Process Talk with Jen: Elizabeth Partridge on Golden Gate
[Posted by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk]
Elizabeth Partridge’s The Golden Gate: Building the Mighty Bridge tracks the epic construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s–at the time by far the world’s longest suspension bridge and commonly thought to be an “impossible” project–from an utterly child-centric POV.
Here at Writing With a Broken Tusk, we are preoccupied with crossing borders, and it strikes me that a bridge is as much of a transitional space as a border between countries. But there’s something about the scope of a bridge–especially one as long, and striking as the Golden Gate–that gives us a physical reminder of being in liminal space that crossing an invisible, imaginary, pencil-thin border between countries.
In some ways it feels like the focus on the bridge’s construction process reflects the process of growing up, as well as the process of making a book–there is so much that happens incrementally, strand by strand or word by word or understanding by understanding, that cannot be easily seen once the bridge or book or growing up is done.
Here’s Betsy Partridge in conversation with Jen about Golden Gate.
[Jen] I was taken by your focus on the bridge’s construction in the book, rather than its conception and design. The main characters are two children who live in a lighthouse, whose backyard becomes the bridge’s construction site. Other characters are blue collar–the lighthouse keeper, the construction workers, and their foreman. How did you come to find this focus for the book?
[Betsy] I’m married to a carpenter/building contractor. I’ve been hearing about concrete and steel and tools and trucks and excavators and rivets for more than 40 years. Add on raising two boys, and two grandkids who live with me. I’ve been around a lot of construction, and a lot of construction talk.
I’m hoping Golden Gate will find readers and listeners who want to know about how things are built: about machines and tools and blueprints. I want them to know about the amazing grit these workers had to get 600,000 gigantic, red-hot rivets into this steel to span the Golden Gate Strait.
Honestly, I also wanted to plant a seed: these are really amazing, highly skilled workers. You want to get out of high school and go into the trades? Cool choice. You’re valued.
[Jen] Yes! And the book highlights so much otherwise unseen skill beautifully. I love the way that the child perspective is foundational to the book–the main characters are excited to see the first trucks rolling down the makeshift road past their window, and they are illustrated taking in the bridge with craning necks, rivets nearly as big as their heads. You wrote “I found I was writing in second person, using the pronoun you. Most writing is in third person, (she, he, them, and theirs) or in first (I, me, mine, ours). Instead of changing it to the more usual third person, I loved the casual immediacy.” Somehow I feel like the second person voice ties into the book’s child-worldview, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Do you have any insights you might share?
“Growing up in an extended family of photographers meant I was trained from an early age to be visually aware of the world around me. ”
[Betsy] I loved imagining myself in the POV of the kids. I wanted to be right there with them. I wanted to feel the rumble of the trucks, hear the shouts of the workers. I wanted to feel that cold fog roll in. I especially wanted to capture the awe of having such a huge structure grow up right beside the lighthouse. Almost unconsciously I wrote in second person to get all those feelings inside my skin. It turned out to be a great way to engage all my senses and get them on the page.
I had planned to convert the manuscript to third person, but then I thought… hm…. If this works for me, would it work for readers? So I left it in second person, turned it in to my editor at Chronicle, Melissa Manlove, and waited. Would it fly with her? It’s so unusual to write in second person I wasn’t sure what she would think, but she loved it.
[Jen] This book and your Sibert Award winning Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams's Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration both come from personal experience: you grew up in the Bay Area and have childhood memories of crossing the Golden Gate to get to the beach in Marin County; Dorothea Lange was your godmother. How do these formative childhood experiences connect to your grownup writerly process?
[Betsy] Growing up in an extended family of photographers meant I was trained from an early age to be visually aware of the world around me. It wasn’t in anything in particular, it was just being around adults who would notice things… the way sunlight fell on a beautiful piece of pottery on a shelf, or the way the setting sun lit up the clouds as we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. Then, of course, Dorothea, my grandmother Imogen Cunningham, or my dad, Rondal Partridge, often had a camera hanging from a strap around their neck, or strategically left on a nearby counter. They’d reach for the camera, and *click* shoot a picture. I was curious, so I always looked to see what they were seeing. There is a beautiful moment of stillness when a photographer kind of holds their breath for a second while they release the shutter.
When I write picture books, I am always imaging what the reader might be seeing in the illustrations. And then the ms goes to the illustrator, who does the illustrations in their own amazing way. It is a pure joy to see what they come up with.
Uma chimes in: Betsy Partridge, you held my virtual hand as I struggled to put images and text together in my own foray into nonfiction writing. Your advice was sound and practical and I knew it was grounded in the depth of your own knowledge and experience. Congratulations on your beautiful new book.
