Christina Kilbourne Interview

Jump to Comments

Note to Readers:  Christina Kilbourne, author of Dear Jo:  The Story of Losing Leah and Searching for Hope, responded to a letter from Mrs. Ehrensbeck’s reading club and agreed to share her answers on this blog.  Dear Jo has already won the “2009 Manitoba Young Reader’s Choice Award” and we’re thrilled to have the book on the ballot for the 2010 NYSRA Charlotte Award.

To Mrs. Ehrensbeck’s high school reading club:

Thank you very much for reading Dear Jo and asking such interesting questions. Below I hope I have answered them to your satisfaction. If not, feel free to send me more.

Did you have a personal experience with internet predators?
I didn’t and haven’t had a direct experience with an internet predator but I am always concerned about issues facing today’s youth and I follow missing children cases, so of course, I have read about terrifying incidents that involve internet predators and children and teens in North America and around the world.
Do you have kids who chat online?  If so, are they careful?
I have two children who are just discovering the internet. They are 7 and 10, but until recently, because we live rurally, we have had only dial-up internet that didn’t allow them to do very many things on-line. We now have an internet stick, which is must faster,  and so they are catching up to their peers with sites such as Webkinz. They don’t chat on-line, they don’t go to social networking sites and they don’t have email accounts. Also, they are only allowed on-line when either myself or their dad logs them on. As they get older, we will give them more freedom about what they choose to do on-line and when and where they go on-line, but not without some education first about the dangers of internet predators and how predators can track, lure and groom young people.

Why did you write this book?
I wrote the first draft of Dear Jo at a novel writing marathon to raise money for adult literacy. The event was 3 days long and I knew, going into it, that I wouldn’t have enough time to write an adult length book. So I decided to write a book for a younger audience. I was allowed to take into the marathon one page of notes and did a lot of planning ahead of time to create a manageable plot. At that same time a young girl went missing in Toronto, near where I live. Her name was Holly Jones and she was found a few days later. She had been raped and murdered and as a new mother, the whole case hit very close to home. I was so distressed, I knew I had to deal with it through my writing. That is when Max’s name and voice came to me. Several of her journal entries echoed through my head. So I combined my distress over Holly with Max’s voice and wrote an early draft of Dear Jo.

Because friends are so important to young people, I realized it would be interesting to write from the point of view of the best friend of a young person who goes missing. I hadn’t seen or read a book from that point of view before and using a journal format was a perfect fit. It was during my research and editing of the book, after the marathon, that I focused the book on internet predators. The more I read about the issues facing on-line youth and the cases involving internet predators, the more I knew I had to make it a central theme of the book.

Did you have to do any research to write this book?
I had to do a lot of research to write this book and as the process went on, I had to do more research to keep up on the technology I was writing about.

First I had to do a lot of research into what it’s like to be a 12-year-old girl. As much as I thought I remembered being that age, my niece, who was 12 at the time, made me realize I was a bit out of touch. I was up on 2 and 4-year-olds, which is how old my kids were at the time I began writing Dear Jo, but 12-year-olds were a mystery. To get up-to-date, I interviewed my niece and her friends about what they liked to do for fun, what music they liked to listen to, what they watched on TV and what they did on-line. I also spent some time listening to them talk and interact and it opened my eyes to their world, their challenges and what was important to them.

I also had to do a lot of research into sites such as Habbo Hotel, chat rooms and instant messaging – things I hadn’t done on-line myself. I also researched cases of internet predators luring children so I could accurately represent the grooming process.

How long did it take you to write this book?
The first draft took me 3 days to write, but since then it has changed drastically. After the initial draft, I did at least 2 more edits before I queried a literary agent and we worked another 3 or 4 months fine-tuning the plot, the characters, the language, etc.

From the first day of the novel writing marathon to the day Dear Jo appeared in print, was about 4 years. I didn’t work on the manuscript the entire time, but over different periods during that time frame.

Would you like to tell us more about (your latest book) and what you are writing now?
I always find it hard to summarize a book that took me 200 pages to write in the first place, but I’ll do my best. They Called Me Red is a young adult novel that came out in the fall of 2008 and centers around the theme of human trafficking. It is about a 13-year-old boy, Devon, who lives with his single father making ends meet. When his father meets Lily, she starts to take over their lives a little at a time until Devon isn’t sure who his father is anymore and whose life he is living. Not long after Lily moves in, Devon’s father falls ill and Lily tries to help him with her herbal remedies. Instead of making him stronger, however, they seem to make him worse. Devon’s father is soon so ill the American doctors can offer him little hope and Lily convinces him to travel to her native homeland, Vietnam, where she claims her uncle can cure him with Eastern medicine. When his father dies and Devon finds himself locked in a room surrounded by strangers and forced to work in ways he never imagined, he understands the extent of Lily’s cruelty and begins his fight to survive. This book also required a lot of research, much of it not pleasant to read. But in the end I knew I had to try and raise awareness about the prevalence of human trafficking around the world and its devastating effects on victims.

Right now I am writing a book about a young girl, Catia O, and her three sisters who are taken into foster care and then adopted into a family, where, for the first time, they learn what a loving, stable life can be like. Although Catia adjusts to family life, her older sister, Jewel, never forgets their biological parents and continues to have problems at home and at school. As a teenager Jewel runs away, back to the town where she lived as a young child, with the intention of finding her biological mother. But her dreams of a happy reunion are crushed when she finds her mother ill with terminal cancer. That’s when she contacts Catia and begs her to also reach out to their biological mother before it is too late. Jewel is shocked when Catia, who is so taken up in her new life, can only think to tell Jewel to thank their mother for giving them and their younger sisters up for adoption, thereby giving them the opportunity for a better life.

Christina Kilbourne, May 29, 2009

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized