When I decided to interview novel in verse authors, I wanted to feature a couple of debut authors. Thanks to Sylvia Vardell's fabulous 2021 Sneak Peek post for all poetry books, I discovered Author Lisa Fipps.

I read this book in one sitting. I fell in love with the main character, Ellie, and how she grows throughout the book. I felt the sting of some the Mom comments.  

What led you to write STARFISH? Was there a reason for choosing to write in free verse instead of prose? 
FIPPS: I wrote Starfish because it was the book I needed when I was a kid. I was bullied relentlessly for being fat and struggled with so many emotions from all the bullying. Since I was an avid reader, I turned to books, hoping to read a story like mine, hoping to feel less alone, hoping to find help with how to handle it all. But a book like that was nowhere to be found. I ended up feeling even more alone. More different. I’ve always dreamed of writing for children, so it only made sense for my debut novel to be the book I always needed as a kid. I’m really surprised and saddened that from the time I was a kid until now – all those years – a book like Starfish didn’t exist. We need fat- and body-positive books for kids featuring fat protagonists, especially since nearly 75 percent of adult Americans and a great percentage of kids are fat. I’m starting to see more and more children’s books with fat protagonists, so that makes me happy. There’s still a long way to go, though. I wrote Starfish in verse because that’s just how stories come to me. I like it because it allows me to cut to the emotional core of a story quicker than prose. Using fewer words also gives me that staccato effect I love.
 
Were there characters that were easier or more difficult to write? Were they based on anyone?
FIPPS: Ellie is based a lot on me, so that made it easier to write her story, at least when it came to what happened to her and how she felt. What made it hard was digging up, facing, and reliving past hurts. The dad was hard to write. On a personal level, I have no idea what a dad is like or what it’s like to have a dad. My dad died when I was thirteen months old. A lot of readers love the dad. One reader who found out I grew up without a dad said, “Do you think you wrote the dad you wished you’d had?” And it dawned on me that that’s exactly what I did, without making a conscious effort to do so. Ellie’s dad is the dad I literally daydreamed about having when I was a kid.
 
I loved the images of the starfish and the whales throughout the book. What led you to choosing those images?  I loved the poem “Whaling Wall” when Ellie sees the beauty of humpback whales. 
FIPPS: When you’re fat, there always seems to be this one defining moment when everything changes, the moment you go from being a regular kid/person to being the fat kid/person. For Ellie, that came during her under-the-sea-themed birthday party, where she wore a whale swimsuit. She cannonballed into the pool, creating a big splash. From them on she was called Splash or some synonym for whale. That’s why I used the whale image in the book. The starfish image came from the scene where Ellie starts thinking that maybe it’s okay to be herself, to be seen, to be heard, to take up space. When she’s trying to imagine what that would be like, she stretches out in the pool and takes up all the room she wants. She literally looks like a starfish, with her arms and legs stretched out. When she starts to face the bullies and defend herself, she notices she takes the starfish stance: Arms stretched out and feet more than shoulder width apart. I think that the word starfish and the image that pops into your head when you hear or read it, gives you a perfect visual of being free to take up all the space you want in the world. 
 
Were the images in the first draft or did they appear in later drafts? 
FIPPS: The whale and starfish images were in the story from the beginning, although I added more emphasis to the starfish as I revised. 
 
Do you have a favorite scene or quote from the book? 
FIPPS: I think the scene where Ellie starfishes and says “behold the thing” as she confronts her mom is my favorite. It is the defining moment for Ellie. For their relationship. But it was so emotional for me to think about, let alone write, that I will never read that poem aloud.

​I noticed that use you used the library for some scenes in the book.  How did being a librarian inform you that there needed to be a library in the book? (Being a retired K5 librarian, I notice when books feature a library)
FIPPS: I am the director of marketing for a public library, but I’m not a librarian. I included libraries in Starfish because they were my refuge when I was in school. And, as an avid reader whose family was too poor to buy a lot of books, I visited the school and public libraries all the time when I was growing up. Coming home with a stack of books felt like Christmas.
 
If you were to give a reading, what might you read to the audience?
FIPPS: I always enjoy reading a few poems from the beginning and the poems with Dr. Woodn’t-you-like-to-know. They’re just fun to read.
 
I’ve been taking some classes at the Highlights Foundation with Cordelia Jense. We’ve been discussing what is the definition of a verse novel? What are your thoughts on the definition? (As the once chair of the CYBILS Award Poetry category, we wrestled with where the verse novels belonged in Poetry or in Fiction or their own category.)
FIPPS: To me, anyway, verse is poetry but it’s also its own creature. It’s a living, breathing, changing artform. You can bend and shape it any way you want it. That’s the beauty of it. It really feels like clay in my hands. 
 
What is next up for you?  Do you have any new books in the works?
FIPPS: Like all writers, I’m always writing. Stay tuned to social media for some exciting news in the future.
 
How did you decide on Author Lisa Fipps and not just Lisa Fipps?
FIPPS: Great question! Lisa Fipps is a common name and so is Lisa Phipps. A lot of people spell my name wrong. Fun fact. When I was a journalist, other reporters in the newsroom got sick and tired of hearing me say, “Lisa Fipps. F as in Frank, i, p as in Paul, p as in Paul, S as in Sam” every time I had to leave a message for someone to call me back. I got sick and tired of hearing me say it. You’d think it’d be an easy name to get right. It’s five letters. One syllable. Alas, it is not. I kept track of the misspellings. There were thirty-four, including Slitz, Flips, and Phillips. I thought the most common misspelling would be Phipps. It wasn’t. It was Simpson. I can only guess that people thought of Lisa Simpson from the TV show when I was trying to spell my name. Dunno. Weird. Anyway, I thought if I branded myself as Author Lisa Fipps for my website and social media that it’d help people find me since it is a common name – although, apparently, wretchedly hard to spell. Lol.

Did you read BLUBBER by Judy Blume as a kid?  It's been so long since I've read it, but it came to mind as I read your book.
FIPPS: I didn’t read Blubber when I was a kid. It was a popular book, and I had planned on reading it. But then when we were in line after library time, getting ready to head back to our classroom, a boy saw a girl holding that book and said, “Blubber’s reading Blubber.” The girl wasn’t fat by any stretch. So, I was afraid to be seen reading it, knowing it’d give the other kids another reason to bully me. That’s one reason I chose the title Starfish for my book. It’s not a title that a kid would be embarrassed to be seen carrying or reading. 

Thank you, Lisa, for sharing this book with the world and for allowing me to interview you.  

​Wondering about my National Poetry Month Project?  Here's what I have been up to since April 1, 2021:
April 1: Welcome and Morning Prayer
April 2:  Interview with Allan Wolf
April 5 Redux: "Outside My Window"
April 6: Sun/Grian
April 7: Adelanto/A Day's Journey
April 8: Wings Redux

Stop by, leave a comment and get entered for book giveaways at the end of the month.
Many thanks to Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference who is hosting Poetry Friday.  She has a great project with translating poems into a second language.

The Poetry Friday Round Up is over at  Mary Lee at A Year of Reading

If you are looking for a book that examines the lives of the Donner Party in a poetic manner and historical detail, read THE SNOW FELL THREE GRAVES DEEP by Allan Wolf.  He graciously agreed to some questions recently. 
What led you to write THE SNOW FELL THREE GRAVES DEEP? 
 I’m always on the lookout for historical subject matter. Some event that folks think they know about. And as I’m a disciple of narrative pointillism, I seek out events with multiple witnesses from all walks of life. The main element of narrative pointillism is the exploration of a single event from multiple points of view. I’m also motivated by visual images (stage coaches, horse-drawn wagons, mortuaries, period clothing, hats, cannibalism, graveyards, rivers, zombie mules, sentient icebergs, rats that sing opera, etc). The images (and the objects within the images) can actually resonate with the heart of a story, and thus a harmonic relationship forms. That’s how I get ideas: by looking at a whole mess o’ stuff and then standing back to see some sort of order in the seeming chaos. To connect and combine and to reassemble. 

When you were researching NEW FOUND LAND, did something pop up that piqued your curiosity about the Donner Party?

Yes, the research for New Found Land certainly led me to other ideas for many other books. In fact, my novel Zane’s Trace was a direct result. Researching one of the Lewis and Clark expedition members, I saw the name “Zane’s Trace” on an old map. I knew then and there, that would be the title of my next book. 

I wrote another novel about Sacagawea and her son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau (never published) that led me to explore the Oregon trail and the Westward Expansion of the 1840s-1860s. I had to write a book that will never be published in order to write the book that was published.

What was involved with researching for the book? What was the process? 

I read a bazillion books. Starting with the oldest and working my way up to the more modern. By doing this you get a feel for how the historical facts have evolved over time. Then you go back and reread the earlier books. The second reading is always so much richer, since by then you have a good context and you’ve built your “prior knowledge” base. Researching for historical fiction is an exercise in vetting resources. You begin to see which books are responsible for spreading mistruths and which books suffer from racial, class, and moral biases.  
I also deprived myself a bit. I would go out in the winter without a coat. I made a bunch of campfires. I interviewed a fellow who had intentionally starved himself. My friend, Klaus, who lives across the street from me, was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus and died, all while I was writing this book. Klaus was a German and I modeled the book’s German character, Ludwig Keseberg, after him. Klaus was healthy and strong as an ox, but he couldn’t eat because of the tumor. So, I watched him pretty much starve to death. I dedicated the book to him. He was a great guy and a good friend. 

Was there anything you discovered that you chose not to put it in the book? 
 Yes. Quite a bit. The actual details of what happened are complex and, frankly, tedious. There were countless rescue attempts, countless attempts to hike out, countless miles of wilderness covered. And the nearly ninety emigrants would separate into multiple parties, constantly diverging and reconverging like some kind of amoeba! It’s enough to make your head swim. I had to leave details out. Believe it or not, I actually left out one murder (that of a Mr. Wolfinger by another party member). There were already plenty of murders without it. I know it seems like an outrageous detail to leave out, but it just made an already complex constellation of events even more complex. 

How did your research inform the voices of your characters? The voices of Hunger, Tamzene Donner, and Patty Reed really resonated with me.  

Voice (and everything else) is born from research. You just have to listen. There is a staple story, in Donner Party lore, of nine-year-old Patty Reed maturely comforting her mother and accepting that she may not survive. The story may (or may not) be completely bogus, but it led me to think of Patty as an angel with a direct line to God. Then you have snow angels. Angels have wings to fly over mountains. You see how the connections begin to, well, snowball. My Tamzene Donner research included the big bonus of having access to her personal letters, so her voice was immediate. 
 Hunger was such a perfect narrator. How did you know it would be the narrator.
 Hunger was just intuition. It probably came to me in the shower. (I call these “meteor showers” ‘cause the ideas just start dropping from the heavens.) Hunger is a narrator and a narrative device, the glue to give shape to the overall story. The iceberg played this part in The Watch that Ends the Night. The Newfoundland dog played this part in New Found Land. I needed a character that could easily place the story in context to history (past, present, and future). I’m writing a novel now in which the narrator is a lake. 
It was quite a cast of characters, how did you determine who you included?  Were there characters that were easier or more difficult to write?
 All potential characters must go through an “audition” phase. I’m like a casting director. Looking for variety. Looking for foils. Characters that will play well off one another. And I want all races, ages, genders, and personality types represented. Another thing I look for is how characters “fit” with the setting and the props and the costumes. A character might have a doll or a pair of oxen, for example, that they can interact with and against.  And I often look for two characters that work together as a team—I call this a pair-acter. (Think the Weasley Twins, or Luis and Salvador in Three Graves Deep). 

I appreciate that you shed light on the unjust and slave treatment of the Washoe and Miwok people. What suggestions do you have for readers to find out more?
To get an excellent overview I recommend The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez. For a more complete list, I’ve included a bibliography in my own book’s back matter. The North American history of slavery, the Reconstruction, Westward Expansion, Jim Crow Laws, Civil Rights and the Black Lives Matter movement, plus the relentless, systematic, and systemic degradation of Asians, Mexicans, and Native Americans—the more you understand our history, the more you see how these are all sister stars in the same evil constellation. One of my favorite scenes in the book is when Tamzene Donner quotes Tennyson and you can clearly feel how things are unraveling. And this line, Flames devour the poetry as I bring the kettle to boil.” Chilling. 

And you might add, Tamzene is boiling water so she can cook the family dog. Oh, I liked that scene too. That was a fun one to write—Tamzene realizing how powerless her intellect is in the face of such primal suffering. As a poet myself, I often feel this way to some degree. Poetry in itself will not pay the bills. You cannot eat a metaphor. 

BTW, I was incredibly sad when Tamzene died. I really liked her character. (And of course, I knew she would beforehand but still…)
 Yeah. I was sad to see her go too. 

Do you have a favorite scene or quote from the book?  

The romantic in me really likes the “budding love” scenes between thirteen-year-old Virginia Reed and her boo, Eddie Breen. I’m also fond of the opening and closing scenes for their pleasing cinematic quality.  A favorite quote comes from Hunger who says the the first line of the novel: “None of this is my fault.” 

If you were to give a reading, what might you read to the audience?

I would like to read the passage that opens Part Six, on page 271, in which Hunger explains the stages of starvation. It is morbid but beautiful. 

I’ve been taking some classes at the Highlights Foundation with Cordelia Jense. We’ve been discussing what is the definition of a verse novel? What are your thoughts on the definition? (As the once chair of the CYBILS Award Poetry category, we wrestled with where the verse novels belonged. In Poetry or in Fiction or their own category.)

Is it a “novel in verse” or a “verse novel?” Or shall we call it a “Versnel” or a “Noversel.” I like to think of my own longform style narratives as a “hybrid novel.” My editor, Elizabeth Bicknell, has called them “postmodern.” But what is it? 

I like to picture a spectrum of literature as vast and inclusive as the stars. Genres and taxonomies allow us to keep track of things, but they never tell the real story. I could argue that Billy Collins is a fiction writer who writes poems. I could argue that Thomas Wolfe and Virginia Woolf are poets writing novels. In my “novel,” The Watch that Ends the Night, the iceberg speaks in iambic pentameter. As the iceberg melts, so does the metrical length of the lines, from pentameter, to tetrameter, to trimeter, to a single iamb. I would call that poetry, I’d guess. And are verse and poetry one and the same? (I personally don’t think so, but that’s a topic for another time.)

Words give a poem sense, while the space between the words give it resonance. Poets can arrange words based on craft, style, and clarity, just as prose writers do. But poets don’t have to stop there. Poets can arrange words based on prescribed patterns . . . or not. Poets can even arrange words wherever the words instruct them too. Space is key. Space between words. Space between lines. You can even remove a word, like you would remove a superfluous wisdom tooth. Line-breaks can be purposefully clunky or smooth. When a line breaks, the words turn. The poem’s rhythm may also turn. The poem’s pace may turn as well. The reader’s eyes, heartbeat, and attention all turn. (Bonus Fact: The word “verse” comes from the Latin, verso, to turn.)

The poet chooses 
where 
the lines        break. 

The power of ‘the space between’ is on display, in a big way, in the “verse novel.” Scenes (or beats) in the plot don’t require the same continuity that we find in prose. As the writer it can be easier to maneuver the narrative when you have spaces and turns in your toolbox. As the reader it can be easier to read and remain engaged. The reader’s eyes are actively engaged as the line-breaks urge them on. The reader’s mind gets to take smaller bites and needs less time to chew. 

I noticed you just released NO BUDDY LIKE A BOOK. Do you work on verse novels and picture books simultaneously or switch back and forth?  
I’m almost always working on multiple projects all at once. But this is largely due to the fact that I work in a variety of mediums. While researching a longer novel, I can always divert myself by writing poetry, song lyrics, and picture books.  That said, there comes a point where I have to put in my earbuds, turn on the “smooth brown noise,” tie my leg to the desk, and get the project done. No messing about. I’ll get a head of steam and everything else falls away.


Thank you, Allan, there is much here to consider.  I borrowed  The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez.  

Please sure to leave a comment below.  I will be entering names in for two Grand Prizes at the end of the month along with other give aways.  One will be a copy of this book.

Welcome to 2021 National Poetry Month. It's my fifteenth year of participating (some years better than others).  
This year I'm taking a look at some previous poems that I enjoyed and will be revising.  Some have been on the blog before and others not.  
I have  five great interviews lined up:
April 2 POETRY FRIDAY: ALLAN WOLF
April 9 POETRY FRIDAY: LISA FIPPS
April 16 POETRY FRIDAY: CHRIS BARON
April 23 POETRY FRIDAY: JOANNE ROSSMASSLER FRITZ
April 30 POETRY FRIDAY: LITA  JUDGE

I love getting books into the hands of readers so there will be prizes for stopping by and saying hi.

I recently finished twelve weeks with a group of fabulous writers and poets.  We read THE ARTIST'S WAY by Julie Cameron and discussed the chapter each week.  A task one week was to write am artist's prayer.  I really wasn't sure I could do it. But I scribbled one in my notebook.  Last week, I revised it using my One Little Word from that last several years to create the prayer.  

The book if you haven't read it, really encourages the idea of playing with art and trying new things.  It calls for a weekly Artist Date.  I've been sitting on some paint canvases so I decided to paint and collage my prayer/poem.