Interview With Diane Haynes — by Lisa Manfield
This interview appeared in ROOM of One’s Own Literary Journal (29:2):
Sixteen-year-old Jane Ray doesn’t set out to save the planet, but when she discovers a dying bird and a deadly oil spill during a seemingly innocuous run along Vancouver’s Stanley Park seawall, the shy but passionate protagonist of Diane Haynes’s debut novel finds herself leading a campaign to convince the offending company to own up and pay up.
Flight or Fight, the first in Diane Haynes’s Wildlife Rescue Series for young readers, takes aim at some heavy issues — environmental destruction, animal rescue, and corporate social responsibility — but wraps them in a youthful context complete with all the adventure and intrigue of a modern-day Nancy Drew novel.
Semi-autobiographical — the storyline is based on an incident that happened to the Vancouver author several years ago, sparking her volunteer work in an animal rescue centre — Flight or Fight shows young readers that they can have an impact on issues they care about.
Lisa Manfield: Do you have a goal in writing this series?
Diane Haynes: E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and other wondrous books for children, is quoted as having said, “I wake up every morning determined both to change the world and have one hell of a good time. This sometimes makes planning the day quite difficult.” Writing books, too! But those are my goals for Jane Ray’s Wildlife Rescue Series: to inspire young people to take action on behalf of animals, and at the same time to give readers a thrilling adventure.
LM: Why did you choose this medium for getting your message out?
DH: I wish I loved TV or film best; I hear there’s money in TV. But I’ve always treasured books, and I’ve wanted to write for kids since I was seven years old myself. Carolyn Keen’s Nancy Drew and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Kathryn Kenny’s Trixie Belden are characters I spent time with in childhood. I wanted to create an experience like that for readers. Of course, Flight or Fight: The Movie has a nice ring to it.
LM: What role do you see young people playing in ’saving’ the environment?
DH: They’re our leaders. Most of the rest of us are just doing triage, paying lip service, patting ourselves on the back for blue-boxing. I met a young girl in Ontario who asked and answered questions about human-wildlife conflict with the insight of a university-level scholar. She said to me, “Thank you for writing a book like this. There’s nothing like it out there.” I thought, “Thank you for being the kind of person who will read it.” [Hi, Olivia!]
LM: What kind of response have you had to the book?
DH: I spent the month after publication traveling through Nova Scotia, Ontario, Albert and BC making presentations at schools, libraries and wildlife centres. Virtually every child or teen had an animal story they wanted to share with me, and they loved the idea of a young person and her friends taking on a major corporation on behalf of animals. A class in Edmonton that had witnessed the 2005 Wabamun Lake oil spill was planning a letter to the Minister of Environment by the time I left, asking for regulations to control oil dumping off Newfoundland!
LM: What’s in store for the next book?
DH: In Crow Medicine, the central animal will be the crow, which is considered a pest animal in western society, and the setting will be Vancouver before the arrival of West Nile Virus. I want to put Jane and the other characters into that tense, tight, exhausted, hair-trigger feeling that occurs when safety and danger suddenly become uncontrollable commodities and friends lose trust even in friends. The other major element with be Aboriginal mythology, in which the crow is the bringer of light into darkness, and represents the ability to take a stand, even when it means standing alone.