Thanks for Participating in the Celebrate Your Freedom to Read With our Contest!!
Thanks to everyone who contributed reviews of banned books as part of TeenRC's Celebrate Your Freedom to Read Contest. Check out the contests page to see the winners.
Thanks for Participating in the Celebrate Your Freedom to Read With our Contest!!
Thanks to everyone who contributed reviews of banned books as part of TeenRC's Celebrate Your Freedom to Read Contest. Check out the contests page to see the winners.
“This is so cool,” says Martha Brooks as the TeenSRC online chat begins. “Cool” could certainly be the choice word to describe the opportunity to chat with the award-winning author. Brooks started writing in her late twenties, and is going strong at sixty-four.
“I just got a lifetime achievement award and it feels as if I’ve only just now learned how to write books,” she comments.
It’s clear that for Brooks, lifetime achievements go far beyond her novels. Throughout the chat, she shares her stories: some funny, some serious, all heartfelt accounts of experiences that have shaped her and her writing.
“We are everything we experience,” are Brooks’ wise words, setting the tone for the conversation. “We all have original true stories that come from *our* experience and that’s what makes them interesting.”
“You can’t write in a vacuum. Your inspiration has to come from somewhere,” says Brooks. “Many of my thoughts are brewing my whole life, but sometimes thoughts hit me when I’m not even thinking about anything.”
One of Martha Brooks’ inspirations is “growing up in a tuberculosis sanatorium,” she reveals, “being sick a lot as a child, not with TB… I find it makes you see the world differently.”
She goes on to share a more recent occurrence. “I went through a near-death experience at Christmas… I went in for cancer surgery on my breast and I had reconstruction… and I almost bled to death.”
Despite the “hellish and harrowing” time it was, Brooks gives what she calls a “breathless reportage… born out of the simple pleasure of having survived and how deeply it colours the rest of my days.
“It was a fabulous experience!!!!!!! The best part was the collapsed lung because the character in my next novel has a collapsed lung and now I know how it feels... I’m laughing! It was great research!”
In fact, Brooks seems to be doing her research everywhere. “I write about the life I see around me,” she remarks. “I’m particularly fond of listening in on cell phone conversations, especially if the person is sitting right next to me. I got two stories in a vet’s office one day.”
“And the natural world is an inspiration too, the beautiful natural setting of my childhood in south-western Manitoba.”
Evidently, nature provides many ideas for the author. “I’m from Winnipeg, Manitoba, where the [summer] weather is lush and beautiful. And I’m going down to my lake in the [hilly country around Pelican Lake] tomorrow for a month!” she states excitedly.
“As a matter of fact,” she admits, “that landscape appears in every one of my books. I just change it. I just change the names.”
For example, the word mistik is a Cree word meaning “wood”. Says Brooks, “Mistik Lake isn’t a real lake – it’s Pelican Lake in Manitoba... where the TB sanatorium was where I grew up. And we have a cottage across the lake from the TB sanatorium, two acres of land overlooking the lake.”
Music is another important source of inspiration. Besides enjoying world music such as African and East Indian music, Martha Brooks’ talents range from words on paper to words to music. She is a jazz singer with a CD, Change of Heart, and finds that her music and writing often mix. “The syncopated beats of jazz find their way into the rhythm of my language.”
“First book I wrote was called The Magic Orchard,” Martha Brooks reveals. “Good thing it was never published! :D IT SUCKED!”
No matter, the popularity of her books certainly proves that young people like Brooks’ writing. However, despite numerous awards including the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award (Children’s Literature, text) for True Confessions of a Heartless Girl, and an expanding young audience, Brooks admits, “It’s not a glamorous way to make a living... I don’t make lots of money. I sometimes just get by, but it’s a *wonderful* way to make a living because I have the kind of freedom that people who work 9 to 5 don’t have.”
She goes on, “Being a writer who has a kind of a national profile is interesting because for the most part you’re living an anonymous life. I like that aspect of being a writer, but, I leave my anonymity when I publish a book or go out and sing jazz. Then I belong to the public.”
“People can be reading my books all over the place and I don’t even think about it. I go about my own neighbourhood and nobody knows who I am, just like everyone else does, shopping, going to movies...”
Like anyone else, she goes to work in an office during the weekdays.
“I write every day except weekends and holidays,” says Brooks. “I’m up very early in the morning and I write from 7:30 until about 1:30 to 2:30 straight through, five days a week.”
She keeps to this regular writing schedule, commenting that “if I wrote when I felt like it, I wouldn’t get my groceries paid for!”
When asked about her writing space, she gives a detailed description of her office that captivates the reader as if it’s from one of her books.
“I see my writing like a movie when I’m writing... I write on a computer in my beautiful office on the third floor of our condominium with a cedar tree brushing against the window. Also, my office is *filled* with books. Brian, my husband, painted a sky on the ceiling of it. (Yes, a sky. This is why I’ve in love with this man.) It has floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over a stairwell.
“I have a genuine arrowhead on my glass-top desk... feathers everywhere... I sometimes burn sage and cedar to get my work going.
“I like to surround myself with loveliness. It makes me feel good. It helps me heal my heart and my spirit and then I can write.”
Even in such a stunning setting, writing has its challenges. “Certainly, when I’m writing a book, it’s best for me to write it for a while and step outside it for 2-3 weeks and then go back in again, to let it bubble,” Brooks admits. “I will sometimes sit and scroll over the first hundred pages of a manuscript and not write a single word... and then two hours later, an entire scene pops into my head, and I’ll write three pages in twenty minutes.”
“Part of it is that I make my living at this and NO job is ever pure pleasure,” she adds. “This isn’t my hobby and basically it’s showing up for work every day and turning out the work. But because I make my living at this, I keep having to come up with plots.”
During the chat, some teens say that their favourite parts of Brooks’ stories are her remarkably well-developed characters. Perhaps it’s Martha Brooks’ experience shining through once again. “I think there are bits and pieces of me in every single character I write about,” she says. “But there’s also this mysterious thing where you grow a character. And they take on their own personality, just like birthing a baby.”
When asked how long it takes her to write a book, she replies, “It takes me too long to write a book, usually. The last one took me five years. I’m hoping this new one will only [take] three... Most of the work gets done when you’re doing something else.”
Brooks’ favourite genre is realistic fiction. “My writing is subtle,” she notes. “I don’t club people over the head and people have to work things out for themselves. In our world we’re being so spoon-fed and I don’t do that to my readers... I like to write about life as it is, not necessarily how we’d like it to be.”
“My life is full of drama,” Brooks declares. Still, “If I had the chance to go back, I would do exactly what I’m doing now including being a jazz singer and coming at that very late in life. I wouldn’t change my life. I wouldn’t have done it any differently.”
She reflects on high school: “good memories of kissing boys... That’s about all that was good about it for me.”
She talks about her sister: “[She’s] eight years older than me, and she lives ten minutes away and I just had pizza with her last night. Most times I feel close to her. Where it counts, yes.”
And she speaks eloquently on her love: “My husband Brian has been my supporter. Because he is so awesome... He’s a very creative person so he understands the creative process, so that’s helpful.” She says she wrote her first book “with him for sure. With him telling me just to write, and not to worry about making a living – just do it!”
“Behind every starving author who manages to eat is a person who tells them, ‘Here, eat. Now write,’” she laughs. For her, that person “just turned sixty-five and he’s gorgeous.”
She continues, “If you’re lucky enough in your life to find someone to spend your life with, the best times are spent with them... As in my case.”
“Life is full of high spots and low spots ALL the way through,” muses Brooks, “and you don’t wish for the low spots. But they give your life texture and they make you wiser and they make you enjoy the joy so much more when you get there.
“Oh, we all think we have it sorted out and then... life surprises us!”
Just from this chat, one can be sure that young readers can expect many more surprising stories from this worldly writer. After all, she’s already working on her ninth novel and will “just keep writing books as long as my mind is able to do that... I’m not planning to retire! The books may come out slower... but that’s okay.”
If there’s one thing Martha Brooks knows, it’s to embrace every experience life throws her way.
“When you celebrate life, it isn’t just an empty thought; it’s what you have to do because you never know what’s coming around the corner.”
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Titles from Martha Brooks include Mistik Lake, True Confessions of a Heartless Girl, Being With Henry, Bone Dance and Two Moons in August.
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