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MEET KIRSTIN CLARK VENUTI (2010)
by Bonnie O'Brian

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

Kirstin Clark Venuti

Above everything, I enjoyed reading. I didn’t have that much else going on.  I was not a good student; I had pretty severe ADD. For some reason, the one thing I could concentrate on was reading books.  To this day, I’m uncomfortable if I don’t have one going and one waiting in the wings.

What books influenced you most when you were growing up?

Boy – there were tons. I’d say the books that most influenced me were PIPPI LONGSTOCKING, CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN, THE MOFFATS, HARRIET THE SPY, Helen Cresswel’s books about the Bagthorp family, THE MAD SCIENTIST’S CLUB, EDWARD GOREY, and anything by Roald Dahl.  The cartoons of Charles Addams also had a huge impact on my sense of humor, not to mention my writing style. Gosh that’s a lot… I must have been an extremely impressionable child.  A sponge, I tell you!

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 wrote both as a child and as a teenager.  My friend J. Amanda and I even tried our hand at writing a series called “The Spacious Objects Club – sort of a Mad Scientist’s Club, but for girls.  We were 9 and 11 as I recall.  It didn’t go anywhere – but it kept us off the streets.  You know what a menace to the neighborhood 9 and 11-year-old girls can be!

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?

It didn’t occur to me that I could be a writer when I grew up until a poet named Billie Jean James visited my school.  I was in the third grade. I had learning disabilities, but Billie Jean pointed out that a lot of artistic people have brains that work just fine – but in a way that’s different from the norm. I was enchanted that this living, breathing, SYMPATHETIC person before me had actually published poetry.  (She was also a great and shining example that you didn’t have to be dead in order to have your books published. An opinion I held prior to meeting her.)  She passed this year, and I’m grateful to have met her when I did.  She knew I became a writer, and she also knew the role she played in that.

What is your first book and when was it published?

My first book is LEAVING THE BELLWEATHERS.  It came out in 2009.  My second is THE BUTLER GETS A BREAK, a sequel to the first. It just came out October 2010.  The books are about a bizarre family who live in a lighthouse in a village called Eel-Smack by the Bay.  The oldest child loves dangerous animals.  He brings things like albino alligators and rare attack squirrels to live with the family.  The middle child is a firm believer in the right of everyone to be free.  To prove it she holds a family of circus performers and their pet seal captive in her bedroom. The youngest three are triplets who are so convinced of their own genius that the end up doing things such as stealing the Mona Lisa.  The family butler, Benway, is fed up with the chaos and decides to leave.  But first, he does what any servant in his situation would do. He writes a writes a tell-all memoir.

Where do you get your ideas?

ADD brain.  Seriously.  I daydream more than the average person.  It can be frustrating for those around me. My sainted family is always finding my car keys in the refrigerator or the washing machine. I have had to change dentists because I was so embarrassed about missing tons of appointments in a row.  I wasn’t avoiding him – I just kept forgetting to go. The silver lining is that when I daydream, I have all these little adventures that can be written into story.

Have any of your books earned special recognition?

LEAVING THE BELLWEATHERS is an E.B. White Read Aloud Honor Book.  It means a lot to me that it is.  First of all because it’s an award from the American Booksellers for Children.  The independent booksellers have been great supporters of the book – they appreciate its quirkiness, and hand-sell it a lot.  The award is also important to me because the read aloud aspect of it was something I really focused on (hmmm – I guess I CAN focus, sometimes) as I was writing it.  I deliberately chose the length of the chapters so that teachers could read one after lunch say, before forcing their charges to do math.  Or for parents to be able to read to their kids, just before tucking them in and then getting on with their own, adult lives.  In other words, kind of short.  I also tried to make each chapter satisfying in itself so that the book could be put down, but then picked up again with ease.  I put a lot of thought into how the individual voices of the characters would sound, theatrically exaggerating them sometimes so that parents and kids and anyone who loves to read out loud would have a lot of fun…

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

I love school visits almost as much as I love writing, and that’s saying a lot.  School visits are important to me, because of how I myself was turned on to the notion of being a writer by Billie Jean James.  I was a student with learning disabilities who overcame them to become a writer. I love having the opportunity to communicate that to kids, especially to those who may be learning disabled themselves.  Not that they’ll all become writers – but I want students to come away from my visits with a sense that all obstacles can be overcome, and that what may seem like a curse (I was always in trouble for not paying attention) can turn out to be a blessing.