Annie Barrows landed her first job at age 12
in the library. "I'd sit in the back when I was supposed to be putting on
the plastic jackets," she admits. "I was being paid to read, which
has always been my career goal." As an adult, she became an editor, but
soon discovered that editors don't actually get to read all the time. "I
always say that if you really want to be paid to read, you should be a security
guard," explains Barrows. "Being an editor is far too difficult, I
think." Not only is Barrows the bestselling author of the Ivy and Bean
series for children, illustrated by Sophie Blackall, she also co-authored The
Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society
with her aunt Mary Ann Shaffer, aimed at adults. Here Barrows discusses the
inspiration for Ivy and Bean, the pressures children feel about global warming,
and the contrast between writing for young people and for adults.
What got you started with Ivy and Bean?
I got the idea for Ivy and Bean when my older daughter was at the end of first grade because we sort of ran out of stuff to read. We'd gone through Junie B. Jones and Magic Treehouse, and I thought, "Someone needs to do something about this." And I thought, "Heck, I'm a writer, I could write a book." I started to think about what kind of book I'd like to read, and what kind of book my daughter would like to read. I thought, "We could go down that fantasy path or write about the real world, her friends, their lives." My ulterior motive is to give kids a real laugh and serve no purpose.
One of the best things about Ivy and Bean's friendship is how different they are, but also how well they complement each other. Did you model their friendship on one you're familiar with yourself?
I don't think there's really a one-to-one correlation with a single real-life person. Ivy is in some ways a lot like my older daughter who leads with her ideas. Whereas, my other daughter leads with her impulse and her body. And I love the combination of one making plans based on her ideas, and the other trying to make the ideas become real. An idea person often doesn't have a way to make them real, and the real child doesn't make those flights of fancy. I wanted to put those together so they could have more fun than they'd ever have separately. Idea people often look in the sky, which is great, but isn't great reading, so you need the real-world person to put the ideas into practice.
Let's talk about Pancake Court--does it bear any resemblance to your childhood neighborhood?
Not at all. I made up Pancake Court because when I first wrote Ivy and Bean, there were two things that had to go: 1. Ivy and Bean make voodoo dolls. 2. When Bean runs away from Nancy, she runs across the street. The editor said, "These two things have got to go." And I said, "But Bean has to run away!" She said, "I don't care. She can't run across the street." So I made it a cul de sac--that was the solution to all my problems--and I took out the voodoo dolls. Of course, I spent my entire childhood running across the street. I lived on a street where all the kids were in the street all the time; we all roved from yard to yard.
How do you keep the series so fresh--both for you and for your readers?
Part of what I have to do is enter into kid-brain myself. I also have to spend time really listening to kids. I used to listen to my kids, but they're older now. So I go to their school and listen to what they're saying, and it reminds me of their world. You have to ask yourself honestly, is this really what a kid would do? Does this sound right? Does this make sense in kid-think? I work on it. I don't know that it's always successful but it's in my head as I'm writing.
Children receive such a heavy message about their responsibility for the planet. Was Big Idea a response to that?
I feel like it is a response to that. I've been watching my own kids get this throughout their elementary and middle school careers, like it's all falling apart and going to hell in a handbasket. I think kids worry a lot about this. It's all out of their hands and they can't do anything really to solve the problem. I wanted to take the kids' vantage point on this and show there's another way to think about this. It's not this unilateral dark picture. There are ways it's being addressed and there are a series of small solutions, and that adjustments in thinking can be key to making a world we all want to live in.
Sometimes it's really hard to come to the simple solution. Was it difficult to arrive at Ivy and Bean's project?
Yes, the ending was very hard to come to. In a lot of the Ivy and Bean books, it has been hard for the solution not to be falsely successful. In Break the Fossil Record, they're not successful in their goal, but they're satisfied as kids. In this case it took me a long time to find an ending that would be honest and where they'd be satisfied. I had to stare out my window for a long time to get to that "We Are the World" space. I think people are very frightened of the outdoors, in a way. We have this conditioning that it's something we have to oppose, that we have to bend to our will. What if we change how we see it, how we feel about it? Does that create more respect?
What was it like to work on The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie
Society after Ivy and Bean?
Sometimes my brain just shorts out when I think about those two things together. It is such a different way to write, writing for grown-ups and writing for kids. When I began Guernsey, I was doing it because my aunt asked me to. I thought, if she wants me to, I will. But I had no idea what it would be like, and once I got into it, it was such a joy to work on--part of that was hanging out with Mary Ann, but also writing those sentences, circling around a subject instead of going right straight at it the way you do with kids' books.
Can you give us a sneak preview to book eight in the Ivy and Bean series?
The eighth book is about money and cheese. It seemed like it was time for me to address the issue of money, which is such a big deal for seven-year-olds. Ivy and Bean want to make money to buy cheese, not because they want the cheese but because they want the little round wax things that the cheese comes in. My daughter told me one day that this is the hot item in the lunch room.
Top photo by Brook McCormick