New Envoy’s Old Advice for Children: Read More

BARRE, Vt. — Katherine Paterson, the children’s novelist who will be appointed the national ambassador for young people’s literature on Tuesday, often assures aspiring writers that she showed little apparent talent as a child.

On visits to schools and libraries, Ms. Paterson, a two-time winner of both the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, frequently recites her first published work, a poem that appeared in her school newspaper in Shanghai:

Pat pat pat

There is the rat

Where is the cat?

Pat pat pat

She gleefully recalled the lines over lunch at a favorite Italian restaurant not far from her home here last week, adding that her teacher appended a footnote to the poem: “The second graders’ work is not up to our usual standards this week.”

Ms. Paterson, who is perhaps best known for the novel “Bridge to Terabithia,” said it was reading that informed her future writing self. As the daughter of missionary parents in China, she read her way through her parents’ library of children’s classics by A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame and Frances Hodgson Burnett. “That is where the friends were,” she said, evoking her lonely childhood.

Now, as ambassador — a joint appointment by the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book and Every Child a Reader, a nonprofit group affiliated with the Children’s Book Council, a trade association for children’s book publishers — Ms. Paterson hopes to share the unfettered pleasure that reading can deliver.

“I think of all the joy reading has given me,” she said. “It is not just because it is good for you, but because it is good.”

She does retain a bit of her parents’ missionary zeal. “I want people to be reading about children of other places and other races and religions,” she said. “I think novels are a wonderful way to do that because you get in somebody else’s psyche and you see things quite differently than the way you see things simply through your own eyes.”

Ms. Paterson will speak at Children’s Book Week in New York in May and at the National Book Festival in Washington in September, and will travel the country to speak to children, parents, teachers and librarians.

The main advice she’ll be giving adults: Read aloud to your children. “You can read out loud, and if you’re exhausted or crying so hard because you know that Charlotte is going to die in the next chapter,” she said, “you can turn it over to the kid to read the next part.” (That’s “Charlotte’s Web,” she’s talking about, of course.)

Ms. Paterson, 77, succeeds Jon Scieszka, the author of subversive picture books like “The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales,” who was the first writer to hold the ambassador’s post. James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress who will officially appoint Ms. Paterson on Tuesday, said that he was pleased with Mr. Scieszka’s reign and that he looked forward to Ms. Paterson’s putting her own spin on the job.

“She’s kind of an extraordinary spirit,” Mr. Billington said. “Wherever she goes, I think she’s likely to say something that will not just be what she said the time before.”

With her silver hair cut in a feathered bob, Ms. Paterson, who drives a gray Prius and lives and works in a cluttered 1830s-era farmhouse, is a mother of four and grandmother of seven.

But it wasn’t her experience as a mother that gave her the ability to tap into the emotional landscape of children. “People often say, ‘Now that your children are grown up, how can you still write for children?’ ” she said. “And I say, ‘I never wrote for them.’ I always write for the child in me, and she is still in there.”

Ms. Paterson’s writing career has included 39 books of astonishing range, with descriptions of peasant life in 12th-century Japan, strikes by mill workers in early-20th-century Massachusetts and a refugee camp in late-20th-century Macedonia. She has published some picture books, but mainly writes for children from 8 to 14.

Ms. Paterson can spend months researching a book. For her most recent novel, “The Day of the Pelican,” which takes place partly in Kosovo, she trawled the Internet until she found a Flickr account with photos from the region and began a correspondence with the photographer, an American who had lived there and could give her details about a country she had never herself seen.

Her best-loved characters, rendered with compassion and nuance, include a defiant foster child (“The Great Gilly Hopkins”), a brooding and jealous teenage twin (“Jacob Have I Loved”), and a poor, artistic country boy who develops a unique friendship with a tomboyish girl from out of town (“Bridge to Terabithia.”)

Ms. Paterson does not shy from dark themes that some have considered inappropriate for young readers. And she has a finely tuned sense of the whirling, complex and not-always-sunny emotions of children.

Her own childhood was peripatetic. Born in China in 1932, she spoke Mandarin before English. The family, evacuated from China twice during World War II, returned to the United States, moving from Virginia to North Carolina to West Virginia. Ms. Paterson’s speech is still inflected with a slight Southern cadence.

In her 20s, she taught sixth grade at a school in Lovettsville, Va., before pursuing a master’s degree in English Bible studies. She then moved to Japan — somewhat reluctantly — as a missionary.

“To me, Japan was the enemy,” Ms. Paterson said, referring to the Japanese occupation of China. But a Japanese friend from graduate school persuaded her to try it, and she fell in love with the country. “It was one of the greatest gifts of my life to be able to be in a situation and find yourself loved by people that you thought you had hated,” she said.

Her affinity for the country inspired her first novel, “The Sign of the Chrysanthemum,” about a peasant boy in 12th-century Japan, which she wrote in five-minute snatches while raising four small children. It was then two years before an editorial assistant discovered it in a slush pile. Ms. Paterson was paid a $1,000 advance for the novel, published in 1973, and paired up with Virginia Buckley, the editor she has worked with ever since.

She rarely writes directly about her own experiences, although several of her books have been inspired by real life. “Gilly” stemmed from her stint as a foster parent, and “Terabithia” is based on the death of her son David’s best friend at 8.

“Who I am comes out in what I write,” she said. “You try to write from the deepest part of yourself, and whatever is there is going to come out.”

She has never considered writing for adults. “When people say, ‘Don’t you want to write for adults?’ I think, why would I want to write a book that would be remaindered in six weeks?” Ms. Paterson said. “My books have gone on and on, and my readers, if they love the book, they will read it and reread it. I have the best readers in the world.”