♪♪ -In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is the New Hampshire Authors Series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ -Originally from Littleton, Tor Seidler grew up in Vermont and Washington state, and now he lives in New York City.

He published his first book, The Dulcimer Boy, when he was just 27 years old, and has been writing and publishing to wide acclaim ever since.

His work has been honored in the list of New York Times Notable Books, Publishers Weekly, and Library of Congress Notable Books, and has received Parents’ Choice Awards.

It's been translated into a dozen languages.

His most recent book is Gully’s Travels.

His classics include A Rat's Tale, The Wainscott Weasel, and Mean Margaret.

Which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

He's also a teacher in the MFA program at The New School.

It's a distinct pleasure to welcome Tor Seidler back to the Granite State.

[applause] Welcome.

[Rebecca chuckles] Well, Tor and I were talking up here as we were getting miked and the whole business was, was happening, and, we started to talk about how you create a fantasy world because many of your books take place in a world that has elements of realism.

Those weasels sure seem real to me, but it's not in a world that any of us live in.

And so would you talk a little bit about how these worlds come to be in your imagination and on the page?

-Well, that's an interesting question.

I've written books, some of my most popular books, for some reason I've written, I don't know, 12 or 15 books, but some of the most popular ones seem to be... have animal characters be anthropomorphic.

I think the most important aspect of writing fantasy is really believing it yourself.

Is really being when I, the first one I wrote of that ilk was called A Rat's Tale and it's about these, rats that live in New York City and there are fancy rats, and then there's not so fancy rats.

And the hero of the book is kind of an artistic rat who feels that he's a total pariah for various reasons.

If I read a little bit of it.

You want me to read the opening paragraph or something?

Give... because I’m sure not very many people have read...

This is the way the book begins.

On a sticky mid-summer day, when the heat and humidity kept most of the creatures in Central Park from stirring a young rat named Montague Mad-Rat, or to be precise, Montague Mad-Rat the younger, was busy collecting feathers in the birds preening grounds above the reservoir.

Once his tail was looped around as many feathers as it could manage.

Montague crept through the underbrush down to the berry patches by the Great Lawn.

Here he carefully gathered up ripe fallen berries into his mouth, choosing the widest possible selection of colors.

These were for his mother, who melted the berries down into dyes to color the feathers, which she fashioned into rather fanciful shapes.

Best described perhaps, as rat-hats.

When his cheeks were bulging, Montague headed for home.

The quickest way was by an underground drainpipe that came up in Columbus Circle at the foot of the Great Park, but it always took him quite a while to get there because of his zigzagging route under bushes and park benches.

Montague dreaded like the plague meeting other young rats.

If they ever caught sight of him, they poked fun at him.

Not that he really blame them, considering his puffy cheeks and the bouquet of feathers in his tail.

But once, about a year ago, he'd introduced himself to a group of young wharf rats in the park before he'd collected any feathers or berries, and they pointed and laughed at him anyway.

Something was obviously the matter with him, but what?

This mystery haunting him ever since, had turned him painfully shy.

- Oh, Monty.

-And that's, [Tor chuckles] I read that, I think because, in creating that world, I wanted to create this outsider character who the reader could sympathize with, identify with.

But I wanted him to be a rat, because I had moved to New York as a young guy and had no money and lived in a crummy apartment and my own...

I couldn't afford a gym at the time, so what I would do for exercise would be I'd go run around the reservoir in Central Park, and I noticed especially this time of year, I'd hear this rustling in the leaves.

And I think I thought it was squirrels at first.

And then little by little I realized it was rats.

And then I'd see these signs on the trees in Central Park, these red signs saying, keep your dogs out of this area because we're putting down rat poison.

And I just began to feel really sorry for the rats.

And I thought they were persecuted.

And I thought, somebody has to speak up for the rats.

And I wrote this book, what, 25 years ago now?

And, I had a lot of fun inhabiting the world of the rats.

But even in the rat world, that I create, there's a... it's a very hierarchical society and their classes and their... he falls in love with a female rat who turns out to be from the... who lives on a wharf.

His, his family lives in a sewer and so there's this whole... it's kind of almost like a Frank Capra movie or something, you know, with Carole Lombard.

-Yeah [Rebecca chuckles] -To answer... to go back to your initial question, I was thinking about I've written, I guess four books that use animal characters, and in each one I used a different kind of strategy to get into the world.

And in A Rat’s Tale, I concentrated on the main character, Montague the guy that you meet at the very beginning, turns out to be the hero of the book.

In The Wainscott Weasel, which is another book I did, this one was illustrated by the same wonderful illustrator, Fred Marcellino.

I don't even get to the the main cha... Weasel until the second chapter.

I open it up in that book I decided to give you the world instead of the character.

And in this other book, Gully’s Travels, which is about about dogs, I decided to open it by giving you sort of a contentious argument between two dogs in Washington Square Park.

So each each one, you know, it's kind of a different way to begin each one.

But I do think the the getting the audience into the fantasy world, is a matter of investing yourself in that world totally yourself and living in it.

Have you ever tried to write fantasy?

-No.

[laughter] Good question.

-Yeah [Rebecca chuckles] You sort of... you become a rat, you look at the world from a rat's eye point of view.

-I've written, stories with fantastical elements, but they're more real, the realism sort of spins off into a little bit of fantasy, like Bigfoot appears, that kind of thing.

But I've never created a whole fantastic world.

And, and it's very interesting to me how it seems to me that there are rules within the world that you create, that you must abide by for you know, who can talk to whom, who can like... in one of the books, the birds, the birds don't talk.

Is that the one?

Yeah?

- Yeah, in the Wainscott Weasel?

- In the Wainscott Wea... And, -they sing.

-They sing and for a long time, the weasels can't figure out why the bird doesn't speak, but that's the rule... -Well, you know, I don't I don't know if this is a anythin... a question that interests anybody here, but in, when I first set out to write an animal book, an anthropomorphic book, I decided I could have the animals talking to human beings do whatever I wanted, and I gave it to...

I have a very distinguished editor named Michael DeCapua, who's edited Maurice Sendak and William Steig and all sorts of wonderful people over the years.

And he told me in no uncertain terms that there are rules and regulations for these sort of things.

You can have the animals talk amongst themselves.

Different species of animals are allowed to talk with each other.

But there's a kind of an unwritten law that you cannot have the animals talking to human beings.

The greatest anthropomorphic writer of all, probably E.B.

White, transgressed that rule in, in Charlotte's Web and has Fern the little girl actually talk to some animals.

But, you know, exception proves the rule.

-When Margaret learns animal language, -She learns animal language is a different thing.

- Yeah, she learns it.

- Yep, yep.

You make a really good point in talking about setting up rules and abiding by them, because I do think that, in whatever world you create, you have to do fairly early on in the first couple of chapters, you have to set up all your kind of rules and regulations, and then you have to abide by them.

And then I think the reader is often willing to suspend disbelief, censorious this, whatever you want to call it, and go along with it.

-One of my favorite lines in A Rat's Tale, and I think of it as the telling detail that you are completely in this world is when I think it's Aunt Elizabeth says, you're looking a little longer today, Monty.

Monty is growing... he doesn't grow tall he grows longer.

And your tail is looking great, you know?

You have to really be in that world.

You're looking a little longer today Monty, yeah.

-Yeah, there's a lot of tail jokes in that with slight sexual innuendos going on... [laughter] -Oh, I didn't get that part.

[laughter continues] But that brings me to another question as I read, I was immersed in your world for this month and I loved it.

It was great.

But there’s, a lot of death.

You know?

People getting burned up in houses, the whole family gone.

That's just in the first page.

And then we move on and, you know, there's a lot of orphans.

There's a lot of, I mean, you hit everything.

People fall in love.

I mean, animals and people fall in love.

So there's, you know, there's violence, there's sex.

There's all kinds of stuff going on in these books for children.

-You get a lot of letters from kids when you write books for kids and, And it's one of the great pleasures of actually writing for children is when you write for adults, I've actually written an adult novel and a couple other adult things.

Adults almost never write you.

Whereas kids, often I think they're encouraged by their teachers, so it may not be coming directly from them, but they do write you.

And I've gotten probably over the years, you know, 100 letters that complain about the very fact you bring up that I killed off the uncle and they found it too sad.

And you know, as an adult, you don't really think of death because we deal with death so often.

It's so much a part of our life.

You don't, you forget how traumatic it can be to a child.

And I do think sometimes I should have been a little more sensitized to that but, -Well I don't know about that.

I mean, I think it's a way to sort of a painless I don't know if it's painless, but if we read about if these children are reading about the death of Uncle Moony, who is, after all, a rat, that's a way of sort of introducing that concept to them, or having them take that concept in and and live with it in this fantasy world, it's a little safer when people die, or rats die in a fantasy world.

-Well, if you look at the tradition of children's writing, I mean, all you have to look into is Perot or the Brothers Grimm particularly.

Most of those stories are incredibly violent.

I mean, just think of a story like Hansel and Gretel.

Think about what happens there, first thing that happens is the this family gets rid of their abandons their children in the woods, then the kids end up with a horrible old lady with a house made of cookies, and she tries to bake them alive in her oven, you know, and it goes on... a lot of children's literature is very, very grim indeed and is dealing with very traumatizing things and there's a reason for that.

There's a guy named Bruno Bettelheim who I don't know if any of you ever heard of him he wrote a book called The Uses of Enchantment, where he went a little too far in interpreting classic children's fairy tales in a Freudian sense.

But I really like the book in that he talks about how by talking about these things to children, it has a kind of cathartic effect.

And if you deal with something in a book, it allows you, as you were beginning to get at, allows you to sort of begin to deal with it in your own psyche.

-Think about Charlotte's Web.

-Exactly.

-We get very attached to Charlotte, and then she's gone, and then there's the... -the little eggs -the little eggs -that fly off -that fly off, so it's a subject, it's a subject.

Well, so you're not a musician yourself, but you consider music to be a pure form of art.

-Well, I think we all do.

I mean, as far as expressing emotion and that sort of thing, because to me music is very mysterious.

Maybe because I can't imagine being a composer.

It just seems to be so amazing the idea of being able to string together notes and create this amazing thing, like the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you know, whatever.

So I do, I put music on a bit of a pedestal, but the visual arts too, and writing itself, I, I think the arts are very important to society.

Because after all, when everything else is gone, what's left, you know?

-But the life of an artist is not an easy one, as Monty discovers in A Rat's Tale, and as The Dulcimer Boy discovers when people try to exploit him.

It's not, it's not a clear path where you can start at step one and move your way up a ladder and become, I don't know, the head of medicine or the CEO, or so you've chosen this life for yourself.

- And you, right?

- And I.

- Yeah.

- And I have as well.

-Well, actually, I love my, I’ve had...

I've been very lucky, in that, I stu...

I moved to New York City when I was young.

I stumbled on a really good editor.

I have a great agent, and I most of the time I've been able to make a decent living just doing my writing and what could be better than that?

You don't have to wake up to an alarm clock in the morning.

You don't have a boss bothering you.

You know, it's pretty great.

-And you discovered your au... or, an audience.

I know you've written one novel for adults, but most of your work is for middle grade, students.

But most of your work is for middle grade, students.

- Yes, yes.

- You discovered that audience early on.

- Yes, yes.

-You discovered that audience early on.

-I was lucky that way, yes.

-And it comes naturally to you writing for young people?

-I begin to wonder, you you made the point that each book is a new adventure, and I think every time you set out to write a book, it's like you've never written one before in a funny way.

- It is true, do you know what do you know what I think is that you have a child, child's sense of humor.

Does that... [Rebecca chuckles] I mean, you know what makes kids... That doesn't sound right, but you know what makes kids laugh.

-Well, I, I take that as a great compliment.

-Now, I want to ask you about illustrators.

I think people are curious about that because it does you know, I look at Brain Boy and... and the Death Master.

Another charming tale.

-Yeah [Rebecca laughs] -It's, it's a creepy one.

It's a creepy one.

But, but the cover just makes me want to read this book.

And then we have Dulcimer.

Where's The Dulcimer Boy?

Just these wonderful, gentle illustrations.

And so you've worked with a lot of... how does that work?

And, do you th... - Well, I mean, I've been very lucky again in that respect in my career because I've had some great illustrators, the best of all being Fred Marcellino, who did both the this one and A Rat’s Tale.

- And A Rat’s Tale.

-And he's just absolutely... sadly, he died very young of colon cancer, but he, he when we'd worked together, we actually worked as, let me take a step back.

A lot of people think when they write a children's book that they should find an if it's the kind of book that needs to be illustrated, that they should find an illustrator and send it into a publisher as a package and try to get it published that way.

That's not the case, usually the publishers tend to want to get the text, and then they will find the illustrator for you, and they don't want you to have anything to do with it as a rule.

And usually the text is done first and the illustrator then enhances your text, and then they send it to the publisher and they print it and publish it.

I was lucky enough in finding Fred Marcellino because he he was somebody I met socially before professionally, to actually get to work with him.

And it was a really interesting process because he would complain to me about certain aspects of my text.

For example, The Wainscott Weasel, the weasel, the main character in The Wainscott Weasel has an eyepatch and a main subplot in the story is how this young weasel was attacked as a little kid by an owl and lost his eye, and it becomes a very important part of the story.

But I never had that in the original story, the illustrator, Fred Marcellino said, I can't differentiate all these weasel characters one from the other.

I mean, one weasel looks exactly like another.

Couldn't you do something to make your hero look a little different?

So, -So you plucked out his eye?

-I plucked out his eye.

[laughter] I plucked out his eye, and that became became a major part of the story in A Rat's Tale, the same thing happened he... we worked as a team, and it really is a marvelous thing to work, to collaborate that way with somebody.

Normally in publishing, that doesn't happen, sadly.

And sometimes you can have an illustrator who isn't such a great collaborator like John is a brilliant illustrator, but he kept trying to change my text in ways that both my editor and I thought were wrongheaded.

So, you know, but it's a very interesting process, and, I personally care a lot about how my books look.

And so I tend to be very picky about the illustrators.

And I've, I've vetoed a number of illustrators over the years.

In fact, this book that you mentioned, do you guys remember those, any of you, remember those books, they were called A Series of Unfortunate Events, you know?

This is that... - You called it.

-This is the same guy that did all those books.

And the first couple people they found for this book I thought were terrible.

And then they, so I think it's important to assert yourself, in the process, to a certain extent, not so much that you alienate your editor and they decide not to publish your book.

-Right, right.

Well, my daughter, when she looked at this book, she said, that's the illustrator from A Series of Unfortunate Events.

We looked through, we couldn't find the name, but, -Oh she picked that up?

We looked through, we couldn't find the name, but, - but... - His name is Brett Helquist.

-Brett Helquist.

-And that's an interesting book of all my books I had written I published that book around 2003, and at that point I'd been writing for quite a while, and I'd published maybe 8 or 9 books.

All my books were set either in a totally fantastic world or in the northeast.

New England or New York or Long Island, and all of my family, as my cousin Christina knows, moved out to Seattle, Washington, quite a long time ago, and they kept complaining to me that I never set anything in Seattle.

Now, when I was in Seattle, I went to a really cool school called Lakeside School, which is like a imitation New England prep school kind of place.

And one of my schoolmates was Bill Gates, and I decided that I should put Bill in a, in a book so the, the villain of this is really, Bill Gates up to a certain extent.

[laughter] -I need to read this again.

[laughter] -The Bill I knew in high school Because, so... -The Bill I knew in high school who was very different from the philanthropic Bill that you all know, probably giving away billions of dollars to, to to help people in Africa get over malaria.

-Death master, he’s the death master.

- That's just a little sidebar.

- Just a little sidebar.

He drugs all the children.

[laughter] And dresses them in uniforms.

It's a great book.

It's a lot of fun.

Inspirations for you.

I wanted you to talk about.

You talked about your, your stepfather and how he was a great support to you and a lot of, in a lot of these books, the, the artists are supported by their families.

Sometimes not so much.

So can you talk about, the role of family or your stepfather in particular, or just in, you know where?

-Well, again, I feel like I was very blessed in my life because I always from quite a young age, from about the time I was 8 or 9 years old, I wanted to be a writer and being a writer, is, anybody that's tried it is, is not exactly.

It's not the kind of thing you tell your parents and they jump for joy.

-Yay -I mean, they want you to be a lawyer.

- Oh goodie.

- They want you to be, you know, something that has a secure income attached to it.

And I was lucky enough to grow up in a family where my mother, who had a not so great first marriage, but when I was very young, she married a guy named Gregory Falls, who at that point was the head of the drama department at the University of Vermont in Burlington and we all became a family, my older brother and me and my mother and him and he started something up in Burlington called the Champlain Shakespeare Festival.

And so as a little kid, I was like, completely supersaturated with Shakespeare, which was a wonderful way to grow up.

We’d go to one play after another and I'd go to the rehearsals and listen to this marvelous language, tripping off the actor’s lips, you know?

And then we moved out to Seattle because he got offered the drama department at a bigger University he works for Washington in Seattle, and he started a contemporary theater out in Seattle that's still one of the preeminent regional theaters in America called ACT Theater, and so I had this wonderful influence at home of somebody who really loved the arts and was passionate about them and who encouraged me, when I broke I...

I'd never told anyone I wanted to be a writer I was.

I went to Stanford University and I had already graduated, and before I ever mentioned to anybody that I wanted to be a writer.

- And you were not an English major?

-And you were not an English major?

-I actually was an English major.

-Oh, you were an English major?

-I was an English major..

But, they probably thought I was going on the professorial track, and... but when I finally broke the bad news to them, they were very understanding about it.

And since then, I've gotten a lot... my mom was great, too.

So I think a lot of people have to struggle with that.

But I was very lucky and didn't.

And as far... as far as influences are concerned, I also feel very indebted to my stepfather because when we when my older brother and I were little kids, he to, to encourage us to read, he made a deal with us and he said, if you guys read a book and tell me about it, give me a kind of book report.

I'll go buy you another one.

And like all kids, I was very acquisitive and wanted books as objects and so that was a great... and there was this series of books that nobody probably reads anymore by somebody named Thornton W Burgess and... do you know the books?

Anybody know the books out there?

- Oh yes!

- Yeah, okay, great.

- We love them!

Those books when I was a little kid, the Old Mother West Wind book, they were all about animals.

They had a huge influence.

I'm sure that's why I wrote my first anthropomorphic book.

And it was because of my stepfather.

He published 46 books, and by reading one, I'd get the next...

I had all 46.

And I really, you know, you could do it by going to the library, but he would actually buy us the actual books.

But he would actually buy us the actual books.

-You could, you could own that book.

That happened in my family, too.

I got a book, only I got one a year.

I had to read it over and over, but I really liked it.

-We had to give an in-depth book report.

It wasn't like you couldn't just say you'd read the book.

You had to... at dinner, at the dinner table you had to actually give kind of a plot synopsis of the whole thing.

-Yeah?

Which I think was probably good also, good... - Yeah.

-So I feel real... very lucky.

I came from a wonderful family and we're still all very close.

Sadly, my stepfather is no longer with us, but the rest of our family is.

-I think you mentioned that just that one of... is it one of the characters in this book that is based on a family member?

In Turpin yeah, well, I had a... - In Turpin.

-I had a New Hampshire uncle.

His name was Jack Tilton, John H. Tilton, and he lived up in Littleton, and he became, he was a member of the state legislature here for years.

And he was, I hate to say it, but he was kind of a I won't say an alcoholic.

Let's just say he enjoyed drinking an awful lot.

- The tipple, he enjoyed the tipple.

- He tippled a lot and I he's the only character in my family ever actually put in a book.

And I got a lot of flak for it, so I decided not to do it again.

- Yeah that happens, yeah.

But if you had made him a rat you could have gotten away with it.

-That's one of the great things about writing about animal characters.

You can you can kind of disguise human beings as animals, and they don't take offense because nobody's going to think that they're this rat character.

-I want to offer you this compliment that your animal characters are just as human as your human characters and just as real.

And that's what draws me in.

-Well, thank you very much, I appreciate that.

I think maybe they're realer because those, those are the books that sell the best.

-Yeah, yeah.

-There's so much great writing going on for young people today.

In fact, a lot of big name adult writers are, as a lot of you, I'm sure know, are writing for YA and young people just because it's a lucrative market commercially but it's also a it's opened up so much.

- And it's an appreciative market - Yeah.

- Yeah.

-And another great thing about it is that your books have shelf life.

You know?

You write an adult novel and you're lucky if it lasts.

I mean, if you're Ernest Hemingway or something it goes on, but you're you're lucky if it lasts 2 or 3 years in, in print.

Whereas when you write, for kids, often your books will stay in print ten, twenty years or more.

-And when the child grows up, -You have an ever renewing audience.

-We pass it on yeah, well thank you.

I want to thank the audience for being so wonderful and thank you, Tor Seidler, for coming to New Hampshire and talking about your work.

Thank you.

-Thank you very much.

[applause] ♪♪