Shinichi Tetsutani, about to have his fourth birthday, riding on his red tricycle the morning that he died in Hiroshima. An old newspaper quoted his mother, an Iowa farmer’s wife, as saying, “I had bad luck with all my boys.” I couldn’t get the terse enormity of that woman’s statement out of my mind. Nothing really unique about him, until I followed paths through the archives and found that his family had already lost their two other sons in tragedies unrelated to the USS Arizona. He was no one special, really, until I discovered that he was from the same small town in Wisconsin where my grandmother lived and where my father had grown up. The 17-year-old Marine, Leo Amundson, on the USS Arizona, for example. In the reading and rereading, though, I found that now and then one small, sometimes not terribly important detail would capture my attention. Research provided me with many true stories, each gripping in its own way. The selection of particular individual stories was the same for both the Pearl Harbor and the Hiroshima sections. How did you choose to tell these particular stories? The servicemen portrayed in the Pearl Harbor poems are based on real people.
When the images began to appear on the page in that form, it seemed right.
But it floated there in my consciousness for some years, images drifting and surfacing now and then. Was it a story? A memoir? I wasn’t certain. It was a subject that had been haunting me for a long time. Maybe that is what I needed to do with this narrative. It distills things, pares them back to their essence. And so I wrote it that way-and later discovered that a lot of authors were writing novels in verse. There is no other way for me to describe that. How on earth did that happen? Was there something in the atmosphere? It’s a mystery.Īnd now, this year, the book I was working on seemed to want to be written in verse.
Nine years ago, two other authors- Richard Peck and Cynthia Voigt-and I, all at the same time, without talking to one another about it, wrote novels in which all of the characters were mice. What did you find challenging about it? Rewarding? Tell us about the decision to tell this story of connections in verse. BookPage spoke to Lowry about writing in verse, choosing which stories to tell and revisiting the past. In the poems that compose On the Horizon, Lowry intertwines personal memories with the experiences of historical figures and ordinary people at Pearl Harbor and Japan who lived through same history as Lowry herself.
As a young child, Lowry and her family lived in Hawaii, scant years before the attack on Pearl Harbor after the war, they moved to Tokyo. In On the Horizon, she reflects on her extraordinary childhood and the historical moment in which it occurred. Two-time Newbery Medalist Lois Lowry is one of the most distinguished writers of all time.
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