The Giver #171

Lois Lowry:

When I'm writing, I can always see everything that I'm writing about. Every scene that I depict in words, I'm also seeing in my head. And yet the interesting thing is, and I think the wonderful thing is that every reader brings their own memories and experience and imag to a book. So what they see is not what I see. So if I write a book and a million people read it, it's a million different books because each one brings their own individual perceptions to it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine radio show number 171, airing for the first time on Sunday, December 21, 2014. Today's theme is the Giver. What better gift is there than a book? Today we speak with best selling author and Newbery Medal winner Lois Lowry, who has bestowed the gift of literature upon adults and children the world over. Lowry has written 45 books, including one that inspired the recent movie the Giver. Join us and learn more about the life and mind of this fascinating Maine resident. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

On Love Maine Radio. We've had many distinguished guests across the microphone from me and none who I think have generated so much excitement here at the Maine Magazine offices. As the individual who is with me today, this is Lois Lowry, who is an American children's book author who spends part of her time in Maine and she's best known, I think most recently for her book the Giver, which won a Newbery Award and also has been made into a movie. So thank you so much for coming in and talking to me. Thank you.

Lois Lowry:

Probably says something about the age of the people here that they're excited about me. They're not that far from being my constituency. You know, I'VE been around for a while, and they were kids not that long ago, I'm guessing.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I think that that's true. I think the fact that the Giver has been a part of school curricula for quite a long time. It was published in 93, so it's been out there for a while. That may be so that people who are in their 20s now and even their thirt recognized this. But you've been writing since 1977.

Lois Lowry:

My first book was published in 77. I was writing before then, but I was also. I was 40 in 1977. I had also gone back to college because I dropped out of college to marry at 19 and had four kids. When my youngest started kindergarten, I went back to college. University of Southern Maine. I lived here at the time, so I was college first, graduate school, writing on the side, and then finally turned my attention to doing what I wanted to do. Being a writer, you have had a

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

very broadly traveled life. Let's say you were born in Hawaii. Your father was in the military. He was a dentist, I believe.

Lois Lowry:

Yep. Army dentist.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Army dentist.

Lois Lowry:

But he was a career military officer. He wasn't a dentist who just happened to fall under World War II. He had made that his career.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So as a result of that, you traveled to and lived in a variety of different places.

Lois Lowry:

Yeah, I was born, as you pointed out, in Hawaii. We left there when I was three, before Pearl harbor was bombed. Then, of course, when the war began, my father had to go overseas. My mother took my sister and me, and she was expecting my baby brother back to Pennsylvania, where she had grown up. And we lived with our grandparents during that period of time. But then when the war ended, my father had to stay in Japan. He became part of the occupation. People find this amusing, but he was MacArthur's dentist. That makes me chuckle for some reason, too. He was responsible for setting up dental services for the military and eventually dependents coming into Japan. So we went and lived in Tokyo. That's where I went through junior high school. I was there 11, 12, 13 years old. Then when the Korean War began, we had to leave. My father had to stay. Casualties were coming in from Korea. We went back to Pennsylvania. Then when he was transferred, it was to New York. I spent my high school years in Manhattan. Very big change from small Pennsylvania town, but for me, a wonderful one. I've been traveling ever since. Circumstances have taken me hither and yon, as they say.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You describe yourself as being married when you were 19, but first you went to Brown. Your path was Not I'm going to get married. Your path.

Lois Lowry:

No, no. Except that this was the 50s, and I think sadly, in retrospect, for many females in the 50s, that was probably our subconscious path to find a husband and to marry. And so though many of us went to college, it was not at all uncommon to drop out and to marry, which is what I just. After my 19th birthday.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And looking back at this now with your own children, it probably seems young.

Lois Lowry:

Well, yeah, people don't do that anymore, I don't think. My own kids. I had four kids. I'm trying to think who got married and who didn't because they didn't all marry, but they waited until later. I do have one daughter who had a child when she was 22. I had four children by the time I was 25. But nonetheless, times are different now and people tend not to make such monumental choices at such an early age.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As I was reading your autobiography, which is interesting because it was written, I think in 95, 96, somewhere around there.

Lois Lowry:

Gosh, I don't remember what year it was published and I don't really think of it as an autobiography, more as a kind of memoir reliant largely on photographs. So it's not an account of I was born then and did this and did that. It's just a kind of collage of memories.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, somebody described it as an autobiography. I agree with you that it is more that. And what I thought was very interesting is the way that you brought in a photo of yourself and then your mother at that age and you contrasted and compared sort of where people were at various stages at their lives.

Lois Lowry:

I haven't re looked at that in quite a long time, but I seem to recall that I did that twice in that book. There's a picture of me at 12 or 13 juxtaposed with a picture of my mother at the same age. And then I think there's another picture of me at say, 18 and mom at that age too. In the same way, my experience at those ages is different from today's 12 year olds and today's 18 year olds. They were also different from what my mother's life had been. My mother actually didn't marry until she was, oh, probably 28, she said. She told me that she felt like a spinster by then. All of her friends had married and had children and she thought nobody was ever going to marry her. And then of course, she met my dad and it was a long and happy marriage. But it's interesting to see how the different generations do Things differently as a

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

result of all of the moving around that you did. It was important to you when you were raising your four children to give them a sense of home, a sense of stability.

Lois Lowry:

Which is not to say that I didn't have that same sense. I think that relies more on family than place. I loved moving, as I did often as a kid, but at the same time, my kids. We moved to Maine in 1963 when my youngest child was an infant, and the others would have been 1, 4 and 5 or something like that, all of them quite young, quite close together, and then all of them grew up in Maine. Only one of them still lives in Maine. My son Ben, who's a lawyer here in Portland, and the others are all scattered about, and I've lost one, as you know. But it was important. It seemed important to me, too, to have that sense of place that I had not had as a child, much as I loved the travel.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, you talk about your child that you lost, and this was your son Grey, who died as a result of a. It sounds like a training accident as a pilot with the military.

Lois Lowry:

Yeah. My son Greg graduated from Falmouth High School and went to the University of Maine in Orono. Eventually, he got a master's degree in aeronautical engineering. But in the meantime, when he graduated from college, not quite knowing what he wanted to do next academically, he applied to enter the Air Force for pilot training. It was hard to get in at that time. I don't know if this is still true, but here's a. I start to say it's a funny story, but it's an interesting story, more than amusing. Gray was scheduled to. He had passed all the tests, the academic tests, to get into the pilot training program in the Air Force, but he had scheduled a physical. That was the final test he had to go through. He was a perfect physical specimen. He was an athlete, didn't smoke in those days. As a college guy, fraternity guy at Orono, he probably drank a bit. But any rate, he was a good, healthy guy. And so the physical schedule was not going to be a problem. But he was skiing and he fell and broke his shoulder skiing. He had to take this physical. So you don't put a cast on a broken shoulder, of course, but he was wearing a. I don't know what you would call it, strapped around his body. He took that off and went into the physical not telling them that he had a broken shoulder. He had to do, he told me later, a number of physical tests. I can only imagine what they were, but he said it was excruciating with this broken shoulder. After he did all of those and passed all of those, he excused himself, went into the bathroom. He said he just lay on the floor and wept. It was so painful. But nonetheless, that's how badly he wanted to be a pilot. He passed all of those, entered the Air Force, became an officer, became a pilot, then became a fighter pilot. He was stationed in Germany, married lovely German woman. He did what all hotshot fighter pilots do when they get stationed in Germany. He went to buy a Porsche. She worked for the car agency. Her degree was business and languages. She was fluent in English. She was also very beautiful. Took him for a test ride and he got the car, got the girl, and was married in Germany. They had a child after they'd been married five years, a little girl born. When their child was almost two years old, he was killed in this very tragic accident which was caused, it turned out, after the investigation revealed, because a mechanic had the plane for routine maintenance and had replaced two essential parts backwards, causing the plane to be unflyable, and it crashed and exploded. Then later the Air Force charged that mechanic sadly with negligent homicide, brought him to trial and he committed suicide. So it was a tragedy on top of a tragedy. But my little granddaughter was the child that was his and his wife's. And in fact she's coming to visit this Winter. She's now 21 and she's the great gift that he left. She's very much like him, has his smile, his sense of humor, his determination. And she's a very good student. She's at a university in Germany now.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And if I remember correctly, she's also the one who is responsible for teaching you one of your first German words, butterfly.

Lois Lowry:

That's funny. I of course always still do. Went to Germany often to visit. And you're mentioning the word butterfly, which is in German, schmetterling. And I remember her with a book, picture book, and pointing out what I knew of as butterfly in French. I knew it was Papillon. She said schmetterling in German, but I remember also thinking for a brief moment that I could understand German and speak it. Perhaps because this two year old pointed out the window, they lived in a very rural area and there were a lot of cows in a pasture across the road. She said something like, I'm going to forget it. Exactly now, Kuzan Schlafen. And I understood that she meant the cows are sleeping. And I turned to my daughter in law and said, I understood what she's saying. And that was because she was talking baby talk. I've never learned German, unfortunately.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And it also became an interesting. I think you describe also that when your son was buried, there was a butterfly. There was.

Lois Lowry:

That's right. Goodness. I'd not forgotten that, but I hadn't thought of it for a long time at his funeral in a lovely old church in the small village where my daughter in law had grown up. It was spring. It was Memorial Day weekend that he was killed. And it was immediately after that that we were there for that funeral. Such a beautiful part of Germany. It was a warm day and the doors were open and I heard a murmur or perhaps an awareness that people were experiencing something. And I turned my head to look and this yellow butterfly was fluttering around inside the church.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It seems interesting just knowing what I know of your Life. You've written 45 books. You have also lost your son. You also lost your sister at a relatively early age and I think somewhere in her 20s. And also you were in your 20s as well.

Lois Lowry:

I was 25 and she was 28 when she died. I later wrote a book, my first book for kids, dealt with that in a fictional way. And I made. Because I was addressing an audience of younger kids. I have the two girls in the book, 13 and 15 years old. But it's about the effect on a family of the death of a young person.

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Dr. Lisa Belisle:

when I asked you earlier about this, the idea of resilience and sort of bouncing back from things that happen, you said, well, you know, when you get to be my age, this happens. You're going to have tragedies in your life. But I'm not sure everybody has the tragedies that you've had. And I'm not sure everybody bounces back the way that you have either.

Lois Lowry:

Well, each person, as they get older, I'm 77 now, has things they've had to recover from. And they may be different, they certainly are different from one person to the next. But I don't feel singled out for particular loss. I've experienced loss as everybody does. As a matter of fact, it's oddly in a. I started to say subconscious. That's the wrong word, but it's a refrain, a theme throughout the book, the Giver, which has become so popular in recent years. The fact that we can't dismiss, tamp down, ignore, forget tragedy. It's part of who we are. Actually, you mentioned earlier that I'd been born in Hawaii. My father was a very good photographer, and we had, from the time I was a child, terrific home movies that he had made. Not the home movies you see where people are holding up their hands and saying, oh, don't point the camera at me. My father took very fine home movies and they ended up on big metal reels. I'm using the wrong terminology, but I became aware when he was getting older that those old movies were deteriorating. They smelled awful. So I took them to MIT and had them transferred to videotape. Later I was looking at them in the living room before I sent them to my father in Boston. I had a friend there who was a Boston lawyer but he'd been a naval captain of a nuclear submarine, so he knew Hawaii. He'd been stationed there. I showed him this film of me as an infant on the beach with my grandmother, who was visiting from Wisconsin. Waikiki, empty beach. Nowadays, of course, it's filled with tourists. But there I am, alone with my grandmother. And it's quite a lovely bit of film. What I hadn't noticed until this friend pointed out to me is that in the background, on the horizon in that film, moving slowly across the horizon. And he, being a naval officer, could identify it. He said, that's the Arizona. So here's this child playing in this idyllic set of circumstances. I want to say there's a rainbow. There isn't, but you can envision that there might have been. It's so lovely. And yet crossing in the background behind her as she laughs and plays, is a ship that carries 1,200 men who will be dead in a few months. The Arizona still lies under the memorial at Pearl Harbor. And it's an example, I think, of how these things throughout our lives, throughout human existence, coexist. Tragedy, ecstasy, all of them, that becomes who we are and what our lives consist of.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

In the book that I guess we'll call a memoir, not an autobiography, you mention wishing after your son had died that you had been able to have a conversation with your mother about the death of your sister. And that really struck me as something, you know, that sort of tragic commonality.

Lois Lowry:

As I said, my sister died when I was 25 and she was 28. We didn't live near each other. We had both been married. She had graduated from college, but got married the week after she graduated. She had three children who were 2, 4 and 6 when she became ill. I think 3, 5 and 7 when she died.

[Unidentified voice]:

So

Lois Lowry:

conversation with my mother, you know, certainly my mother lived to be 86, and certainly there were many years after the death of my sister. And yet, for reasons that I don't now know and never did, I guess she and I never really sat and talked about that experience. My parents were very reserved people. My father was Norwegian. His parents were Norwegian immigrants. And of course, Norwegians have a reputation for being taciturn and reserved, and my father certainly was. So it was something that they never talked about after her death. I'm sad about that. I wish they'd been able to. I wish I'd been able to, certainly after my son's death. So many friends and my surviving children have been able to reminisce about him and to talk about that experience in a way that my parents and I never did.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It was interesting for me to read A Summer to Die because I'm the oldest of 10 children.

Lois Lowry:

Oh, my goodness.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You were describing yourself as the little sister. In the Summer to Die, there are two characters.

Lois Lowry:

Yeah, I left the little brother out. My real brother has never quite forgiven me for that. But when I started writing the book, I put him in. But a little brother in a book. And at that time, the girls in the book are 13 and 15. He would have been 6. He was funny, and it wasn't supposed to be a funny book, but he kept appearing in scenes and being amusing as little kids are. So I took him out. Later, I did a second autobiographical book called Autumn Street. I put him in that one, but he doesn't appear in the first. But I was the middle of three children. I can't believe you were the oldest of two. Ten.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, and I was. This is why I think I was struck, was because you're describing the little sister as somehow physically imperfect. The old. The older sister was the beautiful one, the talented one, the cheerleader, the one who was gonna go on and do great things. And the younger one was the one that never thought herself. Thought of herself as beautiful until her neighbor, who was a farmer, took a photo of her and showed her her own beauty and. But it's something that, as an oldest child, for me to think about how a middle child or a younger child might actually feel about that sibling, that's something that I was struck by. And the fact that you're a children's author or young adult author, and I'm reading this and feeling so struck by it, that says something.

Lois Lowry:

And yet, of course, as an adult, I realize. And Although because of her early death, we never had a chance to talk about this, but my sister was the beautiful one. She was nominated for homecoming queen at Penn State the same year that I was, you know, getting the academic awards. But she was the one who thought of me as the smart one. And so, you know, there's always somebody who's going to be something more than you are. And it's when you're a child that you worry more about that. You learn to let go of that when you become an adult and realize that everybody has something that they're better at than you, and you've got some things that you're better at, and it all equalizes somehow.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I would like to believe that what you're saying is true, but I've met many adults who are holding on to things that happened when they were children and still somehow see themselves as not the pretty one, not the intelligent one, not the whatever. But I do think that books can be a really effective means of showing a child, you know, here's a story that's not your own, but could be yours.

Lois Lowry:

I think one of the reasons kids, and I can speak of myself as a kid who was an avid reader, one of the things that we look for in books as young people is a character that we can identify with. And so often in a book by me at least, the character will have innermost feelings of inadequacy. And, you know, we all do when we're kids and some of us continue to when we're adults. But I think it's a way that kids reading fiction is a way that kids explore their own feelings. Also, main characters in books, the protagonists in books are the people who have to make choices. And I think it's a way for young people reading to explore what choices they would make given a set of circumstances. So it's a way in which they rehearse their own lives. And that's an important thing that books do for kids, I think. I'm an avid reader of fiction, but I read adult fiction being an adult, and I don't think I any longer do that. I think it's a thing that is particularly a young person's thing to place yourself in the place of that character and think, what if. What if this were me? What would I do?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I suspect you have enough of an opportunity to place yourself in a character as part of your writing. So maybe the reading piece.

Lois Lowry:

Well, when writing, because I'm writing for young people and about young people, so the characters in my books are young. And so I'm continually in a position of having to re enter my childhood self when I'm writing. And that's one of the things I've always been good at doing. I think a lot of people can't. If you ask some people to go back and remember their childhood, they'll remember it in an objective way, as if they're retelling or re looking at a movie playing out. But they're not able to re enter the emotional life of themselves as a child. I think that's something that I'm able to do and it's why I'm able to write for young people.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How do you think that that's possible that you're able to do that and others are not?

Lois Lowry:

I don't know. I think it's just A different. I mean, I'm speculating here, I'm speaking from total ignorance, but it's probably some kind of brain chemistry. I remember once when I was a journalist, before I began writing fiction, I was asked to write an article about medical hypnosis. And I spent time with a doctor who used it in his practice. And he hypnotized me. I mean, I remember it perfectly. I wasn't in some weird trance or anything, but he regressed me back to age whatever, 2013. Finally he said, now you're five years old, what are you experiencing? And I said, I'm standing in my grandmother's yard. I'm barefoot. I can feel the pine needles under my feet. I can smell my grandmother's roses. I can hear a dove in the tree above me, the call of a dove. And then later he said, wasn't that amazing how you could, you know, how you re entered your five year old self? And I said, no, actually I said, I do that all the time. You know, tell me any age and I can put myself there and I can feel what it was like to be there, to be that person.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's an interesting talent. I mean, it's something that I had never thought about before. This idea that we can intellectualize ourselves back to a certain age, but we can't always emotionalize. That's not a word I know, but ourselves back to.

Lois Lowry:

But it's a good word. It describes it quite well. I can give you another example. When I was in fourth grade, eight years old, I had skipped second grade, so I was a year younger than my classmates. But eight years old in fourth grade, I wrote a hateful note to another little girl. It's something you do when you're in fourth grade, sadly. And my teacher, Ms. Louise Heckman, had me stay after school to discuss this because my note had made Ruthie Fisher cry. And when I think of that moment, I can see Ms. Heckman, I can see the dress she was wearing that had a little pattern on it, but I see it blurred. It's because there were tears in my eyes. And I'm looking out through those eight year old eyes. Once again, I'm reliving that experience. It still makes me feel terrible. A, that I did that, B, that I got caught. But it's just an odd sensation of having re entered a younger self.

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Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So that ability to reenter your younger self and to create worlds that become books has to coexist with this ability to be an adult in this other world that we call real. You were a mother, you were a journalist. You're now an author who does a lot of public speaking and connecting with people. Yet you seem able to kind of hold these things.

Lois Lowry:

I do. You know, I have a normal adult life, adult friends, adult things that I do. Still working and doing a lot of professional things. Last week I was kind of making a speech in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Next week or week after next, I'll be doing the same thing in Savannah, Georgia. And yet when I'm by myself at work, at home, at my computer, that's when I turn into my other self. When I'm working on a book and inside the head of a book character, I'm also inside the head of myself at that age. Right now I'm working on a book in which the main character is an 11 year old girl. So I spend a lot of time being my 11 year old self. I will say that it's a little more difficult to become a boy, and some of my books like the Giver have a boy protagonist. I'm not sure why I make that decision starting out with a book, but sometimes a boy feels right and Then I have to become that boy. And that requires imagination, since I never was a boy. But I did have two sons and I have three grandsons. So they are resources for me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

The Giver I watched the movie this weekend, and I thought it was a very good movie. I've always liked Jeff Bridges, and I thought he did a great job within the movie. I also thought that the book and the movie were different, as I think usually happens when with very good books and the movie creation. I'm wondering how you feel about this thing that you wrote back, published in 1993, which is about the time that your granddaughter, I believe, one of your granddaughters was born.

Lois Lowry:

Yes. Yes, exactly.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Like it's an entire lifetime ago and it's still kind of walking around. It's walking around in classrooms across the country.

Lois Lowry:

Exactly. And it's also walking into my computer all the time. Time. Because every day I still get email from readers. It used to be regular mail. Now anybody can reach me through my website. And every day there are 40, 50 emails, most of them about that particular book, partly because of the movie, which has generated a new interest in it. But when Jeff came to me many years ago and acquired the rights to the book, he wanted to make a movie starring his first father, who was then alive. It never came together for a hundred different reasons. Hollywood is a strange place with a lot of requirements. But he continued to have that hope. And his father eventually died. And then suddenly he realized he was old enough to play the role himself. The filmmakers were not required in any way by contract to consult with me at all. And they could have gone and done their own thing, and I would have come to the movie theater and not known what I was going to see. But they were very courteous. I'm not sure if that's the right word, but very gracious in including me in the process. Sometimes more than I wanted to be included. I remember two summers ago getting an email from the director, Philip Noyce, saying he wanted to get together with me. I was at my summer home in Bridgeton. He, of course, was in Los Angeles. I remember writing back and saying, well, okay, I could do that. Happy to talk to you. Here's what you need to do. You'll need to fly to Portland, Maine. You won't be able to get a direct flight. You'll have to change in Chicago or something. I will meet your flight in Portland, and then I will drive you 35 miles to my house. It's a big house. You'll have lots of privacy. But we can Spend a couple days. Well, immediately I got an email saying, no, I want you to come here. And it was disruptive to my summer, that summer and then this immediate past summer. It just took all my time. But in the meantime, they had also wanted me to go to South Africa for the filming. And then this past summer I was in San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, and I didn't really want to be that involved. But at the same time I was gratified that they valued my opinion. When they were filming, outside of the four days I spent in South Africa watching, the director emailed me almost every day, sometimes several times a day, just seeking my advice on very small things. Sometimes he took my advice, sometimes he ignored my advice. There were, as you pointed out, changes made. I knew that from the get go that there would have to be. It's an introspective book. There's not a lot of action. A movie is a visual medium. They had to add action. And they did. One thing they did that I was at first troubled by, but later came to terms with is the fact that they made the kids in the movie older than in the book. In the book they're 12. The boy, the main character and his two best friends. In the movie they're older, 17 perhaps. And that was done for purely pragmatic reasons. Their market research told them that teenagers, a large part of the movie audience, won't go to a movie about 12 year olds. And so they didn't want to lose that segment of the audience. And that made sense. And another reason was that if you work with kids in a movie, they're limited by law to how many hours a day they can work. And if they had 12 year olds as the actors, it would have doubled the time of the filming cost a lot. Any rate, when I saw the kids, I met the kids. Then I watched some of the scenes being filmed and I realized right away it was going to be okay. Because of the way the kids in the movie and in the book are brought up. They are completely naive and unsophisticated so that they're like 12 year olds and right away, watching them, I don't know if you had this experience, but I could see that it was okay that they were a little older. I just asked them, please not to turn it into a teenage romance. They assured me they would not. But because they're older, because they're teenagers, and because the boy has this friend who's this gorgeous 16 year old girl, of course he's going to have romantic feelings for her once he begins to acquire feelings. And so that had to become a part of it. I think it wasn't overdone. They used some restraint.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, as I said, I did enjoy the movie. I also enjoyed the book. And I just. I had gone back and reread the book because I have a 13 year old. So I had gone back and read the series sort of as she was. She was reading it and I was just. I was struck by the fact that both were very. Both are very compelling and in kind of different ways.

Lois Lowry:

Yeah. And people who want a movie to be exactly the same as a book are always going to be disappointed. A movie's a different medium and it can't be the same thing. The only movie that I recall where a book and a movie seemed. At least I'd have to go back and reread and re watch to ascertain this for sure. But To Kill a Mockingbird, I think, is the one that felt so much exactly like the book. But even so, I think there were some changes made in that as well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You described this ability that you have to go back into a younger self and really feel that younger self. But for you, it also seems that you have a strong visual sense. I know that photography has been an interest of yours. In fact, in A Summer to Die, you, first book you actually describe.

Lois Lowry:

Yeah, I asserted my own self. Yeah, that was not true of me at 13, but I studied photography in graduate school and I worked as a photographer for a while. The picture of the old man on the COVID of the Giver, that was a photograph that I did. The picture of the girl on the COVID of Number the Stars is also photographed by me. Oh, that one. Gathering Blue. I also did that photograph. But visual. Yes. When I'm writing, I can always see everything that I'm writing about. Every scene that I depict in words, I'm also seeing in my head. And yet the interesting thing is, and I think the wonderful thing is that every reader brings their own memories and experience and imagination to a book. So what they see is not what I see. So if I write a book and a million people read it, it's a million different books because each one brings their own individual perceptions to it. But nonetheless, when I'm writing it, I'm seeing it. Exactly. If I were a painter, I would be able to paint each scene as I write it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How does having a place in Maine impact your writing? I'm thinking about for Art Collector Maine. We interviewed a number of artists and I had the chance to be part of this. And one of them, actually, I think, lives in Bridgeton. So she described this very strong connection with nature. And she liked being outside a lot. And she liked actually the sort of kinesthetic experience of being in nature as to.

Lois Lowry:

Opposed.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Opposed to seeing it from afar. Has this had any impact on your writing?

Lois Lowry:

Well, I've done. Over the years, my writing has taken place in different places. I've lived in Boston, actually in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for many years. Very urban, though I lived in a residential part of Cambridge. Very urban community. But for many years I've also had a summer home in Maine. And that, I think, is where I most feel comfortable writing. I've now sold the house in Cambridge and I've moved full time to Maine. So I'm in Portland. But I also still have the old farm in Bridgeton. And when I'm there, one thing that's important is that I'm relatively isolated. It's very quiet there. I have a beautiful landscape that I look out on. I'm on a hilltop. I look down to Long Lake beyond a meadow. Sometimes there's a deer walking through the meadow. I mean, you could make it up and it would be just like that. That. And I think that sense of being solitary and quiet is important to me when I'm writing. And yet, you know, I did it in an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking out at traffic as well. So part of it is just a function of the imagination.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You began publishing books when you were 40, which was the same time that you got divorced. You recreated yourself from the person that you were from 1 to 19 or 0 to 19, or the many people that you were. And then 19 to 40, and then 40.

Lois Lowry:

She's a wife and a mother. And then the time for being. That passed. And my kids were grown and I embarked on a career. I've been very fortunate with it that I chose the thing that I was best at and that I love most. And so I think the luckiest people are the ones who make a living doing what they love. So that you can get up every morning excited about what you're going to do that day. And that's what my life has been like. I don't know that. It's a form of recreating myself, really. Because that person who went at age 17 to Brown to study writing, had a special scholarship for a writing program that Brown had at that time. That's the same person I still am. I just took some paths along the way and leaped over some obstacles and indulged some other things that were Also, I've always loved kids. I always wanted kids. So I've never regretted having four children. It was probably kind of foolish to have them at such a young age. But if I hadn't, then my life would have taken a very different if I had graduated from college, for example, I wouldn't have been mature enough to be a writer successfully. I probably would have entered the world of publishing, since that was my interest. I would have perhaps become an editor and maybe I would have been good at it. But it would have been a different life from the life that's turned out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

something that was out there because there's a lot of information out there about you. I don't. It's a good thing I think.

Lois Lowry:

I hope most of it is true. I think.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well and this said that your divorce was largely due to the fact that you really had just grown apart in very significant ways. And I think that that for people who are and maybe this is true, maybe it's not true, but I think that for people who go through something as difficult as a divorce to have that be the main reason is often the case.

Lois Lowry:

Oh yeah, I think particularly people who married young and weren't grown up yet. I was 19 when I married, had just turned 19 and my husband was 21. We were kids and then we turned into adults, but we were adults who probably would not have married each other had we met as adults. So nonetheless we were married for 20 years and had four children and so I don't regret that. It's just the way things were there

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

was also a funny scene that I'm recalling now that I actually laughed out loud. I was sitting on the plane reading this about the man that would eventually become the next significant man in your life. But I believe he was your insurance.

Lois Lowry:

When I moved to Boston three years after I was divorced, I continued to live in Maine, and then I moved to Boston. I could have lived anywhere because I have a portable profession, But I've forgotten where my kids were at that time. But probably, perhaps still in New England, except the one who ended up in Germany. But any rate, I moved to Boston, drove my little car to Boston to an apartment that I'd rented by reading a Boston newspaper, and discovered I had no place to park because I didn't have a residence sticker. So I embarked on this quest to be able to have a parking place in Boston. It required my registering my car in Massachusetts, which I tried to do. And they said, no, no, you must have Massachusetts insurance. So I'm spending two days walking around Boston on this quest. So I went to an insurance agency to buy Massachusetts insurance, which I did from a secretary, then walked back to the registry, registered my car, any rate. And then a couple days later, I got a phone call from the head of the insurance agency saying it's our policy to take new clients out for coffee. Are you free after dinner this evening? And that turned out to be the man with whom, a year later, I moved in. We bought a condo together, and he died three years ago. But we'd been together together for 32 years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But in the interim, the first time he called you, you said you weren't really sure you actually wanted to be with him, and in fact, you were just worried he might take your insurance away or something. And that was.

Lois Lowry:

Well, I don't remember, but it seemed odd. And actually, he later confessed, it was not, of course, their policy to take new clients out for dinner or coffee. It was. But my papers had crossed his desk, and he recognized my name because he played tennis with a friend who had said to him, I know this woman who's just moved to Boston. You want to call and ask her out? And he had said, sure, and taken my number and ignored it. And then when my insurance papers crossed his desk, he recalled that that name was familiar, and that's when he called me. So it was an odd way of meeting circumstances. Just fell into the right place. Turned out he lived not far from me, in Back Bay. Yeah, it was happenstance.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But you didn't initially think that you wanted to connect with him. You were kind of tired of dating. And you said, well, I'm looking for

Lois Lowry:

a guy with a neighbor. When you're single at age 40, dating is not fun. And I had met some weird people, including one who in a coffee shop had taken the bill. He had sat down next to me in a coffee shop. He was a very attractive man. We got to talking and he invited me out for dinner or something. And I felt as though this wasn't, I don't know, it just seemed kind of odd. And so I said no. And he picked up my bill for my 37 cent cup of coffee, that's how long ago this was, and balled it up in his hand and threw it at me. And he said, I could buy and sell you. And then he stormed out of the coffee shop. And I thought, my God, what if I had invited him to my apartment for dinner? So anyway, I'd had enough strange experiences like that that I was not rushing to meet any new men. So I said to Martin, kind of jokingly that I really liked men with beards. And actually that's true. If I walk into a room still and there are a hundred people in the room and three of them have beards, I think that those are the most intelligent people in the room. I mean, it's stupid, but that's just a, that's just a thing, I think. And so when I said that to him, he started growing a beard. And he had a beard for the 32 years that we were together.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So as I'm talking to you, it's clear that you, you enjoy the work that you're doing, that you are currently doing.

Lois Lowry:

I love my life. I love my work. I wake up every morning with a sense of exhilaration and anticipation that something new is going to happen today in my mind, in my computer, in my life. It's a wonderful way to exist.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you also, you mentioned how old you are. You have quite a few years ahead of you. Do you have any sense for anything that has sort of left unlived or

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

left undone that you would like to do?

Lois Lowry:

I've always had in my mind a list of things I'd like to do. And I've begun to cross some of them off because of my age. The realization that I'm probably not going to do that, and it's with some regret. For example, I've always wanted to design a house, build a house. Well, I'm not going to do that. I'm 77. That's not going to happen. I've also long thought that I Would like to go live in another country, rent an apartment in Paris or something. I've done that for a week or two here and there. But I realize now I'm not going to do that, partly because I've made another decision, which is kind of foolhardy at my age. But I got a puppy a few years ago and you can't take a puppy to live in France. You trade off, you do some things and let go of others. However, I do still have things on my list that I still want to do. In recent years, I've taken some adventurous trips. I went to Easter Island a few years ago, and then Guatemala and then Patagonia. And so I still have travel left in me. I think that's always been important to me, Martin, and I travel it a lot.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And what are you reading these days? You said you like fiction. Tell me some of your favorite works of fiction.

Lois Lowry:

I just read. I like all kinds of fiction. I like a lot of nonfiction too, but I like British mysteries. And I just picked up a book the other evening about 8 o', clock, thinking I'll read for a little bit. And it was called the Paying Guests. I can't remember the author's name, but it is a British mystery. And two in the morning I was still reading that book because I could not put it down. And I mentioned that to a friend in San Francisco in an email. And I just got an email from her yesterday saying thanks a lot. I was up till two in the morning reading the Paying Guests. So that's my current recommendation.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Lois, I really appreciate your coming in and talking with us today.

Lois Lowry:

Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's been a pleasure for me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We've been speaking with Lois Lowry, who is a children's book author who lives in Maine. Tell me how people can learn more if they don't already know about you, which I suspect that they do if they're listening. But how can they learn more about you and your work?

Lois Lowry:

Well, I have a website, www.loislowrey1word.com and there's a lot of stuff on there. And since I've put that stuff on there, it's all true. If you go to Expedia, you might find stuff that is a little more fictitious that other people have put there. But you just Google me, you'll find out whatever you need to know.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, thank you very much for all the books that you've written and all the places that you've been and the people that you've been in touch with and all the children whose lives you've touched and adults whose lives you've touched.

Lois Lowry:

Oh, thank you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have been listening to Love Maine radio show number 171, the Giver. Today's guest was author Lois Lowry. For a preview of each week's show, sign up for our E Newsletter and like our LoveMain Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as DRLISA and see my running travel, food and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Instagram.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We'd love to hear from you. So please let us know what you think of lovemain Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed the Giver show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.