Q&A with Megan Sullivan: New Children’s Book on Parental Incarceration
Associate Dean Megan Sullivan has published a children’s book on parental incarceration: Clarissa’s Disappointment: And Resources for Families, Teachers and Counselors of Children of Incarcerated Parents. Drawing from the research she did for Parental Incarceration: Personal Accounts and Developmental Impact (co-edited with Denise Johnston and published by Routledge in 2016), Sullivan has written a book that highlights a child’s perspective and also provides resources for adults trying to help children through the emotional struggles of a parent’s incarceration. The book has received the Larry D. Underwood Prize for Children’s Literature, an award given by Shining Hall, a children’s book imprint of Twelve Winters Press. The following Q&A is an excerpt of an interview Sullivan did with Ted Morissey, a co-founder of Shining Hall. Visit Ted Morissey’s website to read the full version.
Ted Morissey: What was your motivation for writing Clarissa’s Disappointment?
Megan Sullivan: My motivation for writing Clarissa’s Disappointment was at least threefold. First, I believe such a book would have helped me when my father was incarcerated. I recall that when I was a middle-schooler, I read a book where the main protagonist, a boy, had a father in prison. I nearly gobbled that book up, because it felt to me that someone understood my predicament. I wrote Clarissa’s Disappointment in part because I wanted to offer that solace to others. I also wrote it because there are not many children’s books that focus on incarceration and none that I know that features what is called the “reentry period,” or that period of time when a formerly incarcerated person returns home to his community and family. It bothered me that the 2.7 million minor children who currently have parents in prison or jail as well as the untold number whose parents have been incarcerated in the United States might not be seeing their lives in print. Finally, I wrote the book because I could not get the voice of Clarissa out of my head.
TM: You’ve mainly done academic writing. How easy or difficult was it to transition into writing children’s literature?
MS: It didn’t feel like much of a transition for me. Perhaps this is because around the same time I began conducting research on children with incarcerated parents, I also started writing what would become Clarissa’s Disappointment. It could also be that it didn’t feel like much of a transition because I see the primary purpose of all writing as about being the best writer one can be. I tend to think less about genres and more about doing the best I can for the kind of writing I’m doing.
TM: Up to the very last, you were tinkering with the text to get Clarissa’s narrative voice just right. Tell us about that process, of creating the voice of this little girl.
MS: Yes, I so wanted to get Clarissa’s voice right. The tricky thing was that because the book is both a fictional story and a resource for others, it was sometimes hard to separate the voice of the child from the voice of the adult. When I was writing I literally had Clarissa’s voice in my head. I imagined what she looked like and how she spoke. I imagined how she moved and thought and wrote, and I tried to convey all of this. Because Clarissa’s story is informed by my own, I was also conscious not to conflate Clarissa’s voice with my voice.
TM: In addition to Clarissa’s story, you’ve included resources for families, teachers and counselors of children of incarcerated parents. Where did you draw from for these resources? Why did you think it was important to create a book that is essentially two books in one?
MA: A huge shout out to Twelve Winters Press! Who else would have taken on this challenge of two books in one? I couldn’t be more pleased. I also feel incredibly honored and humbled that Melissa Morrissey chose the book for the Underwood Prize. This award is special to me in part because Melissa is a teacher; that she “gets it” is a huge vote of confidence.
Often those who are tasked with or have the potential to talk to children whose parents are incarcerated know too little about the topic to be helpful. A school counselor might be sympathetic to the plight of a child whose parents are no longer living together, but will he/she know how to respond to questions about visiting a prison? Families might know how they feel about a loved one who is in prison or jail, but do they know the best way to discuss this with children? Teachers and school librarians want to help children find that “just right” book, but maybe they too would like to know more about how to choose a book with the needs of children whose parents are incarcerated in mind. Furthermore, there is professional literature out there for counselors, teachers and others, and there are some books about incarceration for children, but I felt that combining the two would bring children and adults together in a way that could be especially powerful.
TM: You seem to have great respect for reading and writing (perhaps, especially, reading and writing poetry) for their therapeutic value. Is that true, and if so, where does that respect stem from?
MS: I do respect the potential therapeutic benefits of reading and writing. I’m sure that partly this is because both are therapeutic for me and always have been, though I’ve never been much of a diary-keeper. I think the written word endures because it has something to tell us as readers, and I know writing helps us think about what we believe and how we feel. Maybe this is particularly true in the case of children’s books. I can remember being both transported and grounded by books as a child, and I think it would be wonderful if we could offer others the same opportunity.
TM: What are your hopes for Clarissa’s Disappointment and its resources? How do you hope it will be used? How important will networking be in getting it into the hands of both children who may enjoy it and benefit from reading it, and also the adult professional audience that you’re targeting?
My dream is that Clarissa’s Disappointment will be in as many school and classroom libraries as possible. I also hope families and counselors and organizations that work with children will buy the book to have on hand. I think I will have to be a huge networker to make this happen, and luckily I’m up for the challenge. I feel like I’ve got this thing that I believe in without reservation and that I feel nearly as zealous about as one might a religion! I’m hoping to visit schools and do readings and talk about the book to anyone who will listen, and maybe even those who don’t want to listen!
TM: What are some other projects you have in the works? Other children’s stories? Academic projects?
MS: My next book will be about the Irish writer Maeve Brennan. In 1934 Brennan’s father was the first Irish minister to the United States. When the family returned to Ireland, Maeve stayed and made her career as a journalist and fiction writer. She wrote for The New Yorker from the 1950s through about 1980. The New Yorker published many of her short stories, and two collections of her writing were published while she was alive; more of her work was published after her death. Brennan is often remembered for how she died (i.e. penniless and mentally ill), but her prose is among the finest of twentieth-century women writers, and I want to celebrate that.
Learn more about Shining Hall, Twelve Winters Press, and the Larry D. Underwood Award. You may purchase Clarissa’s Disappointment here.