K. Fawn Knight teaches composition, reading, and American literature at Michigan Christian College in Rochester, Michigan.
K. Fawn Knight Interview with Charles Ferry
Charles Ferry's third novel for young people, Raspberry One, was published at a time of particular interest in war and its effects on children and children's books. A 1983 conference at the Cooperative Children's Book Center in Madison, Wisconsin, for example, examined "War as Metaphor" in children's literature. Raspberry One is set during World War II and deals with the effects of combat on two young Navy crewmen. It was listed as one of the best books of 1983 by both the Young Adult Services Division of the American Library Association and the School Library Journal. The Chicago-based Friends of American Writers recently presented Ferry with an award for Raspberry One as the best juvenile book of 1983. Not long ago, I had a chance to visit Mr. Ferry in his home and to talk with him about his work. The Ferry home is a modest, ranch-style house in a subdivision of Rochester, Michigan. The house is well-loved and well-lived-in"laid back," as Mr. Ferry cheerfully announced. Most of his writing is done in a corner of the living room with equipment no more pretentious than a portable typewriter posed on an end table and an A&P bag for a wastebasket. As we talked, we sat at the kitchen table in a dining room pleasantly awash with mementos of family, vacations, old friends, and past political campaigns. Mr. Ferry has published two previous novels for teenagers, Up in Sister Bay and 0, Zebron Falls! Writing fiction for young adults is a fairly recent development in his life, but communications is not. His professional career stretches back over thirty years in journalism, radio, and television, primarily in Texas and Michigan. Was his background in journalism a help when he began his first novel? He's
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Children's literature in education not sure: "I knew how to compose a literate sentence, which fiction requires, after all." But the need for strict accuracy, so much a part of his journalism training, occasionally hampered him when he first began to write fiction. Readers of his first two novels know that they are set in actual places- Up in Sister Bay in the upstate Wisconsin of Charles Ferry's youth, O, Zebron Falls! in the Rochester of forty years ago. His new freedom to make changes in the actual geography to better fit the story was unsettling at first.
Raspberry One
Still, it was his journalistic instincts, in part, that prompted him to write Raspberry One. Mr. Ferry has a passionate distaste for what he believes is historical "revisionism" in the treatment of World War II in many current novels for young people. It seemed to him that the authors of the books he read had a total disregard for either the facts or the feel of the period. He was determined to make his book an accurate account of the attitudes and experiences common to people in this country in the 1940s. Ferry's book takes place in 1944 and recounts the experiences of two young Navy crewmen assigned to the dive bomber Raspberry One, stationed on the fictional carrier the U.S.S. Shiloh. Mr. Ferry wanted Nick and Hildy's story to be representative of the experiences of young men who fought in World War II. To that end, the actual writing of Raspberry One was preceded by more than a year of research. He read histories of every major naval engagement in the Pacific, studied every carrier, read eyewitness accounts of combat in the area, and interviewed two men who had survived the devastating Kamikaze attack on the U.S.S. Franklin (the prototype of the Shiloh). The result is a meticulously researched historical novel, permeated by a strong sense of patriotism and personal conviction. If some of the values expressed make readers today uneasy, Mr. Ferry is unapologetic. "None of my characters shed a tear when the [atomic] bombs are dropped;' he says flatly. "People didn't-not in this country, not then." They were relieved that the United States had not been invaded and that the war was over. It is, he believes, enormously important not to "write down" to young people. World War II, he emphasizes, was a war "fought by young people." He himself was only 16 when he "sneaked" into the Navy and was sent to flight school. The main characters in Raspberry One are all in their late teens. Young people should know their own history, presented accurately: "I didn't try to tell a moral. Point-
Interview with Charles Ferry
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ing out how bad war is was not in my mind. I just tried to be faithful to the material." The book was almost a "pure conception" to him. He knew immediately what the focal point of the novel would be: a newsreel seen in a theater forty years ago, but never forgotten, of the Franklin's heroic entry into New York Harbor. The Shiloh was modeled after "Big Ben." Curiously, his intention to make the harbor scene the climactic one in the book altered as he wrote. When he had finished his talent show scene, in which the few grievously wounded survivors of the Shiloh put on a cheerful show for their rescuers, he decided that this was the emotion he really wanted to capture. Consequently, the harbor scene was never written. Other changes, major and minor, were made in the earliest versions of the book as well. Originally written in the first person, the novel was rewritten in the third person, broadening the conception beyond the experience of only one flyer. Hildy changed, too, as the novel developed. "He surprised me!" Mr. Ferry admits. Originally intended to be an emotional casualty of the war, Hildy just wouldn't stay down. "He just kept saying, Tm not giving up.'" He usually works from legal pads on which he has jotted ideas, "prompts," as he calls them. From these snatches and pieces, he types successive drafts, writing and rewriting extensively, moving from chapter to chapter and back again. Although he wrote his first two books back-to-front, as it were, beginning with the final chapter, Raspberry One was written roughly in chronological sequence. Part I (and Chapter 1) were written first, and then Part Ill, the closing chapters of the novel. He avoided the combat scenes because he was worried that they were the only part of the novel where he would not be drawing on his personal experience (the war ended at about the time he finished flight school), but he actually wrote them rather rapidly and with comparative ease once he came to them. Does he think of himself as a writer for young people? "I don't write for young people. I write for people of any age. I know that what I write is most applicable to young people, but that's all that is in my mind." In a sense, he writes for himself. He quotes Emily Dickinson: "How can I know what I think until I see what I have written?" Franny's
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Children's literature in education and Nick's fathers, both warm and sympathetic men in Raspberry One, are products of a new understanding of his own father.
O, Zebron Falls/
Robbie Van Epp, the main character in Up in Sister Bay, rarely sees his father. Lukie Bishop, the 16-year-old protagonist of O, Zebron Falls/, struggles painfully to communicate with her father. "Sometimes she thought she loved [her beloved Uncle Farnie] more than she loved her f a t h e r - a n d felt guilty about thinking that way" (p. 15). Only in researching Raspberry One, Mr. Ferry says, did he begin to understand what his own father, a gunner in World War I, must have endured. 'All my characters are 'me:" he muses, "composites of people I've known. Next time I'll do a father in spades." Occasionally a character is suggested by a particular person in his life. Sister Joan Therese, Charles Ferry's own eighth-grade teacher at St. Joseph School, was transformed into Robbie's dear friend, and her pet phrase, %tick-to-it-iveness;' appears in Sister Bay, as well. There is a sense of audience, however, in the seriousness with which he views his own writing. He is, he says, "spinning yarns," but not only that. He is also trying to write "honestly," a term he borrows from Hemingway. Any conversation with Charles Ferry, one quickly discovers, is full of allusions to his favorite authors: Hemingway, Dickinson, Salinger. From Chekhov he quotes the idea of the "concrete universal," the one evocative detail that will stand emotionally for all the other details that might have been included. He tries to include just enough detail to trigger the reader's own imagination. When he deals with sexuality, as he does in all three of his novels, he tries to suggest intimacy, rather than detailing it, both from respect for the young reader's privacy, he says, and from a belief in the power of the imagination. He uses profanity sparingly, even when writing about life in the Navy, from the same conviction: gratuitous detail kills a book. One also can't talk long with Mr. Ferry without realizing that he is a man with vigorous opinions on a wide range of subjects. A slightly built man in his mid-fifties, he is graying and so thin he appears almost frail, an impression that fades as he talks energetically about his hobbies and particular concerns. Politics, natural foods, the mass media, and values are all areas of strong conviction. Although he graduated from high school and "dabbled" a bit in college, he is fond of saying that he is the product of a "good eighth-grade education" and laments that schoolchildren today don't seem to him to
Interview with Charles Ferry
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have the same exposure to fine writing and music as earlier generations.
Up in Sister Bay
0, Zebron Falls/
A distinct vision of life in the rural Midwest, as an earlier generation experienced it, permeates both Up in Sister Bay and O, Zebron Falls/Up in Sister Bay is set in the last year or so before the outbreak of World War II. It is 1939. Robbie and his friends Libby, Jim, and Charlie plan to homestead Loon Lodge, but their plans are threatened by hidden small-town scandals, by racial prejudice, and by the coming war. Critics have applauded Mr. Ferry's ability to evoke a particular place and time in his novels. Up in Sister Bay is, in part, an evocative celebration of the seasons and tempo of life in rural Wisconsin.
0, Zebron Falls/celebrates small-town life. Lukie Bishop lives in a rural Michigan town of Tuesday night Musicales, community fish fries, hometown football games, and seemingly unshakeable stability. Lukie imagines that she and her classmates will always live in the Zebron Falls she knows: "That was how it had always b e e n . . . and that was how it would be with them. It was the one great certainty of her life" {p. 35). The intrusion of World War II into her placid world, and the death of her Uncle Farnie, force Lukie to wonder for the first time if Zebron Falls will always be the same and finally bring her to the painful realization that the town she knows is not the same town for others-notably, her best friend Billy, the only black student in her high school. But, in both novels, the security and goodness of small-town life and values are ultimately confirmed. It is tempting to suspect some nostalgia here, and at least one critic has suggested that Mr. Ferry's books attribute a rather rosy-colored hue to the lives of people forty years ago. Are his books nostalgic? No, he says, they don't represent a hankering to go back to an earlier period of his life. They are, he believes, authentic-showing what a particular period of our history was like. His books try to say, believe it or not, "this is the way it was." Certainly the battle scenes in Raspberry One are powerful and present a horrifying picture of war. They are a serious treatment of combat for young readers. The scenes aboard the floundering Shiloh are, I think, the best that he's written to date. And, certainly, he seems to be a man content with life. His newest
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Children's literature in education
novel, One More Time, will be published in the spring of 1985 by Houghton Mifflin, and he's hard at work, he tells me, on a new book about the 4-H. In the meantime, he continues to bake his own bread, spread seeds for the birds in his much-loved garden, write with music and his black Belgian sheepdog "Spook" for company, and chat with his wife, R u t h - m u c h enjoying the now of everyday routines. Books b y Charles Ferry Up in Sister Bay. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. 0, Zebron Falls!. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Raspberry One, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. One More Time. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
