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MEET MARILYN REYNOLDS
by Bonnie O'Brian

What books influenced you most when you were growing up?

Marilyn Reynolds

As an English major with literary pretensions, I’d like to say that I was influenced by Willa Cather, and William Shakespeare, or at least Louisa May Alcott. But the truth is, I was most influenced as a child by Nancy Drew books. She was smart, independent, and always on the side of right, and she was my hero. I also loved the stories of Albert Payson Terhune and the Pollyanna stories. Much later I learned that elements of these stories were racist, sexist and/or fascist, but I grew up to be a liberal feminist anyway.

Did you write stories when you were growing up? at school? Or at home as a hobby? As a young child, or as a teenager, or both?

I didn’t write stories as a child. I was too busy trying to be Nancy Drew. I was very lucky, though, to be surrounded by story tellers, particularly my southern kin, and I absorbed a narrative sense through that tradition.

When you went to college, were you already pursuing a writing career? (or a career in illustrating? or just art in general?)

I started college, newly divorced, with two daughters, under four, and with very limited funds. Although by that time I harbored a semi-conscious interest in writing, my trustworthy conscious brain told me I’d better work toward financial stability and health benefits. Becoming a writer at that time of my life didn’t even make the list of possibilities. I majored in English because I liked to read, and chose to teach for the obvious reasons of financial stability, but also because I wanted to pass my love of reading on to others.

If you didn’t write as a child, then when did you start writing and what inspired you to start?

It was not until my second daughter left home, allowing me the proverbial “room of one’s own,” that I began writing. To begin with, I wrote mostly personal essays, mixes of humor and despair, depending on my immediate experiences and observations. I’m not sure what my inspiration was for these essays, other than a desire to express my own particular point of view in my own particular way, but my inspiration to shift from essays to realistic teen fiction was definitely a desire to get more relevant books into the hands of my “hate-to-read” high school students--books that they might possibly relate to. At the time I started my first YA book, 1987, once my students had read Go Ask Alice, the S.E. Hinton books, and a variety of Judy Blume books, I had a hard time finding titles that appealed to my very reluctant readers.

Was your first book accepted immediately? or did you experience a number of rejections?

My first book, Telling, was rejected by twenty-three publishers before it finally was accepted. It took me nine months to write and two years to get published. I would have given up after about the tenth rejection, but my students were fighting over whose turn it was to read the manuscript each day, and I had already seen one girl gain hope for her life after she read Telling. Her experience, and the interest of other students, gave me the determination to keep trying.

What are the topics are some of your books?

My books all deal with difficult issues that teens sometimes must face. Pregnancy, abuse, rape, lack of family support, school difficulties, substance abuse, abortion, all issues that I saw played out in the lives of my students. My hope for my books is, first of all, that they tell a good story. Beyond that, if readers connect with the struggles of believable fictional character, and gain some perspective regarding their own struggles, so much the better.

What do you most want the students to get out of your school visits?

What I most want students to get from my school visits is that each and every person has his/her own unique story to tell, and his/her own unique way of telling it. One needn’t be a genius to be a writer. If any of my high school English teachers were still alive today, and they heard that I’d become a published writer, that would send them straight to the grave. One of the greatest gifts we have to offer is the gift of our own personal stories. Shared stories and shared understandings light the path to peace, and we desperately need help finding our way along that path.