So here’s what happens when a person wins a Newbery, what happens is that your phone rings at five in the morning and it rings and you don’t know who’s on the other end and you answer the phone and it’s a room full of super cheerful and enthusiastic librarians who tell you congratulations and they’re all excited and they’re kind of yelling and you can hear somebody jumping up and down and they’re so thrilled. And all you can do is respond with garbly nonsense because you just woke up and you don’t actually totally believe that this is really true or real life.
And surely they called somebody else by mistake and they didn’t mean to call you at all. So that’s what it was like for me. But it was good that I live in the state of Minnesota because if I lived in California they would have called me at three in the morning. So this is just how they do it. The thing is that I think that some people are lucky enough that they at least have an inkling that they are likely to get a phone call that morning, because everybody knows when it’s going to be, because there’s been enough conversations and their books have been coming up in a lot of conversations and so they’re aware.
I was not aware at all. First of all, because my books a high fantasy novel and high fantasy novels don’t really win the Newbery, I mean, the last time was 1985 with The Hero and the Crown.
I mean, the nice thing about winning the Newbery is that, I mean, on one hand it’s a lot to take in. It took me a really long time to even process that it was true at all, which caused some like weird conversations because my picture was in the newspaper.
The mayor of Minneapolis declared Kelly Barnhill day and like the superintendent of Minneapolis public schools, because of course I’m a graduate from Minneapolis public schools, came to a ceremony and shook my hand and like it was bananas, right? I even have the mayor’s proclamation at my house. And it was bananas.
I mean, the time for me when it really started to feel real to me was actually when I was in the state of Texas, because I went down for the Texas Library Association.
And the Texas librarians are a force of nature. But my book was also a Blue Bonnet. And it was the first time that I had been in a … I mean, that conference is huge. There were so many just deep and profound book lovers that are there. And it was the first time that I had really like seen how my book has mattered to some people. And that was deeply humbling to me. And one of the things that we do as writers is that we write our book and we live with our book and we live with these characters and we live with the sound of it and we live with each sentence.
But then we hand it over to our publishers and the book doesn’t belong to us anymore. The book belongs to the reader. And the story is built by the reader. The story isn’t built by the writer, the writer just you know, the writer creates the world and creates the characters and writes a lot of pretty sentences and gives a lot of raw materials and the reader builds the story.
And so to be in that environment and to see the stories that the readers have been building and to be in the presence of this book that isn’t mine anymore and that truly belongs to them that was amazing to me. I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forget it.