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In When Sally O’Malley Discovered the Sea, Newbery Medalist Karen Cushman takes readers on a journey across a small piece of Oregon geography and history, neither of which feels small at all in the telling.

Roger Sutton: Where did Sally O'Malley spring from — the character and the novel?

Karen Cushman: Ideas all come as pieces, like LEGOs, and the pieces of Sally started with this series of books called Images of America about small towns across America — tiny little towns. There was one about the lost gas stations of San Mateo and one about Chicago's Ukrainian Village — there's even one about the island where I live, Vashon Island in Washington State. And as I looked through those, I found one for a Wilhoit Springs, which was a popular mineral springs spa not far from Portland in the nineteenth century, and I thought that would be an interesting place to set a book. I always think of the beginning and the end of a book first, and I wanted this one to start at the hot springs and end on the Oregon coast in a town that's now called Cannon Beach but was then Elk Creek. They have a little historical society, and I hung out there and got a lot of information. So I had the beginning and the end of the book, and then these lines popped into my head: “Miz Broome chucked me out. Chucked me right out like I was chewed-on chicken bones. ‘That’s the last straw, Sally O’Malley,’ she called as she chucked my coat after me. ‘Goodbye, and good riddance.’ Jumpin’ jiminy! Due to an unfortunate incident with the pig and the church ladies, I was out and on my own. And so was the pig.” I thought, I have this character, what am I going to do with her? So I took her out of the hot springs and put her on the road.

RS: In many ways it's an epic journey. But how long is Sally’s journey to the coast, maybe two weeks?

KC: I think it took about two weeks for her to get there, yes. That included ten miles through the mountains down to the beach, so it was quite an endurance test for her.

RS: Did you make the trip yourself to prepare?

KC: I did. My husband Philip — who is gone now — and I went there many times. Cannon Beach was his favorite place, and it's a beautiful little town. The beach is glorious and there are these haystack rocks that came up through the water millions of years ago. Now they're home to puffins and other birds and it's just really lovely.

RS: When did you decide that what Sally was going for was the sea?

KC: Pretty early on. She heard somebody talking about the sea, and I thought it was something for her to aim toward but also a metaphor for what she was seeking. Something big and glorious and exciting. It turns out that's not what she wanted. She didn't want the sea, really, she wanted a place to belong, people to belong to. She discovers it at the very end.

RS: It's a really elemental story. You have this headstrong girl, this bratty little boy, you have a helpful dog, you have a guiding figure in Major.

KC: And a donkey.

RS: It’s practically archetypal.

KC: Yes, Joseph Campbell would be proud of me.

RS: I think Joseph Campbell would be very proud. Was it something that required a lot of research?

KC: Yes, it did. I know what the towns are like now, but I had to look and find out what they were like then. Some of it was really surprising. Oregon is very big on their local history, so I was able to find a lot of newspaper articles and other resources. There are historical societies, little tiny ones, in a lot of the towns. The Oregonian was a big help, especially for the chapters in the book where there's a flood in Portland. I had no idea about the 1894 flood that was so deep and so destructive. That's one reason I set the book specifically at that time, because there was so much information and pictures of the flood — men in top hats and frock coats paddling rowboats down the river to get to the office, and the river was the street. It was amazing.

RS: What caused you to move to the Pacific Northwest to begin with?

KC: Philip and I liked the rain and the cooler weather. We were living first in Southern California and then Northern California. We kept moving north, and we found that we were taking all our vacations up here. So we started looking around for possible places to live. He was working — teaching full time and had patients also — so we had to wait till he cleared all of that out. But when the time came, we were able to move here.

RS: Very lucky.

KC: Very lucky, yes. I've lived in a number of places all up and down the West Coast. I seem to be a West Coast person. But this is the place that I think is the most like home for me and Phil also.

RS: I am sorry to hear of his passing.

KC: It's a tragedy. He died in a hit-and-run accident. The driver who hit him said that he heard voices telling him to kill somebody, so he did. He picked my Philip.

RS: When something terrible happens to you, is writing something you can do? Is it a refuge?

KC: At first, after Phil's death, I wasn't writing. I thought I'd never write again. But then I realized that it was a refuge, a place to belong, a place to work out my own feelings and hopes and talk about them, without talking about me. I wonder if that's why Major died in the book. That she was sort of a guiding figure, which Phil always was. I killed her off, and I wondered if that had something to do with his death.

RS: Is this the first book you wrote since he died?

KC: Yes. And what was really hard is what a package deal we were when it came to writing and editing. I would sit in one room and he in another and I'd be yelling up, “Phil, is this the right word for...?" Or "How do you think she'd feel about this?" Or "Is this too much?” “Not enough,” is usually what he said. “Not enough!” It was the first time I didn't have that sounding board.

RS: He was there when you wrote your first book?

KC: The very first book. He’s the reason I had a career. My daughter, Leah, is a children's book buyer at Broadway Books in Portland, Oregon, and I will call her about things, but it’s not the same. She's not that intimately connected with what I'm writing. She will say, “Well, that sounds good.” But that's not what he would say; he would write “MORE MORE MORE” in big letters in the margin.

RS: Was it a surprise to discover that in your relationship? When you started writing, did you know that you were going to have this close collaborator in the next room yelling encouragement?

KC: Well, he was a close collaborator in most of the things that I did, so I wasn’t surprised. I was surprised and pleased by how much he would pay attention and how many times he would read a draft and how constructive he would be about it. He was a smart guy, so I listened to what he said — kicking and screaming sometimes.

RS: And now you’re on your own.

KC: Now I’m on my own with everything.

RS: It’s something of a triumph to get this book written, then?

KC: I think it was. Friends said, “I can't believe you're writing right now,” but I told them that that's what I do, I'm a writer, and that's where I look for a place to belong and something to do — support for my own feelings and desires. And what else am I going to do? There are only so many dirty dishes for one person, I have to find something else to do. But it is very nourishing. I don't know how many more books I can write — I will find out, I suppose.

RS: Do you feel — and I'm not probing about your religious beliefs or anything — but do you feel his presence when you write now?

KC: No, he’s not here. Sometimes I yell out to Phil to ask what he would say about something — but there's no answer. He's not here. I can't touch him, and he can't answer me.

RS: But he was there for the previous, maybe dozen books? And I just wonder if you can still sense his support. It helped make you a writer.

KC: Yes, I know that he would be supportive, and I can tell as I read through Sally what parts he helped me with, because I had started the book before he died. There are places where I remember his notes in the margin saying, “more emotion” or “how does she feel?” I tend to be sort of terse and straightforward, but he wanted me to warm it up and use more emotions. So when I hit those places in the manuscript, I can feel, I think, what he would say.

RS: It seems like he left you with a great gift in that way. That you can ask yourself what he would say. You can spot those moments in the manuscript where you aren’t naturally doing what's best.

KC: Yes, and I definitely think, What would Phil say about this? and then go back and add tears or anger or frustration or what have you.

RS: I feel like in some ways you and I grew up together in this field because your first book came out just a few years before I started at the Horn Book, and here we are almost thirty years later. How do you see the world of children's books from this end of things?

KC: I don't know that much about the publishing end, but I think it's very different. There are fewer opportunities for writers who don't have the next big thing or a celebrity background. It's harder for young writers to come in. And I think there are way too many books published. Leah talks about the boxes and boxes of books that come into the bookstore every day. She can't read them all. Who can read them all? I’m not sure that what publishers are looking for is the same thing that readers are looking for.

RS: It’s a perfect intersection, where the right book gets published and the right reader picks it up.

KC: Right, but it's harder now that there are so many books out there, I think.

RS: And that’s another struggle because you want writers to have opportunity, but at the same time you're saying — and I would agree with you — that there are too many books being published already.

KC: Yes, we can’t possibly keep up. My daughter has trouble buying books because there are so many she can't read. These catalogs come, and they're just loaded with titles, but there's no way she can read them all and decide whether or not to buy them for the store. She thinks there are fabulous books that go unsung.

RS: What’s next for you?

KC: I’m working on a new book. I’m on my tenth iteration of the first forty pages, so I don’t know how it's going to go, but we’ll find out because that’s what I do: I write.

RS: That would be the hardest part for me about being a novelist. It would be the second drafts, the third drafts, the fourth drafts. I think I went into book reviewing because it’s like 250 words and you’re done.

KC: I look at it like a logic problem. My daughter, when she was a teenager, subscribed to Games magazine, which had all these logic problems. You have to figure out if the man with red hair is sitting next to the woman with blue hair, all these parts and moving them around. I look at working with drafts that way. Okay, this doesn’t feel right, so what can I do? And I move it around this way and that way and think about it a little differently and figure it out. I still have the first seventeen drafts of the early pages of Catherine, Called Birdy. I used to take them to schools and talk about how writing is not just putting words down on paper, it’s what you do with them after that — that’s the real writing.

RS: And over and over and over again.

KC: Over and over and over, yeah.

RS: But you like the process?

KC: I do like the process, as much as I complain about it. The hardest part for me is putting the words down on paper at the beginning. Once the words are all down on paper, then I can manipulate them and polish them and make them better or rethink them or change voice from first person to third. I can do that. But the hard part is sitting and looking at those blank pages and asking, “What am I going to say? I don’t have anything to say.”

RS: And then with Sally O’Malley you started with two places and not a character. The character came after the locations?

KC: Yes, right. I knew where it started and where it ended in terms of settings. Then I found those first few lines that sent me off in her direction, and then it became her book, Sally O'Malley’s.

RS: I was really one with Sally O’Malley in her quest to see the sea, because you did a great job of making something that could be big and abstract a personal, character-driven quest. The ocean as a goal. We really saw it come from her, so it became a provider of suspense in the book: when will Sally O'Malley see the sea? And what will she think when she gets there? I thought that was brilliant.

KC: Yes, and I didn't know until I got to those parts of the book how she would feel or what would happen. What would the sea mean to her when she actually saw it? What would she do with it when she got there?

RS: Thank you for bringing Sally’s era back to us and making it come to life.

KC: Thank you. I seem to like playing with other times more than current times.

RS: You’ve had several books set in medieval Europe. And others set in America, from The Ballad of Lucy Whipple set in Gold Rush California to The Loud Silence of Francine Green, about the 1950s. You completely change continents and centuries. Can you tip us off as to where and when the next one will take place?

KC: What I’m playing with right now is a medieval city, an apothecary’s daughter, a fraudulent relic seller, and a talking alligator hanging on the ceiling of the apothecary shop.

RS: Talking alligator?

KC: Yes. I thought, Well, what would he say and why is he there? I don’t know what his voice is. For a while I experimented with him talking like an old guy in the park in New York City. But that didn’t seem to work in a medieval setting, so I have to figure out exactly what he says and how he says it, and why he’s there.

RS: I have full confidence you will put in the work and you will come up with something brilliant.

KC: Thank you, I like to be believed in.

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