An Inside Look with Katherine Marsh
(Author of Nowhere Boy)
*During the summer of 2016, I added this feature to my blog which was called "Season #ONE". This first season ran from June of 2016 to March of 2017.
*I started up the interviews again in June of 2017. It was great to get back to Season #TWO. This season ran throughout the summer.
*Season #THREE ran during the school year of 2017/2018.
*I started up the interviews again in June of 2017. It was great to get back to Season #TWO. This season ran throughout the summer.
*Season #THREE ran during the school year of 2017/2018.
*It has been such an honor to connect with authors and "chat" about their novel, characters, and thoughts about the story.
*This is the Seventeeth interview of what I'm calling Season #FOUR.
*Thank you to Katherine Marsh for being the Sixty-Eighth author that I've had the pleasure of interviewing. I truly appreciate it.
*Here are links to the first Sixty-Seven interviews…
SEASON #ONE
SEASON #TWO
Interview#38 with Terri Libenson (Author of Invisible Emmie)
Interview#39 with Tony Abbott (Author of The Summer of Owen Todd)
Interview #40 with Rob Buyea (Author of The Perfect Score)
Interview#39 with Tony Abbott (Author of The Summer of Owen Todd)
Interview #40 with Rob Buyea (Author of The Perfect Score)
SEASON #FOUR
Interview #54 with Jonathan Auxier (Author of Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster)
Interview #55 with Sharon Creech (Author of Saving Winslow)
Interview #56 with Stacy McAnulty (Author of The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl)
Interview #57 with Kelly Yang (Author of Front Desk)
Interview #58 with Jennifer A. Nielsen (Author of Resistance)
Interview 59 with Christina Collins (Author of After Zero)
Interview #60 with Eric Walters (Author of Elephant Secrets)
Interview #61 with Phil Bildner (Author of The Rip and Red Series)
Interview #62 with Erin Soderberg (Author of Milla in Charge)
Interview #63 with Laura Shovan (Author of Take Down)
Interview #64 with Donna Gephart (Author of In Your Shoes)
Interview #65 with Alan Gratz (Author of Grenade)
Interview #66 with Barbara O'Connor (Author of Wonderland)
Interview #67 with Lindsey Stoddard (Author of Just Like Jackie)
*I so enjoyed this story. Once I started it, I could not put it down. It was such a special story about two incredible boys and the relationship they formed. It was a thrill when Katherine agreed to do "An Inside Look" interview. This is definitely a novel I'll be sharing with my students.
*Katherine was kind, gracious, and giving with her answers to the questions. It is an honor to post her responses here on the blog.
*Here is a link to my review of the book...
*Thank you Lindsey Stoddard for writing this book...
Nowhere Boy
by Katherine Marsh (August 7, 2018)
In 2015, our family moved to Brussels, Belgium and we made the decision to put our two children in the local Belgian school. This was a full immersion experience as they did not speak French when they started. Their experience inspired the story of Max, an American boy whose parents drag him to Belgium and put him in the local French-speaking school. I wanted American kids to feel what it is like to be so far out of your linguistic and cultural comfort zone, to feel like an Other. The character of Ahmed was inspired by the refugees—nearly 1 million of them—arriving in Europe that year, including 80,000 children under 18 years of age travelling alone without parents. Ahmed also doesn’t want to be in Belgium, misses home and feels like an Other. But at the same time that there are parallels between the boys, there is not equivalence. Max has so many more advantages than Ahmed. I believe it’s the duty of the person with more to help the person with less. At the same time, when I spoke with volunteers who worked with refugees that year they all expressed how much the experience had GIVEN them. Generosity and kindness are a two-way street.
What do you think is Ahmed and Max's most admirable qualities?
I think both boys’ most admirable quality is the choice they make to listen to each other. They are initially quite suspicious but they take that extra beat to listen and give each other a chance to be more than a stereotype. And I think that’s so important in this day and age, in America especially.
Is there anything you wish they would have changed or done differently in their story?
I wish Max and Ahmed could have changed more hearts and minds. But there are characters in the story who do no share their views and their tolerance toward strangers. I tried to be fair to these characters—to show the roots of their fear and prejudice. In some cases, these people make legitimate points, for example about the difficult logistics of integration. But I also want to show that there is a moral responsibility, found in every religion, to help strangers and Others. Fear closes us up and it’s not a state of grace where we can be our best selves.
What do you think these boys can offer to other children that are experiencing similar situations to what they went through?
We are all Others or feel like Others at some point or another in our lives. What I hope Max and Ahmed can offer is the power of friendship to anchor us to our own sense of self-worth. It was really important to me that Max was a struggling student, that he is not “the best” at things like his sister Claire, but that he can still be a good friend and a good person and feel a sense of self-worth through that. I think for kids like Ahmed the message is that the world values you, that you are important even when you feel powerless and that you still have the power to change another person’s life.
How did you research Ahmed and Max and the circumstances they found themselves in?
Max was the easy one because our family was living a very similar experience. For Ahmed, I did a lot of research, including interviewing Syrian refugees from Aleppo, aid workers and even an unaccompanied minor who had arrived in Belgium by himself in 2015.
Do you and the boys share any similarities?
I share moments of self-doubt with the boys. Having been in Brussels during the lockdown and terror attacks, I also have a sense of the fear the boys felt.
What was the hardest scene to write about them?
I wrote the scene of Ahmed recounting to Max what happened to his mother and sisters in Aleppo in a single writing session. I had done a lot of research and reading by that point and I was able to imagine the emotional devastation in a very visceral way. I cried when I wrote it and each time I revised it.
Who do you think was Ahmed and Max's biggest supporters and why?
Max and Ahmed’s biggest supporters are Farah and Oscar, their friends at school. Farah is Belgian but of Moroccan descent. This is a big community in Brussels that I got to know a bit; they are still treated in many ways as outsiders, an experience that both gives Farah fellow-feeling for Ahmed and extreme wariness about breaking the law to help him. Oscar is a bit of a delinquent and a bully but he has endured his own personal loss that allows him to make the empathetic and imaginative leap to understanding Ahmed and his situation.
Why do you think some young people can risk everything for another human, when others are self-centered and can’t think beyond themselves?
I wish I knew the answer to this. I think fear is a big part of why we don’t help others. Fear makes Others into abstract threats rather than allowing us to see their humanity and what is common between us. I think we need to help kids listen, even to people they don’t like or agree with, and to imagine themselves in their shoes. This is not about being a doormat and letting people with bad intentions walk over you. It’s about listening to individual stories and individuals rather than generalizing and then standing up for what your conscience tells you is right.
What do you think they are doing at the present time?
Without spoiling the ending for your readers, I will only say that I gave Ahmed and Max to America. I did this not knowing if it would be a happy ending for them. It’s up to readers, American readers especially, to write the ending of their story.
What was the hardest scene to write about them?
I wrote the scene of Ahmed recounting to Max what happened to his mother and sisters in Aleppo in a single writing session. I had done a lot of research and reading by that point and I was able to imagine the emotional devastation in a very visceral way. I cried when I wrote it and each time I revised it.
Who do you think was Ahmed and Max's biggest supporters and why?
Max and Ahmed’s biggest supporters are Farah and Oscar, their friends at school. Farah is Belgian but of Moroccan descent. This is a big community in Brussels that I got to know a bit; they are still treated in many ways as outsiders, an experience that both gives Farah fellow-feeling for Ahmed and extreme wariness about breaking the law to help him. Oscar is a bit of a delinquent and a bully but he has endured his own personal loss that allows him to make the empathetic and imaginative leap to understanding Ahmed and his situation.
Why do you think some young people can risk everything for another human, when others are self-centered and can’t think beyond themselves?
I wish I knew the answer to this. I think fear is a big part of why we don’t help others. Fear makes Others into abstract threats rather than allowing us to see their humanity and what is common between us. I think we need to help kids listen, even to people they don’t like or agree with, and to imagine themselves in their shoes. This is not about being a doormat and letting people with bad intentions walk over you. It’s about listening to individual stories and individuals rather than generalizing and then standing up for what your conscience tells you is right.
What do you think they are doing at the present time?
Without spoiling the ending for your readers, I will only say that I gave Ahmed and Max to America. I did this not knowing if it would be a happy ending for them. It’s up to readers, American readers especially, to write the ending of their story.
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