Uncategorized

Q&A with Rosa Jordan, author of Wild Spirits, Part 2

What was the creative process like for you?

I love stories. For me the creative process is just writing down stories I have heard and want to share with people. Or sometimes it’s about writing out stories I have made up, stories that in my mind always take off when I start thinking: “What would happen if…?”

In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?

I am most attached to whichever character I am writing about at the time, because it seems to me that that character is inside my head, talking to me. I can actually hear their voice in my mind. They tell me stuff about themselves and I get to know and understand them, so I like them. In Wild Spirits, I love Danny and Wendy both, but I probably like the animal characters even more than the human ones because they do such outrageous things–really!

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received as a writer?

The best advice I ever received as a writer was: “It’s not getting published that makes you a writer. Anybody who writes is a writer, just like anybody who skis is a skier. The more you do it, the better you will get.” The second best advice was, “Never give up. Never give up trying to get your work published, and never give up trying to make it better.”

What are you reading right now?

Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, about four young American girls growing up Africa with a father who is crazy. Also, Beryl Markham’s West with the Night, which is the true story of an English girl growing up in Africa and nearly getting eaten by a lion. As a teenager she trained race horses and later was the first person to fly the Atlantic from England to Canada.

What is your next project?

I’m working on a young adult novel called The Magical Margay, about a girl who is so unhappy in junior high that she talks her mother to take her to live in Mexico for a year. She thinks of her ability to get something she wants by figuring out carefully, step by step, how to get it, as a kind of magic. As she gets to high school she quits imagining she has any magic power and no longer believes she can make things turn out the way she wants. But while in Mexico she acquires a margay (an exotic jungle cat). What happens with that wild cat leads her, in a roundabout way, back to believing that if she goes about things in a smart way, she can get where she wants to go and do what matters most to her–even if it’s something other people think is totally impossible.

Wild Spirits is available in stores now!

Rosa Jordan’s previous novels for young people, The Last Wild Place, The Goatnappers, and Lost Goat Lane, won or were nominated for numerous awards, including the 2007 VOYA Top Shelf Fiction for Middle Readers distinction, the Red Maple Award, and the Chocolate Lily Award. She grew up in the Florida Everglades and now lives in Rossland, British Columbia, in the Monashee Mountains.

© 2010 Defining Canada.