Questions for “Oh, Give Me a Home” by Jane Kurtz

1. Your experience as a missionary child seems to have deeply shaped your work… there’s a warm sense of nostalgia in the poems about Maji, contrasted with more skeptical memories of your time in America. How much of your childhood perspective has carried into adulthood, and what was it like to revisit these contrasting experiences through writing?

Let me focus on one word in this question. Missionary. I never use it when I’m talking about my childhood in Ethiopia because people I talk with bring a lot of assumptions about what that word means: who I am. Who my parents were. What my life in Ethiopia was like. So that’s one example of a way interactions can still make me instantly uncomfortable and not really seen, just as I felt when I was young and coming to the U.S. to live for a year every five years. But I found a voice for talking about Ethiopia when I became a writer because I connected with readers who were warmly curious instead of indifferent or even hostile to my background. When the 23-year period that my family initially spent in Ethiopia comes up in conversation, I can still feel awkward, nervous, or invisible. Writing this book was an exercise in hope that readers would extend that same warm curiosity to my real childhood.

2. Can you share what it was like to grow up in a culture that wasn’t inherently yours, yet may have felt like home as a child? And what was the experience of returning to America like… coming back to a place that was technically home, but may have felt like the farthest thing from it?

Well…I wouldn’t have spent five years or so writing this book if I could easily share what my complex childhood was like. I wanted to offer glimpses into my first time of doing the high-wire dance that many children of diplomats, business professionals, and others do (about 50 million temporary residents around the world). There is a label now for people like me: third culture kid. Ethiopian culture wasn’t mine. But I also spent most of my childhood living outside my parents’ culture. Tanya Crossman, who has interviewed hundreds of third culture kids, explains that they often have “unique identity challenges” as they try to figure out where they belong--a good way to describe my experiences. I thought I knew about America because of the books I’d read. What a shock to find myself feeling like such an outsider. My lifetime close bond with my siblings comes from having been in the boat together, the only ones at times.

3. I love the magic you weave into childhood memories, such as in the line from page 23: "The white world is just / our mountain top. / No valley or mountains beyond. / Just me dancing in the yard, / a damp and delicious ballroom, / a fairyland of fluff." Did the sense of magic emerge naturally as you reminisced during the writing process, or was it a more intentional decision to integrate that element into the work?

One of the realities of my childhood is that my mom was an avid reader and managed to pack a lot of books to take to Maji, including collections of fairy tales. (She read an article by a librarian about 100 best books for children, and I’m grateful to that librarian!) Reading, story-telling, story-acting were ways that my sisters and I made some sense of our complicated lives. So, while I did have to make up some details for various scenes, the sense of magic wasn’t invented. As a kid, I constantly imagined myself into strange and wonderful worlds like the ones I was reading about.

4. On page 32, in 'Maji Mist,' you continue to evoke the magic of Maji with lines like, "I run around the circle / that the cedar trees make. / Sometimes in stories / holes suddenly yawn / and gobble people up." As a reader, it’s easy to contrast these mystical, wonder-filled depictions of Maji with the more blunt and straightforward poems about America in Part 2. Could you speak to how growing up between these two very different worlds shaped you, and whether you’ve ever been able to return to the magic of Maji, even if only in your writing?

It's true that the two childhood years (five years apart) I spent in the United States felt very prosaic compared to the dense forests and waterfalls and mists and sensory details that surrounded me in Maji. The first time I returned to Ethiopia—after 20 years of living in theU.S.—I was instantly struck by smells and sounds and textures that felt rich and fascinating and said “home” to me. A few years later, my parents and some of their children and grandchildren (including two of my kids) made an intense mountainous hike back to Maji. I’ve returned a number of times since then, including with painters and writers. One of the Ethiopian painters had a show in Dubai and his hosts showed him buildings with gold fixtures and said, “Is it the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen?” He told me that he said, “No. Maji is.”

5. Throughout the book, young Jane consistently longs for a pet, which seems to symbolize freedom versus captivity. This may reflect the sense of freedom you felt in Maji versus the feeling of confinement in America. Was this contrast a deliberate choice?

Huh. I don’t know that I analyzed my childhood pet longings quite that closely, which shows how great it is to have readers who see underpinnings and themes. I only know that we were surrounded by animals in Maji, and pets in books we were reading seemed so enchanting—and anything seemed possible in Maji the way it didn’t in Boise or (later) Pasadena.

6. Mommy and Daddy seem to use materialism as a way to entice the girls about life in America, for example in the poem “America has stores” (p. 106). In contrast, the girls’ reasons for wanting to stay in Maji are rooted more in experiences and the natural beauty they encounter there. Could you speak to your own experience with the commercialism and oversaturation of material goods in America, especially in comparison to the simplicity found in other countries?

The contrast is pretty stark, especially with the rural parts of other countries where I’ve spent time. Material goods make life easier. I don’t want to romanticize the struggles of living without clean water or adequate housing or medicine. But I can say that Ethiopia is rich in human connection and in making music and telling stories, in laughter and the slow, thoughtful enjoyment of food and coffee together. I miss that richness. Stuff can definitely get in the way. Now, though, I have Ethiopian-American grandchildren and a volunteer role creating books for and about Ethiopia—including lots of collaborators in Ethiopia and theU.S.—so I’m still traveling between continents, still experiencing and thinking a lot about what’s hard and what’s lovely in each of the places that sometimes feel like home to me.

7. Photographs are beautifully interwoven throughout your poetry. How did you decide which images to include? Did the writing come first, with photos selected to complement the poems, or did certain images spark the poems themselves?

I don’t think I used any of my photos to spark memories, although I might have needed them as I was doing the first draft to piece together exactly how Maji looked back then. The house where our family lived is still standing, as is (for example) the tree beside it that Joy and I used as our department store, but everything is much older, of course. Eucalyptus trees…waterfalls…vines…the plants we called “water babies” are all things I’ve seen recently. I put together some childhood photos for Catalyst Press, and that gave my editor the idea to include some in the book. I love having them there!

8. You mention in your Author’s Note that when writing, you sometimes had to change the order of true events or embellish memories into full scenes. How did this process feel for you, considering that our memories aren’t always linear or concrete? Did you find yourself mapping out a chronological timeline for your memories, or did you write poems first and then rearrange them afterward?

I started writing the poems as part of Poetry Friday, a project of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Children’s and YA Literature, where I was part of the faculty for many years. A series of skilled readers helped me think about how to make those poems into a whole book. I did lots of rearranging and mulling what book readers might need or want to know or understand. One example of how I had to combine imagination and memory: the potato chips and elevator encounter in NYC and the crocodile question from Oregon are stories my family told and laughed about for years. As an adult, I realized they were stories of culture shock. But I had to flesh out the scenes around those anecdotes. Also, I don’t think we traveled through Paris on that trip back to the U.S. rather than five years later. But my Paris memories are much more vivid than, say, my memories of Greece. I also wanted Paris in the book because my dad’s World War II experiences were a huge part of why we ended up in Ethiopia, something I didn’t understand until I was an adult but now refer back to when people ask, “What took your family to Ethiopia?”

9. As a poet myself, I understand how much thought goes into line breaks, spacing, word choice, and structure. What influenced the form of your poetry in this book, and how does that reflect your story?

I don’t have formal training in poetry, but I love reading it and always have. (My teacher in Boise wrote, “We have enjoyed Jane’s poems. They are exceptionally good for her age. Perhaps it is one of her talents.”) As a young teacher, I spent a lot of time writing with kids, using books like Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Reflections on A Gift of Watermelon Pickles…And Other Modern Verse. Together, we learned to focus on unusual, exquisite details. We practiced playing with sounds and rhythms of words and sentences. After I experienced a flood in North Dakota and saw our mostly-ruined house for the first time, I flew to speak at a reading conference where I talked about writing this kind of poetry with kids. An author friend said,“What if you wrote about the flood that way?” When I returned to clean-up and a FEMA trailer, I found that’s exactly what I wanted to do. My snippets turned into the picture book, River Friendly River Wild. Later, when I read the wonderful verse novel Inside Out and Back Again, I thought, I wonder if I could tackle writing about my weird childhood if I did it that way. And it (slowly) worked. Sometimes poetry puts up barriers for readers. But sometimes it is like looking at a haunting, evocative photograph where the whole story isn’t there but where vivid glimpses of the world plus emotion—some kind of truth—are gripping. I like reading and writing that kind of poetry.