After her speech at the third Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming, she says she needs to run to the bathroom to brush her teeth before the interview, and I tell her it isn't necessary. She has fluttered away though, and soon returns, complimenting the arch of my eyebrows, which I had never before considered more than average.  She tells me she enjoys dangerous leisure sports, like rock climbing, white water rafting, windsurfing, which she claims all enhance her experience of the writing process. Her photos of her in action may cause your stomach to drop, as she hangs suspended from "The Dangler" in the Shawangunks range in New York.  In an age of computers, she still handwrites all of her work, and as for her historical fiction, she goes far and beyond basic research.

She says, "For all of my books, especially the historical ones, I add research to the imaginative process.  Usually my research involves reading books, articles, and original records, doing interviews, and visiting the sites where my stories take place.  But the research gets really interesting when I decide to reenact some of the events in my characters' lives.  Whether that's riding a train all night to Canada or trudging along the North Carolina beach during gale force winds, reenactment helps me truly understand what the people in my books must have experienced."

Her latest book is dedicated to "Jackie," a fifteen-year-old prostitute of the frontier West, and the real-life inspiration for Elisa Carbone's Last Dance on Holladay Street.  The book is geared toward middle-school readers, perhaps as young as nine, which may upset school administrators, and Carbone worries that some school libraries will refuse to stock her book.  It can be said, most truthfully, that this is the first young adult work of fiction set in a brothel.

But unlike the real Jackie, Carbone's protagonist never ends up behind the closed doors.  She is a vehicle through which Carbone emphasizes the importance and sanctity of inner beauty above the need for girls to sexualize themselves at a young age.  Lately, Carbone has dealt with historical fiction, such as Storm Warriors, the true, nearly unknown story of an African American search and rescue team on Pea Island, NC, and Blood on the River, a story of the Jamestown settlement told from the perspective of a would-be thief, had he remained in London.  She declares the subjects themselves choose her, subjects that have been forgotten by time, but Jackie was different.  Carbone writes after finding her photograph in a Tombstone, AZ museum, "I wanted, desperately, to save her."

She explains why she chose a brothel as her setting:  "When I first learned about the brothels in the US in the 1800's and how young women and girls were coerced and pressured into working there, I was struck by the parallels with what is going on today, with young girls, and boys, too, often being pressured into sexual activity when they are much too young.  I wanted to write a story that would empower young readers and help them see the value in following their own path.  I wanted to inspire them to be strong, be true to themselves, and most importantly, not give in to peer pressure."

Needless to say, I bought the book.

                                           **************

Lisa DeVries: Did you always want to be a children's writer or young adult writer?

Elisa Carbone: I was always interested in writing.  When I was four and a half, I decided I wanted to write a book, but I didn't know yet how to write.  My Dad would take dictation while I told him stories, and he would write them down.  And we did this every night after he came home from work and even when we went on vacation we would "write together" in the afternoon. Eventually, I thought, "Okay, I think I've written a book now."  I had my Mom type it out for me, and it ended up being only a few pages.  I was so sad.  But it was as if even then I had this sense of wanting to create something outside of myself; I always loved writing stories.  I had a teacher when I was in the fifth grade say that a story of mine would make a great children's story, but I didn't really think about it again until I was an adult and had two children. I was just finishing up graduate school.  The story came to me at first in one line, one line that I couldn't get out of my head, and then the story started to build up around it.  That turned out to be a book that I wrote over a year ago and then I edited it for a year.  Now it's just in a drawer somewhere. I think of it as one of my learning books.

DeVries: Where do you like to write? Do you have your own writing space?

Carbone: I have a room that I write in, but sometimes I stay with my parents for a month in August or in May.  They have a seat outside, and when I'm wearing a certain hat it lets everybody know not to talk to me.  And that's my place.  It's just going there and doing a few rituals I have to get back in the mood of the story.  When I was writing Last Dance on Holladay Street, I was reading a memoir written by a woman who had become a prostitute when she was 15 in New Orleans, and then she ended up becoming a Madame; she opened her own brothel. She was in the business her whole life, and she had written this book when she was in her seventies, a wonderful writer.  She was uneducated and from really poor beginnings, but she was an amazing writer.

DeVries: Of all of the books you discussed today, it was evident that each project required a lot of historical research.  Concerning how you choose your topics, do you usually spring upon them unexpectedly?

Carbone: Yeah, spring upon is a good word.  Sometimes I feel like it is a little like being tapped on the head with a little magic wand by the muse.  "Here's your topic," and it just comes unexpectedly, like Last Dance on Holladay Street.  It was like seeing that picture of Jackie, of who I showed you, or with Stealing Freedom; it was seeing Ann Maria's face.

DeVries: So do you choose historical fiction or does it choose you? You mentioned it sort of "taps" you on the head.

Carbone: Yes, it definitely seems to choose me.  Right now, there has been a series of events that have happened where people are saying to me, "You should right about this for your next book," because they know I'm in between books and I don't have a topic now.  Recently, everything seems to be about pirates.  The very word just keeps coming up, about six occasions now.  Nancy Roberts, who I have signed with two weekends in a row, sat next to me the last time we were signing.  She was the one person next to me who wrote all the pirate books.  I have turned on the radio and heard "ECU Pirates beat such and such."  So maybe I'll write about pirates.  I'm still unsure.  It hasn't hit me yet; it hasn't tapped me on the head.  I thought I was going to write about the Galveston tidal wave in Texas, but I know a book is coming out next month that has already received a starred review, and I'm not going to compete with that.  So when I hit on a topic I spend nearly three years immersing myself into that topic, researching it every chance I can get, writing about it, editing it. I spend almost every day for three years on a topic.  So it has to sort of put its arms around me and say, "We're going to be happy together for a long while."  It has to make me feel completely absorbed with the thought of it.

DeVries: Is that why you choose these historical narratives because no one really knows about them, or in Jackie's case, they haven't been given a voice before?

Carbone: Stealing Freedom is Ann Maria Weems' amazing story that had never been told before.  Now there are a few things that have come out about it and also the Storm Warriors. Those men had done this amazing and heroic rescue and nobody had heard about it for a hundred years.  When I started writing about it, I knew there were two other non-fiction books coming out about it, one for adults and one for kids and I figured, "You know, this one fills the gap."  "Heroes in the Attic" is one of the talks that I give to students about uncovering stories of heroic Americans, Americans that we have forgotten about, and then certainly stories of the girls and women who ran the whole sex trade in the old West.

DeVries: Tell me about the real deal, the girl in the photograph.

Carbone: Jackie. That's really all I know about her. She obviously started her career early, I think earlier than 15. There isn't any way that she is a 15 year-old-girl, but when I studied what happened to these girls, what drew them into the profession, I found a multitude of ways girls could enter prostitution.  One account was of a girl from a rural community in Kansas and "recruiters" came into town, good-looking young white men dressed in nice suits.  They would tell the girls, "We have great job opportunities in the city," in this case Denver.  And they promise getting them "set up," but don't really tell them what the job is.  Sometimes they would drug the girl and once her virginity was lost, she would feel too ashamed to face her family again.

DeVries: But their families would just let them leave with these men?

Carbone: Sometimes yes, especially if the family was poor and they thought she would be sending home money.  And often they did send home money, but they couldn't admit what they were doing.  There was a book published in 1901 called The White Slave Trade, which documents the kidnapping of young girls for prostitution.  Sometimes they were fooled into this, and then drugged; sometimes their clothes were taken away.  Once their self-image and self-respect was totally down the drain, then they were captives.  Their captors didn't even have to take their clothes away or worry about letting the girls out of their sight.  I even discovered situations of young girls in the bigger cities like New York who were kept behind bars.  There were bars on the windows so that they couldn't get out, and sometimes bars on the windows, so their boyfriends couldn't get in for free.  There were also situations of girls who were sexually abused at home, and they figured, "Why don't I go ahead and get paid for what I'm already having to do?"  There were girls whose families were so poor and hungry that they decided to go to the city and get a "respectable job" to send money back and found out very quickly that the jobs that were open to girls and young women didn't pay for food, shelter, clothing, heat, and you certainly wouldn’t have money to send back.

DeVries: So most chose the "oldest profession" because of economic reasons?

Carbone: Because of economics, and some were orphans or widows, or married women whose husbands took off, which often happened, you know; this is the Wild West. There weren't that many opportunities for women, and that is what is going on now in other countries, a lack of opportunities to work a living wage.

DeVries: Your protagonist, though, Eva, never ends up behind the closed doors upstairs.

Carbone: That's right.  The step below "working upstairs" was working in the dance hall. Girls were paid twenty-five cents to dance and the man would sometimes want to sit and talk with her awhile, and so he would buy her a drink.  It cost a dollar for a cocktail for a dancing girl, a huge amount of money at the time, and all it wasn't actually a cocktail; it was sugar water because the girls weren't allowed to drink alcohol.  She was really being paid for her time to chat.

DeVries: I'm hoping the book ends hopeful, but I don't want you to tell me. I n reality, would she have eventually gone upstairs?

Carbone: There is a good chance she would have.

DeVries: Is she molested?

Carbone: It gets a little icky.  My editor said during the dancing scene it turned her stomach, and I said, "Tracey, you're the one who told me to write that scene."  I was going to just have her dance. There is also an attempted suicide scene.  It was very common for girls to commit suicide. Nearly every week someone would take an overdose of opium, which they were allowed a certain amount of every day.  They were usually semi-drugged most of the time just to help them get through the work easier, and the addiction helped keep them there.  Or rat poison is another thing they used for a quick suicide.

DeVries: When I was in middle school, I remember several books were banned from our library, and I think it placed a considerable amount of avid readers at a disadvantage.  Did you ever have any fear that school administrators, libraries, or the parents of young readers would consider this topic a little too risque for the age group, or perhaps some publishing houses would refuse to publish it?

Carbone: A little bit. I started working with my editor on it when she was still at my first publishing house.  When I told her about the idea she said, "I think it's good, but maybe you should write me a proposal."  My editor then moved to another publishing house, though, and they did not accept the final manuscript.  They said they couldn't deal with it, that they didn't think schools and school library marketing would accept it.  They were asking me to set the book somewhere else, not in the brothel, have her live with someone else.  But nothing else made sense to me. It wouldn’t be appropriate if Eva lived with her friend Mr. Stonewall. So I said, "I'm not changing it."  I sent it to my new editor who was at the original publishing house, and she accepted it right away. I was still worried though that maybe they wouldn't reject it, but still alter it, so actually I hired an agent who did indeed like it. I don't normally have an agent, but this is the one book I have an agent for.  I needed to make sure that it just didn't get dropped.  And then, yes, I became concerned because it hasn’t been bought for book club, and most of my books have been bought for book club.  Still though, it's okay for the girls who read it and love it; they do love it.  Girls have come up to me and hugged me because it has touched them.  That's who I wrote it for.  As for concerned parents, I had a mother of a nine-year-old student say to me, "Anything that can empower my daughter, I want her to read it."

DeVries: What age group is this book intended for?

Carbone: Eleven and up, but like I said, I've had mothers with girls as young as 9 who say they want their daughters to read this.  I think any young girl who is starting to be aware of her own sexuality, aware of the pressures directed at girls, everything from advertising to magazines, to media to boys, to peers to everything, that it would be appropriate.  It brings up the issue of, how is my self-image protected from this onslaught? Last Dance is not about sexuality; it's about that treasure that we hold inside, our own strong sense of self and how we respond to this onslaught of sexual pressure.

DeVries: Because libraries or middle schools may consider this a risque topic, even though Eva never goes upstairs, what would you say to these people, critics, concerning what this book is really about?  What do you want young female readers to get out of it?

Carbone: I want young female readers to see a story where someone like them is going through a great amount of pressure, much more than any of them are facing.  The average girl is faced with sexual pressures from the outside, but no one is sort of forcing them into this. I would love for them to read this and feel Eva's strength, feel what Eva risks in saying "No" to these pressures. I want to inspire the reader to feel his or her own inner strength. This book is not about a young girl feeling sexual attraction and then saying no to it because she’s too young. I didn't write it for fifteen or sixteen year old girls. I wrote it for younger girls, because there are too many girls falling prey to sexual pressure, and there is too many sexually active thirteen and fourteen year old girls. They are not even old enough to be dealing with this kind of situation on the level of sexuality; they are dealing with it on an emotional level.

DeVries: Do many of your books have social messages like this?

Carbone: Yes.  That is what I thought about asking the adult writers: do you have a message in your book?  I know that the overwhelmingly amount of people who write for young people do have a message.  Some young adult authors write a story that will just get kids reading, but I’m always saying something in a book.  In fact, that's why I started writing.  I felt as though I had something to say, and I think one of the most effective ways to communicate to a young person is through story.  They are fascinated then.  You can give kids all of the information you want, but if they're not concentrating, it isn't going to sink in.  But if the story pulls them in and they're being drawn in through the story, then you can embed the messages.  Storm Warriors, for instance, the message is "follow your dreams," and with Starting School with an Enemy the message is, "sometimes it takes more courage not to fight than to fight."

DeVries: Now about the book cover, I really like it because it doesn't automatically make you think, "Oh, this takes place in a whorehouse."  Do you think it portrays the story's innocence?

Carbone: Well, it is a fairly innocent book, and I've heard from other artists that it's a wonderfully done piece of art.  I don't really know much about art, but with a lot of my covers I've just had to get used to them.

DeVries: Do you think you will ever write adult fiction?  This book can obviously reach more than one type of reader.

Carbone: What makes something adult as opposed to young adult?  I think one feature of adult writing is that it goes into much more detail of description and kids will not sit still for that; I can't sit still for that either, so I'm not going to write that.  Adult writers can go into such gruesome detail about violence too, and I can't handle that so I can't write it.

DeVries: And I guess the question is, is it always necessary?

Carbone: Right. I don't even read adult fiction, I read adult non-fiction, but I don't read adult fiction if it were published within the last 100 years.  And the third thing is, there is sex in adult fiction, and I don't want to write about that.

DeVries: That's kind of funny.

Carbone: But no, there's no sex in here.  And often adult books have this pained-body feeling; they're about depressing things, and in kids books, you want to give some hope.  It's not that I only want to write for kids; it's just that the things that adult literature expects are things that I don't want to do in my writing.

DeVries: Do you think that is the worry some people have about children reading this book, that if you even allude to sex or talk about it . . . ?

Carbone: If you even let children know that there is a "sex for money" trade out there . . . it's just letting kids know that there is such a thing as prostitution.  And it doesn't take much to play on a young girl's desire to be beautiful and to be desired.  It's all over the media.  "This is what you want, this is what you need."  It doesn't take much to put a girl in a situation where she is totally at the mercy of someone bigger and stronger than she is, and once the girl has turned one trick, it doesn't take much for her self-image and sense of self to take a huge nosedive.  I feel like a young girl without the protection of knowledge is so at risk and so fragile that to say "No, let's not let them know this is going on" is like saying, "Let's not use our seatbelts because we don't want our kids to know that people die in car accidents."

DeVries: Does literature provide this protection of knowledge? 

Carbone: It is always helpful to tell children, "Don't talk to strangers," or "Don't go anywhere with a stranger," but what if it's someone they know?  An article I read recently reported a young girl who was carried into prostitution because it was posited by the popular guy at a party, and it turns out the guy and his father were running a prostitution ring.

DeVries: Talk about the family business.

Carbone: Yeah, exactly.  So the more knowledge, the better.  Empower young girls, to make better decisions, to fight off the pressures that are coming at them from every angle, it's a good thing.

DeVries: You mentioned you were taking a break from writing earlier?  But you said you didn't feel good about it.

Carbone: At first, I was so tired from writing.  I thought, "I have to take a break," and then, of course, the first thing I did was work on editing the study guide for Blood on the River.  Then I interviewed a dozen historical authors and wrote an article and then I thought, "Okay, it is really time to take a break," and so I became very active.  I was doing a lot of skiing, windsurfing, some rock climbing, and I got a little tired.  I did start writing a book.  It's another edgy young adult book, a like The Pack, so it isn't historical.  I think there is often a lot of fear in writers, of how you get into the writing mode, and the book I was writing was really a different format than I've ever used before.  I didn't know if it was any good, and my daughter came out to see me; she was a children's book editor in New York for a time.  At first I didn't want to read it to her because I thought, if she didn't like it I would be destroyed somehow, but I read it to her and she loved it.  And that gave me the worse case of writer's block I've ever had and I haven't written a word since.

DeVries: All those activities, aside from the writing, sound really dangerous.

Carbone: For me, it becomes a mental focus when I'm doing these sports.  I love what it does to my brain.  I feel as though it is a no-mind state.  I feel like it trains my brain so that when I'm trying to focus, to really see a scene, my brain has been trained to see it in more depth, more color, more detail, more vividness, and put that into my writing.  Hopefully, I can make the reader feel it and see it.  I want to write something that transports the reader.

DeVries: Do you ever worry that children won't be able to connect to these historical figures in your books?  How do you make these characters real to them?

Carbone: I guess I just try to make them as real as possible as a person.  I don't ever put anything in there extra that would help kids today.  I wouldn't have Eva be "fashion conscious," although I did have her get excited about a blue silk dress and putting on a little bit of makeup, and silver combs in her hair, but I didn't do it because I thought, "Oh, girls today are all into fashion and jewelry and makeup."  No, I did it because I imagined that a girl growing up on a farm who never thought she would have these nice, fine things would look into the mirror and see herself looking more beautiful then she ever thought she could look, and feel very flattered and wonderful about it. Then, what a shock when you go down to do your first night of work, and you're surrounded by these men, sweating and stinking of tobacco and whiskey, pressing a belt buckle into your hip.  It's almost like Eva saw her own beauty, and then what she was asked to do with it was so hideous that when she leaves that night, she goes into the backyard and falls on her knees to throw up.  In order to handle the work of dancing, she removes herself from her self, and that is something that I read that prostitutes did.  It was as if they couldn't continue to be in their own sense of self and also do the work.  I had a good friend who was raped, and she said it was the same thing, like she lifted away and was sort of watching it happen; she was no longer there.  The most important thing about beauty I think is for every woman and every girl to see their own beauty when they look in the mirror.  Just that.  Because there is nothing beyond that needs to be done with it.

DeVries: Since finding Jackie, and through your research into the houses of ill repute of the old West, you have become active in ECPAT-USA, the End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes association. Can you tell me more about that?

Carbone:  The estimate now is that there are 2 million children in the sex trade, kids as young as six years-old, kids coming from other countries that stay in underground systems, shifting from state to state.  The American-born girls that are brought into prostitution rings are frequently brought into truck stops.  I've read interviews from truckers who say you can't even get a good night's sleep anymore at a rest area because girls are always knocking on the cab door, but it's like they're working for somebody who is threatening to cut their throat if they try to run away.  It's an underworld that people don't want to know about.  I learned about ECPAT while I was writing the book, and they educate people to the fact that it's going on.  I would greatly appreciate it if you could print their website in your article; the more people reached the better.

DeVries: As per her request, see: http://www.ecpatusa.org