Interview with Peter E. Morgan (conducted by Karen Schoenberger)

(click on image for review of this book)

You seem really to have heard the dialects you write in and really to have experienced the food and other cultural expressions of the places and people in your book.  Did you take this same road trip yourself?

Well, I guess I should come clean and admit that I was an avid hitchhiker when I was in college, though Nick and Maria's experiences in Running Out of Summer are "entirely fictional," as the disclaimer says. Although it wasn't so very long ago that I was traveling by thumb, things were certainly different back then--or maybe we were just generally less aware of the things that can happen to a youngster on the road.  Though I would shudder to think of my own son hitchhiking, since I grew up in Europe, my friends and I hitchhiked everywhere.  When I came to the US, it just never occurred to me not to do so.  Besides, I didn't have a lot of choice back then.  As a college student in Scotland, I applied for the Study Abroad program and was given a scholarship to attend the University of California for my junior year. Since I didn't have any money to get there, I took a summer job running a sailing program on a kids' camp in Canada, which paid my round-trip airfare and a bit of pocket money.  When August rolled around, instead of showing up for the return part of the ticket, I took my first quintessentially American step and lit out for the territory.  That was my first big East-West road-trip, but it certainly wasn't my last.  With regard to the rest of your question, I have always had an interest in accents, though I never had one myself, of course.  And as for food, well, I love to cook.  I'm sure you could produce a geocuisinical map of any country: a map with contours showing, for instance, the extent to which grits extend beyond the Deep South, or with shaded areas indicating the competing styles of barbeque as they battle state by state for regional supremacy. Geocuisinical?  Yes, I made that up.

 

Nick and Maria are both foreigners in the U.S.  As observers, what would you hope they show young readers about this country?

I have always been a passionate advocate for youth travel, mainly because I think that travel teaches us as much about ourselves as about the areas we visit.  Conversely, when we meet travelers like Maria and Nick, we share their "outside" point of view for a short while.  While their vision may be limited, it also points out the limitations in our own points of view.  I think that when we live in a place and become comfortable, or at least familiar, with our surroundings, we become perhaps a little over-confident that our outlook is the only outlook--the true, and right, and proper outlook. The fact that someone can come from outside and supplement our understanding of the familiar reminds us that our understanding is always only partial.
 

What do you think Nick and Maria show young readers about adolescence in general?

Maria and Nick are both victims of circumstances they neither invited nor deserved.  That happens to all of us.  Adolescents, especially, feel that it happens to them all the time.  What makes Nick and Maria interesting is how they play the hands they have been dealt, which is one of the big themes in Running Out of Summer.  Adolescence is a time when the stakes in the game of life begin to increase dramatically.  We learn, too often by trial and error, just who we can trust and who we can't. We learn that our fate is written not in the stars so much as in the choices we make each and every day.  We learn that there are consequences, good and bad, for our actions as well as our words.  The scary thing about many adolescents, and also a lot of adults, is the degree to which so many are willing to gamble so much for so little. And when the bet goes bad, the consequences suck in our friends, our families, and often innocent souls who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I think that sharing the experiences of fictional characters like Nick and Maria can help us almost to role-play a range of possibilities.  That way we have at least had some sort of vicarious experience, some degree of intellectual and emotional practice in dealing with similar situations if we are ever faced with them in our lives outside of the text.  Life is always a risk, but as Maria tells Nick, it doesn't have to be a gamble.  You assess the risk, you do what you can in every case to minimize it, and then you move forward with a better chance for success.  The result can still be exhilarating--and what's more, you live to do it again.  It's a model for success in every area from personal relationships to business.

 

In the story, Nick and Maria meet or are picked up by many colorful characters on the road.  Who were your favorite characters to write about and why?

Yes, I feel I know them like family.  Don't forget, I know even more about their histories than actually made it into the final draft of the book.  I like the Sophie and Henry characters, people who carry their loads, and those of others, even though it is past time they were allowed to rest.  I know the world will be a better place with people like Maria and Alice.  In general, I have always liked picaresque novels and road-trip stories and films (especially desert road trips).  They speak to me of individuality tempered always by the ultimate connectedness of all things.
 

Many of your characters share a passion for the environment.  Is this a passion of yours also?

Absolutely.  I am very encouraged that young people take such an active interest in the environment in a way that was less common when I was young, and I am optimistic that the next generation will treat the earth, as well as each other, better than the current one does.  It always strikes me as a terrible irony that a world so massive and complex, one that has developed over so many millions of years, can be so severely damaged in such a short time without the proper care and respect. 

 

Running Out of Summer reads like a fast-paced journey narrative as well as a mystery.  What aspects of the story do you think young adult readers might respond to and why?

I hope that young adults will ultimately see this as a novel of empowerment and self-determination...but before that sinks in, if it ever does, I hope that they will see Running Out of Summer as a compelling and fast-paced adventure--a darn good read.  Having taught Young Adult literature to pre-service and in-service teachers for many years, I saw a great deal of literature written for young people that was more like medicine than fiction.  None of the benefits that teachers hope their students take away from literature can ever effectively be absorbed if the reader feels that the book is like eating dry bran cereal.  I hope that some of my readers will be inspired to think about and look into a few of the very real issues and questions the book draws on for its background; but those who read it and enjoy it and then pick up and read something else will please me just as much.

 

What would you say are your five favorite books and why?  Any favorite young adult books?

I bet if you asked me tomorrow, my five favorite books would be different.  I am an omnivorous reader, and I love everything from Shakespeare to Lois-Ann Yamanaka.  I am currently judging a writer's competition, and even those novels that the critic in me tells me are flawed I still enjoy.  All stories draw me in, and it's really hard for me not to appreciate the efforts of someone who has worked so hard to entertain and inform me.  As for Young Adult literature, anything by Chris Crutcher, Christopher Paul Curtis, Laurie Halse Anderson, Francesca Lia Block...there are so many good books out there that just take your breath away.  I also like books that explore the young adult experience in ways that are accessible to older teens and also compelling for adults--Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging (a book every teacher ought to read), Anthony Grooms' Bombingham, and so on.
 

 
Where did you grow up?

I was born in England, in one of the London boroughs.  When I was three years old, my parents joined a program offering inner-city families 100%, no-deposit-down mortgages to move out to new, planned communities around the country and get a start in terms of home ownership.  We moved out to Harlow, where my parents' first decision was whether to buy a carpet or a couch.  They chose the carpet, red, I think (though I was only three-and-a-half at the time), and the furniture came later.  From there, we moved further out into the Essex countryside, and I grew up climbing trees and wading through streams in and around a little thirteenth-century village called Bocking.  Later, I went to Scotland and California for university.  After graduation, I worked in Scotland developing and testing a life and social skills curriculum for unemployed teens, then in Orpington, near London, teaching special education, before moving back to California in the mid-eighties.
 

What would you say are the best qualities about adolescents today?

I think that today's adolescents are anxious to be defined by their own attitudes and achievements, or not defined and pigeonholed at all, and certainly not defined by the labels their parents earned.  Maybe that's why we are onto letters--Generation X, Generation Y, etc.  It's like the seasonal hurricane naming system--we have been through all the names, and we are onto letters because we never thought things would go this far. When I moved from California to the South ten years ago, this was especially clear.  While there was still a great deal of evidence of old attitudes, my students, on the whole, were anxious not to be thought of as part of the Old South, or even the New South, but as a generation which had moved beyond that and joined the rest of the country.  When I travel to Hawaii or California, I see social changes that today's and tomorrow's adolescents will refine and carry with them across the country, and that pleases me a great deal.