Rosemary Graham

BIO

Rosemary Graham just missed being born in Paris. Well, maybe not "just." Two years after she was born in humble Jersey City, New Jersey, Rosemary’s younger sister was born in glamorous Paris, where the family lived for a few years, across the street from a race track. Rosemary did attend a French nursery school and so her claim to have been "educated in France," she assures us, "is entirely, technically correct."

Now an English professor at Saint Mary’s College of California, Rosemary lives in Berkeley, with her husband and daughter, where some of her best friends are hippies.

AUTHOR TALK

May, 2003

In this interview Rosemary Graham talks about her inspiration for MY NOT-SO-TERRIBLE TIME AT THE HIPPIE HOTEL, her website for the book, HippieHotel.com, her next book and her advice for aspiring teen writers.

TR: What inspired MY NOT-SO-TERRIBLE TIME AT THE HIPPIE HOTEL?

RG: The book is loosely --- very, very loosely --- based on a vacation I took with my father just after my parents got divorced. We went to this retreat-type place in a big, rambly house on Cape Cod with a bunch of other divorced parents and their kids. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

TR: Not really.

RG: Exactly. Can you imagine a worse idea for a vacation?

TR: How much of what happens to Tracy in Hippie Hotel happened to you that summer?

RG: None. Well, except for the part about waking up in the middle of the night to the sounds of squeaking bedsprings in the first chapter. I toned it down for the book, though.

TR: How so?

RG: I made it PG. In real life it was more PG-13, verging on R. The rest of the book is totally made up.

TR: Your narrator, Tracy, is a talented piano player and song writer. But she’s sort of given up on her music as the story opens. Why is that?

RG: It’s a side effect, so to speak, of her parents’ divorce and the reality of single-parent families. Tracy’s parents’ divorce is what they call "amicable." The parents still talk, but they’re both distracted by high pressure jobs and worries about Tracy’s older brother Chris, who’s acting out more obviously than Tracy is --- smoking and drinking and cutting school. And so they don’t really notice when Tracy pulls back from the thing that she loves most --- making music. I think this kind of thing happens a lot. In some divorced families, while there might be enough money for piano or dance lessons or sports teams, there isn't enough parental time and energy and attention to make sure the kids get to practices, performances, and games. That's just how it is. Tracy can’t rely on her parents to make sure she keeps up the piano. She’s got to find her way back to that piano bench on her own.

TR: How did you come up with the other girl characters in the book, Beka and Kelsey?

RG: Tracy’s a little stuck, emotionally, holding most of her feelings inside. We learn in passing that her mother struggles with depression. Tracy isn’t quite at that level, but she may be headed there. I wanted to present her with some other emotional possibilities. Even though they both seem so different from Tracy --- Beka’s the Angry Girl, Kelsey's the happy California Girl --- Tracy has more in common with them than she can see. Like Beka, Tracy has stuff to be angry about, but unlike Beka, Tracy doesn't acknowledge her anger. Instead, she takes things out on herself by eating and neglecting her music. Kelsey, on the other hand, is someone who’s quite comfortable in the world. Kelsey’s open, easy way with boys, for example, is a mystery to Tracy, who can barely utter a word in the presence of a boy she likes. Hanging out with Kelsey and watching Kelsey in action encourages Tracy to venture outside of herself.

TR: Like when Tracy meets Kevin, the skate-boarding, guitar-playing dude in a Pilgrim costume?

RG: Exactly. Tracy’s first impulse, when she meets Kevin, is to follow all that how-to advice from the magazines. But instead of helping her connect with this guy --- who really does seem like a good match for her, and who does really seem interested in her --- those scripts just get in the way. It turns out they aren’t any help when it comes to actual communication with a living, breathing boy.

TR: Tell us about the Hippie Hotel website. Did you design it?

RG: I have no design skills. But the idea was mine. I wanted to bring Farnsworth House, a.k.a. The Hippie Hotel, to life, but in a way that would still leave a lot to the imagination. We set it up as a tour, narrated by Tracy. You can peek into the rooms, see the beds where she and Kelsey and Beka sleep, strewn with their stuff. But you don’t see the actual characters. We wanted to leave that to the reader’s imagination. I hired an artist to do the drawings, Jamie Kidson, who’s a former fasion designer. She did a great job. And she pointed me toward her step-sister, Susan Bein, who did the animations and the pop-up text. Susan teaches web animation at Carmel High School, and a couple of her students helped with the site. They’re the guys winking at you from the framed pictures over the piano in the parlor. I love that.

TR: What’s next for you?

RG: I’m working on a second novel, this one from the point of view of Kelsey.

TR: A sequel to Hippie Hotel?

RG: Well, not really a sequel in the proper sense, because it doesn’t continue with all the characters, just Kelsey. It focuses on Kelsey’s efforts to change her image when she goes back to school in the fall. Because she’s rich and pretty and blonde, people tend to assume things about her --- that she’s shallow, for example, or only interested in her social life. She decides to challenge herself, and everyone else’s idea about her, by going out for the school newspaper, which is run by her school’s super achievers.

TR: What advice do you have for aspiring teen writers?

RG: Read. A lot. In my career as a college English professor, I’ve noticed that the best writers are always the kids who have been life-long readers. It’s not exactly osmosis, but something like that does happen when you spend a lot of time with the written word. It sinks in. You know how sentences, paragraphs, and essays work. If you read a lot of stories, you’ll absorb story structure, too. Take creative writing classes and learn to look at your own work objectively. Good writers revise a lot. What you read on the page in the published novel is rarely --- if ever --- the first thing the author put down. And . . . I’d also like to say it’s never to early to start. If you want to be a writer, be a writer. You can do it right now, today.

© Copyright 2003, Rosemary Graham. All rights reserved.

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