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MEET JANE CUTLER
by Bonnie O'Brian

What did you most like to do when you were a child?

Jane Cutler

I liked to read, draw, listen to the radio, play catch in the driveway, roller skate, and do just anything else that involved playing with other kids, since I was an only child. I spent a lot of time by myself, even though I didn't want to. And during that time, I made up stories. I didn't write them down. But I realize now, I was "writing" in my head long before I thought of myself as a writer or a storyteller.

LITTLE WOMEN. I read it several times a year for years and years. And like so many women writers, I identified with Jo March. But the part of the book I read with the most pleasure was the beginning, the warm family part, where the mother and the four young sisters are a close, loving, interdependent unit. It fulfilled the fantasies I had about what family life ought to be. I realized early on, I think, that books and stories, and the characters that inhabit them, could mean a lot in my life. That they could nourish and support me. And I realized, too, that this must be true for others.

When you were a child did you ever have moments when you decided that you were going to be a writer when you grew up?

I did, yes.

Do you do other types of writing - for example, educational, nonfiction, magazine work?

Have any of your fiction stories been about real people or events?

In THE SONG OF THE MOLIMO, which takes place at the St. Louis World's Fair, 1904, I mix real people with imaginary ones. It works out very nicely. The Pygmy, Ota Benga, who really was at the Fair, and my fictional 12 year old, Harry, become fast friends. Jessie Beals, the first woman news photographer was at the World's Fair, too, and I've made her a pivotal figure in my book. It was enormous fun, working with fictional and real characters at the same time. Challenging and entertaining. Other characters in this book are based closely upon real people, but fictionalized and renamed: the anthropologist who is the head of the Fair and the anthropologist who brings Ota Benga to the Fair from the Congo, for example.

Do you enjoy researching or do you prefer working totally from your imagination?

I do quite a bit of research. When I wrote LEAP, FROG, I became a minor expert on the red-legged frog, which is an endangered species in California, as well as the frog featured in the famous story by Mark Twain about the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County. For my book MY WARTIME SUMMERS, I had to do endless research about World War II in Europe. And for THE SONG OF THE MOLIMO, I became a world class expert on world's fairs, Pygmies, heredity, Darwinism, eugenics, early photography, ragtime music, turn of the century American society and scientific thought, St. Louis, slavery, the history of the Belgian Congo, and so many other subjects I can hardly remember them. It was a fascinating book to write! Also, I met amazing people – one, Chauncey Spencer, of Lynchburg, VA, had been a Tuskeegee Airman, and (so I found out about them),had known Ota Benga, the Pygmy who is one of the main characters in the book, when he – Chauncy – was a little boy. I interviewed him in Lynchburg several years before he died, and he told me wonderful stories about his boyhood with the Pygmy, and about the rest of his life, too. Researching and writing that book was one of the biggest adventures of my life. And I got to do a C-Span segment about it, which was a kick, too. Chauncy came, and he sat right up on the front row – a stately old almost blind man – he beamed at me through the whole hour of my talk, smiling and nodding and encouraging me. What an afternoon that was! I found out that writing a book can lead you into strange and wonderful places, imaginary and real.

Do you work on more than one book at a time?

Sometimes I have. When I've been able to do that, I have been writing very happily – it's happened when I've been in a very creative period. I don't know if it's something I would recommend to students in a writing class. But I would tell students that if they found themselves full of creative energy and wanting to work on two manuscripts at the same time, go ahead and give it a try. Whenever I have done it, both books have turned out well, and both have sold. A good combination is to work on books in different genres: obviously, a novel and a picture book will make very different demands upon a writer and call for different skill sets. It's a great combination if you want to work on two projects at one time.

Which of your books did you most enjoy writing?

Maybe it would be easier to say which one I did not enjoy writing. And then I realized that is not true, either. It's not a hundred percent fun to write any book all the time. Every book is wonderful to write – and every book is terrible to write. Every book is the best experience you've ever had writing, and I would guess that every book is also the worst experience you've ever had. For myself, I find a picture book – when it works – can be pretty easy. Usually writes itself in a month or two. Chapter books can be relatively easy, too. They move right along. The novels are tough, though. And easy to reads – now there is a challenge! But this doesn't really answer the question, does it? I enjoy the easy ones because they are easy – AND I enjoy the really hard ones because they wear me out and when I finally get them right, it is such a wonderful feeling. I guess in the end, I enjoy it all.

What are you working on now? When do you expect to start submitting it to publishers?

I'm working on a book about an unlikely friendship between an old woman and a young teenaged girl – the woman, when she was a child, had to flee Germany and the Nazis and ended up in Shanghai, China, where she had an exotic and difficult wartime childhood. The book goes back and forth in time, took a couple of years to research, and is a bear to write. But I love my characters, both in China during WW II and in the retirement home, in the Now, and that keeps me going. This is the sort of book that you don't want to write: the characters keep saying and doing things I don't expect and I have to adapt to what they are making happen, which is pulling me off course and making the book much longer and more complicated than I had planned. I prefer a book that goes where I think it will go, which is usually the case, with a few decorous and entertaining surprises here and there. But sometimes, as you've heard before, a book will get the bit in its teeth – and then, whoa Nelly.

Do you write every day and do you have set hours that you work?

I do and I don't. But I can tell you that I am absolutely sure everyone who is serious about their writing should!

Do you like to include humor in your stories?

Many of my books are funny as well as serious. I love it when a scene turns funny on me. I think humor in books, as in life, is a precious commodity, and I value it highly.