When University of Alabama at Birmingham English professor Kerry Madden-Lunsford launches her new book, “Werewolf Hamlet,” on Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Red Mountain Theatre, the event will be different from you average book signing. The $25 ticket will get you a signed copy of the book, but you’ll also have a chance to see UAB actors Knox Villemarette and Caleb Womack perform as the two brothers in Madden-Lunsford’s book. Here, the author talks about how that came to be, as well as a bit about her life and career.
Tell me a little about yourself.
I grew up the daughter of a college football coach, so I moved around all the time. Sometimes, it was a winning season but more often a losing season, Dad would say, “Kids, I gotta announcement. Now you’re an Iowa State Cyclone.” Or “Pittsburgh Panther or Kansas State Wildcat or Tennessee Volunteer.” We were on the move, and I wrote about it in my first novel, “Offsides,” that came out almost 30 years ago with William Morrow. When Dad was hired to coach special teams with the Detroit Lions, I was a senior in high school and stayed to attend the University of Tennessee and later Manchester University in England as an exchange student. I received my MFA from UT and then I spent my first year of marriage teaching English in Ningbo, China, with my husband, Kiffen. We moved to Los Angeles after China where we raised our family. After “Offsides,” I wrote “Writing Smarts,” an American Girl book for kids who want to write stories and poetry. I wrote the Smoky Mountain Trilogy about a family in Maggie Valley, N.C. – “Gentle’s Holler,” “Louisiana’s Song” and “Jessie’s Mountain.” The book that brought me to Alabama was a biography called “Up Close: Harper Lee,” which was how I came to be a professor at UAB and introduced me to Kathryn Tucker Windham and Charlie Lucas. I wrote my first picture book about them called “Nothing Fancy About Kathryn & Charlie,” which my daughter, Lucy, illustrated, and we did storycatching workshops at rural Alabama libraries for children. I wrote another picture book, “Ernestine’s Milky Way,” about my mountain mother, Ernestine, whom I met at Joey’s Pancake House when the Maggie Valley books came out. “Werewolf Hamlet,” my new children’s novel, is my ninth book.
Tell me about the genesis of “Werewolf Hamlet.”
I began writing “Werewolf Hamlet” right as I was finishing the Harper Lee book in 2008. I wanted to go back to fiction. I felt like I was living in a snow-globe of Monroeville and all things Harper Lee, and I wanted to capture the childhoods of my children who were growing up so fast. It was going to be a lark or a funny romp of a novel, and it even began as a kid’s journal that he was forced to write daily at school, and he hated it. I wrote draft after draft and the voice was there, but the plot was wobbly. In 2014, the book went out to a lot of publishers with a big, resounding “No thanks!” Around that time, our family began face the crisis of addiction in our son, an adult, and I was powerless to do a thing to stop it. I was whining to a counselor, wanting to fix everything, set him on the right path again, and even said, “I’m a children’s writer. I write for kids. My kids are my editors and inspiration. How can this be happening?” And the unimpressed counselor shrugged and said, “Write the book for the kids who need it.” I resisted at first, but that’s ultimately when I began to write the story that broke my heart, but I channeled it through a young boy who thinks he can save his big brother and make him act normal again. Angus Gettlefinger thinks if he puts on “Hamlet” with werewolves, his big brother see it, learn his lesson and will stop acting like a werewolf and became his big brother again, preferably by Friday.
At the heart of the story, it seems, is a theater kid. Were you a theater kid growing up?
I was a babysitter. As the oldest of four kids, I was in charge, but babysitting was no fun without a little theater, so I made my siblings dress up as characters in the novels I was reading. So sometimes, they were orphans eating gruel or prairie children in aprons with slates to take notes in our pretend one-room schoolhouse or they were runaway children on a train. My brothers always protested, but my little sister was game (not that she had much of a choice). In England as an exchange student, I met a group of British drama students who were having a huge debate over “Hamlet.” In Knoxville, nobody argued over “Hamlet.” They debated whether Tennessee would beat Alabama. I was out of my element, and of course, I had never read “Hamlet” so I could add NOTHING to the conversation except to pour tea and keep my mouth shut. The drama students also advised me, “Journalism is a grotty trade school occupation! Be a playwright! That’s real writing.” So, I read “Hamlet” and a lot of other plays, and after Manchester, I returned to UT and changed my major to theater and became a playwright.
How big a Shakespeare fan are you?
I love Shakespeare. We used to take our kids to Shakespeare in the Park in Los Angeles, and I remember one time during the strangulation scene of “Othello,” a pack of coyotes began howling, and our kids were riveted. But I really had to teach myself how to understand Shakespeare in the beginning. I used to read the plays along with watching the staged versions in the library archives at UT, and I learned so much at Manchester University, too.
This book tackles some pretty serious subjects. Can you address that a bit?
As a family who has been on this journey of addiction for a long time, I wanted to write something to show kids they are not alone and that they don’t have to save or rescue anybody. I use humor to try capture the insanity, too, and since the book is set in Los Angeles, I loved bringing in the ghosts of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Lon Chaney and Harry Houdini to give advice to Angus Gettlefinger.
You have specialized in writing books for youth. Did that specialty just evolve over time, or has that been what you’ve wanted to do from the start?
It evolved. After “Offsides,” I fell into a terrible period of rejections for almost a decade. I tried ghostwriting, freelance writing and even soap-opera writing. I was writing the stupidest lines like, “My, that bathrobe looks familiar.” My kids were coming home from school with novels like “The Phantom Tollbooth,” “Dovey Coe,” “The Giver” and many others. My son would say, “Mom, you have to read this!” So, I thought, I have three kids, and my husband, Kiffen, is one of 13 children, so what if I tried writing for kids? It was my own children who wanted me to write stories, and I was always encouraging them to write stories and paint and draw. We raised theater kids who also loved sports. Anyway, I imagined my husband’s family in the Smokies, and I recalled how one of the babies, Eppie, slept in a drawer when she was born, and I thought – I want to write about a little girl who is a songwriter and wants to see the whole world beyond Maggie Valley, and I thought – What if there is a blind child? And what if the mama thinks a paycheck is a whole lot more valuable than a poem? And what if there is a bossy grandmother with a glass eye? Kiffen’s father also played the fiddle for the Reno and Smiley and the Smoky Mountain Boys, and his great uncle, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, was a banjo player and songcatcher, so I had lots of material inspire me.
It’s not often that a book signing features a “dramatic reading … by actors.” I’m guessing given the title that this book lends itself to that?
When George Saunders’s book, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” came out, he came to Alabama Booksmith, and I brought my fiction workshop to meet him. That night, I was also invited to read some of the characters in the book along with Patti Callahan Henry and Lanier Isom. It made for such a dynamic night rather than just a reading, which inspired me to find two UAB actors to read the brothers, Angus and Liam Gettlefinger, for the book launch at Red Mountain Theatre. In between each chapter are interludes called “Conversations with Liam in the Night,” where the brothers talk to each other. Sometimes, Liam is sneaking in or sneaking out, and Angus is trying to make him behave, and they insult each other using the “Shakespearean Insulter,” with lines like “Thou art a very ragged wart!” I also needed to find quiet moments in the novel when a dear writer friend told me “There are no quiet moments in this novel.” She was right, so I created the interludes that move through the past and present, so we really get to see the relationship between the brothers.
Who is the audience for “Werewolf Hamlet”?
The kids in the novel range in age from 8 to 17. It’s a middle-grade novel, so it’s for the 5th grade to 8th grade crowd, but I think older kids will relate and maybe even some adults, too. The parents are not at their best in this novel. The mom is a control freak volleyball coach blowing her whistle and the dad is a failed actor, trying to hold it all together, and there is grandmother from Metter, Georgia, controlling the family purse strings. I had a sweet student from Metter years ago, and she told me there is a sign in the town that says, “Everything is Better in Metter,” and I thought that was funny.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
I hope kids who read it might see they can still love the person who is struggling with addiction, but they still get to live their own lives. I heard the expression, “Let go or get dragged,” and I took that to heart.
Is this the last we’ve seen of Angus, or are there more Shakespeare plays with werewolf casts coming?
Right now, this is my only Shakespeare novel with a werewolf cast, but my new children’s novel is called “Millie G and Vulcan,” and it feels like a companion novel to “Werewolf Hamlet.” This is from the point of a girl who lives beneath Vulcan and needs a giant in her life to fix things. Her father’s drinking gets the family into trouble, and Millie G knows that giants in stories fix things, so she makes a wish for Vulcan to wake up. That book is about to go out on submission to my editor, but my agent is happy with it. I began that book in 2011 when my youngest, Norah, said, “Can you please write something with a little magic in it instead of historical fiction?” We were new to Alabama, and Vulcan was a mystery to us, and so I gave it a try, and it’s been so much fun to write.
What is next for you?
I’m working on a memoir called “The Family Plan – Unstable Connections” – a memoir in phones and plans. It’s about our family’s journey with addiction, only this book is for the mothers and the fathers. I’m also determined to finish my novel called “The Moors of Tennessee,” which is a coming-of-age novel for three generations of women about an exchange student from Knoxville who goes to Manchester and falls in love with the Brontës, and her grandmother from East Tennessee, who has never been anywhere, follows her, against the wishes of her daughter-in-law, who could care less about the Brontës.
Launch party for “Werewolf Hamlet,” by Kerry Madden-Lunsford, Feb. 11 at 6 p.m. at Red Mountain Theatre.
