The Mighty author Christopher Paul Curtis tells stories of the past to help kidscreate a brighter future

Christopher Paul Curtis, who headlines the Inprint Cool Brains! reading series on Sunday, is an author who has lived a life almost as interesting as some of his young protagonists.

Born and raised in Flint, Mich., Curtis is the first African-American male to win the Newbery Medal, for his book Bud, Not Buddy. Before finding success in storytelling, he attended the University of Michigan and worked a wide variety of jobs he disliked, including garbage man, census taker and 13 years on the GM assembly line. During all these forms of employment, he would write during breaks and off hours.

Curtis wrote his first book, The Watsons Go to Birmingham —1963, during a year he took off from a job at a warehouse. He was determined to succeed as a writer. “I’d saved enough money to carry us for the year and what I’d do is go to the public library and I’d sit there and I said to myself, ‘This is not a vacation. You’re off work for a year but you have to take it very seriously,’” he told CultureMap in a recent interview.

When I asked if it was a freeing experience to know he had a year to just write, he laughed and countered, “It was a terrifying experience. It’s not very often that you get a chance to try to have a dream come true. We all say we want it, but once you’re faced with the possibility, there is the possibility it will come true, but there is the much larger possibility that it won’t come true. What do you do after you’ve taken the shot at your dream and you have nothing to show for it?”

Luckily, what he had to show it was a novel for middle-graders that would later be distinguished as a Newbery Honor Book and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. Now, he tells the kids he talks to, “You have to take a chance. At least give yourself a shot at following your dream.”

He also stresses to young would-be writers that writing is a lot of work and isn’t always easy, but “Even if it doesn’t work out, you learn things about yourself.”

From a girl's point of view

His latest book, The Mighty Miss Malone, is about an Indiana African-American family’s struggles during the 1930s. The story is narrated by the truly marvelous and mighty 12-year-old Deza Malone, a born storyteller who made a cameo appearance in Bud, Not Buddy.

Deza is Curtis’s first attempt at writing from a girl’s point of view. Discussing any worries he might have had about creating a female narrator, Curtis says, “The way I write, I wait for the character to come to me. . ..And it didn’t take anything extraordinary to get Deza to come to me.” Once he began and “talked” to Deza, he had little trouble capturing her voice.

Though Deza is extremely intelligent, nestled within the safety of her family, she does not always realize how many obstacles, like racism and poverty, she faces in the United States in 1936. Shortly after her father is in a terrible fishing accident on Lake Michigan, the Malones begin to lose the few things of value they own — their family ties and the comfort they find in each other.

Many of Curtis’s previous novels are also set in the past. He has always found history interesting and particularly thinks it’s “fun to try to speculate what these huge historic events, what effect they have on people’s small lives and particular young people’s lives.” And in a literary market place filled with wizards and vampires, Curtis believes there will always be kids who wonder about the past and the way things were.

In The Mighty Miss Malone, Deza is caught in the Great Depression, and unfortunately readers might find the poverty Deza lives within is not so distant as we would like.

When writing the novel, Curtis was very aware of the connections he was making between Deza’s time and our own. He reminds us, “Poverty is still so in our face. You can’t avoid it. One in six American children goes to bed hungry.”

Curtis also sees similarities between how families living in poverty were treated and demonized in our history and how they are treated today.

“I think it’s extremely short-sighted to want to cut all the programs that help the poor and to think of the poor as these horrible people. That was something that was done in the Great Depression and it’s being done now. We give ourselves credit for coming so far in so many things, but I think in one of the most important things we haven’t gone anywhere and that’s in taking care of children and making sure children at a minimum don’t go to bed hungry, at a bare minimum. And we can do that, but we just don’t have the will to do it.”

The Mighty Miss Malone ends with hope for the Malone family, but they go through so many struggles to get there, I had to ask Curtis if kids ever blame him for his characters’ suffering. He laughed "no," but said they do sometimes resent not being told what happens to his characters after the novels end.

“They don’t seem to mind what happens to characters because they know people goes through things. They just want to have some type of assurance that things become O.K. later, that things improve for the character,” he says.

Curtis believes it’s important that kids use their own imagination and interpretations when seeing beyond his novels endings.

The Cool Brains event at Johnston Middle School is not Curtis’s first visit to Houston. At the end of our conversation, he spent a few minutes reminiscing about past visits he’s made, and particularly about a week he spent working with Alief ISD students several years ago. He has was amazed at the “very diverse group of young people” he encounter. He said he always has a great time in Houston.