Buffalo Flats, Ep. 13: Martine Leavitt Interview, Part 1
Episode 13: Martine Interview, Part 1
In this episode, we interview Martine Leavitt herself! She talks to us about her inspiration for Buffalo Flats, the painful process of writing it, and her secret to sticking with writing when it's hard. Martine had so much wisdom to share that we split the interview into two episodes. Watch for Part 2 next week.
Links:
My Book of Life by Angel by Martine Leavitt
Calvinby Martine Leavitt
Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Erin: Drinkware. That's exciting. I didn't know about that.
[Music intro]
[00:00:06] Anne-Marie: Welcome to this special episode of the Kid Lit Craft Podcast. This season we're taking a deep dive into the YA novel Buffalo Flats by Martine Leavitt. Today we are so excited to talk to Martine Leavitt herself. We'll take a deep dive into her thoughts about the writing of Buffalo Flats. I'm Anne-Marie Strohman and I write for children and young adults as well as short stories for adults.
[00:00:43] Erin: Hi everyone. I am Erin Nuttall and I write for children and young adults, mostly young adults.
[00:00:35] Anne-Marie: On Kid Lit Craft, we look at mentor texts to discover the mechanics of how writers do what they do, so we can apply it to our own writing.
[00:00:43] Erin: And if you've been listening this season, you know that we have been taking a deep dive into Martine Leavitt's Buffalo Flats, which is the story of Rebecca Leavitt, a teenager in the Northwest Territories of Canada in the late 1800s, and what Rebecca wants more than anything is her own piece of that beautiful land.
[00:01:03] Anne-Marie: Today we are so lucky to introduce you to Martine Leavitt herself.
[00:01:07] Erin: She was so gracious to talk to us, and we really enjoyed the conversation. She is so fun. We love Martine.
[00:01:14] Anne-Marie: We did have some recording difficulties and we can blame it on the Canadian snowstorm happening at Martine's the day we recorded. We thought at first we'd lost Martine’s part of the interview completely, but luckily our recording program saved a backup copy and that is what you will hear today.
[00:01:29] Erin: It was lucky indeed. It was such a great interview. We were really sad to think that it had been lost. And like I said it was a great interview. So our usual short form, we threw it out the window and we just chatted and chatted with Martine and learned so much. So what we're going to do is break it into two episodes, a shorter one today, and a longer one next week.
We wanted to make sure you got as much writing wisdom from Martine as possible.
[00:01:57] Anne-Marie: So without further ado, here's our interview with Martine Leavitt.
So Martine is here with us today. Hello Martine.
[00:02:06] Martine: Hello. Thank you for having me on your excellent podcast.
[00:02:11] Anne-Marie: Martine is from Alberta, Canada, and although she moved around as a military kid, she has lived in Alberta for many years. She's the author of many award-winning books for young readers, including Calvin, My Book of Life by Angel and Keturah and Lord Death. She teaches in the MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she recently served as the Katherine Patterson Endowed Chair. And if you're a listener of this podcast, you know that she is the author of Buffalo Flats, which we have focused on this season.
[00:02:44] Erin: Anne-Marie and I also have a personal relationship with Martine as she was my faculty advisor and Anne-Marie's workshop advisor at Vermont College of Fine Arts when we were both there working on our MFAs. She is also our dear friend, so welcome Martine. We are thrilled to have the chance to pick your brain about Buffalo Flats.
[00:03:06] Martine: Thank you. Pick away, I hope there's something in there to, to help people who are writing.
[00:03:14] Erin: What inspired you to write this book and did you approach the research because it was historical fiction, so it's a little bit different than the other books you've written?
[00:03:24] Martine: Yes. So I blame it all on the Big Red Book. And the Big Red Book is what we in the Leavitt family lovingly call a hardbound collection of personal family histories from my husband's ancestors.
They were pioneers who came up from the states to settle in the Northwest Territories, what is now called Southern Alberta, in Canada. And each of these ancestors wrote a very brief, just a two or three page summary of their lives and those who actually died before doing this thing, that was a part of their family culture, their kids wrote it up for them. And the first time I read this collection of family histories through, I thought, this is so my story to tell. I was so inspired by the courage and the humor and the resilience of these pioneers in what was a pretty daunting place to land.
So that was the inspiration for it. And how I approach the research, so you would think that this book was just sort of handed to me on a tray, but oddly, people in the past don't stop to think to explain every little thing about their lives. So they would mention horses and I would be like what's a horse? And of course I know what a horse is, but there's so much more to it. What kind of horses did they have and how do you put a saddle on a horse and how would this, you know, what would be the impact of horses in the story? And what about cows? How do you brand a cow? And how do you feed a cow through the winter? I kept getting stopped and thinking, I don't know what I'm talking about here. And you didn't tell me. You thought that a hundred years from now, I would still be riding a horse to school and I would just know what that meant.
So, I did have to do a tremendous amount, amount of research. The problem is, Erin and Anne-Marie, is that I have a form of mild obsessive compulsive disorder called spartanism. And spartanism is the opposite of hoarding. People with spartanism want to throw away or give away everything, and we heal ourselves by throwing and giving away things.
Well, historians keep notes and dates and references. They write down everything. They file everything. And all those little pieces of paper just about drove me out of my mind and so I would just throw them away, think, okay, I'm done with you. And then three days later, of course, I would need them again.
So it was really torturous for me personally to write a historical novel because you do have to be able to research responsibly. And it was a bit of a struggle. So now I've been outed, you know, all about my, my issues.
[00:06:52] Erin: Well, if that's your only issue, I feel like pretty nice issue to have, keep your house nice and clean.
[00:06:59] Martine: Some people think that.
[Laughter]
[00:07:04] Erin: Your discussing the cows and the horses made me think about Rebecca's fear of the chickens, which was something that I just adored about her because chickens are kind of scary.
[00:07:15] Martine: And that came right out of the Big Red Book. One of the people who wrote their life history talked about her job, that she had to feed the chickens every day and how afraid she was of them because they, they really can be ornery.
[00:07:28] Erin: I will admit to our listeners, I knew that a lot of this came from your family history, but I did not realize that it was one book, that it was this family history project that your family engaged in and what a gift that they gave their descendants.
[00:07:44] Martine: Dr. Clark Leavitt did the gathering and the publishing. It's…and there were 22 children and then their children wrote their family histories. And it's a lengthy book. It's about 800 pages long.
[00:08:00] Erin: No wonder it's the Big Red Book. That's, that's, that's amazing. I wish I had something like that for my family.I, I think that that would be quite the treasure trove.
[00:08:12] Martine: You know, Erin, I believe that maybe everybody has a story like that from their family. Maybe you don't have a whole collection, but most people have family stories that could really turn into a story that only you can tell.
[00:08:29] Erin: Oh, that is something to think about. 'Cause I know some of my family stories, so. Yeah. So how within this venue of this Big Red Book did you find Rebecca? She's not a real person, right? Or is she?
[00:08:45] Martine: No, no. She is not a real person, but most of the events that happen in the book, the events really happened. So I sort of just plunked my fictional character into the center of these events in this culture and this life.
And of course, that influenced who she might be, what she might be lacking in life, how she might respond in certain situations. So yeah, the real world of these pioneers had an enormous influence on creating Rebecca, the fictionalcharacter.
[00:09:25] Erin: I loved that Rebecca was the baby.
[00:09:28] Martine: Yes. She had to be the baby 'cause she had to be a little bit spoiled by her mom. You know, I don't know Anne-Marie if, in our workshop together, I did one of those exercises with characters where you interview your character and you ask them things like, what, what would you eat for breakfast? And what is your biggest fear? Did I ever do that with you Anne-Marie in workshop or, or you, Erin, in my mentoring.
[00:09:56] Anne-Marie: I don’t…
[00:09:58] Martine: If I didn't, I'm glad because, you know, I don't actually really believe in how helpful those questions can be. I think that sometimes we make friends with our characters the same way we make friends with real people. You just spend time with them. And I don't really know my characters at all when I first begin. I do have a sense of their, maybe their family culture, where they grew up, family dynamic. Maybe I'll have some sort of sense of that. But I discover my characters as I go through the story and write it down and put them through stuff. Put them through the ringer. I just have to spend time with them. And then of course you get to the end and you think, wow, I, I know my character so much better now.
And that is why God invented rewriting, because that's when you go back and you make changes and you flesh this character out even more. And so that's kind of how I discovered Rebecca just spending a lot of time with her.
[00:11:06] Anne-Marie: I find—we did not do that exercise in our workshop together, and I find those so tedious. I'm like, does it matter? But I do think, like I have to have the heart of the character first. And then the incidental things like what kind of shoes they wear and all that kind of stuff like that, I can just make up in the scene. And I think I learned that from you, that the heart of the character is so much what matters and how they change internally is so much what matters.
So when you started with Rebecca, kind of what did you start with at the beginning?
[00:11:37] Martine: I think, of course I started with this love of place, with this landscape that she would have fallen in love with, because I fell in love with it.
[00:11:50] Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:51] Martine: My father grew up just a short horseback right away from the Waterton Lakes National Park. I'm not sure if you're familiar but it is sort of the Canadian side of the Glacier National Park.
Anyway, I was taught to love those mountains. And this is the same area where my pioneer ancestors settled. And so there was that connection in place, the landscape. And I heard my father often say, this is God's country. He was in the military. He moved away quite young. He never really came back permanently, but he would call it God's country. So I somehow made that connection between this landscape and God's country and God himself. And so my first introduction to Rebecca was this girl who would come upon God and how she might react to him, with him, and how she might feel afterwards and what that might cause her to do after that.
And that was the start. That was the beginning, is this girl who has this extraordinary epiphany and yet she's just this ordinary girl. Like, what do you do with that? And then she would have this connection because she had this experience there. Not only did she love the land, but she wanted this particular piece of land and her desire for that, for this connection with the divine motivates all of her actions from then on.
So I would say that that was the beginning of understanding Rebecca.
[00:13:47] Anne-Marie: I love that. I definitely remember in workshop focusing so much on how the external goal and the internal change will work together. And that was so well done…
[00:13:57] Martine: Yes.
[00:13:58] Anne-Marie: …with Rebecca. And I love knowing that from the beginning of your process with Rebecca, you had that, that interaction with God, which is. You know, it happens externally in the story, but it's such an internal moment. And then also that external desire for land just from the beginning. So lucky.
[00:14:19] Martine: It's interesting that you say that because obviously I did not always have it under control because I remember I did a workshop with Shelly Tanaka once, and Shelly Tanaka is like the Queen Bee editor in Canadian Publishing, and she is my Canadian editor.
I withhold Canadian rights, and she works with Margaret Ferguson, who's my American editor, and I'm sure you're going to ask me about my revision process because it's a little bit famous and, and, I remember her saying to me when I was struggling with revision, she said, Martine, take your own advice.
And she said, what is your emotional and concrete desires that, because we've done this workshop together, she knew my language for how that worked. And, and yes. And that was, that was a sad moment, let me tell you, when your editor comes back to you and says, take your own advice.
[Laughter]
[00:15:32] Anne-Marie: But we can't always see what we need to know ourselves, right, about our own work. So tell me about the revision process. Your famous revision process.
[00:15:43] Martine: Yes. Well, it's famous because I was very open about it and because I'm still a bit traumatized by it for this particular book, as I said, I have this spartanism. And so with all my other books, as soon as I finished a second draft, I would throw the first draft away.
And then when I did the third draft, I would throw the second draft away and I would delete things from my computer. And by the time the book was an actual book being published, there was absolutely no evidence that I had done any work at all. The book just fell from heaven and there it was. But I knew that this particular book, Buffalo Flats, was going to be hard on me.
And so I decided to keep all of my revision and I do print up, not because I don't love trees, I do love trees, and I hope that the tree I killed will forgive me, but. Now I, and I did an experiment and I, I stacked up all of the revisions and then the journals, the journaling that I did at first, and it goes up to my waist, and I'm a rather tall woman, but the stack is at least waist high.
[00:17:03] Anne-Marie: That's impressive.
[00:17:04] Martine: I think I kept them because as I said, I knew it was gonna be torturous and I thought the torture might make a good story. And so it, it was really, really arduous. It was partly because I was fighting off more than I could chew. Initially the story went over a period of four years and that is very difficult to do, to do a story over a period of four years.
And I just wasn't up to it. I couldn't do it. And the book finally came together when it got cut down to a year and a half. Also I was trying to put everything into this book. So when I first sent it to my editors, it was 430 pages long, and as you know, it's only about 230 pages long now. So I had to cut a lot. It was really, really hard.
[00:17:56] Erin: So, Martine, I remember when you brought those manuscripts to a lecture that you gave at VCFA and it just sticks with me. ‘Cause you're right, it was so tall and I don't even know if you brought all of them at the time 'cause you hadn't even finished the book.
And yet even at that time it was a mighty stack. And I think about that sometimes. I have a manuscript I've been working on for a long time. And it's actually the one that I worked on with you. I sent it out and I got some nice comments but I never got any further than that and I was pretty sad about it.
And then it occurred to me that I could revise it again and I didn't want to, but I remembered your stack and I thought, well, if Martine can keep doing it, I guess I can too. And I have, I finished another revision and it's so much better. And, and I think having done it after I really took apart Buffalo Flats really helped me because, you know, to hear that originally Buffalo Flats was over 400 pages is astounding because it's so tight and it's tight in a way that is just lovely to me because you have what needs to be there, but you don't have what doesn't need to be there. And so I was able to go through my manuscript and be like, you know, does this need to be here or am I just, you know, because I'm writing about a world that I also really know and love and I noticed I was including a lot of things that just were nice little tidbits for myself, but it didn't, didn't add that much value to the story itself.
And, and so I really like where I am now with it. But just so you know, your stacks did serve a good purpose. I think about them frequently when I am trying to parse through my, my own work. So.
[00:20:06] Martine: So, so my pain helped you.
[00:20:09] Erin: Your, your pain definitely helped me. If that's any consolation to you.
[00:20:17] Anne-Marie: I, I have a question about that pain though, because like, how did you keep going through all of that?
[00:20:24] Martine: You know there were tears occasionally because in the past my editors would send me, you know, a five page letter and I would work really, really hard and send it back. And then they would send me a three page letter and I'd work really, really hard and send it back. And then they'd send me a one or two page paper and I'd work really hard and send it back. And they'd say, our work is done here.
But with Buffalo Flats, I got the five page editorial letter, and then the next one was a seven page editorial letter, and the next was a five page editorial letter. And it just, the problem was that I found it so difficult to let things go. I just, there were certain parts of the story that I adored and I didn't wanna let things go.
I didn't know how they kept seeing the timeline. The timeline doesn't work. And I was like, well, I don’t know how to fix that. I just, I couldn't, it was just beyond me. And but you know, Erin and Anne-Marie, I did one thing right. As a writer, as a young writer, I vowed that I would never quit.
[00:21:41] Anne-Marie: Hmm.
[00:21:42] Martine: That is not to say that I don't have a couple of manuscripts sitting in a drawer that I don't know if will ever become anything. They're just sitting in a drawer for now. But in terms of my career, in terms of writing, in terms of stories that I actually believe in I just promised myself I would not quit. And that kind of got me through. And if I had just one little nugget of advice for emerging writers, I would say that's the key is do not quit even when you quit.
Don't quit. And yeah, I, I finally cracked the code. I think I just about broke my editors along the way, but we were pretty happy with the end result.
[00:22:31] Erin: I do remember you talking to me about it and saying, one of the characters was pregnant for four years, or it was something really ridiculous and you're like, I just dunno how to…
[00:22:43] Martine: Yes.
[00:22:44] Erin: 14 months or something. It was like a ridiculous amount of time. And you're like, I, I just dunno how to make her not pregnant for that time, all that length. And I'm like, well, she's not an elephant so…So, so, but that is very encouraging to us as emerging writers that even, you know, even people who have a lot of experience with this, sometimes it's, you really just have to keep going even when you don't know what the heck you're doing.
[00:23:14] Martine: Yeah, you have to believe in what you're doing. You have to believe in yourself, you have to believe in your story. And don't give up.
[00:23:25] Anne-Marie: I'm curious about when you decided that, like what were the circumstances where you were like, I'm, I'm not gonna give up.
[00:23:32] Martine: I tried so hard to get into a class when I first realized that writing was it for me. I could not get into a class. I wasn't good enough. And I remember saying to myself, fine, if you won't teach me, I'll figure it out myself. And there came a moment also where I thought, you'll never be a published writer.
And I thought, I don't care. The joy of getting words on the page, the joy of telling stories will have to be enough for me if I don't get published. And yeah, I think when you come up against it, when I finally did get into a little class and I got to submit two pages of my writing and the teacher said something really sarcastic at the end of it, this is, this is one of those moments when you just say, you can't stop me.
I'm not gonna give up. And so that was ingrained into me really early on when it was very discouraging and I just kept going.
[00:24:44] Erin: Actually this is something that I've been thinking about lately, that the things that are most important and are most valuable to us as humans are things that we work for and that don't come easy. And I feel like reading Buffalo Flats, I can see how important and valuable this story is to you. And that makes it more valuable to me as well. Imagine if Buffalo Flats had just dropped in your lap, you'd open the Big Red Book and you were like, oh, this is a lovely story. I'll just go ahead and, and write it out. I don't know that it would be as meaningful. I don't know. You can tell me, maybe you would've preferred that, you would've preferred the non-pain route.
[00:25:28] Martine: Well, unfortunately it never happens that way. It's just part of the process. Because I was lucky with my other books and they were not as painful and difficult, although My Book of Life by Angel was pretty painful and difficult, have to say. But every writer at some point meets up with the monsters and this was my monster. I think that if you spoke to any writer no matter how brilliant, they would tell you the same thing.
[00:26:01] Anne-Marie: So Erin, we obviously need to leave our listeners with one last beautiful sentence from Buffalo Flats. What do you have for us?
[00:26:09] Erin: This is towards the end of the book when Rebecca and Coby are, are talking about the future and I'll just leave it at that.
“She had learned that no mortal soul could love the whole world at once, you could only love the person before you and the next and the next, one at a time, man by woman, by a child, just the one before you and the world, each soul carried with her.”
And it is a beautiful sentence, but it also is a sentence that sums up Rebecca and her journey through the book Buffalo Flats.
[Music outro]
[00:26:49] Anne-Marie: That's it for today. If you're enjoying this podcast, you can find more content like this at kidlitcraft.com. Find us on social media @KidLitCraft, and you can support this podcast on Patreon. You can find Kid Lit Craft t-shirts, as well as tote bags and drinkware now at Cotton Bureau.
[00:27:07] Erin: Drinkware. That's exciting. I didn't know about that. If you could please download episodes, like, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, it really does help. And let your writer friends know about the podcast. We can't wait to nerd out with you.
[00:27:23] Anne-Marie: Thanks for joining us. See you next time for the rest of our interview with Martine.
