. Right. And so you bring that in there too. Right. Yeah, I find that unique in a sense in your book that, well I do think the best children's books deal with this, but that they really do deal with ethics from the point of view of the kid in a very sort of true to life way. You know, I thought that was a wonderful thing to read. Well, thank you for saying that. I would say all the good children's books are in that same vein. I mean, even the more adventurous ones, like Treasure Island, I mean, really, there's moral choices being made there too, I mean, they're often more violent. Or highly dramatic. Or highly dramatic, yeah. But what interests you in the long run is those choices. Which leads me to my next question, which is that one of your adult novels, which is Frank City Goodbye, which I recently read. It shows, this is what I think it showed. It showed to me sort of a coming of age in 1964 in San Francisco. And to me it seemed like San Francisco, when San Francisco was just on the brink of the whole, for lack of a better phrase, peace and love, flower power, hippie dump, movement, explosion, yes. And then it seems to me in that book there's an innocence that's there that sort of disflowered. Now, what I wanted to ask you, I'd love to hear anything you have to say about that book. And also, it's now 30 years later. It's now 1994. If you could talk a little bit about that sort of coming of age at that time, and what might be different for your son, who is 18, for example, now. Any thoughts you have? Boy, it's very different now, that's for sure. When I wrote Frank City Goodbye, I was just trying to tell what had happened. And trying to make it sound reasonable. The hippies are so mis-portrayed in the media, and they still are. It's so rare to see a hippie character or read about a hippie character. Particularly in movies, it's just awful on television. They throw in a hippie sometimes, and it's just some weird guy or weird woman. You can't relate to it. And yet, having lived through it, I related to it, and I know it wasn't just beads and flowers and strange. I remember the first time somebody went like that to me, I thought, what? What was that? And it turns out, they'd seen it on television. And it spread like wildfire, and in about two days the whole country was doing it. And I think some of the last people to know about it were the hippies themselves. So what I was trying to do with the book was describe how some people who were there at the beginning saw this thing, just mushroom way beyond anything they could possibly have imagined and out of their control, and it just was the right thing at the time, I guess. And the line, in fact, I believe it was in Boone Barnaby, looking back on that, where Boone is talking to his father about drugs, and Boone says, how could anyone be stupid enough to take drugs, and his father says, doctors take drugs, basketball players take drugs, anybody can be stupid, and he also, Boone said, something disparaging about the hippies, I forget the exact word, and his father said, the hippies believe in peace and love. What's so bad about peace and love? Which is the line I've always been wanting to say, you know, so I got to say it there. And it goes back to Frank City Goodbye, which actually I cringe a little bit when I think about people reading it now, because it's a book I wish I had rewritten. First of all, it needs a new title. No one can remember the title. And secondly, and much more importantly, it just needed a rewrite. There's certain things in there that I wish I could change. You talked about an innocence being the flower. I wish I had kept some of that innocence or made it more innocent, because it doesn't exactly fit with my memory of what happened. I guess I'm talking about the sexual relations in particular. There was a hardness to them that I didn't intend, and that if I had re-read it after it had cooled off a little bit and went back, I know I would have changed it. And some of my friends read it and said, you know, that doesn't sound right. That's not you, and that's not what was going on. And now it embarrasses me that that's out there, and I can't change it, you know. Really? But that's something you have to learn to live with. I couldn't put it down, and I thought it, you know, me reading it just in the last year for the first time ever, and having lived in San Francisco close to that time also, maybe not having had that experience, but having lived here around then, I thought I had so many levels going on, you know. There were so many things. There was this couple coming to San Francisco. They can't arrive by machine, so they walk across the bridge, and then meeting these other people in these sort of magical adventures that they have, but then also that something really is changing, and something changes for them too. I just thought it was a great story. Well, maybe I should re-read it, you know, I haven't looked at it in a long time. You also asked how it, you know, how things are different now, and how my children, you know, they haven't read the book, and I'm dreading the day when they do it in a way. It's Frank City. It's a Frank book too, you know. You know, the world is so different now, but part of me thinks it's time for another flowering of that type, and I'm just waiting for it to happen. I'm surprised it's taken 30 years. I thought it would have happened a long time before. Maybe with not without, not with all the drugs, I mean, we've learned from that, but other ways, softening, and I mean, kids are growing up today so pressured to succeed and so worried about getting jobs, which is exact opposite of how, you know, the strange era that I grew up in and that is described in that book where, you know, you weren't worried about getting a job. That was the last thing I didn't mind. And you did strange work, whatever happened to come your way. I'd like to see kids back off a little bit and relax a little bit and get back to that, and yet I can understand why they don't, because times aren't as easy as they were back then. I guess it was an affluent time coming to a climax in the 60s, and it's not so affluent now. People don't have that luxury to just drop out and live on their parents' money and act crazy for a few years. We're the parents now, you know, so we know what our times are like economically, you know, it's hard. I think what also struck me in both Danny Ait and Boone Barnaby is that there's a hearkening back to those times in the adults in these novels. The thing that we spoke about a moment ago about Boone and his father having a conversation about marijuana, and I distinctly remember the hippie line, because I was going to talk to some kids in school about that, because Boone's father calls the soccer coach a hippie, and Boone's reaction is, don't call him that. He thinks it's a pejorative term. It's really interesting, I thought, that we see that view. And then, of course, Danny's father being a Vietnam vet who is having these flashbacks, and I think that what I'm trying to say here is that there's sort of a, you've taken moments from that time of the 60s that have sort of bled down, or we are, they inform our times today. But in a darker way, it seems to me, and perhaps that's the whole Vietnam era that happened immediately following the events of Frank City goodbye. Well, those are the two great events of the 60s. The hippie thing and the Vietnam, and they worked in totally opposite directions in many ways. I think we're feeling the effects of Vietnam more than the effects of the hippies now, which is sad, I don't know, when we'll grow out of that. It's sort of a chain reaction things keep on affecting the, and the generations that follow. I mean, I see it in these kids in this book. I mean, I see, this is, Danny ain't his Danny's story, but he's very much influenced by what his father went through. Well that's part of the way I write. I don't intend to do this, but I always seem to write about the relationship between a child and his parent, or at least one of his parents. You know, I think I'm writing about the typical children's book, I think is about children reacting, interacting with other children. And I think my typical book seems to be a child, not only reacting with other children, but his relationship with at least one very significant adult, sometimes more than one. For instance, in Boone Barnaby, his soccer coach is very important to Boone, and so is his father. And Danny, Danny's father is very influential to him, even though he's hardly in the book. He disappears in the first chapter. That's a pretty marvelous bit of writing, then, to write about a child and his parent, and the parent is absent. Yeah, but he's thinking about his father the whole time he's gone. And then Danny, because his father's gone, is looking for other role models and trying out different things. And I think that's really true to life, because that's basically what kids are doing. They're watching how adults behave, and they're picking and choosing among what they see, and whether we like it or not, we are being role models all the time to these kids. And in many ways, I sometimes wish we weren't. Yeah. Yeah, it's a big responsibility, isn't it, to know we're being watched? Wow, yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the lives of these kids, especially this book here, Danny, ain't, it seemed to me he's sort of perhaps not exactly on the brink of adulthood, but he's starting to make some adult choices. And again, this has a little bit to do with the last question I asked you about what is it now that informs those choices, as opposed to, say, the young man in Frank's City Goodbye in 1964? What are the differences? I mean, well, you've said a little bit about it. Economically, things were different. Maybe it was a more hopeful time. Oh, it was. It's hard to even remember the youth culture of the 60s. Just knowing that someone else was your age was enough to make you instantly think he was on my side, even though it didn't work that way when you really got to know them. But I remember hitchhiking around the country. And it was like this big brotherhood and sisterhood. And I don't feel that walking around the streets now. Everyone's sort of choosing little pockets of behavior to emulate. You could be a punk, or you could be a heavy metal kind of kid or an athlete. But the kids, I don't see them all feeling a universal brotherhood and sisterhood. Yeah, a common bond anymore. And it's more like every man for himself. And I don't know where to generalize from there. It's something I haven't thought through. Would you want your kids to be checking across the country? No, but they may do it. I don't know. It was incredibly dangerous. I mean, I did it. And I can think of some. I must have nine lives. And I don't think it's gotten any safer. It's probably gotten worse. No, I wouldn't be wild about the idea. But that maybe because you're a parent. Oh, sure. Sure. Oh, I know. I mean, I'm thinking that necessarily because times are horrifying and scary. But because you're a parent, you're going to worry. Oh, yeah. I worry all the time. I mean, what can I do? I'm a parent. I'd like to ask you something else about Frank City Goodbye. I read that it was written in the early 80s. Is it late 70s? Yeah, it's 78, 79. It's probably written. And then I read that it was used as a textbook, as a contemporary history of the hate. And I found that absolutely fascinating at San Francisco State. Yes, there's a professor at San Francisco State. I don't know if he's still doing it, but he was using it as one of the required texts in his history of San Francisco. And I took that as a great compliment because he was basically saying that I'd gotten the details right on the history. Even though you felt it was a little hard-edged in some ways, maybe. Well, that was emotionally. But the physical facts, I must have gotten right. And I did a lot of research on that book. In a way, it was a historical novel, even though I wrote it very recently after the fact. It's funny how quickly some of this information vanishes. There was, I don't know if there still is, a library in San Francisco. Well, you're a librarian. You may know about this. Now, what's the name of it? The Michael Aldrich Library or something like that? No. Maybe Michael Aldrich was the name of the librarian. Oh, me. It's been a long time. It's a library devoted to drugs, basically. Oh, really? And because it was devoted to drugs, it had a lot of information about the hippies and its files. And it was still functioning. It had a room somewhere where I could go to in the time I was writing this. And now I think it's just in some warehouse somewhere. It's not open to the public. But it's very interesting. And I did a lot of research. And that helped me get a lot of the details right. Because I was not living in the heat at the time. You weren't. No. You're just filling a myth for me. This is my own. The question I knew would come. I wasn't going to say is that you. I wasn't going to. No. Well, it certainly wasn't about me. And I did pass through the heat in 67. But by then, it was a whole different thing. Yeah, it was a whole different thing. That's right. No, but my feeling was that all over the country, there were little hate Ashbury's happening. And my particular one was in St. Louis, Missouri. I mean, there was a little hate Ashbury in Boston. New York had the East Village. And every city, Chicago, I think it was around Old Town, there was a little scene happening in every city that went through the same changes on a smaller scale. So I could relate to it in that sense. Now, I should also say that when I was, in those years, if you called me a hippie, I would be insulted. I mean, just as nowadays, you don't call someone a yuppie. It's sort of an insult. And yet, looking back on it, maybe they'll say, oh, I was a yuppie. Now, at the time, a hippie was an insult. And if someone called me that, I'd say, no, I'm not a hippie. That's those other people over there. Well, it was a media invention, in a sense. I mean, to say, oh, he's took that kind of a label, I think. Yeah, well, it was a put down. Yes. And nowadays, I find myself telling people, you know, I was a hippie. I'm volunteering the information. I'm saying, I want to be identified with it, because I like a lot of the things that came out of it. And I wish, in a way, we went back to it, leaving out some of the drug abuse. What do your kids think about you being a self-avowed or self-acknowledged hippie? Oh, they tolerate it. I don't make it a big deal with them. You walk a fine line with kids. With anything, yeah. In fact, it's kind of what I got into in Boone Barnaby. That was kind of like a discussion that could have happened in my house, where the Boone discovers that his father used to smoke marijuana. That's a conversation that probably is happening in millions of households around this country right now. How do you deal with that? Yes, I had the conversation with my wife stepping up here. Yeah, because she went to be very honest. And it's a different picture of that now, I think, than it was at the time when you and I were coming of age. Yeah, I mean, you want to admit it and be honest about it. And then, on the other hand, in this day and age, it's hard to admit it and be honest about it, you know? By admitting it on television, I'm blowing my chance to be a Supreme Court justice, you know? You haven't really said anything yet. You haven't really said anything. Tell me the screen. You're discreet, and you can still become a Supreme Court justice. I also read your book, Son of a Poet, Your Book of Poetry. And I found that, I mean, to me, again, I'll interpret what I thought that it was, was a book of poetry about being a father and about your children. And I thought that it showed. I mean, it must be in a way difficult for me to have me talking about it, because I find that a very personal book, you know? It was. It was very personal. I'm surprised you got it, because it was hardly, I sort of withdrew it from distribution. I interlibrary loaned it. Because I was afraid it would embarrass my family after I got it out. And I decided I just would give it to friends. And sort of, there's a pile of them sitting in my attic, and that's about the main distribution of it. It is very personal, and I hope my children will understand. When I wrote it, I made a decision. I was just going to be honest. I wasn't going to hide it. And the first poem in the book makes that pretty clear. I just wanted to lay it all out there. And maybe I laid it all out of it too, frankly. Because now I'm not, I don't feel comfortable with having it in bookstores. I'm happy to have friends read it. I'm happy you read it, actually. People who appreciate poetry and appreciate art can understand that you can write about something that's very personal, and yet, in a way, it's not personal. And the very act of writing about it, you change it. And you're dealing with a more universal issue than just what's personal. And what I'm trying to do is universalize and use my own specific life to create universal things, which is what poetry is all about. You take a specific thing and you try to find universal meaning in it. And people who can understand that, I'm very comfortable to have read it. I'm not comfortable having strangers read it who don't understand poetry, who think it's all self-confession, which maybe some of it is, and maybe some of it isn't. In the act of writing, things change. I can turn something completely around. And I'll still tell about it in the first person, as if it was true, as if it really happened. But it might be exact opposite of what happened. I might have had something happen to me where I don't like the way I handled it, that it felt bad to me. So in rewriting it, I'll handle it a different way. It's one of the beauties of writing. Yeah. You can rewrite your history. Rewrite my history. Well, what I think about that book, though, is that it shows such an acute, which is also what I think you do in these books, has this acute power of observation, I think. And there's tremendous respect, again, for the children who I believe are your children in the book of poetry, and also an awe of them that I like very much. I like that sense of just this mystery of childhood. And that leads me to what is probably going to have to be my last question, which is, it seems to me today that I believe you have faith in kids. I watched you today with the students from Petro Hill, and I see all of the books we've mentioned. It seems to me that the media, however, gives us a picture of ominous teenagers on the loose. And I fear that we are creating a picture of our teenagers that is not, in fact, true. Well, sure. Anything to say about that? I get frightened to death reading the newspaper. I read about kids shooting kids and guns in schools and knives and horrible stuff. And then I go to schools, and it's not like that. But it's the old situation. What's news is the shootings, not the everyday miracles that are going on in schools. I love visiting schools. I love being with kids. I wish there was a school. I could just be a writer in residence and just have my office there, because it stimulates me. I get so many ideas, and my writing is so much clearer. I don't have to stop and think, get myself in the right frame of mind when I'm around kids. They just put me in that frame of mind. Fortunately, I have my own kids, but they're growing up. And they know you very well, too. They know me very well, sure. It's nice to have that sort of directness of kids who don't necessarily know you and who will tell you what they think, too, I think. Well, that's why it's good for me to speak to a group either in a library or in a school, because my way of speaking is to try to get them to ask questions and interact with me. So I get as much from it as they do. Yeah. Well, in our last moments, could you tell me what some of the children's books that you found once you started reading to your kids were that you liked? Can you, am I putting you on the spot? There was my mind, totally blank. Let's see. Did you, I'm trying to think if you mentioned anyone. I like Gary Paulson's books. I like Judy Bloom's books. Now, what is that wonderful book about that boy? Uh-oh, now I'm going to be on the spot. That boy who gets in a toy car and goes, Phantom Tollbooth. Phantom Tollbooth, wonderful book. Yeah, oh, right, I would like that book, yes. Well, my kids all love it, because it's the greatest book in the world, and why can't I write like that? And then I like a lot of oldies. I like Treasure Island, and I like Tom Sawyer, and I don't know, every time I go to the library, I find new books, or new books being published every day that I like. It's wonderful. I don't know how I miss them when I first started reading to my kids. It's having the kids, I think, that helps you go into finding what those books are. And you have a sequel coming up also to this. So I'll leave our readers with that thought, that there is a sequel coming out to Danny Aint to the Adventures of Blue Barnaby. And I thank you, Joe, very much. It's a good pleasure. Thank you. And thank you for listening again to Author Talk.