HARDWICK – Peter Gould came to the Jeudevine Library on the evening of April 7 and gave an insightful talk about his new young adult novel, “Red Nose Girl.”
Initially set in a small town in Vermont, it is about an independent 15-year-old girl, Lettie, who frequently wears a clown nose to school. This gives her the complex identity of a circus clown, amusing but also somewhat dangerous by breaking the boundaries. The nose is more important developing her characteristic of someone who always tells the truth no matter what the consequences. This gets her into constant trouble with her fellow students and teachers, and she often ends up at the principals office.
Her only friend is Trevor, an Afro-American boy of the same age who dresses flamboyantly. Together they are working on an Advance Placement Course for their history class on incarceration in this country and the problem of for-profit prisons, with Vermont shipping some prisoners to other states. Vermont facilities are at full capacity and it is cheaper to send them elsewhere. The issue is important personally for Trevor because his own father is in such a for-profit prison in Mississippi.
But the problem is much wider than the privately owned prisons run by corporations rather than publicly accountable states and the federal government. Inseparable factors are the horrifying history of human slavery in America for the first two-and-a-half centuries until the Civil War and the legacy of pervasive racism and systematic violence. In addition, there is the almost-universal discrimination preventing people from getting good jobs and participating in the growing economy of the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20th century; the inordinate mass incarceration of Afro-Americans due to the inequities of sentencing and demonic travesties of the justice system. There is the harm to families caused by the absence of a parent, especially when that person is put in a prison at too great a distance to visit regularly.
Thus the heroine, Lettie, and the hero, Trevor, take on an enormous cause to raise people’s awareness of these contemporary problems. The novel becomes a journey, simultaneously inner and outer, for two relatively innocent but curiously wise teenage high school students to discover what power they have to change this unjust system.
The nominal structure of the novel is that they travel to Mississippi to see Trevor’s father, but the larger message of the journey was their coming of age, discovering who they are and dealing with the often frustrating adult world.
Gould read some extended passages from the beginning of the novel and towards the end, giving the audience the flavor of his writing style. In “Red Nose Girl,” he has created vivid characters which we can identify with, following Letties every thought and observation as well as her conversations with others on her journey. In his talk he revealed aspects of how a writer proceeds to put together a work of fiction based on both personal experience and a creative imagination.
Peter Gould is uniquely qualified to get inside the minds of young people as he has given his own Shakespeare theatre camp, Get Thee To Funnery, in the summer of several locations in Vermont (including Craftsbury Common) for the past 29 years. This particular topic has been fermenting in his mind for twelve years, and is based originally on two actual high school students who took on these same issues, testified about them in the statehouse and were applauded for their efforts by the Vermont legislature. He has gone out of his way to have the novel read by knowledgeable people to check for the authenticity of contemporary teenage conversations and mindsets, as well as talking with state officials in the Department of Corrections and visiting a maximum security prison for youths in New Mexico doing a theater project. He himself has been a life-long activist for justice and has written seven previous works with activist themes, from “Burnt Toast to Home Comfort,” “A Peasant of El Salvador,” “Mac Bush,” “Marley,” “House Drawn Yogurt” and most recently, “Write Naked.”
A separate, more detailed review of “Red Nose Girl” will follow.
David K. Rodgers
David K. Rodgers is a writer, mason and card carrying dilettante, who dabbles and babbles in art. He has lived in East Craftsbury for the past 40 years.
