Kirby Larson: The Girl Who Wanted to Be Dorothy
Kirby Larson learned that words have power at age seven, standing on a playground where the popular girls always got to be Dorothy. She told them her mother was in the hospital — leaving out that she was there having a baby — and got to be Dorothy that day. Decades and 250 rejection…
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Kirby Larson learned that words have power at age seven, standing on a playground where the popular girls always got to be Dorothy. She told them her mother was in the hospital — leaving out that she was there having a baby — and got to be Dorothy that day. Decades and 250 rejection letters later, she'd write Hattie Big Sky, a Newbery Honor book, and a shelf of historical novels about the slices of American history most of us were never taught.
Kirby talks about what a silver sticker costs you: the innocence of writing purely for love, the privacy that disappears when strangers call you by your first name. About the manuscript she rewrote entirely on a trusted reader's advice, then threw out and restored, because her writer's gut wouldn't budge. About the novel she started in 2011 and only sold this year. And about book banning, and what it's doing to the middle grade market and to writers with less privilege than she has.
Topics & Timestamps
(00:43) The playground, the Wizard of Oz, and a seven-year-old's discovery that stories change people
(02:18) From broadcast journalism to picture books — and the library trip that flipped the switch
(04:16) 250 rejection letters, and learning that revision is 95% of the job
(05:33) What she imagined the life would look like, and how little she let herself dream
(07:01) The bookstore event with two toddlers — and how that "disaster" launched a career
(09:01) Publishing is a relationship industry
(09:37) The Newbery Honor: "like winning an Oscar"
(10:08) What it cost — ghostwriting, working on spec, losing the freedom of anonymity
(12:27) Giving up privacy: presentations, vulnerability, and strangers who feel they know you
(13:56) What loneliness taught her — the observer's advantage, and mining old cruelties for characters
(16:11) A quieter Newbery, before social media — and building a circle of fellow creatives
(18:29) Her own definition of success (hint: it happens at the desk)
(19:25) Fan mail: Duke, Dogs for Defense, and readers convinced her invented characters were real
(21:37) Turning down a respected editor because the story didn't touch her heart
(23:32) Killing darlings, abandoned projects, and the novel she started in 2011
(25:06) How she knows a story is right — overlooked women, forgotten history, and why there are so many dogs
(26:36) C.S. Lewis on children's books, and why adults write her as often as kids do
(27:39) The hardest lesson: learning to ask for help
(29:05) A typical work day — and the research assistant asleep under the desk
(30:20) What people get wrong: the fame, the money, the second job most writers have
(31:08) The hardest conversation — rewriting Liberty in one POV, then trusting her gut and going back
(34:04) Book banning inside publishing houses: editors asking writers to second-guess themselves
(34:58) Where the inner voice comes from
(36:10) Self-discipline, and what her son taught her about it
(37:50) Violet the contemptible cow, stubbornness, and the folded love notes she leaves on her laptop
(39:35) What she'd be doing instead
(42:23) The price right now — the middle grade market and fear
(43:24) The stories she isn't blocked from telling, and who is
(44:46) What she's afraid of: the blank page, and writing the terrible
(45:53) The charming literary note practice that made her closest friends
(49:17) What the life gave her that outsiders never see: confidence, and a passport that stays current
(50:38) What the whole arc has been about
(51:30) What made it worth it — the awards kids vote on themselves
(52:10) The metaphorical headstone
