Meet Deborah Wiles, Author of Kent State

Click to Enlarge +Meet Deborah Wiles, Author of Kent State

For bestselling children's and YA author Deborah Wiles, reading is an act of empathy. Many of her stories are set in the turbulent middle decades of the 20th century United States, exploring the realities of segregation, the Vietnam War, and the long march for civil rights. Her latest novel, Kent State, recounts the May 4, 1970 Kent State University shootings and their surrounding events in a free-verse format. Featuring many voices and perspectives on this infamous event, Kent State offers young readers a chance to step into the conversation and feel the weight of this event and its consequences for themselves. I was thrilled to speak with Deborah about the book, the historical event it captures, and what lessons can be learned when we compare this tumultuous time in American history to today. Read SLC's highly recommended review of Kent State here, and read on for a conversation with Deborah Wiles!

Your book Kent State is about the events and actions leading up to and including what happened at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when the National Guard shot and killed four students at the university. Can you tell me more about the core message of this book?

With Kent State I tried to accomplish several things in as eloquent and elegant a package as possible. I wanted to pass on the history of what happened on May 4, 1970, which involved research into the Vietnam War and the events at Kent State, including backstory on the victims and historical context. I wanted to explore the idea of First Amendment rights being stamped out by our government—especially the right to protest and petition, and the right to free speech. I also wanted the book to be a call to action for young adults especially, to show them that when young people speak their minds and band together, they can and do change the world. And we need them now to do just that.

The format of this book is unconventional, with different voices telling the story in different fonts and locations on the page. Can you tell me more about this format and why you decided to tell the story in this way?

As I researched Kent State both online and in person at the university, walking the ground where it happened, walking through the May 4 Visitor's Center and seeing the differing perspectives on the Vietnam War and the counterculture of the '60s, interviewing survivors who were students or faculty in 1970, and sitting in the Special Collections Archive at the university library and pouring through the mountain of primary source material about May 4, it became clear to me that this was not one person's, or one perspective's, story. It wasn't even my story, although I was 16 at the time and watching this horror unfold on television on the evening news. It was the story of all those who had lived in Kent at that time—students white and black, faculty, townies, and National Guard soldiers alike. So many of them had contributed oral histories or letters to the archive, and I knew, reading and listening to them, that I needed all their voices, in a kind of collective memory of that time and place. I chose to place them in specific spots on the page and use different size fonts and typefaces to delineate each voice, as a way of inviting the reader into the conversation as "our young friend here" and sitting with those voices, to listen to the story.

One of the groups of people that you included in the telling of the story is the Black United Students or BUS. Can you tell me about your decision to include this voice in the story in the way that you did?

There was a lot of material about BUS in the '60s in the Special Collections archive, and much of it was meeting flyers and organizational pamphlets and position papers stating their desire to petition the college for black studies courses and equal housing and opportunity. There were photographs from the local police archives that showed very clearly the racial profiling of black students and their whereabouts—even down to investigating their parents. There was history of a BUS walkout in 1968 when the Oakland, California police sent recruiters to campus to try and hire black police officers, on the heels of the death of Black Panthers in Oakland. BUS was very active at Kent in the '60s, and it was clear from oral histories that they knew that "when white men are standing there in a uniform, holding rifles pointed at you, you know there are real bullets in that rifle." White students believed the Guard had blanks in their rifles—they shouted it to one another on May 4, before the bullets started flying. Black students knew better. They had been told by BUS to stay away from the Commons on May 4, and most of them complied. It was a major part of the story, to me, especially as I wanted to tell the story of government overreach going forward to today.

This year, 2020, is the 50th anniversary of this horrific event. How do these events matter today? Why do they matter specifically to the teenagers of today's society?

Kent State takes its place in the long arc of government overreach in this country, from the Boston Massacre to Wounded Knee, to today's examples like the Dakota Access Pipeline and separating families at our borders. I also make a strong case and draw a direct line from Kent State's killings to the way we don't listen to opposing voices in this country, to the point that we squelch First Amendment rights, which leads to fear and violence and people taking the law into their own hands. I include lone gunman and school shootings in this category, which is not a reach, when you consider that our democracy declares itself to be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, protecting us and ensuring our liberties and freedoms for all, with malice toward none and charity toward all. Young people keenly understand justice and fairness and the lack of same. And young people traditionally stand at the vanguard of change. They are also the most vulnerable at that vanguard. I want them to know they have choices to make about their futures, and they don't have to turn those choices over to an old narrative they've learned somewhere else. They can think for themselves and they can move into a future that's inclusive, diverse, and just.

This book covers topics of racism, intergenerational discord, war, gun violence, and the power of a single voice. How do you feel these issues have changed over the past 50 years, and how have they remained constant?

I am not a historian; I'm a writer and a researcher, a mother and a grandmother, and a child of the U.S. military and the South. As a citizen who is those things I can say that—from my perspective—we have moved into a time of great dissension in our country, where people have taken immovable cultural, political, socio-economic, racial sides—on all sides—and it is very hard to have a conversation or even hear one another on issues of racism, war, gun violence, and the power of a single voice. But I still believe in the power of that one voice, and I also believe in listening. So much of my work, stretching back to my first essays in the '80s and my first books almost 20 years ago now, like Freedom Summer and Each Little Bird That Sings, and certainly all of the Sixties Trilogy books, deal in large part with listening to one another. I truly believe in this art, this skill. I believe it is teachable, and I believe it has the power to help us learn to think critically and compassionately, and to unite us. The voices in Kent State begin to listen to one another, even though they disagree.

The last "voice" that you included in this book is that of the reader. You broke the fourth wall by having your characters acknowledge the reader. There are also multiple instances where you invite the reader into the story by stating, "INSERT YOUR NAME HERE." Why did you decide to do this, and what do you hope it accomplishes with the readers of the book?

"Insert your name here" has one meaning in the May 4 section of the book, and another in the Elegy that ends the book. In the May 4 section, I want you, the reader, to be immersed in that moment, totally in the seconds of those shootings, to hear it, see it, taste it, touch it, smell it. I want you to feel what it was like to be running for your life on May 4 when American soldiers start shooting at you for doing nothing more than protesting an unpopular, unwinnable war. I want you to imagine you are one of those shot: INSERT YOUR NAME HERE instead of the fallen student whose death I have just described. Then, in the Elegy section that ends the book, I want you to be on fire for change and to insert your name into the continuum of those who have fought for change, and to be the change you want to see in the world.

Is there anything else about the making of this book, the messages and themes of this book or how they apply to today that you would like teenage readers and/or their teachers to know about?

I so appreciate your thoughtful questions and the opportunity to share more about the book here. Thank you. I would recommend the audiobook of Kent State as another way to experience this story. Scholastic Audio gathered a full cast together, in one room, in one day, to perform this book for you, so you can hear the arguing, the pain, the fear, the accusations, the collective memory of those who were there on that day, and whose voices deserve to be heard. You've probably deduced, too, that with these voices raised up like a Greek chorus, the book lends itself to Readers Theater and a staged play. I wrote it in such a way that it has multiple opportunities to find its voice with young adults and all of us, to speak to us from a time past, and to challenge us to step into a different future.