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MEET JEAN FERRIS
by Bonnie O'Brian

What books influenced you most when you were growing up?

Jean Ferris

The books I loved best were the OZ books. Perhaps because they were about a girl always adapting to a strange new place. My father was an army officer and we moved a lot, so I was often a girl adapting to a strange new place, too. Reading about Dorothy finding friends, solving problems, dealing with difficulties, having adventures was reassuring to me, that I could do it, too. Also, I liked that she always had her dog Toto with her, because I liked doing everything with my dog, Zippy.

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 never thought that I would be a published writer. I loved to write from the time I first learned how to—in fact, I wrote my first book when I was seven. Illustrated it, too. But I wrote to entertain myself, to work out things that were perplexing me, mostly because it was something I just like to do. I didn’t have a TV in my house until I was 13, so I read a lot and, because I got such pleasure from it, I guess I thought I’d try to do it myself. I didn’t publish my first book until I was 40, so it took me a long time to think about publication!

When you went to college, were you already pursuing a writing career?

No. I was writing, but not considering it a career. I went to college as a journalism major because I thought that was the only way you could get a job writing. But after I took a few courses, I realized that wasn’t the kind of writing I wanted to do. I wanted to write fiction, and that is frowned upon in journalism!

What kinds of things inspire you to write?

 Usually I write about something that’s on my mind. I’ve written two or thee books (ALL THAT GLITTERS and RELATIVE STRANGERS) about absent fathers when I was worrying about why father are important in the lives of children. I was thinking about what fathers bring to children that mothers don’t and what’s missing when the father isn’t there. I’ve written about teen depression after one of my daughter’s friends tried to commit suicide at 14. I’ve written about a hearing boy in a deaf family (OF SOUND MIND) when I read an article about a family like that and wondered what it would be like to be in the minority in you own family when you’re in the majority in the rest of the world. Ideas are everywhere—the bigger question to me is; why this idea and not that one? All I can say is that certain ideas stay in my head and when they do, I know I need to write about them.

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

I like both. I love research, once I have an idea of what I want to write about, because the more I research, the more ideas I get for my story. And sometimes I’ll come upon some research material that is a mother lode of everything I need. But I also like to use my imagination, sometimes based on something I’ve learned in my research. In my book, UNDERGROUND, I did so much research on the Underground Railroad that it seemed logical to me that Mammoth Cave in Kentucky could have been used as a stop on the Railroad, though there’s no evidence that that ever happened. In fiction, it can!

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

I never work on writing more than one book at a time, but I can work on writing one while I’m doing revisions, or proofreading another. Creation takes all my energy and all my concentration and all my imagination, and I seem to have only enough of all that to pour into writing one book at a time.

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

When I’m actively working on a new book I try to write every weekday. I always take the weekends off because I have a lot of other things I like to do besides write. I don’t exactly have set hours of working, though usually I work between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm. What I do have is a page requirement—normally five pages—for every day. And if I’m busing in the morning with something else, I’ll write in the afternoon, after I get home. The important thing is to write regularly. It keeps the creative wheels oiled, and it keeps the story that’s being written fresh in my mind.