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MEET JACQUELINE LEVERING SULLIVAN (9/2010)
by Bonnie O'Brian

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

Jacqueline Levering Sullivan

I grew up in the Northwest where it rained constantly, so I had plenty of opportunities to read. Each week I brought home an armload of books, as many as our local library would allow.  I remember a friend of mine and I working our way through GONE WITH THE WIND  when we were about eleven.  We felt very grown up. Perhaps that novel inspired my interest in historical novels.

Did you write stories when you were growing up?

I began to write novels in junior high, also one act plays and monologues.  A very supportive teacher often invited me to put on my plays at her afternoon parent teas.  I kept my stories secret from my mother, however, and hid them in shoe boxes in my closet, certain she would disapprove.  She had dismissed my art teacher's recommendation that I have private art lessons, so I was certain my mother would consider writing just as impractical.

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

Most of ANNIE'S WAR is fiction, but Grandma Hattie is based on my grandmother. Miss Gloria and Uncle Billy are also inspired by real people.  A completed YA novel I am currently revising is about a real event, the death of a friend when I was fifteen. All of the main characters are inspired by real people. 

When did you begin writing for children and what inspired you to start?

One afternoon in the summer of 1992, a neighbor's daughter overheard my conversation with her mother about the internment of the Japanese during WWII. She told us her class had been studying the war and that nothing had been said about that period in our history. I went home and started a novel about a girl whose best friend has been sent to a camp.  The story was intended just for my neighbor's children, but I found I liked writing for children, particularly stories based on historical events.  It has become increasingly important to me that young people learn about how their lives connect with the past as well as the value of shared experience. I recently reread that novel, and it is certainly a typical ´first¡ book. Nevertheless, that first book was the beginning, and I have been writing for children ever since.

What gave you the idea for ANNIE'S WAR?

The idea for all of my books has first begun as an image.  For a great many years I have carried the memory of my relationship with the African-American woman who worked for my grandmother in the late Forties. I can still see Gloria in the lavender suit and hat she wears in the early pages of the novel.  The most significant image, however, is one where she is kneeling in front of me holding my tear-streaked face in her hands. I thought she was the most loving person I had ever known.  The affection that Annie feels for both her grandmother Hattie and Miss Gloria reflects my own feelings as a child

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

I have always enjoyed researching and particularly enjoyed reading about President Truman for ANNIE'S WAR.  I read some of his personal letters available on the Truman library website and reread David McCullough's biography of Truman. Information gathered from old newspaper files about the segregated bases in Walla Walla, Washington was particularly informative, but most surprising were the historical accounts of cross burning in Washington State.  Currently, I am working on a novel about a teenager who befriends a homeless woman living in her Mercedes. The research has uncovered a great number of stories about affluent women who, for a number of reasons, end up homeless.  The novel is set in 1984, but the stories of homeless women continue to make news.  For another novel set in the Fifties, all I had to do was read my old yearbooks, a real treasure of information.

What jobs have you held, in addition to being a writer?

 I have taught both junior high and high school, but for the past twenty-five years I have taught writing at Pitzer College, a member of the Claremont Colleges. I also founded and directed the Pitzer College Writing Center.  Teaching writing to talented and enthusiastic students has been my dream job.  We write every class meeting, and I write the same prompts that I assign my students.  That practice has given me pages and pages of ideas for future stories.