Excerpts from Karen Hesse’s Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech

June 27, 1998

Washington, D.C.

I was told once that writing historical fiction was a bad idea. No market for it. I didn’t listen. I love research, love dipping into another time and place, and asking the tough questions in a way that helps me see both question and answer with a clearer perspective. Out of the Dust is my third historical novel. In the first two, Rifka Nebrot and Hannah Gold brought me back to my Jewish roots. But Billie Jo Kelby brought me even deeper. She brought me back to my human roots.

I can’t think about roots of any sort without thinking of my husband, Randy. We have had nearly thirty years together, to listen to each other, to learn from each other. Among his many gifts, Randy has a marvelously green thumb. I, unfortunately, do not.

Once, accidentally, I watered one of Randy’s favorite house plants with vinegar. The plant looked thirsty. I thought I was doing my husband a favor. I didn’t know the bottle held vinegar until I had soaked the soil, until the sharp acid filtered down through the rich dirt toward the roots. The plant died. It couldn’t have done otherwise.

The innocent substitution of one liquid for another . . . it happens. In Out of the Dust, when Billie Jo’s mother reaches for the pail, she thinks she, too, is reaching for water, pouring water to make coffee. She doesn’t realize her mistake, that she is pouring kerosene, until the flames rise up from the stove.

Readers ask, could such a terrible mistake really happen? Yes. It happened often. I based the accident on a series of articles appearing in the 1934 Boise City News. That particular family tragedy planted the seed for Out of the Dust, as much as the dust storms did.

Let me tell you. I never make up any of the bad things that happen to my characters. I love my characters too much to hurt them deliberately, even the prickly ones. It just so happens that in life, there’s pain; sorrow lives in the shadow of joy, joy in the shadow of sorrow. The question is, do we let the pain reign triumphant, or do we find a way to grow, to transform, and ultimately transcend our pain?

The first traceable roots for Out of the Dust reach back to 1993 when I took a car trip out to Colorado with fellow author Liza Ketchum. When we entered Kansas, something extra ordinary happened. I fell in love. I had never been in the interior of the country before. Our first day in Kansas we experienced a tornado. I watched, awestruck, as the sky turned green as a bruise and the air swelled with explosive energy. The second day in Kansas, we walked in a town so small it didn’t have a name. It grew up beside a railroad track and never fully pulled itself from the earth. The wind never stopped blowing there. It caressed our faces, it whispered in our ears. The grass moved like a corps of dancers. The colors were unlike any I had ever encountered on the east coast or the west. And the sky and land went on to the horizon and beyond.

It took me three years to internalize that experience enough to write about it. I had been working on a picture book in which a young inner city child longs for rain. My writing group loved the language but had problems with the main character’s motivation. The question, as it usually does, came from Eileen Christelow. She asked, “Where’s the emotional line here? Why does this child want it to rain so much?” I later captured the motivation, the emotional line of that picture book, even to Eileen’s satisfaction, but at that moment, instead, my mind slid precipitously back sixty years to a time when people desperately wanted rain, to the “Dirty Thirties.”

But how could I recreate the Dust Bowl? I was born in 1952, in Baltimore, Maryland. What did I know from dust? I knew alley dust, I knew gutter dust, but what did I know of dust so extensive it blew from one state to another, across an entire nation, and out over the ocean where it rained down on the decks of ships hundreds of miles out to sea?

I phoned the Oklahoma Historical Society and asked for help. I’d found, in one of the very dry treatises on Plains agricultural practices, a reference to the Boise City News, a daily paper published in the Oklahoma Panhandle during the period in which I was most interested. The Oklahoma Historical Society confirmed that there had been such a paper. I asked if I might get copies of it. Yes, they said, it was available on microfilm. So off went my check to purchase the film, and when the package arrived, with giddy excitement, I rushed to my local library and took possession of the microfilm machine, proclaiming it my exclusive property for weeks while I dug in and lived through day after day, month after month, year after year of life in the heart of the Depression, in the heart of the Dust Bowl. I saturated myself with those dusty, dirty, desperate times, and what I discovered thrilled me. I had thought it never rained during that period. In fact, it did. Only rarely did the rain do any good. But it did rain. And through that grim time, when men jumped to their deaths from tall buildings and farmers shot themselves behind barns, I discovered there was still life going on, talent shows, dances, movies. Daily acts of generosity and kindness. Living through those dirty years, article by article, in the pages of the Boise City News, supplied the balance of what I needed to recreate credibly that extraordinary time and place.

I gave the manuscript to my daughters first. A novel in free verse. I didn’t know if anyone would understand what I was trying to do. But both Kate and Rachel handed the limp pages back, hours later, their eyes welled with tears. Okay, I thought. They must have understood a little bit. I revised the manuscript based on Kate and Rachel’s comments, and gave it next to Liza and Eileen. They asked a lot of questions, but for once they didn’t ask about emotional line. I revised the manuscript again, according to Liza and Eileen’s comments.

The next time I sent it to [my editor] Brenda Bowen. “It’ll be great,” she said. “But I want you to think,” she said. “What is it about, really? What is going on with Billie Jo and Daddy, what is going on with Billie Jo and Ma? And what is going on with Billie Jo herself?”

And I knew. It was about forgiveness. The whole book. Every relationship. Not only the relationships between people, but the relationship between the people and the land itself. It was all about forgiveness.

I began my literary life as a poet. When I was expecting my first child, my ability to focus on the creation of poetry diminished as my need to focus on the creation of human life increased. For seventeen years my brain continued to place the nurturing of my daughters above all other creative endeavors, and I forsook poetry. Not that prose is easy to write. But for me, at least, it required a different commitment of brain cells, a different commitment of energy and emotion. Part of my mind always listened for my children during those years. And that listening rendered me incapable of writing poetry.

But something inexplicably wonderful happened. My daughters grew up. They reached an age of independence and self possession that for the first time in seventeen years permitted my brain to let go of them for minutes, hours at a time, and in those minutes and hours, poetry was allowed to return and Out of the Dust to be born. I never attempted to write this book any other way than in free verse. The frugality of the life, the hypnotically hard work of farming, the grimness of conditions during the Dust Bowl, demanded an economy of words. Daddy and Ma and Billie Jo’s rawboned life translated into poetry, and bless Scholastic for honoring that translation and producing Out of the Dust with the spare understatement I sought when writing it.

I have so much respect for these people, these survivors of the dust, the Arley and Vera Wanderdales, the Mad Dog Crad docks, the Joe De La Flors. I discovered Joe in WPA material on the Internet and wove him in, a Mexican-American cowboy, hardworking, unacknowledged. I put him up high in the saddle where he belonged, where Billie Jo could look up to him.

Occasionally, adult readers grimace at the events documented in Out of the Dust. They ask, how can this book be for young readers? I ask, how can it not? The children I have met during my travels around the country have astounded me with their perception, their intelligence, their capacity to take in information and apply it to a greater picture, or take in the greater picture and distill it down to what they need from it.

Young readers are asking for substance. They are asking for respect. They are asking for books that challenge, and confirm, and console. They are asking for us to listen to their questions and to help them find their own answers. If we cannot attend always to those questions, to that quest for answers, whether our work is that of librarian, writer, teacher, publisher, or parent, how can they forgive us? And yet they do, every day. Just as Billie Jo forgave Ma. Just as Billie Jo forgave Daddy. Just as Billie Jo forgave herself. And with that forgiveness, Billie Jo finally set her roots and turned toward her future.

Often our lives are so crowded, we need to hold to what is essential and weed out what is not. Reading historical fiction gives us perspective. It gives us respite from the tempest of our present-day lives. It gives us a safe place in which we can grow, transform, transcend. It helps us understand that sometimes the questions are too hard, that sometimes there are no answers, that sometimes there is only forgiveness.

Hodding Carter said, “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other wings.” Ellen Fader, members of the Newbery committee, members of the ALA, from the girl who devoured Newberys in a corner of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, thank you.