Authorgraph No.214


A


t one end of Sarah Crossan’s kitchen is a blackboard that takes up nearly a whole wall. While Sarah’s daughter could be expected to make some contributions there, it’s a fair bet she didn’t write up the quote from Aristotle or the admonition well out of a three-year-old’s reach to


‘work hard and be happy’ (if I remember the gist of it). Sarah has certainly been working hard. Her first book for young people, The Weight of Water, was published the UK in 2012, and in the three years since there have been four others, with her newest title, One,


just


Already she has a sparsely furnished,


eco-friendly,


suite version of a writer’s shed at the end of the garden.


While she always wanted to be a writer, Sarah says that she lacked confidence. She studied Philosophy and Literature


published. en-


Sarah Crossan Interviewed by Clive Barnes


Kasienska’s point of view as a series of short poems, each rarely more than two pages long and sometimes as short as six or seven lines. Sarah was aware of the verse novel for young people as a popular form in the USA. She had taught Karen Hesse’s Newbery Award-winning Out of


the at


Warwick University and then chose to train as a teacher partly, she says, to get over her shyness with people. She taught for a couple of years, and it was while teaching that she decided to return to Warwick to do an MA in Creative Writing. ‘I was


teaching kids and telling them they could be anything they wanted to be, and then they would ask me, so did you always want to be a teacher then? And I would have to say, well no, not really.’ She says that she knows that some people doubt the validity of a degree in creative writing but, for her, it meant that she was told ‘I was not terrible’ and could for the first time feel justified in taking herself seriously as a writer.


By the time Sarah graduated, she had met her future husband and moved to New York with him. Not able to find work, she came back after six months and returned to teaching, maintaining a long distance relationship for three years. She then rejoined her husband in the USA and spent seven years teaching in independent schools, before they finally moved back to the UK after the birth of their daughter and the publication of Sarah’s first novel.


It was while teaching at a private school in New York that Sarah gained an Edward Albee fellowship, enabling her to retreat to a remote converted barn on Long Island to write for a month in the company of other writers and artists. Her intention was to complete the adult novel she had been working on for about six or seven years. In the event, what emerged was the first draft of The Weight of Water, written in the intensity of the moment, ‘getting up at 5 in the morning and writing until 10 at night.’ She was persuaded by a friend to send it out, and it was picked up by her present literary agent, Julia Churchill. ‘Having been a teacher, and really loving young people, writing for them was sort of natural, and I don’t know why I hadn’t done it before. And then I thought, okay, this is what I am meant to be doing.’


Although written in the States, The Weight of Water is the story of Kasienska, a young Polish immigrant living with her mother in a one-room flat in Coventry and finding her place in a new country and a new school. What makes it distinctive is that it is written from


10 Books for Keeps No.214 September 2015


Dust. ‘But I hadn’t realised that, although in America the verse novel sells really well – you’ve got writers like Ellen Hopkins who are bestsellers – in the UK it’s much more of a hard sell and Julia said we’d have to find a publisher who had real confidence in the book. I was very lucky to find Bloomsbury.’


To say The Weight of Water was well received would be an understatement. It was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and won a clutch of other awards. It was followed by two prose dystopian novels, Breathe (2012) and Resist (2013). These are set in a future polluted time where the air is so contaminated that survivors are confined to a hermetically sealed dome in which social divisions determine access to oxygen. Sarah returned to a contemporary story with Apple and Rain, published in 2014, about a young girl adjusting to the sudden arrival of her long-lost mother and a


new sister. This was also in prose, but with a big supportive role in the story for poetry and Apple’s poetry-loving English teacher. This, too, was shortlisted for the Carnegie. And now there is this year’s new novel, One, the story of conjoined twins, again in verse.


Sarah believes that with the dystopian novels she was finding her feet, ‘working out what kind of writer I was’; and, although they were successful commercially, she probably won’t go back to genre writing. ‘I feel more comfortable with contemporary fiction and I feel really comfortable writing in verse.’ True, verse is more intense and can sometimes be difficult to write, ‘because it’s about the melody, and the rhythm of the language’, but ‘I really like that stripping away. There is a lot of narration in prose and you don’t necessarily need that. I think that writing in prose is like a film and that writing in verse is like a series of photographs. With verse, you leave the reader to do a lot more work and it gives the reader a lot more credit.’


She doesn’t feel that she actively chooses the way that she writes. She says that, however pretentious it might sound, it’s the story that demands a particular approach. She began One in prose believing


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