Richard Peck fans: check out his Horn Book interview

Notes from the Horn Book offers this five-question interview with the great Richard Peck. Here's a tease:

Season of Gifts is Richard Peck’s third novel about Grandma Dowdel; she appeared first in A Long Way from Chicago, a Newbery Honor Book in 1999, and again in A Year Down Yonder, which won the 2001 Newbery Medal. Peck’s numerous other honors include the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, and the National Humanities Medal. Raised in downstate Illinois but a longtime resident of Manhattan, Peck, an inveterate traveler, was packing for the Riviera when I caught up with him on a recent Monday morning.

1. Grandma Dowdel is only the most recent of your great ladies. Who was your great lady?
Grandma Dowdel is my humble homage to all my long-vanished great-aunts: Midwestern farmwomen in Lane Bryant dresses who ruled the universe from black-iron stoves in kitchens hot enough to steam the calendars off the walls. They left the small boy I was in no doubt about who ruled. And now I want to bring them back in the looming person of Grandma Dowdel for a young generation who may barely know one adult from another.

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