Nim's Island — Interview with Author Wendy Orr

Writer Wendy Orr is the author of Nim's Island, as well as 28 other books. A native of Canada,Wendy is now a resident of Victoria, Australia, where she lives with her husband, Tom, and a very large dog. She has two grown children — and no problem leaving her house! We sat down with Wendy to learn more about Nim's Island and her life as a writer.

Nim's Island is many kids’ favorite book. What was your favorite book growing up?
I loved a lot of books when I was young, but I think my favorite was probably Anne of Green Gables. It’s the first book that I can remember reading to myself and really actively being that character. I identified with Anne, who I really had nothing in common with except that she wanted to be a writer. And that, I think, really validated my burning desire to be an author. So that was quite powerful.

Did you start writing when you were young?
When I was eight, I wrote a sort of first draft of Nim's Island.We used to take a ferry to visit my grandparents, and we’d pass these little islands on the way. I decided it’d be really lovely to live on one of these little tiny islands off the coast of British Columbia. It would actually probably not be that easy for a small child to survive on one. But I wrote a story, and because of Anne of Green Gables, it was about an orphan running away from her orphanage to go and live on one of those tiny islands.

You wrote the first draft of Nim's Island when you were eight years old?
When I was writing "Nim," forty years or something later, I started it as a series of e-mails and journals. It wasn’t really coming to life, and so on about the seventh draft, I suddenly started remembering being the child who wrote this story, "Spring Island." And that was when it really came to life, the feeling of wanting to make things and be on an island and, you know, find things and do neat things and be self-sufficient. And that was when the story really came to life for me.

What makes the characters in Nim's Island so special?
All three of them take strength from helping other people.With Nim, it’s very much for Jack that she wants to keep the island secret. Of course she doesn’t want those tourists there — they’re scary and horrible. But she’s also willing to sacrifice her own desires to keep Jack happy by keeping the island a secret. Jack, like any parent whose child is threatened, will do anything to get back to Nim to take care of her. And Alexandra has to admit that she can’t lock herself in an apartment forever when Nim reaches out to her for help. She could have never done that, to sort of have some self-help program for agoraphobics, you know. She had to do it for somebody else.

What would you like readers and audiences to take away from Nim's Island?
I think that we can all be a lot braver than we think.We’re all capable of so much more than we think. Each of the characters in Nim's Island has to figure that out in a fairly dramatic way — rebuilding a boat from nothing, fighting off marauding, piratical tourists, being an agoraphobic and leaving your apartment to cross the world. In more minor ways, we’re all capable of just so much more than we think. And, I’d really like kids to remember that, because sometimes the world seems so big. I don’t want children to feel that the world is such a scary place that they are powerless, because they can do a lot and look after themselves in many ways.