With self-deprecating humor, Lois Lowry expounded on her ""childlike views"" and how they shape her writing Wednesday night to a Memorial Union Theater audience of UW-Madison students and community members.
The acclaimed children's author of modern youth classics like the Newberry Award-winning ""The Giver"" and ""Number the Stars,"" described her methods of storytelling and narrative ""credibility"" in an event sponsored by UW-Madison's School of Education and Cooperative Children's Book Center.
In the annual speech dedicated to bringing a children's or young adults' writer to the UW-Madison campus in honor of the UW-Madison alumna and longtime children's book editor Charlotte Zolotow, Lowry joked her connection with Zolotow was tentative at best.
She said she ""seethed with a childlike jealousy"" when remembering the 2005 lecturer's recount of a lunch with the author of the children's classic, ""Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present.""
""Why wasn't I invited to lunch with Charlotte Zolotow?"" she said. ""Neither of them is invited to my birthday party.""
This childlike attitude, according to Lowry, helps her in the process of writing for her young target audience. She pointed to Zolotow's work as indicative of the power a simple plot structure can have.
""Memory itself is such an important aspect of so much of Lois Lowry's work,"" Megan Schliesman, a CCBC librarian, said.
Additionally, placing her characters in a situation that is ""a little worrisome"" spurs a mental image for her of the fictional situation and gives the characters an ultimate boon for which to strive, according to Lowry.
""It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened,"" Lowry said, quoting ""The Giver.""
Lowry said she had no idea who Jonas was or why he was frightened until she realized he was not quite frightened; he was apprehensive. Her imagination then filled in the details of the extreme structure of his world and the limited allowance of emotion in a community with complete equality and appointed jobs, Lowry said.
After ""The Giver"" was published, Lowry said she received letters from people claiming the plot was familiar or even plagiarized from works like Aldous Huxley's ""Brave New World,"" Margaret Atwood's ""The Handmaids Tale"" and George Orwell's ""1984.""
Attributing the familiarity to the idea that each author traveled to the future through their own imaginations, Lowry said this ""future vision"" was integral in children's literature.
""Everything is new to them,"" Lowry said of young readers, whether the experience be wiggling a loose tooth, encountering a human-sized rabbit or witnessing a moose walking down the street in a residential area. ""It's all of equal value, equal interest, equal surprise—everything is credible if the writer makes it so.""
