Would-be novelists, take heart. Karen Lipski Cushman, who won the 1996 Newbery Medal--the children's literature equivalent of a Pulitzer--didn't put pen to paper until she was nearly 50.
Her career as a novelist began one morning, when she woke up with a story idea about a medieval girl who thinks she has no options in life. Cushman, '63, started telling her husband, but he cut her short.
"He said, 'I'll read it if you write it down.' So I scribbled about seven pages that turned out to be the skeleton of Catherine, Called Birdy," says Cushman, relaxing in her craftsman-style Berkeley bungalow built in 1914. "Once I had it on paper, I wanted to know more about what would happen to this girl."
The author, now 55, has been taking bows ever since. Catherine, Called Birdy was named a Newbery Honor Book by the American Library Association, and her second novel, The Midwife's Apprentice, won the 1996 Newbery Medal. Her latest novel, The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, tells the story of a homesick, pigtailed, 12-year-old, dragged west to the California goldfields by her widowed, entrepreneurial mother.
The idea of showing the California Gold Rush through a young girl's eyes came to Cushman while reading a book jacket. "The book described the Gold Rush as 'a movement of men'--90 percent of the people who came to the state in that period were men," Cushman says. "I thought--who were the women and why did they come? What if they didn't want to come? What if there were a girl?"
Like Lucy, Cushman first came to California as a preadolescent and hated it. "My parents had built up California as a place where we'd live next to movie stars and stick our arms out the window to pick oranges off the trees," the Chicago native recalls. "But the things they loved about it--like eating Thanksgiving dinner on a picnic table in the backyard--I thought were just awful."
It wasn't until Cushman won a scholarship to Stanford that she truly began to feel at home on the West Coast. "I used to tell people that going to Stanford was like The Wizard of Oz, when everything suddenly turned to color," she says.
Cushman majored in English literature and classics, and had visions of doing "archeological digs at the Acropolis by moonlight." After graduation, though, she soon discovered the real world of work was different.
Eventually, Cushman married a young rabbinical student, had a daughter, earned master's degrees in human behavior and museum studies, and taught 10 years in a graduate museum studies program. When her daughter left for college, she finally began writing.
Cushman's books sparkle with attention to historical detail. For her first two novels, she spent several years in libraries at UC-Berkeley and the UC-San Francisco Medical School, combing through old texts on medieval manners, housekeeping and traditional healing methods. As a result, young readers learn that in medieval times spider webs were used to staunch blood and that people believed the pain of childbirth could be eased if a woman held certain types of stones in her hands during labor.
Research for Lucy Whipple was even more painstaking. Because few sources describe the Gold Rush experiences of women or children, Cushman had to extrapolate from the writings of male miners. Still, the book is full of historical gems--as when Lucy's brother offers nearly 50 separate words for liquor.
Cushman won the Newbery Medal for The Midwife's Apprentice soon after she submitted the manuscript for Lucy Whipple. Since then, the year has been a blur of plane trips, interviews and book signings.
When her schedule slows down, Cushman plans to return to the Middle Ages in a new book, which she has tentatively titled Matilda Bone. Like Apprentice, it will focus on medieval medicine through a young girl's eyes. "The point of historical fiction," Cushman says, "is to give people experiences with which they can identify."
After Matilda Bone, who can say? Cushman never knows what idea she'll wake up with next.
Theresa Johnston, '83, a freelance writer in Palo Alto, is a frequent contributor to Stanford.
