Whitney Stewart, Biographer by PATRICIA AUSTIN Whitney Stewart is a relatively new biographer on the scene, and clearly her subjects-the fourteenth Dalai Lama, political and spiritual leader of Tibet, Edmund Hillary, mountain climber and a goodwill ambassador for the Sherpas, and Aung San Suu Kyi, a leader for Burma's democracy movement-are not the usual fare of biographies for children. I first met Stewart at a meeting for the Society of Children's Book Writers after the 1990 publication of herfirst book, To the Lion Throne and was struck by her intensity, by her passion. She has since spoken to my college class, Nonfiction in the Classroom, about her experiences in writing and research. Recently, I spoke with her at her garden district home in New Orleans where I sensed more than ever how private passions fuel public work. One wall of her living room was lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves. I couldn't help but notice many titles on Tibetan history, Buddhism, and the writings of the Dalai Lama. Another wall was artfully adorned with Tibetan tapestries. A white kata, or scarf used as a sign of respect for the lama, was draped around one of the tapestries. On tables, the religious and cultural artifacts of the east said volumes about both her trips to Tibet and her Buddhist practice. Stewart hasn't always been Buddhist, but she has always wanted to be a writer. As early as tenth grade, she recalls seeing advertisements from the Children's Literature Institute and being tempted by the question in their ad - "Do you want to write a children's book?" Indeed, she began the correspondence course. Throughout college, she continued to take every chance she could to meet authors and forge a relationship with editors. She even contracted with an Italian publisher to write two books, instructional books teaching science concepts through fiction. Her father, a lawyer, negotiated the contracts, but twice the deals fell through. On another occasion Stewart began writing a guide book of New Orleans, which also fell through. Writing for children was not only an avocational interest but also a focus for her college courses. Since Brown University did not offer a Children's Literature major, Stewart designed an independent major in Language and Semiotics and then persuaded a professor to let her write a thesis on children's books. Although she wanted to write about juvenile fiction, she was swayed when her professor said, why not biographies? She was not initially excited about the possibility. The biographies that she remembered reading when she was a child were, in her words, "for the most part really awful-fictionalized and full of made-up conversation." But then she discovered the work of Jean Fritz. Impressed by the accurate portrayal of historical subjects coupled with her ability to weave a story, Stewart contacted Fritz to ask how she chose subjects and found dialogue so that she didn't have to invent it. What began as an honors thesis on Fritz as a biographer became what Stewart called "a continuing conversation with the woman who inspired me and helped me launch my career." How then, does Whitney Stewart choose her, subjects? And how does she find dialogue so she doesn't have to invent it? We traced her career and talked about her writing and research processes to answer these questions. Beyond describing what she does, her comments serve as advice to others who are interested in writing biographies. "First of all," she said, "I have to choose a subject I can live with for a long time. It's hard and it's involving, so I have to pick people who inspire me." Actually, she chooses subjects that speak to her childhood. "I had a strong sense of what I now would call a spiritual path, but then I had no words for it. Something; was going on inside me that I couldn't understand. I was trying tounderstand the divine." She was inspired by Gandhi and by the story of Jesus that she heard again and again as a child at Christmas time. With the subjects she has chosen, she wants to teach young people about justice, peace, and rights. She wants to show children about the quiet and intuitive side of life which she longed for as a child. Stewart's choice to write about the fourteenth Dalai Lama resulted from life decisions intertwining with writing decisions, as is so often the case for authors. Stewart was a vigorous athlete and a rock climber in high school and college and had long harbored a desire to go to base camp in the Himalayas. After graduating from Brown, she became a travel agent in New Orleans so she could see the world, mistakenly believing she could travel all the time. Although she still wanted to be a writer, she also needed money to live. Often however, despite the desire to write, she was just too tired after a day at work. Starting a travel newsletter for the agency at least kept her hand in writing, and she entered a travel story contest sponsored by Gambit, a local newspaper. To her surprise, the story, about traveling in Greece on a train, won the contest. The writing, the sending it off, and the winning renewed the confidence that she'd lost in college when projects kept meeting dead ends. Shortly thereafter, in 1986, she and her mother decided to go to Tibet, making a long-held dream come true. Doing travel research prior to the trip (she spent a year in the planning stage-pretty much like writing), she read a lot of Tibetan history and Eastern philosophy, another interest she'd had for some time. On her first trip, she had no intention of writing a book but kept journals and wrote letters. Having the vision of a writer, she toyed with the idea of publishing from the journals and letters and had the foresight to ask her family and friends to save the letters--some 250 in three months. Once in Tibet, she fell in love with Lhasa. "It was being in Tibet; it was the Dalai Lama’s story; it was reading his philosophy that gave me the idea to write about him." At the same time, she got an idea for a book about a Tibetan boy in exile. This piece "Clockwise Around the Stupa" was published as a story in Highlights, but never published as a book. Back in the States and alert for opportunities to find a potential publisher, Stewart went to a convention of the American Booksellers Association. She proposed the idea of writing a children’s book about the Dalai Lama to editors from Snow Lion Publishers who had a long standing relationship with the Tibetan leader. They expressed interest but asked that she submit a written query. She didn't get a response for six months. When it did arrive, however, the reply was positive. From that point on, Stewart takes no credit for the paths that opened for her. She noted that "too many things have happened that I didn't do. It's as if someone else was pulling the strings" The editor of Snow Lion, Sidney Piburn, wrote a letter of introduction and advised her to write to the Dalai Lama's secretary, Tenzin Geyche. Piburn also told her about a Buddhist Center in Washington D.C. Since Stewart was planning a move to Washington, she contacted a Tibetan monk who became her first Tibetan Buddhist teacher. He wrote Stewart another letter of introduction to the Dalai Lama. After corresponding with Geyche, she was asked to send a list of questions she wanted to ask the Dalai Lama. She interviewed first with Geyche who then granted the interview with the Dalai Lama, the first of four interviews. When her first book was completed, she began thinking about her next subject. Not unlike fiction writers who speak of characters tapping them on the shoulder, Stewart found herself thinking again about Tibet and the Himalayas. In the midst of the usual bustle and crowds of yet another bookseller's convention, the tap came, figuratively speaking, from Edmund Hillary. Stewart contacted Anne Keiser, a friend who had done a lot of photographic work with Hillary and posed collaborating with her on a children's book. Indeed Keiser was interested and the groundwork was laid. Stewart queried several publishers and two said yes. Lerner contracted not only the Hillary biography but also a book about the Dalai Lama for an older audience thus launching their Newsmakers series. The process of making contacts this time was paved by Anne Keiser. Stewart did a series of interviews while staying in Hillary's base camp. After writing two biographies of the Dalai Lama and one of Hillary, Stewart told her editors at Lerner that she wanted to write about a woman. When asking teachers and librarians about potential subjects, she was uninspired by the figures they suggested-mostly modern entertainers. What nagged at her instead were the memories of conversations about the leader of Burma's democracy movement and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi. The great respect the Dalai Lama held for the Burmese leader also influenced Stewart's decision to write about Suu Kyi. After writing and sending the proposal to Lerner, Stewart heard nothing for months. Ironically, the week the publishers met and voted on the proposal, Aung San Suu Kyi was released after six years in house arrest. The response was not only an immediate yes, but how fast could she finish the book? The choice of subject is only the beginning of a long road of research. "When you get down to the nitty gritty of research, you learn how much you don't know," Stewart said. "But now there's Internet." What used to take months, she can now accomplish in a much shorter time frame. Within three weeks, she discovered the Burmese scholars who had already written about Aung San Suu Kyi, and she received suggestions of people to interview from one of the experts behind the film Beyond Rangoon. Almost as important as the research about the person is the research about the place, and for Stewart that research was best accomplished by visiting the settings where her subjects have lived. "I hadn't been to Antarctica and New Zealand, and it was hard for me to write about them" [in the Hillary biography]. Much as for Russell Freedman, who has remarked how important it is to walk the roads the subject has walked, Stewart too finds that knowing a place is essential to her understanding, enabling her to write from her core. The time spent in Tibet had given her valuable insight into not only the land, but also the people. "Nestled in the sharp ledges below Everest," she writes "are isolated Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, refuges for Tibetan monks and nuns. Temperatures there often drop as low as -50' F. and powerful winds whip against the rocks. Hail and snowstorms can keep the monks and nuns captive for months" (Stewart, 1996, p. 9). When she decided to do a book on Aung San Suu Kyi, she had to go to Burma. She couldn't imagine writing without going. The trip to Burma involved many risks, however. Since it is illegal to talk about or criticize the Burmese government, Stewart experienced much tension during her two-week stay and even now is reticent to share many details about her stay there. Writing about a controversial personage, Stewart was concerned from the outset about the safety of the people she contacted. Well aware that a letter to Aung San Suu Kyi requesting an interview would signal the government, she sent a letter by courier-at a cost of $70.00 for a one page letter! Only weeks before the trip to Burma, the interview was granted. Unfortunately, because of delays in Aung Suu Kyi's schedule, the interview lasted only thirty-five minutes. Later when she was writing the book, Stewart questioned whether she really knew enough, worried because of the brevity of the interview and the limited time spent in Burma. Feeling a deep sense of responsibility for recording a life, Stewart needed to be reassured by friends and editors that her year of intense research had yielded enough to enable her to create an accurate biography. To assuage her fears, three Burmese scholars read the work before it was submitted to publishers. Thinking and talking about writing biographies, Stewart has discovered that character, setting, and plot are as important for a biographer as for a writer of fiction. Her job, she finds, is to let these elements unfold throughout both the research and writing process. Newspapers, journals, histories, letters, and diaries yield pieces of the puzzle. Stewart reads all she can about her chosen subject before she begins and continues throughout the research and writing process to immerse herself in theirworlds. She recalls having spent two years reading nothing else but books related to Tibet. For another entire year she read only about Burma. Part of her work, she claims, is making connections. One of the first steps in making contacts is to look at bibliographies and source lists of any other books published on the subject. She pays attention to whom others are quoting and the books they're using. She often makes contacts through friends,- and whenever she's reading books or watching a film clip she's aware of specific people mentioned and follows up on those leads. Since one of the ways that a writer can trust facts is by getting those facts from many sources, she tries to ask people she's interviewing for the next contact. In the interviewing process what is important is developing the chronology of the subject. What often shapes a person's story, the plot line of his or her life, is the anecdotes that support the facts, and the words and feelings of the subjects. She asks for dates, locations, and names both of the subjects themselves and other people who have professional or personal connections to the subject. She avoids asking questions the subjects don't want to talk about, holding the privacy of the individual in deep regard. She tries to do face to face interviews when she can, but says it's very expensive. Sometimes when time and money just won't permit, she does phone interviews. For her most recent book, she did 90% of the interviews by phone, some on e-mail, and some by regular mail. Regardless of the medium of communication, all conversations are taped. She does take some notes during the interview but hesitates to write too many for fear of "missing out on the nuances of personality." She tries to record mannerisms mentally. In researching setting, she pours over histories of the locality, reads travel guides, and collects maps before her trip to the significant locale. During her stay, she visits the subjects' homes, offices, and favorite places. She takes photographs of every place she travels and often makes sketches as well. Actually, helping the picture editor find illustrations is another phase of the research process for authors of nonfiction. Just reproducing the pictures is a hefty expense, not including the publisher's copyrights, so biographers are eager to find a source for inexpensive photographs. In addition to taking many of her own, she usually asks the people she interviews if they'd be willing to share photos. The processes of discovering character, setting, and plot through researching, writing, and editing a book are never linear but rather recursive. All phases of the process are happening all the time. Writing, Stewart states, in part of her Buddhist practice. "I meditate before I write, sometimes while I write. When I’m writingwell, I don't remember how I wrote the sentences. When I reread what I've written, I don't remember the process of writing. It's as if something else is writing through me. Sometimes I even think it's the subject. That's what it feels like. When I haven't been meditating and the writing isn't going well, I should just stop. I should do some other aspect of the process-research, read, orinterview." In making choices about what to include from the plethora of research, Stewart says that some anecdotes are too adult. Although she doesn't want to avoid certain subjects, she looks carefully at how she writes about sensitive moments in people's lives. Sometimes, she says, it's "difficult to figure out the difference between melodrama and what's fact." She tries to find out what would be fun for kids. She wants to pull anecdotes that will make readers laugh and anecdotes that concern issues relevant to the lives of children. She thinks in terms of what inspired her as a child. She wants to show the relationship with siblings and parents because those issues are important to the kids who are reading. In fact, before Stewart interviews her subjects, she spends time talking with children. She wants to know what they want to find out. Generally, when children read biographies, they want to discover the hopes, dreams, and fears of the subject. Stewart readily acknowledged the role that other people play in the creation of a book. Publishers set the guidelines as much as the writers themselves, especially when a book is part of a series. In writing To the Lion Throne, she did not write for a specific age group, however the book evolved as appropriate for third and fourth graders. Now, however, Stewart "knows the age of her audience at the outset because publishers dictate it. Lerner also prescribes the text length of 18,000 words or 128 pages, the number of photos, and the number of chapters. Librarians and teachers too affect how an author writes. They want a text that is over a hundred pages, an often stipulated requirement of the book a child has to read. Young readers want books that have big print and color pictures. Perhaps most valuable to any writer is the Editor. "Editors have a lot to do with the way a book reads and looks," Stewart said. "Maybe it's because I was an editor, I realize how much I rewrote books. While I'm given credit for writing The Dalai Lama, Spiritual Leader of Tibet, Susan (her editor at Lerner) wrote it too." Sometimes editors have made suggestions regarding organizational issues. Other times they identify parts of the text that need fleshing out. Most of the final revisions deal with language. The editor used the phrase "spiritual leader" in the subtitle to attract young readers, and although the Dalai Lama's secretary said that the subtitle was not accurate and wanted it either changed to "political and spiritual leader" or left out, the editorial decision was sustained. "We debate words all the time. What makes the word saffron more difficult than yellow. It's just unfamiliar, but this is the way kids learn." In an attempt to grab readers, Stewart chose to begin The 14th Dalai Lama, Spiritual Leader of' Tibet with his escape. She wanted to use a dramatic scene first. Pleased with the structure, the publishers requested that Stewart revise the Hillary manuscript beginning with the ascent to the summit of Mt. Everest. Since so many children have little if any previous knowledge about her subjects, Stewart's beginning with the climax involves her readers from the start, inviting them to care, tempting their inquisitive nature. Recently I had the opportunity to see exactly how Stewart's subjects pique the curiosity of her young readers. I shared several chapters of The 14th Dalai Lama, Spiritual Leader of Tibet with a group of third and fourth graders, many of whom had read To the Lion Throne. After the opening sequence which details the Dalai Lama's escape from Tibet in 1953 after the Chinese invasion, several children wanted to know, "How can he help his people by leaving them?" When I read the chapter about the Dalai Lama's childhood, some doubting Thomases wanted to know, "How can they be positive that the 14th Dalai Lama is really reincarnated from the other Dalai Lama?" Students who had read the first biography hastened to explain to the others about the signs that led the lamas to eastern Tibet in their search. Clearly the students had been intrigued by the signs and readily recalled that the body of the 13th Dalai Lama, first placed in his tomb facing south, later faced east. The children were equallyfascinated by the tests given to prove that indeed the child found was the one sought. The young boy showed repeated preference for personal items that had once belonged to the 13th Dalai Lama over similar items never used by the late lama. One young reader pondered why the Tibetans would want the same leader over and over. "Because if he's reincarnated," she said, "he's really the same person, so that means they've always had one leader. Maybe someone else would do a better job." With no intent to cast aspersions on the work of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, the child was thinking deeply. As I listened to these nine and ten-year-old children posing questions, raising issues, and open to learning about a culture so foreign to their own, I was struck with the Dalai Lama's own words with which Stewart (1996) ends her biography. Each of us must learn to work not just for his or her own self, family, or nation but for the benefit of all humankind. Universal responsibility is the real key to human survival. It is the best foundation for world peace (p. 121). And so young readers, who explore the lives of others and are elevated to new places, offer us hope for the future. |
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