Katherine+Paterson

=** Katherine Paterson **= = =  **K**atherine Paterson was born in 1932 in China, where her parents were American missionaries. Her first language was Chinese. Because of wars, the family was forced to move from China twice. The second time, Katherine and her family returned to the United States, where they moved frequently, owing to her father’s new assignments. When she first entered school, Katherine knew little about the United States and spoke English with a British accent. Before she graduated from high school, she had attended more than a dozen different schools. Paterson sees her choice of characters— children who are different from their schoolmates— as a reflection of her own childhood experience of having been an outsider in different cultures and frequently the new kid in school. She especially remembers her experiences in a North Carolina elementary school, where “Pansy and her gang of seventh-grade Amazons. . . used to roam the playground, ‘seeking whom they might devour.’” Paterson “could spot them coming across the entire width of the school grounds and would be reduced to jelly on the spot.” At the same school, she worked as a library aide and became an avid reader. “I do not think it would be [too much] to say that [the school library] saved my sanity,” she adds. After finishing college, Paterson taught school for a year in a small town similar to Lark Creek in //Bridge to Terabithia.// She then spent four years in Japan as a missionary. Returning to the United States in 1962, she married John Paterson, a Presbyterian minister. The couple has four children. Before Paterson became a full-time writer of fiction, she wrote educational materials. In her spare time, she began writing historical fiction set in Japan. Her first great success was winning the National Book Award for //The// //Master Puppeteer,// a mystery about a boy’s success in a traditional Japanese art. //Bridge to Terabithia//, Paterson’s first book set outside Japan, won the Newbery Medal in 1978. Three years later, she won another Newbery Medal for //Jacob Have I Loved,// a bittersweet story about twin sisters. She also won the National Book Award a second time for //The Great Gilly Hopkins//, the story of a wisecracking foster child. Paterson continues to write fiction for young people and is recognized for her understanding of how children cope with difficult situations. She now lives in Vermont, where she enjoys sailing, swimming, and playing tennis. Not surprisingly, her favourite hobby is reading. She describes her attitude toward life and writing in this way: = = //'I see myself as a tiny speck in a vast and marvellous universe, in which every particle is. . . connected, and in which nothing happens to any part that does not affect the whole. . . . Telling stories is what I do, so I try to do it as well as I can.'// __ **Inspiration for the book** __ The year 1974 was a difficult one for the Paterson family. In the spring, Katherine Paterson was diagnosed with cancer. She had a successful operation to remove the tumor, but the experience frightened her and her family. They hadn’t yet recovered from this brush with death when eight-year-old David Paterson’s best friend, Lisa Hill, was struck and killed by lightning. “The two events were almost more than we could bear,” Paterson has said. So when she went to a meeting of children’s-book writers and publishers in Washington, D.C., and someone asked her how her children were, she didn’t answer with her usual “Fine.” Instead, she poured out the tragic tale of Lisa Hill’s death and her son David’s grief. When she finished the story, a book editor said, “I know this sounds just like an editor, but you ought to write that story.” Not sure what else to do, Paterson began writing. “I wrote Bridge to Terabithia because I couldn’t do anything else,” she has said. “Of course, if I could’ve done anything I wanted to do, I would’ve brought Lisa back from the dead. But I couldn’t do that, and I couldn’t even comfort my son, who was totally distraught. So I did what writers often do when they can’t do what they really want to do. They write a story to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense. . . . So that’s why I began to write the book. And people always want me to say that it comforted my son, but no, it was really for me.” Paterson wrote quickly at first, dozens and dozens of pages. But then one day, she says, she found herself “totally frozen. The time had come for my fictional child to die, and I could not let it happen.” Paterson put the book aside until a friend asked how it was coming along. “I can’t let her die,” Paterson told her friend. “I can’t face going through Lisa’s death again.” “Katherine,” her friend said, “I don’t think it’s Lisa’s death you can’t face, it’s yours.” Hearing those words gave Paterson the push she needed to finish the book. “If it was my death I could not face,” she said, “then by God, I would face it.” Within a few weeks, Paterson had finished the first draft of the book. “I discovered gradually and not without a little pain that you don’t put together a bridge for a child. You become one—you lay yourself across the chasm,” Paterson has said. “In writing this book, I have thrown my body across the chasm that most terrified me.” Paterson hopes Bridge to Terabithia will help children deal with death by giving them practice before it actually happens. “I feel that Bridge is kind of a rehearsal that you go through to mourn somebody’s death that you care about,” Paterson has said. While Bridge to Terabithia got its start in fact, Paterson has told her readers it is entirely fiction. “Bridge is loosely based on my son’s friendship and the death of his friend. But the resemblance stops there because they [David and Jess, Lisa and Leslie] are very different people. Their families are different. They live in a different place. So it is fiction and not fact, but it grew out of a real incident.”  = =