Jim Wilkinson
Interviewer: Well, let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born?
Wilkinson: I was born in Boston in 1943. My mother said it was a cold and windy day. I was a fat little baby whom the nurses said resembled the British leader Winston Churchill, since World War II was still going on at the time. My father was an industrial chemist whose childhood polio had left him with a bad leg, so for both those reasons he was exempt from the draft. But still, my parents’ decision to have a baby in the midst of a world war seems an act of courage.
Interviewer: Where did you grow up?
Wilkinson: Until age ten I lived in Newton, a suburb of Boston, in a large Victorian house that gradually filled with siblings. We were four children in the end—two boys and two girls—and I was the oldest. The house sat on a quiet, leafy street and with a lawn in front and an old-fashioned garden in the back planted by the previous owners, with jack-in-the-pulpit and peonies in the spring and roses in the summer. I remember the clop-clop-clop sound made by the milkman’s horse on the street outside, and the smell of burning leaves in autumn, which of course is prohibited today. It was a different world.
Interviewer: But you left Newton. Why?
Wilkinson: My parents decided that the suburbs were not the best place for raising four children. I don’t know exactly why, exactly—the schools were excellent and we had no issues with our neighbors, but suddenly there we were, looking for a house in the country. The two conditions were that there had to be water nearby and it couldn’t be too close to a road. It took a year of weekend trips out into the surrounding countryside before my parents found 18 acres in Groton, about forty miles northwest of Boston, and instead of a house, just a foundation. The original house there had burned, leaving charred pieces of wood and fragments of glass. Our new house set on that old foundation was a modern one, with large glass windows on the east and a flat, sloping roof. My parents hired a very young architect to design it for them—I don’t think they could afford a more established one—whose name was Morehouse. A good name for an architect, don’t you think?
When we children visited our property in Groton for the very first time, well before the house was constructed, we discovered a porcupine in a field and were enthralled. As suburban kids, we of course had never seen a porcupine in the wild, only in a zoo. So this sight seemed wonderfully exotic and full of promise for all the other exotic things we were going to discover in our new home. The sense of wonder that I felt then is the same one I tried to convey in the first chapter of Beyond: Escape, when Dara looks out over the Broad River and sees a panorama of unspoiled wilderness for the first time.
Looking back, I think my parents were right—the countryside was indeed a wonderful place to grow up. Imagine having eighteen acres all your own! We swam in a nearby lake called Baddacook in the summer and skated there in the winter. There were apple orchards in the surrounding hills whose blossoms smelled perfumed the spring air and where I picked apples in the fall. I think that’s where I started to “have a thing about trees,” like Dara. Unlike kids today, we were allowed to roam freely with no parental supervision. With two friends I even built a treehouse forty feet up in the air that was large enough to sleep in. My father insisted on inspecting it, but pronounced it safe and let us use it. Up there we felt like birds. Kids need freedom to become self-reliant, I think, and I’ve given Dara and her friends a lot of that kind of freedom in Beyond.
The only drawback to living in Groton was the public schools, which were terrible. I stuck it out there from sixth through ninth grade. I remember my ninth-grade English teacher taking me aside and apologizing because I looked so bored, but there was nothing she could do. So I lived for the weekends, when I could do projects and roam around on my own. But then thanks to a scholarship went off to a boarding school—Phillips Exeter Academy in Exter, New Hampshire, fifty miles northeast from Groton.
Interviewer: What was Exeter like?
Wilkinson: Exeter was a shock. I remember being terrified during the long drive to the school. I was fourteen and had never lived away from home for more than a couple of weeks at summer camp. Socially I had a lot to learn. But being in an all-boys’ school eventually taught me how to deal with other boys my age in ways I had never had to before. And academically, Exeter was superb. After being bored in the Groton public schools I now had to work harder than I ever had in my life. I think that Dara’s music lessons with Primo Paganini in the first book of Beyond, where she, too, works harder than she ever has in her life, were inspired by my time at Exeter.
Interviewer: And after Exeter?
Wilkinson: After Exeter I entered Harvard, again on a full scholarship. Thanks to my time at Exeter, I was given sophomore standing, though I still lived in Harvard Yard with the freshmen. Someone had warned me about the “sophomore slump” that many prep school graduates experienced at Harvard, so I decided my best option was to spend that next year out of the country. Since I would technically be a junior, I was accepted into a Junior Year Abroad program sponsored by Sweet Briar and spent a wonderful year in Paris. My best year at Harvard was really the Parisian one.
Interviewer: Why, what did you do there?
Wilkinson: I practiced my French and took a half-dozen courses, but above all I plunged into culture. Students in Paris were eligible for low-cost concert tickets to concerts, museums, and plays. They cost about five dollars each, if you can believe it, so I made a rule that I would try to go out to see something new every other night. I went to my first live concert of music by Johan Sebastian Bach and couldn’t believe how few musicians it took to perform the Brandenburg concertos. I took a train to Milan over Easter and hitchhiked from there down to Rome. Then that summer, once classes were over, I bicycled from Paris down to Spain and then up again through the Rhône and Rhine Valleys, camping all the way and had a wonderful time. I really fell in love with Europe then. That determined my future studies and teaching, but and a lot of that love also found its way into Beyond.
Interviewer: That sounds like a long trip.
Wilkinson: Almost 3,000 miles, 75 miles on average per day, spread over two and a half months. It’s actually one of the things I’m most proud to have done. During the trip I discovered that I liked being alone, and that I could rely on myself to solve many (though not all) problems—useful lessons for the future.
Interviewer: So after that year abroad you went back to Harvard. Then what?
Wilkinson: I graduated in 1965, then returned to Paris for a year and spent another as a student in Berlin. Then it was back to Harvard, where I earned a Master’s degree in comparative literature and a Ph.D. in history. While still a graduate student I began teaching and found I loved it and have been teaching ever since. After retiring from Harvard forty years later, I still teach in an adult education program every year near where I live, which has allowed me to cover topics as diverse as Italian literature, Japanese history, and the Silk Roads.
Interviewer: And where do you live now?
Wilkinson: I live with my sister, Holly, in a small Massachusetts town twenty miles from where we grew up. We share the house with our much-loved orange cat, Nikko, whose name means “sunlight” in Japanese. Earlier I lived in cities all over the world — London, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Kyoto, Tokyo, and of course Cambridge, which is the scene for the American part of Beyond. But I’m happy now to be finally back in a familiar rural landscape with hills and apple orchards and a view of a small mountain from my bedroom window. It’s only an hour away from Boston by car, and the air is clean and there’s room for a large garden.
Interviewer: What about writing?
Wilkinson: My book The Intellectual Resistance in Europe was published back in 1981 by Harvard University Press, where it won a prize. I then revised a European history textbook and wrote and published a number of short pieces in journals like The American Scholar and Salmagundi. But I didn’t begin to write fiction until I was well into my fifties. Once I began I realized I loved it and wondered why I hadn’t started sooner.
Interviewer: Why, what’s so enjoyable about writing fiction? And how does it differ from writing non-fiction?
Wilkinson: Oh, they’re very different. Non-fiction generally begins with a puzzle. There’s something that defies logic, or just seems wrong. For instance, Protestant areas in Germany in the 19th century were generally more prosperous than Catholic areas. But that doesn’t seem to make sense, so why? The German sociologist Max Weber wrote a whole book to answer that question. Non-fiction should pull you along like a detective novel, where you’re out to solve a mystery. Fiction, on the other hand, though it can also involve plenty of mystery, is driven not so much by puzzles as by conflict. It took me a long time to understand this, since I’m not someone who naturally gravitates to conflict. But when I realized that some of my favorite parts some contemporary fiction were the scenes where the characters confronted one another, it began to make sense.
Interviewer: But why write fiction for children or adolescents rather than for adults?
Wilkinson: For me it’s more fun, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps because it gives me permission both to introduce a little fantasy and an opportunity to deal with bigger themes, like animal welfare or climate change. I enjoy adult fiction, of course, but with a few exceptions like Barbara Kingsolver, most contemporary writers seem intent to focus mainly on families, intimacy, or self-discovery—themes that, while important, ignore much of the real world. Katherine Rundell, α British children’s writer who also writes academic books for adults, as I have, makes the case that children’s writing has a lot to offer grown-ups precisely because it’s free to explore so many big subjects and to expand our imaginations through fantasy. I love the title of her essay “Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise.”
Interviewer: And Beyond? How and when did you begin it?
Wilkinson: I began Beyond a quarter century ago, right around the millennium, on a blazingly hot summer day. I had just read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which is still my favorite of the seven Harry Potter books, and also Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, which is my favorite of the His Dark Materials trilogy. And I remember thinking, “I should try to write something like that.” I had an image in my head of a girl running down a flight of stairs from her apartment, flinging open the outside door, and colliding with the heat—but that was all. So I wanted to find out what she was running from and where she was going and started writing. Soon Dara was on the planet Beyond, and I kept writing. The writing was amateurish and clumsy at first, but I think I’ve improved in the decades since then.
As for the story line, all I knew when I began was that I wanted to have the girl involved in an adventure that would change her life. As the chapters accumulated, I followed Dara as she discovered her talents, became a lot braver, and met one challenge after another as she learns to be a different sort of magician. Some writers plan their novels in advance, but I find I write best and my ideas come most easily to me when I just sit down and write. That makes me a “pantser,” not a “planner.” Of course I have some idea of how I want each book to end, but absolutely no clue at first how I’ll get there. But that’s OK. I think it was the fiction writer E.L Doctorow who once compared writing to driving at night. You only see as far as your headlights will reach, but that way you still reach your destination, even if it’s far away. I totally agree.
But being a “pantser” meant I needed to write Beyond series to the end of book five before going back and revising the other four. Some early themes became more important in later parts of the series and these needed to be punched up retrospectively, so to speak.
Interviewer: So let’s move on to reading. Do you read much?
Wilkinson: All the time. I own a lot of books, 5,000 at least and counting, in English and in several other languages. I tend to have three or four books that I’m working on at the same time and go from one to the next. Right now I’m reading The Summer House by the Japanese writer Masashi Matsuie in translation; Robert Silverberg, Downwards to the Earth, a classic piece of science fiction from the 1960s; Kate Elliott, The Witch Roads, which is contemporary adult fantasy; and Mark Solms, The Only Cure, a thought-provoking study of mental healing with relevance for Beyond.
I read a lot of middle-grade and YA fiction—favorite authors include the Brits Katherine Rundell and Lucy Strange. During the COVID pandemic I also started a book club that’s still running and choose our monthly selections, which that helps me try to stay current with adult fiction. I try to keep up my language skills by reading in French, German, Spanish, and Russian when I can, since those skills tend to atrophy with disuse. But my Japanese is still a work in progress. I’m now reading novels based on Hayao Miyazaki’s anime films at the rate of a page a night. They’re designed for young readers, which is just my level, and have beautiful illustrations taken from the films.
Interviewer: What about your painting?
Wilkinson: I wish I could draw illustrations like Miyazaki. But discovering that I can do watercolor painting has still been a wonderful and recent surprise. While writing Beyond, from the start I had vivid images of the Broad River and the Great Barrier Cliffs and Eskros’s fortress. But to make them come alive in watercolors still feels like magic! It’s a good reminder that you discover new things you never knew you could do at any age.
Interviewer: Music plays a big role in Beyond. Tell us more about your interest in music.
Wilkinson: I was six or perhaps seven when I joined the choir of Grace Church in Newton as a boy soprano. We wore long black cassocks and starched white surpluses over them and sang for the Episcopal service every Sunday. Since that childhood introduction to choral singing, I’ve been part of a dozen choral groups, including the Singakademie in Berlin, which revived Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion after decades of neglect, and the Back Bay Chorale in Boston, where I sang for twenty years and took part in almost eighty concerts. Two of those concerts were devoted to Monteverdi’s “Vespers,” which Dara conducts in volume three of Beyond, so I know that piece—and the others that Dara conducts—quite well from having performed them. I also took piano lessons as a child in Newton and would love to own a harpsichord one day. Two of my favorite keyboard pieces, both of which figure in Beyond, are François Couperin’s “Les Barricades mystérieuses” and J.S. Bach’s fugue in C sharp minor from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Oh, and the Brahms Intermezzo that brings Dara in tears in volume two.
Interviewer: And interests besides music?
Wilkinson: I like to make things—all sorts of things, really. So if I’m not reading or writing or painting watercolors, I work in the garden, cook dinner every night for my sister and me, and build bookcases or bird feeders or plant racks. There’s not enough time in a day to do it all, so I rotate from one project to another, though I try to preserve time every day for writing and, of course, cooking dinner.
Interviewer: And languages?
Wilkinson: Some people enjoy solving crossword puzzles, but I prefer decoding words, especially if they’re written in a different alphabet. Some languages I’ve studied formally, others I picked up on my own. I studied Latin, French, and Italian at Exeter, and then German at Harvard, but then taught myself Greek, Russian, Spanish, and now Japanese. Like Mr. Paganini, I find other languages fascinating. Learning them is like being initiated into a secret code.
Interviewer: What about Meerkat?
Wilkinson: Oh yes, Meerkat. I had a lot of fun creating what’s called the “conlang,” or “constructed language” of Meerkat for Beyond. Any language is really like a game where you have to specify the rules that govern how the words interact, so creating a conlang means coming up with rules that make sense, based on existing languages, and then a vocabulary. Meerkat achieves a middle level of difficulty—not as simple as Spanish, but not as complex as Greek. Dara spends a long time learning it, but still finds it easier than Greek.
Interviewer: The Greek language keeps coming up in Beyond. Both Hieronomos and Eskros are native Greek speakers, originally from Byzantium. Other children’s books like the Harry Potter series privilege Latin. How did you get interested in Greek?
Wilkinson: Oh, I think the Greeks were just more creative, more intellectually curious than most Romans. They did amazing things that no one had done before in fields as different as literature, art, philosophy, and mathematics. I’ve always admired them, but it wasn’t until I my early forties that started learning the language. I found an introductory grammar by a man named Clyde Pharr who believed you should study Greek by learning Homer’s Iliad, and I made my way through the first book of the poem and loved it.
I chose Greek as a key language for the Beyond series (along with French and Meerkat) in part because it’s been so neglected in other books for young readers. Of course I don’t expect that reading the Beyond series will necessarily send people off to learn ancient Greek. As Dara discovers, Greek can be quite a challenge. But why should Latin always steal the show?
Interviewer: Will there be more books in the Beyond series?
Wilkinson: No, the fifth, Homecoming, is the last. When I began I thought there would be just one, then three, then a fourth, but now I’ve finished the final, final book. When I finished book three, a friend who had read it said she wanted to read some more about parrots, and it occurred to me then that there were other loose ends that needed to be tied up, such as Peter, Ali’s father, Gaston de Lisle, why “song” is disappearing, and the fates of the Beyond and Earth. It took two more books to do that.
Dara is thirteen when the series begins and has her sixteenth birthday when it ends. She’s learned a lot about magic and herself in those three years and has experienced a sort of accelerated adolescence. She’ll have more adventures as she grows up, of course, but by the end of Beyond: Homecoming she’s much the person she’ll be as a grownup, so it felt right to end the series there.
Interviewer: So I’m curious—this is a long series. If you proceeded to write it without a plan, how do you construct it.
Wilkinson: Oh, I still have some rules. For example, always try to end a chapter with a question to be answered or a problem to be resolved in the next. Always try to start a flashback with something happening in the present that reminds the character of what happened in the past. Try to use questions your characters ask themselves to prompt readers to ask the same questions. Definitely treat your animals as real characters, not just props—they have emotional lives, too, after all. That sort of thing. I’m very partial to circular or recursive structures, where things return to a point near where they were at the beginning, but where the characters have grown and the reader has gained a deeper understanding of them and the issues involved in the meantime. I doubt many readers will see these pattern, since the scenes often occur in different books, hundreds of pages apart, but this sort of “mirroring” intrigues me and has helped me structure the novels in many ways.
Interviewer: Just one more question: Are there other books you’d like to write?
Wilkinson: Yes, for sure, my health permitting. Probably too many. More middle-grade fiction, of course; a novel for adults, set at a fictional university in Boston; and at least four works of non-fiction—a history of Europe since 1945, a study of local culture in three European cities in the 1920s, a study of suffering as seen by the contrasting Christian and Buddhist traditions, and a book whose working title is “The Spirit of Inquiry” about the mental training required for research and argumentation. That’s enough to keep my busy for a while.
Interviewer: Then I should end this interview and let you get back to writing. Thank you for your time.