Topical Guide 111
Mark Dorset
Reading: Learning to Read
Literature, Juvenile: Primers
Day Jobs: Educational Publishing
MATTHEW AND I KEPT OUR DISTANCE throughout kindergarten, but we wound up together in Mrs. Castile’s class in the first grade. We were in competition from the first day. Mrs. Castile asked me to distribute copies of Along Sunny Paths, the primer that we would be reading. Matthew looked through his copy and marched right up to Mrs. Castile’s desk with it.
“Mrs. Castile,” he said, “I don’t want to cause any trouble, but I’d rather not waste my time reading this book. … I don’t want to have to read this junk.” He tried to hand the book to her. …
“Matthew,” said Mrs. Castile. “This book is not ‘junk.’ All of these books are brand new, and there are lots of nice stories in them.”
“Mrs. Castile,” said Matthew, “the stories in here are too simple. They don’t give you anything to think about. You know what I mean. Here, look at this one—‘Quack, Duck, Quack.’ That might be interesting for … Peter. In fact, he’ll probably love it, but it’s just too simple for me.”Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam”
THE BABBINGTON REVIEW: Let’s recap briefly. In our earlier interview, you offered a well-rehearsed origin story for the Personal History, and I did my best on behalf of the Review and our readers to pry you from the practiced version—
EK: [chuckles] Yes, you did.
TBR: And I think I succeeded—to a degree. Let’s see if I can loosen you up a bit more this time. Ready?
EK: Ready. I think.
TBR: You “met” Peter Leroy while daydreaming over a German lesson. At some point you began writing about him. Tell me about that—the first experience of writing about this character.
EK: I began writing about Peter Leroy in an exploratory way, not for publication, and not even in an attempt to tell a story, just to find out what was there. This exploratory phase— which I think of as practice now—lasted nearly eighteen years, eighteen years spent learning about Peter’s friends, the town of Babbington where he lived, his family, his experiences, his feelings and ideas, scenes, snatches of conversation, encounters, bits and pieces—
TBR: I’m hearing something practiced again.
EK: Sorry. As I told you last time, I have said these things before. I’ve been asked these questions before, and my answers don’t vary much. I’ll try to improvise a little more.
TBR: Tell me: do you have any of that material—the stuff you call practice?
EK: Yes. I do. Stacks of it.
TBR: Would you ever make it public?
EK: No.
TBR: Would you give it to a library or university?
EK: No.
TBR: Why not?
EK: I don’t want my mistakes made public. I want the finished work to be all there is. No scraps, nothing that should have been thrown away but wasn’t.
TBR: Okay, I guess I understand that.
EK: Some day I have to get around to actually throwing all the scraps and mistakes away.
TBR: Ah! The fact that you haven’t done that suggests to me that you don’t actually want to do that. You do want someone to see the scraps and mistakes.
EK: Moving right along—
TBR: Ha. All right. Go ahead.
EK: While I was practicing, I didn’t think that I was practicing. I thought I was writing a novel—a novel about Peter Leroy. But whatever it was or was to become, I couldn’t stop working on it.
TBR: Was that all you were working on at the time? I mean—did you have a day job?
EK: Oh, yes. I always have. At the time that we’re talking about I had left teaching and become an editor at an educational publishing company.
TBR: Care to say what one?
EK: Ginn and Company, in Boston.
TBR: A company with a long history before you joined it.
EK: Yes. I think—
TBR: Founded in 1867 by Edwin Ginn, originally called Ginn Brothers, specializing in school texts from very early in its history.
EK: You’ve certainly done your homework!
TBR: I’m just reading from my phone.
EK: Oh. Of course.
TBR: So you became an editor at Ginn—
EK: Yes, and I worked in educational publishing for the next seven years, from 1968 through—or nearly through—1975.
TBR: I detect a little foreshadowing in there.
EK: You’re right. Be patient.
TBR: Patience isn’t really one of my virtues, but go on, and I’ll wait impatiently to find out what happened in 1975.“Risking the Ridiculous, Continued: An Interview with Eric Kraft, Part Two,” in Issue Number 15 of The Babbington Review, available as a pdf document (slow to load but handsomely formatted) or a mobile version (quick to load but not as handsomely formatted)
[more to come on Monday, October 18, 2021]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” and “The Static of the Spheres,” the first four novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.