Description:
Interview with Kim Ventrella, author of The Skeleton Tree
Interviewer: Sheldon Beach
Interviewee: Kim Ventrella
SB: Hi, this is Sheldon from the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Library System. I’d like to welcome all of our listeners out there for the very first in our series of Oklahoma author interviews. For my first guest, I recently got the opportunity to sit down and chat with Kim Ventrella. Kim is the author of the middle grade level novel, The Skeleton Tree. I hope you enjoy my interview with Kim and come back again to listen to more of our author interviews, as well as some of our upcoming Oklahoma history podcasts. Please, enjoy.
KV: Well, … it’s like me and the world of literary criticism are completely separate now, I think once you become an author you have to completely separate yourself [laughs].
SB: Yeah.
KV: Other than that, everybody does that, but for me I’m like, “Yeah I’m done, I’m done,” [laughs].
SB: Sure.
KV: It’s a totally valid thing and people can be really hilarious at being critics and stuff, but it’s just, it’s no longer for me [laughs].
SB: Yeah. So do you read book reviews, not for yourself-
KV: No.
SB: But for other people?
KV: No.
SB: I’m curious.
KV: No [laughs].
SB: Not even other book reviews?
KV: No, I’m so frightened visiting Goodreads, that if other people have it up on their phone I’m cringing [laughing], I’m covering my eyes and cringing like, “No.” Just because it’s not a part–not a healthy part of your world anymore, I feel like if you’re going to be an author, cause you have to [laughing]-
SB: Yeah.
KV: Be able to create without worrying about all that stuff, so-
SB: Yeah.
KV: So it’s a good thing, it’s just no longer a part of my sphere [laughs].
SB: Yeah, no, I feel like that might make it a little difficult for your day job though.
KV: Well, yeah, I guess that’s true, as a librarian you do come across that, but not so much the critical side, I guess.
SB: Sure, sure.
KV: Necessarily, you’re just–you’re trying to connect people to literature. You’re not judging what they choose [laughing], or the quality of what they choose necessarily.
SB: Right, right. So when you got started writing did that ever cross your mind? Did you ever think, “How’s this going to be reviewed later? How’s somebody going to-?”
KV: Yeah, but it’s weird because when I first started out I’ve written reviews for The Daily Oklahoman, for School Library Journal, I used to have a book review blog, and did a ton of stuff on Goodreads, and even though I knew I wanted to be a writer it just wasn’t the same [laughs], I just didn’t know how it would feel until it actually happened. And then when it happened I was like, “Okay I’m never gonna write a review again,” [laughing] I just stopped all of it.
SB: Right.
KV: Definitely not every creative person feels that way, but I just felt that way [laughing], because I know how reading a negative review would affect me personally, and so I just didn’t feel like I could go out and write honest reviews anymore [laughs].
SB: Right, yeah, I can see that being an issue. So, since we’re already recording-
KV: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
SB: Do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself?
KV: Sure.
SB: I do want to say welcome to the very first podcast that I’ve ever recorded for the Metropolitan Library System.
KV: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me.
SB: Yeah, so, introduce yourself to our many, many dozens of listeners that we’ll have, thousands, maybe millions.
KV: [laughing] Okay, yes, definitely millions. Alright, my name is Kim Ventrella and I’m a librarian, formerly with the Metropolitan Library System [laughing], and currently with the Pioneer Library System.
SB: That’s cool, we can edit that out [laughs].
KV: Okay, we’ll just edit that out, no mentioning the P-word on this podcast.
SB: No, it’s fine, they’re our friends, they’re our friends.
KV: [laughing] Yeah, so, I am a child’s department manager with them, so doing all the children’s stuff, and I’ve been a teen librarian in the past, but I am here because of my new book, which just came out the end of September 2017 with Scholastic, and it’s called Skeleton Tree. So that’s me writing books, fighting demons at night, as librarians do, and working at the library.
SB: Right, everyday, it’s just like the movies.
KV: [laughing] Yeah, exactly, it’s just like Giles, that’s why everybody becomes a librarian, right? So they can be just like Giles and-
SB: Sure.
KV: Fight vampires.
SB: Exactly. Everyday.
KV: [laughing] Everyday.
SB: So, as far as your book, how’s that been going since September?
KV: Yeah, I think it’s going well, it’s a big, long process, cause it sold two years before so it takes about two years for the first book to come out. And it’s neat seeing it on shelves at Barnes and Noble, and people send me little photos of it in the book fair at their schools, I’m like “Yeah!” But it’s also kind of terrifying, you’re like “Oh my god, people are actually reading this book? What?” [laughs]
SB: But that’s what you want…
KV: Yeah, yeah.
SB: That’s why you wrote it.
KV: Yeah, so it’s out there, it’s really cool to hear stories from people who’ve read it, like from random states, or from the UK, it’s out in the UK! There’s a really cool version, it’s illustrated over there. It’s cool to hear stories from people who’ve read it, and it spoke to them.
SB: Did you have any input in the illustrations? I’m always kind of curious about that, just sometimes I’ll see really odd illustrations of books-
KV: [laughing] Oh, yeah. Yeah.
SB: Sometimes they’re really good! So as an author did they ask you like, “Hey, how do you feel about this?”
KV: Yeah, definitely. It was different because there’s two different publishers, so US and UK are different deals, but in the US they definitely gave me input, they suggested an illustrator that my editor had found because she had seen some of her design work and she thought it was goth, and weird, and cool and that it would fit a little bit with my style and the book. And so, she had her draw up a couple of mockups of what the cover might look like, and one of them was this really cool skeleton hands, with a butterfly coming out of them, and little skulls on the butterfly wings, and it was awesome! My agent and I really loved that one, but my publisher thought it was too young adult, and my books a middle grade novel, so it’s a little bit younger than YA. And there was this other one that I just–to this today I would pay to have a poster of this and put it up in my room, cause it was so hilarious [laughing]. It was like a boy and skeleton on a teeter-totter, a boy teeter-tottering with a skeleton [laughing], basically.
SB: I feel like the weight ratio might be off.
KV: [laughing] Yeah, might be off.
SB: Logistically.
KV: I know. Yeah, and the way it was drawn was kind of, it was kind of weird. The perspective was kind of weird, the skeleton kind of looked like a ginormous skeleton. Anyway, I thought that was kind of awesome in this kind of horrible, but cool way. And then the one they settled on, which I think is way better and kind of a literal translation of skeleton tree. It’s literally a tree slash skeleton with the two main characters peeking out from behind and lots of cool, whimsical details up the sides, which is what Lisa Perrin, who’s the illustrator, is known for. So, that was cool, and then the big deal on that one is I really thought it would be neat to have a flip book inside, so when you flip the pages you see this dancing skeleton, and my editor's boss, David Levithan, was like, “We’ve never done that before, I don’t know if we can!” But eventually he totally okayed it, and we did it, and I was psyched about that. And the UK one is actually illustrated through Owl, and they’re beautiful illustrations by Victoria Assanelli. She’s a great illustrator, and they’re so whimsical and weird, and just the expressions on the kid’s faces, she captured it. And she managed to make the skeleton emotive and adorable, and not scary, and kind of how he is in the book.
SB: Well, that’s nice.
KV: Yeah, yeah. It was cool. It’s a back and forth, but you do get some say as the author in the illustrations.
SB: Yeah.
KV: For sure.
SB: Over the course of the two years that it’s been-
KV: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Over the course of that.
SB: How was that?
KV: It’s pretty standard for your first book, things just take way longer than you expect they will. Even if you write really fast, I tend to write the first drafts really quickly. The first draft of Skeleton Tree took like two weeks to write, but then you have the editorial process with your editor and you have several rounds of big edits and that can take over six months because you’re going back and forth, and you have like a month or two to work on each round, and you’re sending it back and getting more feedback, and then it goes to copy edits and proof reads, and on and on until you finally have the reviewer copies come out, and then the sales team has a lot more to do than you realize, like getting those in the hands of reviewers, and bringing them to conferences, and putting their whole marketing plan together and stuff.
SB: Yeah, you said it just took two weeks, but did you have the idea going for a while first?
KV: No, no. I like-
SB: Just popped in one day and said “Hey, you know what-”
KV: I did, because back then I was really 100% discovery writing all the time, not planning it out ahead of time, which is my true love is discovery writing [laughing], I really prefer to write that way. I was just writing novels like back-to-back to back, and of course most of them were really crappy, but then it got to a point where I was like, “Yeah, that’s pretty good, and this one’s better, and it’s getting a little better every time.” So, I just kept doing it and then one day came up with the one that happened to sell.
SB: So how does your process go? I know it’s kind of a silly standard question, but when you sit down to write you know-
KV: Yeah.
SB: Cause I was talking to somebody just recently who’d say like, “Well you know you always see like ‘Oh, I can’t do it unless I’m in my office’ or like ‘Oh, I have to go sit under a tree and wait for inspiration.’”
KV:[laughing] I think every book’s different for me, but for Skeleton Tree my funny story is I wrote it sitting in a dog bed, which is true [laughs]. I have this really cushy, awesome dog bed, and at the time all the chairs in my house were the worst, uncomfortable, I had no good office chair. So, I just sat cross-legged in this dog bed, and my dog is sitting on the couch behind me kind of peering over my shoulder, and I wrote the first draft that way, and it totally worked. But since then my big purchase after selling the book was to get an office chair, so I do have an official chair, which is nice, but I don’t even use it that much [laughs]. I write outside a lot, I think it’s more stimulating sometimes if you can have a nice breeze and some stuff going on around, and I’ll go to coffee shops and all kinds of places. But yeah, I think each book kind of needs its own sphere so you can get in that mindset and you’re not feeling like–not writing in the same place you wrote the last book, so helps you separate them. But yeah, and like I said I really love discovery writing, just sitting down with a blank page and starting to write stuff because I think often you come up with the most original ideas and it just feels less contrived to me. When you thought it out ahead of time it almost seems more forced when you go to write it, but if you can just discovery write from a blank page, I feel like I come up with my favorite ideas. Although now that I have deadlines and whatnot it is not always possible, so I do have to plan stuff out, and I think that’s– it’s also a really valid way and probably a necessary way to write especially if you’re on a fixed deadline and you can’t just kind of write whenever you want and if you throw it away, fine, you know, that’s not always possible so-
SB: Does it feel too much–too corporate now? Cause you’re doing that, it’s like, “I don’t know, I was so inspired when I started and-”
KV: [laughing] Well, I mean, both sides–a little bit of both things, because discovery writing for me right now is a great way to get into the story, and to kind of come up with that initial idea, so it feels fresher. But it is really helpful, I have to admit, if I then sort of plan out at least the emotional arch of the character, so I have an idea of where I’m going. Theoretically, it will make the revisions a lot less painful later if I’ve already thought all of that stuff out to begin with. So yeah, I don’t think it’s like, “Ugh, corporate, the man’s holding me down,” or something but it is–you have to be a little bit more structured, I guess, when you have people waiting to read your stuff. It’s just a little bit different. Yeah.
SB: So, did you draw on any inspiration from real life or anything? I feel like there was a character in the book that was from a country that I can’t spell that I seem to remember you’ve spent some time in?
KV: Oh yeah, that’s true. That is true. So yeah, in the book the main character is named Stanley and he’s twelve years old, and he has a little sister named Miren, who’s eight, and of course it’s always kind of annoying but also he really loves her deep down. And they have a nanny, who is named Ms. Francine, who is from Kyrgyzstan, so she’s Russian but she’s from Kyrgyzstan, where I did live for a couple of years when I was in the Peace Corps, and it was really, really awesome. So, in my mind I imagine that she’s from the same town where I lived, which is Naryn. It’s really great, it’s in between these two giant mountain ranges basically, so you’re in a mountain valley. And the town, you can walk from one end to the other, in this valley it’s like one road, it takes like an hour to walk from one end to the other basically. I mean it’s really cool, really remote, there’s all kinds of tiny shops and they all have the exact same sort of things that have all been imported from China or neighboring countries. They have the outdoor bazaar, one bank in town, and there was this one–there were hardly any Russian people in the town where I lived, but there was this one Russian lady who worked at the bank and her personality is nothing like Ms. Francine, but in my mind that’s kind of like how I see her, just this really sort of bulky, strong, Russian woman, who is just really strong-willed and has lots of wisdom to offer to Stanley and Miren, and Stanley’s mom, and all the characters in the story cause she’s kind of like seen it all and she lived this rough life where she had to go–it’s winter seven or eight months out of the year, and you have to go get your own water in little buckets from the pump, and it’s all frozen over so you’re slipping and sliding, and her dad kept goats, and so always chasing after the goats [laughs]. So yeah, that part was a little bit based on real life, but the rest of it with Stanley finding the finger bone-
SB: That didn’t happen to you?
KV: In his backyard, that did not really happen to me. Although I wish, one day I’ll come home and I’ll find that little finger bone sticking up in my backyard, but hasn’t happened yet, so- [laughs].
SB: Now, do you mind if I ask, as a person who probably should’ve researched the question before I’m going to ask, what’s the primary language that they speak over there?
KV: [laughing] They speak Kyrgyz.
SB: Okay, do you speak that?
KV: Not anymore. I did, when I was there, attempt, and they rate you and stuff so I was intermediate level, but I just, yeah, it’s hard and it’s always really intimidating to speak to people in a language when you know they’re going to kind of laugh at you. Every time you go to the store–and of course I spoke in Kyrgyz whenever I went shopping or went to the bazaar, cause people don’t speak English in general, but yeah, the reactions on some people’s faces, I mean super nice, but they can tell. It’s obvious that you’re not pronouncing this correctly. You’re just an adorable failure basically at Kyrgyz. So yeah, that’s how I would describe my Kyrgyz learning, I was an adorable failure. Other people though, yeah, there were a couple of volunteers that really were close to being fluent by the end of their service there. It kind of depended to if you were in a really remote village, some people were like truly nobody spoke English, so that was the only way you could communicate. Whereas I–it was in a small town but I worked at a university training English teachers, and the university students, and high school students, so basically everyone I encountered really wanted to speak English with me, that was their primary goal of interacting with me [laughing] was to improve their English skills. So yeah, I didn’t learn it as well as I would like to, but it was still a great time and definitely changed my perspective on things here, on my life, and for the rest of my life it will change that way I see things, and so I’m really grateful for that, that I got that new perspective, which probably informs my writing in some way I don’t know [laughs].
SB: Sure, maybe someday you’ll write a book about a girl fumbling her way through a foreign land, you’ve even got a good name for it already right? What was it, “Adorable Failure?”
KV: [laughing] Yup, “Adorable Failure.” Exactly, yup. ™. So, yeah [laughs].
SB: Look for it on shelves soon.
KV: Coming soon. My life story. So, yeah. What else is happening? [laughing] What other penetrating questions do you have for me?
SB: What are you working on next? Do you have something, or are you still in the process of trying to work on selling this? Are you still doing book signings?
KV: Oh, yeah. I mean, I’ve done a lot of local-
SB: Flying all over the place?
KV: Signings, I should have more coming up this next year, but I’m really trying to focus on writing the next thing, I know another great Oklahoma author Ally Carter, a young adult author, at a conference I went to recently said the very best way to market your book is to write the next one. So just keep writing and don’t focus so much on the promotion, I think people get too caught up in that and really it’s the writing that’s the main focus. So yeah, I’m working on that. The first book deal was for two books, so the second one comes out spring of 2019, so still a ways from now, but we’re just going to the copy edit phase on that, so it’s almost done with editing and then it will just be waiting for that one to come out. And then I have a lot of other projects that I’m working on with my agent, so they’re just kind of in the proposal phase, so now instead of writing the whole book before I sell it, since I’ve already sold a couple, I just put together a little proposal with the first couple of chapters and a synopsis and then we pitch that to my publisher, so got a couple of those out and hopefully have some good news soon [laughs].
SB: Anything you can talk about? Or are they all just keeping it under wraps-
KV: Yeah, keeping it under wraps-
SB: Until their release date?
KV: There is one that I’m really excited about, and I don’t know if it’ll get published or not, but it’s a collection of sort of intertwined scary stories for kids, so I’m excited about that, cause when I was a kid one of the things I liked to read most was that collection Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark and the companion ones to that, and just anything dark, and macabre, and creepy, and horror for kids I was all over when I was a kid, and I like to think of it like I write books that I would’ve liked when I was that age, and so I would love, love, love to put out this collection of horror stories for kids. And it’s very different from the stuff I’ve written before, if you’re familiar with Skeleton Tree you know there are spooky elements, but overall it’s more of a heartwarming story about family and finding meaning in some of the more challenging times in life. It’s just a different type of story, it’s spooky, but it’s definitely not a horror story, it’s not meant to just scare, and frighten you, and horrify, and disturb. But these scary stories are, and I’m really excited about that [laughs].
SB: So after the heartwarming part’s done you just want to make children have nightmares?
KV: [laughing] Yeah, exactly. Exactly, because that’s what I loved to read when I was a kid, and I think-
SB: Yeah.
KV: And now working in the library too, that’s one of the things you get most it’s like, “Just get me the scary story,” you know, “Where are all your scary stories?” Kids love that, and it’s a great way too to help kids feel safer and better about their lives, because you get to experience scary things that are probably over the top or treated in a humorous manner, or in a safe environment, like within the pages of a book, and once you get to experience that, and probably overcome the bad guy, you just feel better about the rest of your life, like, “Well maybe I can tackle all these actual issues I’m having in my life [laughing], maybe I can do that.”
SB: Yeah, I don’t remember if–I feel like I didn’t read a lot of really scary stuff when I was a kid, although I did get on an elevator with R.L. Stine once.
KV: Oh, you did? Where was that?
SB: It was in Austin at a conference-
KV: Oh, really?
SB: My wife was very excited about it-
KV: Wow.
SB: Because she in fact had gotten him to sign a couple of books-
KV: That’s so cool.
SB: Cause she had seen him earlier at the conference, that’s why–I’d never seen him before, so that’s why I knew who he was because we got on the elevator and she was “Oh, that’s-,” she whispered just like, “This is R.L. Stine,” I was like, “Oh, that’s cool.”
KV: That’s so awesome [laughs].
SB: Yeah, she and another guy that was at–another librarian that was on the elevator too, made a remark and he chuckled and afterwards they both got off the elevator and it was like, “Did we just make R.L. Stine laugh?” Because apparently he’s really funny in speeches and things he gives-
KV: Right.
SB: But he doesn’t laugh himself, I guess.
KV: Oh, really? Oh, I did not know that, okay.
SB: They were really pleased with themselves, actually it might’ve been another YA author or somebody that was talking to him, he was very excited that he made R.L. Stine laugh.
KV: [laughing] Well, there you go man, that’s like that’ll have to be one of my goals now.
SB: Yeah.
KV: Make R.L. Stine laugh [laughs].
SB: Oh, I thought you were going to say have children grow up to want to make you laugh.
KV: Oh, there you go! Yeah, that too.
SB: Yeah, “She used to scare the crap out of me when I was a kid, with her delightfully terrifying stories, nightmare inducing children’s stories.”
KV: Right, right. Yeah.
SB: I’m really trying to sell this for you.
KV: I know, thank you. You’re doing a good job man, yeah. Well, that’s the key, they’re “delightfully terrifying,” so that’s you know-
SB: And that’s the name of your next autobiography.
KV: Exactly, yeah. Autobiography number two, “Delightfully Terrifying,” so look for that.
Well, and I just recently have rediscovered Edward Gorey, I don’t know if you are familiar [laughing] with all of his artwork and all of his books, but I’ve always loved his creepy, peculiar, macabre artwork, and I’ve just been reading more about him lately and trying to learn more of what he was about and it’s so strange because we have so many parallels in our lives.
SB: Oh, yeah?
KV: We both majored in French Literature, strange, we were both obsessed with Agatha Christie when we were kids, weird, we were both huge Buffy fans, he was like a huge Buffy fan in his older years-
SB: Okay, that one surprises me.
KV: Oh, yeah. It’s true, he would binge watch TV and it was Buffy, that’s what he loved. So, yeah, all these sort of random parallels in our lives.
SB: So which is your favorite of the Gashlycrumb Tinies?
KV: Yeah, I love the Gashlycrumb Tinies, I just ordered all of his anthrogories-
SB: Do you have a favorite child, my favorite was always-
KV: No, no, do you?
SB: Neville who died of ennui.
KV: [laughing] Yeah, that is probably the most hilarious, just the idea, right? [laughing] Yeah, ennui, just a cool word too. No, I don’t know, but that’s the thing is I haven’t read all of his books, but that’s why I just ordered like every one of his books and I could only find like one book about him and one book about his art, so I’ve ordered all of them and January is my Edward Gorey month, so I’m excited to delve into all of that. I feel like I’ve missed out, I feel like I should already know all about him, because I just admire his style so much, but I don’t, so that’s my 2018 plan so far.
SB: Cool, cool, cool. Sounds good.
KV: [laughing] Yeah.
SB: So I’m guessing since you haven’t read a lot yet, he’s not as much one of the authors that have inspired you-
KV: No, no.
SB: What did you read–like what did you read as a kid that’s inspired you, aside from Scary Stories?
KV: Aside from Scary Stories, well, I mean, like I said, I was–I don’t know why I was so obsessed with Agatha Christie, her-
SB: As all children are.
KV: As all children are, I guess, maybe, I don’t know [laughs]. I feel like you’re being sarcastic.
SB: Who knows what the kids are reading these days, it’s probably Agatha Christie.
KV: [laughing] It probably is. I don’t know, just something about Poirot with his distinguished little mustache, and sort of portly figure, and fancy suits, and then his sidekick Hastings, solving the mysteries, with all the rich English folks [laughing], something about that was very intriguing to me as a child and I had a huge crush on Hastings, so that was probably why I read them so much [laughs]. But yeah apart from that I do remember really loving The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, so that was probably one of my– I mean The Giving Tree and Skeleton Tree, and The Giving Tree, if you haven’t read it, is the super sad story of the tree that gives everything it has to this boy who befriended it, and you’re crying in the end cause you’re like, “Why did you give it all to the boy, tree?” But you love it [laughing], so that kind of I think prepared me to love stories that are really sad, in that sort of cathartic way that ends up making you more happy in the end. They change the way that you see the world, they change a little bit about who you are, after reading The Giving Tree you’re like, “Yeah, I’m gonna be more selfless like that tree,” [laughing] you have that nice cry that makes you just feel like you’ve released something in the end and now you feel better about it, so that prepared me I think to like books like that. But yeah, like I said, I loved all those Scary Story collections, I loved The Giver also, there’s a theme, there’s The Giving Tree, there’s The Giver [laughs]. All those, yeah–Where the Red Ferns Grows, all those really sad stories, Charlotte’s Web, classics. And I also loved biographies, when I was little, I don’t know why, I was obsessed with Charlie Chaplin, Al Capone, Billy the Kid, all of these random historical figures, I was totally obsessed with and would just read books about them, and I would write my own little research papers I wouldn’t turn into anyone, I would just write them, and it was back in the day so I would copy little pictures of them and paste them with glue onto paper, it was hilarious [laughs]. But I wouldn’t say I was really a voracious reader, I loved reading everything that I read for school, but I was also really picky and at the time I didn’t feel like I liked books that were geared toward my age necessarily, I always felt like I was looking for something else that just wasn’t what I was finding at the time. I loved Roald Dahl short stories, and he has this great one about the landlady who stuffs and taxidermies her guests, and that was one of my favorites.
SB: Yeah, I always think it’s interesting when people like Roald Dahl, either you’ve read all of it, or you’re on one side or the other, and it’s like, “Well, I really love Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the BFG,” and it’s like, “Oh, have you read any of his short stories, they’re very creepy and I think there was something wrong with him.”
KV: [laughing] Yeah, well I do love his novels too, especially The Witches-
SB: Yeah.
KV: That’s probably my favorite one. But yeah, I really love his short stories and that’s another thing, I have a whole plan next year of all the things I’m going to be rediscovering and that’s another one of them because it’s been a really long time since I’ve read most of things, but I just reread Royal Jelly the other day, it’s a very interesting one, if you’ve read that [laughs]. It’s about this guy whose wife has a baby and she’s–the baby’s losing weight every day, and getting smaller, and weaker, and so the guy has this brilliant idea, cause he’s a beekeeper, that he’s going to start feeding the baby royal jelly in her milk. And royal jelly is some sort of thing that’s secreted from the glands of the female bees, and so they feed it to all the bees for the first three days, and then the queen for her whole larval period, and that’s why she gets so giant, and that’s why she’s able to procreate because of this royal jelly [laughs]. And so, this story, of course it takes a funny turn and it’s all about how the dad and the baby, maybe they are actually sort of turning beelike as well thanks to this royal jelly [laughs]. Again, kind of creepy and twisted and demented and just the type of story I like.
SB: Yeah. I always thought it was funny that he was a spy in World War II and I believe so was Ian Fleming.
KV: [laughing] That’s strange, yeah.
SB: Cause Ian Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and then Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay-
KV: Oh, really? Oh.
SB: So if you watch the movie, it was written by two spies.
KV: I did not know that.
SB: Yeah.
KV: Okay, wow. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, it’s strange the background that some–that these people have [laughs].
SB: Yeah, sometimes I don’t like to find out things about famous people because I think, “Well, I want to like them.”
KV: [laughing] Right, yeah, you can’t really dig too deep. You always find stuff out that you’re like, “Oh, that was disturbing,” [laughs].
SB: Right, I’m sure nothing about you-
KV: Oh, no. No, no, no [laughs].
SB: When your fans find out … You’re just so delightfully charming.
KV: [laughing] Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely not, no skeletons in the closet [laughs].
SB: Or growing in the backyard.
KV: So to speak. Yeah, or growing in the backyard [laughing]. Well, I don’t know if anybody has questions about how to get started as a writer or if they’re interested in writing. If they are, you can totally be in Oklahoma and still get your book published. It feels like you’re kind of isolated out here, but [laughing] since the whole publishing industry is based, essentially, in New York, there’s some little–some agencies that aren’t in New York, and a few publishers, but for the most part all the big publishers and agents are out in New York, but there are a lot of great authors that have gotten their book deals, and gotten their careers started, while living in Oklahoma, and so definitely all your listeners across the whole state can totally do that [laughs]. The library’s a great place to get started, that’s kind of why I got into libraries in the first place, was–I went to this conference they used to have here called The Red Dirt Book Festival and they would have authors speak and librarians, and there was this one session I went to with these two librarians that had published their children’s book while they were working at the library, and I don’t remember what the book was or who the librarians were, but I just remember I was inspired by that. And so that same day I went and changed my major from French, cause I was taking–doing the Master’s degree in French at OU and I switched to Library and Information Studies and that’s kind of how I got started cause I just wanted to be surrounded by books and to get that deeper knowledge of the literature, which is kind of a part of–especially if you’re going into children’s or teen librarianship, you really have to know about that specific area of literature in order to recommend stuff to kids, so-
SB: Especially if you don’t read book reviews anymore.
KV: Yeah, especially if you don’t read book reviews anymore, which back then I did, but yeah [laughs]. So yeah, it’s a great way to get into it, and then there’s so many resources around the state too that people can look into if you’re looking to write children’s books, there’s the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators which is a great local group, so many of our local authors are a part of it, like Tammi Sauer, Anna Myers, tons of authors that have published twenty, thirty books apiece, and they got started with that group in Oklahoma reading all the books, writing all the words, getting the word out there. Yeah, it’s totally possible.
SB: Great, well thank you so much for coming.
KV: Yeah, yeah.
SB: And is there anything you’d like to end on? Let our listeners know how–where to find your book?
KV: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. So, look for Skeleton Tree, it is a middle grade novel with Scholastic, so for grades 3-7, you can find it in Barnes and Noble, Full Circle, Best of Books, at the libraries, or on Amazon, or if your schools have a Scholastic Book Fair or readings clubs you can find it at the fair and in those catalogs. And thank you so much for having me, it was great to talk to you.
SB: Great to have you.
KV: Yeah, thanks.
SB: That was Kim Ventrella, author of The Skeleton Tree. We look forward to lots of more great stories from Kim, and I’d just like to say thank you to her for taking the time to sit down and talk with me about her new book. You can find Kim at kimventrella.com. Thanks for listening, we’ll be back soon with more stories, interviews, and information from your friends at the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Library System.