Photo © by Merry Scully
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| Jack Gantos Photo © by Merry Scully |
Joel Shoemaker
(June 2003, 100 – 103.)
[Editor's Note: This interview occurred before Jack Gantos won two prestigious book awards for Hole in My Life. In January 2003, the American Library Association (ALA) announced that his autobiographical work had become a Michael L. Printz Honor book and a Robert F. Sibert Honor book.]
When I read Hole in My Life, it knocked my socks off. "The prisoner in the photograph is me." From that first shocking revelation, each laser-targeted word led me gently, yet inexorably, toward an understanding of the steps that had brought him to this particular point in his life. The book evoked memories of the '60s, sure, but more than anything else, I thought how terribly typical his thoughts, dreams, and missteps had been. And of how little things have changed for teens today. Hole in My Life might change lives—if it's in the hands of the right reader, at the right time.
I had heard of the author, Jack Gantos, and in fact had reviewed Desire Lines, his first novel for young adults. I knew that previously he had written books for younger readers, but I had never met him nor read any of his other books. I didn't know where he came from, literally or literarily. Then I met Jack at the American Library Association (ALA) conference in Atlanta in June 2002, where I arranged to conduct this interview, which was edited from e-mail exchanged during the fall of 2002.
SHOE: Forgive the pun, but Hole has such an arresting cover—title, color, layout, and the riveting photo which reminds me of the popular '60s Ché Guevara poster—except for the prison ID number, of course. Gantos is what kind of name?
GANTOS: Gantos is Lebanese. I believe it was spelled Ghantous at one time but was reduced either by immigration officers or personal choice to Gantos.
SHOE: What do you think, now, when you look at that photo?
GANTOS: Considering the comparison with Ché—I’m just glad I don't have a hole in my forehead.
SHOE: Last year in my interview with Will Weaver, he said he "us[ed] up quite a bit of personal real estate" in his first adult novel. You've been carving off little bits of yourself in all your books, haven't you?
GANTOS: From the beginning of my writing, I've been pretty much involved in using up personal experience. As a kid, my writing was done in personal journals. From my very first picture book, Rotten Ralph, people asked if it was based on a true story about my cat. Yes, I did have a rotten cat. And yes, I did have to embellish on his abilities and animate him far beyond his limited feline rottenness so he would serve the book—rather than write the truth, which was that I served the cat.
But the books that really announce that I'm mining events from my life for the sake of literature are the Jack Henry books of short stories. Jack Adrift might be the last Jack book. Though fictively treated, it covers five very significant years of my life, from fourth grade through eighth.
You asked if it feels as if I've carved off pieces of myself. Before writing the Jack books, I use to daydream endlessly about these years and recalled them vividly. I could imagine entire rooms, houses, neighborhoods, my schools, church, camps and travels, conversations, meals—the memories were all very rich, and I had full access to them whenever I wished. But I rarely daydream about those years anymore—it feels as if I've bled those memories of their vitality. It is a hard irony to realize that the reason my childhood memories were so vivid to me in the first place was because I wrote them down as a kid, and now they have dimmed because I have consumed them for my fiction as an adult.
SHOE: And now you're consuming more in Hole.
GANTOS: Yes, describing my senior year in high school, my drug smuggling post-high school activities, and time spent in prison. Not only does it cover three years of my life, but it covers nearly every important theme in my life—my dedication to reading, my desire to write, my love of what is humanly artful and naturally beautiful, and my strong belief that life tumbles forward from violation to redemption and that no one has to be lost along the way. I'd say that book burned up a lot of personal real estate. But, much like after a forest fire, new growth soon appears. New books are springing up to fill the void.
The Joey Pigza trilogy is based some on experience and observation (although I'm not ADHD [Attention Deficit Disorder]), and the vast majority of the prose is entirely fabricated. I suspect that these books are really a way for me to enter my future, and I'm very much looking forward to what I'll next attempt. I have some Rotten Ralph Rotten Readers to complete and then I'll have to choose between two front-running novel ideas.
. . . .
SHOE: You manage to insinuate references to more than twenty-five authors and literary works in Hole.
GANTOS: It was intentional, as I was pointing out how I used books as the stars in my life by which I charted my course.
SHOE: That course including the detour to prison. How exactly did that happen?
GANTOS: I was asked if I would help sail a boat loaded with a ton of hashish—I would make ten thousand dollars in cash for my effort—and I said, "Count me in" immediately, with complete disregard for the consequences. The money looked like a way out of the boxed-in life I was living. Now I write books rather than smuggle drugs. The desire to have a thrill in my life (believe me, living off of writing is a highwire act) manifests itself in the writing challenges I tackle. Whether launching a boat or a novel—there is a risk.
A lot of guys in prison were working on the life formula of "maximum pleasure for minimal effort," so conning anyone into giving them something for nothing was an art form. They don't really pursue the truth of who they are. For me, writing has always been, in part, an effort to find what is honest about myself so that I can measure the distance between who I genuinely am and what I am inventing about myself.
. . . .
BOOKS CITED
Desire Lines. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997. 160p. $16. 0-374-31772-0. VOYA October 1997.
Hole in My Life. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002. 208p. $16. 0-374-39988-3. VOYA June 2002. Random House Audio, July 2003. $25. 0-8072-1644-5.
Rotten Ralph. Illus. by Nicole Rubel. Houghton Mifflin, 1976. $16. 0-395-24276-2. $6.95 pb. 0-395-29202-6. Houghton Mifflin Audio, 1988. $9.95 book and cassette. 0-395-48873-7.
Jack Adrift: Fourth Grade Without a Clue. Farrar Straus Giroux, August 2003. 176p. $16. 0-374-39987-5.
Joey Pigza Trilogy:
Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998. 192p. $16. 0-374-33664-4. HarperCollins, 2000. $5.99 pb. 0-06-449267-2. VOYA February 1999. Random House Audio, 1999. $18. 0-8072-8171-9.
Joey Pigza Loses Control. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000. 195p. $16. 0-374-39989-1. HarperCollins, 2002. $5.95 pb. 0-06-441022-6. VOYA February 2001. Random House Audio, 2000. $30. 0-8072-8728-8.
What Would Joey Do? Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002. 240p. $16. 0-374-39986-7. VOYA December 2002. Random House Audio, 2002. $25. 0-8072-0948-1.
Joel Shoemaker is a library media specialist at South East Junior High School in Iowa City, Iowa, a past-President of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), and series editor of the Teens@the Library series for Neal-Schuman Publishers. His interviews of young adult authors appear each June in VOYA.
This interview has been excerpted from its original form published in the June 2003 issue of VOYA on pages 100-103. See its complete version in the magazine for further revelations about how Gantos’s prison time and other life experiences affect his writing and how he discusses those effects with teen readers.