{"id":6553,"date":"2018-03-18T12:19:36","date_gmt":"2018-03-18T16:19:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=6553"},"modified":"2018-03-20T12:21:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T16:21:00","slug":"kelly-barnhill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/03\/18\/kelly-barnhill\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking About \u2018Dreadful Young Ladies\u2019 And Evil Rulers With Newbury-Winning Author Kelly Barnhill"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the start of last year, Minneapolis novelist Kelly Barnhill won the Newbery Medal, the highest honor in young adult literature, for her fourth novel, “The Girl Who Drank the Moon.”<\/p>\n

\"Kelly<\/a>
Kelly Barnhill’s 2016 young adult novel \u201cThe Girl Who Drank the Moon.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the book, a witch, a swamp monster and a tiny dragon adopt a magical girl abandoned by a depressed village as part of the citizenry\u2019s misbegotten scheme to appease the witch, whom they believe to be evil. The girl\u2019s magic gets out of hand, despite the witch\u2019s efforts to train her and keep a lid on things. But she\u2019s no evil witch. The evil, it turns out, is in the village\u2014among its craven, hard-hearted leaders and in a miserable tower. The book is a heart-felt tale about the bad compromises people make to get by, about the people who take advantage of them, about transformations, about the power of friendship and love.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to wrestle with the notion of false narratives and how those in power can manipulate story, can manipulate narrative for their own ends,\u201d Barnhill told me when she was in town recently to speak at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square. \u201cFascism is basically storytelling. It\u2019s a narrative that alters people\u2019s sense of the world. All terrible, terrible human endeavors are based in stories. \u2026 It\u2019s something we need to think about critically.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barnhill\u2019s young adult stories are often a kind of fairy tales\u2014and evil rulers make frequent appearances. Her 2011 novel \u201cThe Mostly True Story of Jack\u201d is about a boy and the richest, most powerful man in town, who is out to get him. Because the man is trying to sustain evil magic than has so benefited his family through the generations. In Barnhill\u2019s 2014 book \u201cThe Witch\u2019s Boy,\u201d one of the villains is a king seeking to build an empire at the points of swords.<\/p>\n

When \u201cThe Girl Who Drank the Moon\u201d arrived in August 2016, many saw in it echoes of Donald Trump and his campaign for president. Barnhill\u2019s take: \u201cI do think that all our art at some point or another is prescient and the human mind can imagine all kinds of stuff. I\u2019m not the only one who\u2019s written about the terrible evils and pains of despotism and where that leads us.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"Kelly<\/a>
Kelly Barnhill’s 2018 book \u201cDreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Barnhill was visiting Boston to promote her new book, one for grownups, called\u00a0\u201cDreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories,\u201d<\/a> a collection of nine tales dating as far back as 2007. One of the earliest stories is \u201cElegy to Gabrielle\u2014Patron Saint of Healers, Whores, and Righteous Thieves,\u201d a story about a magical healer and her daughter who grows up to be a righteous pirate queen before the authorities catch up with her.<\/p>\n

The newest story is \u201cThe Unlicensed Magician\u201d from a couple years ago. It\u2019s about an invisible, magical girl and her alcoholic father living a nation that has fallen under the control of a fascist dictator. The strongman extends his life by kidnapping magical babies and draining them of their powers. Barnhill writes: \u201cSo many things,\u201d the Minster mused, \u201ccan be accomplished with guns. How many more things might be accomplished with magic?\u201d<\/p>\n

The book also features a World War II ghost story, the adventures of a widow spotted cavorting with a sasquatch, a tale about a taxidermist who becomes mayor of an economically dying town, and an account of an insect-man who abandons his university teaching position to find an astronomer he\u2019s dreamed about.<\/p>\n

And, of course, there are the four vignettes of the title story, \u201cDreadful Young Ladies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were playing around with this notion of me being dreadful as a child. Because I was dreadful. I was moody, I was insubordinate,\u201d Barnhill says. \u201cSo I wanted to put these characters together who were as dreadful as dreadful could be.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the stories, one woman \u201closes\u201d children, another is an erotic vampire, the third eats the inspector sent to investigate irregularities, the fourth is a young girl who flies away with the son of the man carrying on an affair with her mom.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a lot of pressure, I think, on girls specifically,\u201d Barnhill says. \u201cThis fear of disappointing. This fear of being labeled as dreadful when you behaved in a way\u201d that didn\u2019t meet expectations. \u201cThat was a huge fear of mine growing up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Kelly<\/a>
Kelly Barnhill. (Bruce Silcox)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Barnhill was born in Minneapolis and grew up around there, the oldest of five kids, with dozens of cousins often also orbiting around.<\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up as a girl in America,\u201d Barnhill says. \u201cI grew up in a Catholic family, in a very large Catholic family. I grew up in a school with a lot of bullying, but nobody really acknowledge that there was a lot of bullying.\u201d<\/p>\n

She attended college in St. Paul, then spent her 20s \u201cin that post-college ennui,\u201d she says. She moved to Florida and Virginia. She and her husband became park rangers deep inside Olympic National Park in Washington state, at a lake and alpine meadow up above the tree line. (An inspiration for the witch\u2019s house in \u201cThe Girl Who Drank the Moon.\u201d) Then she studied to be an English teacher in grad school at Portland State University in Oregon before returning to her native Minnesota to give birth to her first child.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had really stopped writing in my 20s, after college, and I had thought maybe I was done with writing,\u201d Barnhill says. \u201cIt was really after my third child was born that I returned to writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was 30 years old then. The baby was colicky, so he often napped on her belly and she read. She found her way to Louise Erdich\u2019s book \u201cLast Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI read it four times in succession, again and again, obsessive,\u201d Barnhill recalls. \u201cAfter reading it four times, I woke up the next morning and I wrote a story about a young woman who turns into a fish.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Kelly<\/a>
Kelly Barnhill’s 2014 young adult novel \u201cThe Witch\u2019s Boy.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As for the stories collected in \u201cDreadful Young Ladies,\u201d Barnhill says, \u201cThe thread is gaze. All the characters are chasing under the limitations of gaze. It\u2019s male gaze. It\u2019s the community gaze. It\u2019s the parental gaze.\u201d In \u201cThe Insect and the Astronomer: A Love Story,\u201d \u201cit\u2019s the gaze of the lover to the beloved.\u201d<\/p>\n

Often it\u2019s a gaze of disapproval.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there is something universal in how we see and how we are seen. And how we empower ourselves to take the reins of our own identity and make it something that belongs to us,\u201d Barnhill says.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo we stay within?\u201d she asks. \u201cOr do we sidestep? There are consequences to that action as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s final story, \u201cThe Unlicensed Magician,\u201d which comes in at just over 100 pages, is about a whole society struggling to get by under the restrictions of a dictatorship\u2014from everyday compromises to the small personal rebellions. \u201cIt is strange to read it now in the face of these strange times we\u2019re living in, grasping men in power, those willing to drain whatever resources for their own personal gain,\u201d Barnhill says. \u201cThat\u2019s the world we live in and it\u2019s terrible. I think we make art to come face to face with terrible things and to think about how we move past it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know so much of our modern life was originally dreamed up in science fiction stories,\u201d Barnhill says. Cell phones, moon landings, super computers. \u201cWe are living these speculative imaginings of our great-grandparents. \u2026 It really does remind us that the speculative imagination is powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n

In our stories, \u201cwe\u2019re also tracking a course for where we\u2019re going,\u201d Barnhill says. \u201cIt is through art that we track a course to the future. It is through art that we rewrite the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the start of last year, Minneapolis novelist Kelly Barnhill won the Newbery Medal, the highest honor in young adult literature, for her fourth novel, “The Girl Who Drank the Moon.” In the book, a witch, a swamp monster and a tiny dragon adopt a magical girl abandoned by a depressed village as part of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6562,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[322,321],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6553"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6553"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6587,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6553\/revisions\/6587"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}