Keith McGowan's Keithbooks.com -- Interview with Children's Book Author Keith McGowan

A Brief Interview with Keith McGowan

Q. What was it that inspired you to write The Witch’s Guide to Cooking with Children?

A. One day, I wondered to myself: Who’s the most terrible villain of them all in children’s literature? And it occurred to me that it might be the witch who eats children from Hansel and Gretel. Yes, I thought, she’s a terrific villain. What would it be like to go up against her? A great adventure! And probably funny to boot.

Q. Is the witch the central character in the book?

A. While readers probably focus on the witch and the adventure, for me this book is really a book about what it’s like to be a brother or sister. Sol and Connie are the book. It’s their story. And they are truly a brother and sister which means they don’t always get along, they fight, they get on each other’s nerves, and they upset each other. But they also stick together and protect each other. That’s how I was with my siblings growing up.

Q. Where were you born? Do you have brothers and sisters?

A. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I have two brothers, one four years older than me and the other one eight years older than me.

Q. What were you like as a kid?

A. I loved to read books. I loved animals and had many pets: a tortoise, hamster, parakeet, and a snake—though not all at the same time, of course. The family dog and I grew up together. I also studied piano and loved music. I still love music. And I rode my bicycle a lot. I wrote stories, too.

Q. Where do you live now?

A. I live in Vienna, Austria, in Europe. The countries next to Austria are the Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Hungary, and Slovakia. The last places I lived in the US were New Orleans and Chicago.

Q. What is it like where you live?

A. I live with my wife on a quiet, tree-lined street not too far from the city’s largest park, called Prater, which is almost like a forest. Vienna has horse-drawn carriages that take tourists around the downtown part of the city. And our street is one of the streets that those carriages take every morning to get downtown, because there isn’t a lot of traffic here. So every morning, I hear horses clackety-clacking outside my window. If I’m still waking up, it feels a little bit like I’ve woken up back in olden days.

Q. What is your favorite color and what is your favorite food?

A. Purple and noodle soup.

Q. What are some of your favorite books?

A. For kids, favorites of mine include:

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson

Black Beauty by Anne Sewell

Stone-Faced Boy and A Likely Place by Paula Fox

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt

Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key by Jack Gantos

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

M.C. Higgins, the Great by Virginia Hamilton

Momo by Michael Ende

The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin

Goggle Eyes by Anne Fine

I could go on and on . . .

For grown-ups, some of my favorite books include but aren't limited to Middlemarch by George Eliot, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Tell Me A Riddle by Tillie Olsen, Through A Scanner Darkly by Philip Dick, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and all of Jane Austen's books.

Q. Why did you set The Witch’s Guide to Cooking with Children in modern times?

A. Once I realized that I was going to write a story with the witch from Hansel and Gretel, I started to wonder about Hansel and Gretel in general. I asked myself: What would that story have sounded like to kids back in the 1800s? And I realized that, to them, the tale happened in a more or less real setting. When the story was first told, I don’t think it was that strange to be the children of a woodcutter living in a cottage near the woods. So I made the decision to try to recreate the way the meeting with the witch from Hansel and Gretel might have sounded when the story was first told, not as if it were taking place in the faraway past but as if it were happening “today,” and not as if the witch lived in a fairy tale setting but instead “somewhere near you.” When you hear it told in this way, you realize immediately that the old folktale was much more of a true adventure.

Q. Does The Witch’s Guide to Cooking with Children retell Hansel and Gretel scene by scene?

A. The Witch’s Guide to Cooking with Children preserves three elements from Hansel and Gretel as told by the Brothers Grimm: the brother and sister, the parents, and the witch who eats children. But it certainly doesn’t try to follow the Grimm version of the story closely. I always understood the idea of a folktale more as each generation, in each country, telling a certain type of story to their kids. There is an old Italian version of Hansel and Gretel called Nennillo and Nennella, for example, that starts off the same, with the terrible parents, but the sister and brother, once they are lost in the woods, meet totally different fates. I read a Polish version at one point—I can’t find it anymore—but I seem to remember the witch was totally different in it, and maybe one child was turned into a tree? I never had the idea to try to bring kids the same folktale as the one the Brothers Grimm recorded, or to follow the scenes of their German version. Instead I thought more about what it was like for kids to hear about a witch that might eat them, and parents or stepparents trying to lose them. What would a story like that mean to American children in the 21st century? So you’ll see those elements in the book, which I saw as fundamental to the story, but you won’t find any of the details like a bread house or birds eating bread crumbs, and the story takes place in a town not in the woods. This is really my own story about a witch who eats children and a modern brother and sister who meet her. What surprised me most about telling this story for children in modern times was that it came out as a kind of comedy—a satire on modern life. But it struck me at once that this was the way the story should sound.

Q. Was it hard writing The Witch’s Guide to Cooking with Children?

A. Absolutely, it was very hard. But I had so much fun writing it that even when it was very difficult I didn’t mind. At least, it seems that way now.

Q. What about the art in the book and on this website?

A. I feel truly honored to have illustrations by Yoko Tanaka. She is an incredible artist with a singular vision. She also paints fine art of the most original sort. She really understood my story and related to it in her own unique way. All the art on this website comes from her illustrations, too. It’s amazing to have someone like her add her vision to my words.

Q. Will we be seeing Sol and Connie in more adventures? Are you working on a new book?

A. I promise to try my very best to make every one of my books as exciting and intriguing as I can. The odds are very good that, among my books to come, we will hear what happened to Sol and Connie—it’s not what you expect! In the meantime, though, if you enjoyed The Witch’s Guide to Cooking with Children, be on the lookout for my next book which I hope you’ll see in bookstores next year. I can’t reveal what it‘s about yet but I can say that it’s for kids and by the same person who wrote The Witch’s Guide to Cooking with Children. And I promise that it is offbeat, exciting, and at least a little bit funny.