Is there going to be a sequel to The Off Season?

Will there be a Dairy Queen movie?

What is up with you and your sister? This link may or may not explain things!

For other questions, please check out the lengthy INTERVIEWS section of this website; dollars to doughnuts at least one of your questions is answered there. Trust me.

For reading groups, educators and all inquiring minds:

• Questions about Dairy Queen
• Questions about The Off Season
• Questions about Princess Ben
  

Questions from Caitlin, age 12.

Were you like DJ when you were her age? Did you ever have a relationship with anyone like Brian?

No, and no! Although I spent a lot of time wishing for the attention of boys like Brian. I very much know what it’s like to yearn from afar. And I didn’t have any of D.J.’s athletic abilities, even though I wanted them SO badly – I can’t sink a basketball to save my life, or run fast, or even really understand ball sports. . . Plus in high school I was a bookworm, and a geek, and a motor-mouth, none of which fits D.J. If we were in school together, I’d be in awe of her, but we probably wouldn’t speak very much.

D.J. has no idea how great she is, she doesn’t give herself any credit for being an incredibly talented athlete, and a hard worker, and she can’t even see that she’s pretty. That teen-girl ability to dismiss everything that you’re good at, to have no idea that other people might like or respect you, and only focus on the negatives (both real and fabricated) – that description fit me perfectly, and sadly it fits a lot of other girls as well.

Did any of this happen to you? Did you know anyone who had this happen to them?

I didn’t grow up on a dairy farm. Well, we had two goats, and they did need to be milked twice a day, but that’s not quite the same as milking 30-odd cows. Also, unlike D.J., I very much resented milking, and tried to get out of it whenever I could. I never played football in high school, and I don’t know any girls who played high school football – though I’ve known a couple of girls who probably could, and in the past few months I’ve been sent newspaper articles about girls who do.

If you’re asking whether I know any teenagers who suffer about who they are, and try to guess their role in the world . . . Um, about a million. And that, to me, is what the book is really about, figuring out who you are, and what you love. D.J.’s real problem at the beginning of this story is that she doesn’t know what she’s passionate about – and WHO she’s passionate about, which is equally important. Figuring out she loves football is a life-saving discovery for her. If you can use Dairy Queen to figure out what you MUST do, what the great passion of your life is, and then to seek it out – well, I can’t imagine anything more gratifying for a writer than contributing to this.

Did you use any names of people that you knew?

I tried very hard NOT to use real people’s names. For one thing, there’s a legal issue: if I use the name of someone I know for a character who isn’t very nice, then that person has a right to complain, or sue. Beyond this, there’s the much greater issue of mixing up real people and made-up people. When I use a real name for a character, then it’s much harder for me to keep track of that character in my head – I keep associating them with the real person, with my own opinion of that real person – and what I think about that real person might have no relation to the truth! I wanted very much for all these characters to be completely fictitious, because then I could control what happens to them. Since then, I’ve heard people say, “Oh, so-and-so in the book reminds me exactly of ____.” I always reply, “That’s great, but I didn’t know ______ when I was writing.”

There is one exception: when my mother was growing up, she had a dog named Smut, named after corn smut just like Smut Schwenk. That name always cracked me up, and I was thrilled to be able to use it here.

How did you choose the names of the characters?

Choosing names is a huge responsibility, and of course the name relates so closely to the character. It’s important even if the name doesn’t relate to that person, because THAT says something, too. For example, I don’t think of Amber as an “Amber”-type girl at all, but it shows a lot about who her mother is, and how Lori’s vision of her daughter didn’t turn out quite the way she’d planned.

To be honest, I was little self-conscious about D.J.’s name. It’s such a stereotype, the tough girl using a boy’s name – the book My Sister Mike does it, and George in Nancy Drew – there are hundreds of examples. But the fact is that D.J. picked her name. She’d originally been called Dorrie, and she insisted that everyone switch to this very boyish “D.J.” At the beginning of the book, she really wants to be a boy. She never comes out and says this, I don’t think she’d ever even admit it to herself, but she really sees herself as more of a boy than a girl. That’s one of the elements of the book that I really like – that playing football makes her more feminine.

Beyond this, Wisconsin has a huge German and Scandinavian population, so that gave me a lot of direction in picking names. Pennsylvania has a large German population as well, going back to the Pennsylvania Dutch, and whenever I came across a good Germanic name (such as Schwenksville), I’d file it away in my memory banks. I’m also not above paging through a phone book to get name ideas – you’d be surprised what you come up with, doing that.

What inspired you to write this? What made you want to write a book?

Well, I had this dream about a girl playing football, and I decided to turn it into a story. But that’s just a thought – if everyone could write stories from their fragments of dreams, we’d be swimming in books! I was much more inspired by the belief that I needed to write a book that I myself wanted to read. Certainly a book that I’d want to read when I was 13, but even a book that I’d  want to read as today, a so-called grown-up. You must understand that I never in my wildest dreams expected to get published, and certainly not to receive any recognition. All I wanted was a story that I could keep in a box in my desk, and read every once in a while – that’s how I consoled myself as I sent it off to a literary agent knowing that she’d send it back with a letter beginning “I’m sorry, but . . .” Sometimes when I get nervous about my book reviews, I need to remind myself of this reality.

Was writing any part of this story hard mentally?

The hardest part was getting inside Brian’s head – in part because I’ve never been a boy, or a jock, or popular, but also because D.J.’s opinion of him changes so much over the course of the story that it was hard to get a bead on him. Developing him as a character, and his mother . . . I suffered the most over that, and took many long walks to figure him out. I’m so glad I put the time into it.

Where did you find the time to write a book?

Thank you for asking! I’m very lucky in that I can keep a lot in my head – for a while, at least – so I thought through the story in great depth before I started writing. I can do a lot of thinking when I’m cooking, for example, or running and biking, which I was doing a lot of at that time. And I type very quickly. But I do tend to get preoccupied when I’m in the middle of writing – I’ll be driving the kids to school and in my mind I’m a million miles away. There were many takeout dinners, and then I’d race back upstairs to finish a chapter while it was still fresh. To tell you the truth, much of the writing process is a blur now. I don’t know where this book came from – I felt more like a conduit, delivering this story, than its sole creator.