Whales on Stilts! (16 page)

4. Many old-time novels end with a marriage.
Whales on Stilts!
does not. It ends with robots. I like it when books end with some hand-holding, flowers, and distant bees. If you could choose a place for a wedding to end this novel, would you choose the Chapel in the Dozing Glen or the Wee Kirk in the Heather? How would you dress the bridesmaids? Should the groomsmen wear tuxedos? (Remember: They are whales.)

by Ann Mow bray Dixon-Clarke

Ann Mowbray Dixon-Clarke:
What gave you the idea for this book?

M. T. Anderson: I wanted to write a book that was like summer vacation—just fun and breezy and free of rules.

A. M. D.-C.:
Do you have a particular writing schedule?

M. T. A.: I wrote this book in a cabin by a lake in Canada. I would go rowing and then sit down to write while I was eating my awful meals. (I live alone and I'm a bad cook. That means a lot of dry pork chops and limp broccoli.)

A. M. D.-C.:
Okay, you know what's good? Ribs and coleslaw on a backyard grill.

M. T. A.: Thanks. I'll keep that in mind.

A. M. D.-C.:
What were your favorite books when you were a kid?

M. T. A.: Of course, I loved all of the Jasper Dash books, and they were one of my main inspirations for writing
Whales on Stilts!
On long Saturday afternoons, I would turn off the television when the cartoons were over and go to the local library. I'd trot down the stairs to the basement, where they kept all of the old books that hadn't made it onto the electronic database. I would sit there and read a Jasper Dash adventure, and suddenly I would feel myself part of this community of readers, kids from the fifties with buzz-cut hair and kids from the seventies with necklaces made of shells, all of us in awe before the same wondrous stories, all of us meeting in the space of the imagination.

A. M. D.-C.:
It sounds like you were kind of lonely as a kid. Is that true?

M. T. A.: Not really. I had my friends and my books, and we made up worlds together.

A. M. D.-C.:
If you were lonely, would you have liked to have been invited to a wedding with some ribs and slaw? Between a child-learning specialist with a certain flair and a whale-human hybrid? Did
you ever think of
that
on a Saturday afternoon, when you were lying on the rug, a book open in front of you, the sun falling through the basement window, the savor of library paste and uncertain patrons in the air? Did you think that you might want to be at a whale-human hybrid wedding with a garden nook and a bagpiper playing Pachelbel's
Canon and Gigue,
the smell of hollyhocks and ham hocks mingling by the grill, and Jasper and Lily and Katie sitting on folding chairs, all looking at each other like they'd be kind of relieved to be somewhere else? And then, suddenly, coming down the aisle, is the most handsome whale-human hybrid you've ever seen, the ruffles on his shirt as blue as the balmy Caribbean, free now to show his face to a world that never loved him and the woman who does, and who always shall, with all her soul? Did you imagine the laughter afterward on the porch, the kiss beneath the ivied bower—the rapturous kiss, with the tang of baleen, the scent of foreign seas?

Did you, author? Did you foresee this, the dancing till dawn? Did you?

Did you?