Carolyn Coman: A Horse of a Different Color
By Jessica Rae Patton, Associate Editor

Dark is the word often used to describe the subject matter of Carolyn Coman's novels. Edgy, harrowing, gritty and difficult are other adjectives that reviewers and readers – and Coman herself – have used in reference to the topics undertaken by this esteemed writer of young-adult fiction. This past July, while both were teaching at the Writers Workshop at Chautauqua in upstate New York, Teaching Pre K-8's Editorial Director Pat Broderick and Carolyn Coman spent an afternoon talking about Coman's reputation for facing the toughest of subjects in her work, and her foray into lighter, humorous territory with her latest book, The Big House (Front Street, 2004).

Nose to the grindstone. From the age of eight, when she penned her first story, Carolyn knew she must write. "I got an assignment to write a story, and I was working on it in study hall. When the bell went off, I wouldn't get up and leave the desk because I figured out what the ending was and I had to get it," Carolyn said. "It made such an impression on me that it was so important. It was more important than other things were to me and that's the first time I realized it. So that's when I date knowing that I was a writer, and I always wrote after that."

Carolyn attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, a school where students, with the guidance of an advisory committee, determine their own course of study. She was able to concentrate nearly exclusively on her craft all through college, but upon graduating, the need to earn a living called and she couldn't immediately do so with her writing. "I decided that I would get as close to the book world as I could," she said. "Just about that time I met a wonderful old bookbinder named Arno Werner who took me on as his apprentice and taught me the craft of bookbinding."

"The darkness, the edge – there will always be a little edge. It always seems to come up – I kind of can't help myself; it's in me."

Getting her feet wet. For the next 10 years, Carolyn created books, but certainly not in the manner she'd envisioned as a child. After her apprenticeship, she went on to open her own bindery in New Hampshire, doing fine leather bindings, restoration and fine editions.

Carolyn's commitment to one day fill such pages with her own words was unwavering. "I finally came to terms with the fact that nothing would do but to write -- even though I had this little business and it provided me a living and it was a wonderful craft." So, she secretly took half a day a week to work on short stories. She didn't want anyone to know because "I was so scared that I wouldn't do it. My whole objective was to finish a story -- to get to the ending, and I did. And then I wrote another and another…that's how it began."

A fait accompli. Carolyn's breakout book was What Jamie Saw (Front Street, 1995), which garnered a Newbery Honor and was a 1996 National Book Award Finalist. She was lauded for the poetic sensitivity and restraint with which she told the story of nine-year-old Jamie, his mother and infant sister fleeing their violent home, the fear of an unknown future and the rebuilding of their family.

Carolyn's books extrinsically are about domestic violence, incest, murder and racism; however, the intrinsic theme of all is the breakdowns that occur within families and the process of how these rifts heal. The universal experience of familial conflict is certainly relevant to young readers, and is a common theme in YA literature; yet, her protagonists' voices and perceptions are so authentic to their respective ages and life circumstances that they truly stand apart in the genre. The traumas her characters walk through feel simply true to their situations, never gratuitous.

Carolyn doesn't know the sources of these troubling tales, only that she was compelled to tell them. "I remember very clearly when I was writing What Jamie Saw, thinking: Who would ever, ever want to read this? I mean, who would be interested in this? Because it's what I had to write…there's no question about that, but I just couldn't imagine that it would find a place." Jamie found its place at Front Street Books, where founder, president and publisher Stephen Rox- burgh embraced it as he had Carolyn's first novel, Tell Me Everything (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), while an editor at FSG. He and Carolyn have worked together as editor and writer for 18 years – and as husband and wife for four.

Bringing home the bacon. Carolyn has taught at Vermont College's low-residency MFA Writing for Children program for the past seven years. She is able to keep a daily writing schedule at home in New Hampshire; she meets with her students twice a year and corresponds with them by mail. "I'm in such a privileged position now, which I was never before," she said. "I basically have every day to write. It's usually a week out of every month that I devote to my student's stories." Carolyn shared the great satisfaction she garners from teaching: "The joy I feel when one of my students gets a book accepted is pure. It's better than your own. You just feel like you've watched this thing grow and finally they have it, and they have this prize. It's, oh -- the best!"

Pat Broderick (left) and Carolyn Coman trade expressions they like. Pat: "There's no pot so crooked some lid won't fit." Carolyn: "It's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick."

‘Til the cows come home. Her most recent novel, The Big House, is a farcical detective story of sorts, the sleuths being Ivy and her younger brother, Ray. Carolyn's theme of the fractured family continues in this middle-grade reader: When their parents are jailed for embezzlement -- that they committed the crime is a given; they are grifters by trade – the children are sent to live in the mansion of the loathsome Marietta Noland and her often-napping husband, Lionel. The siblings investigate, getting "the lay of the land," and in doing so collect some surprising evidence about their caregivers.

The book is spiced with old-timey idioms, favorite expressions culled from Carolyn's childhood. "A lot of the dialogue came from my father's voice in my head," she explained. "He was someone who used a lot of old-fashioned expressions he loved." Humorously, Ivy interprets literally these sayings she's learned, also, from her father.

When asked about this departure in tone from her earlier work, Carolyn laughed. "Well, it's a huge digression…This book was initially intended to honor the memory of my brother. It was both a desire on my part to move through the grief [of his death], and to look at the joy…writing this really brought me back to when we played as kids." Sibling relationships are key in all of Carolyn's novels: their importance, the alliance found within them, the pain resulting from their discordance and the anguish of the loss of a sibling.

Will she continue on this less angst-strewn narrative path? In a word – that word being "sequel" – yes. "It took me so long and it was so hard to get their [Ivy and Ray's] voices and to make the jump to that more light-hearted genre," Carolyn said. "I thought -- I can't leave here yet."

November/December 2005, Vol.36, No.3