Monday, September 21, 2020

Keir Graff Cobbles Together More Hilarity with 'Tiny Mansion'

Chicago author Keir Graff has taken us a lot of places with his middle-grade novels, and I am especially excited about the setting for his latest effort, The Tiny Mansion (Putnam's Books for Young Readers, September 8, 2020). While Keir has other titles on the shelf, both for young readers as well as adult (as part of a writing duo under the pen name Linda Keir), his not-exactly-a-series run of The Matchstick Castle (2017), The Phantom Tower (2018), and now Tiny Mansion offers readers fast-paced action, laugh-out-loud humor, and as Kirkus describes "quirky" treats and "wacky" plots. 

In a word, fun.

Aside from the immediate charm of setting his story in a tiny house, Keir peoples it with a delightful cast of characters. We follow Dagmar, age 12, as her family is forced to live off-the-grid in the redwoods of Northern California where the neighbors aren't exactly typical. An eccentric tech billionaire, his brother the woodsman, his sister the crunchy animal lover. As well as the billionaire's son, who could use a friend.

Keir took a little break from writing to talk about the book and where his ideas come from.


QUESTION: The world you build for Dagmar is fascinating. What prompted you to choose a tiny home in the redwoods? Can you talk about the creative process and how you came to write The Tiny Mansion?

KEIR GRAFF:
When I was a kid, my family visited an artist friend who lived in a trailer in the redwoods of Northern California. I slept on the ground outside, under a towering tree, and woke up covered in spiderwebs! And a couple of years ago, when I was on tour for The Phantom Tower, I visited the enchanting community of Canyon, California, where a teacher gave me a tour that included hand-hewn, un-zoned wooden houses. Those events, decades apart, definitely played their parts—and my writing process has always been a little bit like literary quilting.

But the real truth is that I did it backward! After books called The Matchstick Castle and The Phantom Tower, I was looking for another architecturally themed title that would create a question in the minds of young readers. After I hit on The Tiny Mansion, I knew it would have to be set in a tiny house, which was perfect, because I really want one of my own!

The tiny house also felt like a writing challenge I wanted to accept—after going big, with big structures in the previous two books, could I create an even bigger adventure, this time starting with an even smaller home?

Q: Billionaires, survivalists, New Agers. How much fun did you have creating these characters? Who did you enjoy writing the most?

KG:
Obviously, I love eccentric characters, as evidenced by the daffy van Dash family of The Matchstick Castle and the elderly residents of The Phantom Tower. In The Tiny Mansion, Dagmar’s family isn’t exactly ordinary, given that her dad is a renegade handyman and her stepmom is an artist working with found materials. But supporting characters offer more opportunities for exaggeration because they don’t generally need to be quite as three- dimensional.

I loved writing all of them, and Vladimir, Blake’s hulking Exurbistanian bodyguard, most of all. He looks scary but turns out to have a pretty good heart. (The audiobook narrator did him with a Russian accent, something she said was on her bucket list!)

Q: How do you want young readers to experience the book?

KG: Repeatedly! All joking aside, while I do tackle issues in my books—and this one touches on plenty of them—I try hard to avoid didacticism, because I really want kids to read for the same reason I did: for fun! In these times especially, kids need opportunities to escape and live for a while in the worlds of their imaginations.

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