Frieda Gates | Author of Sawney Beane & Childrens Books

March 25, 2009

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! It’s already almost the end of winter here in New York. It’s a beautiful day; the sun is shining, crispy late winter air out here. We’ve got four guests on the show today; I’m very excited about it. We had our final guest cancel on us, he’s got the flu, and it’s that time of year so I’ve got a special guest to sit in for him. Her name is Sarah Watkins and we’re going to chat with her at the end of the program. She’s an amazing vocalist and violin player, she’s famous for being the lead singer of Nickel Creek and we’ll talk to her at the end of the show. She’s of course our author of sound. Then I’ve got three sound authors to start off the show. Those will be Frieda Gates, the author of Sonny Beam – it’s a wonderful book. Bob Cesca with a Forward by Ariana Huffington a book called One Nation Under Fear: Scaredy cats and fear mongers in the home of the brave. A very clever title and clever cover. Then I’ve got the third guest on the show who is Keith Lee Morris with his novel called The Dart League King. It’s a gorgeous book. So we’ll start off the show today speaking to Frieda Gates about her book, Sawney Beane. Welcome to the show.

Frieda Gates: Hello!

Dr. Kent: So tell me a little bit about this book. Where did it start? Where did it come from in your mind?

Frieda Gates: Well it’s based on an actual event. The event was recorded by Daniel Defoe and actually when he wrote under the pseudonym Captain Charles Johnson and there’s some dispute there whether it was actually Defoe or not. But it’s about Sawney Beane who was a legendary character throughout the British Isles and is noted because he existed on cannibalism and propagated incest. For 25 years he lived in a cave and living in this manner until he was finally discovered, it took a long time. And executed along with his entire family. Now there’s some law where they wonder if the children, since they were brought up by these cannibals and therefore know no other way of life, yet they were executed just because they were his children and that’s been kind of a question of law whether children growing up in such circumstances are actually guilty.

Dr. Kent: Now what a fascinating topic for a book and you know, we could all listen to this all day long about these mysterious times and events and all of that. Now you’re well known for children’s literature and you’ve done a lot of other things. This is a heavy topic.

Frieda Gates: Yes, in fact I was wondering if I even should have written it under my own name because I didn’t want it to be put into the children’s section by mistake. The fact that it has sex and violence it’s certainly not for children. My other books are children’s books and textbooks. So this is quite a ways and it was funny because I took a course in short story writing and one of the assignments was to write a dialogue while eating. I did that and then I wrote 40 other short stories all in the same subject. One had to do with cannibalism and I love research. In researching cannibalism I came across Sonny Bean and couldn’t really understand why there was never another novel written about him other than the record by Daniel Defoe. And it just was ripe for the telling so I did it. Of course I had this reputation and they said if Frieda invites you to dinner watch out because she may be it.

Dr. Kent: And this isn’t normally something we think about coming from that part of the world. We have such a love affair with Ireland and Scotland and we think of upright folks and the hunt for the holy grail and the Dan Brown novel and the bagpipes and the kilts. So what’s been the reaction to this?

Frieda Gates: It’s interesting you say that because Daniel Defoe was English and a journalist and the Scots always claimed that the story was fictitious and he just made it up because he wanted to write something derogatory about the Scots. I went to Scotland of course to do research and I was amazed that everybody knew who Sonny Bean was but they always had this reticence to talk about him because there’s ballads written about him and he’s very famous but whether it’s actually true or not is up for grabs. Of course Daniel Defoe wrote under many different pseudonyms, in fact he wrote for four different newspapers at the same time with four different opinions and he was imprisoned for not paying debts. He was a terrible character so even the life of Defoe is interesting.

Dr. Kent: So bring us into what was the setting back then in the 15th century. I mean it’s such a murky, we understand history back about to 1700 and 1600 and in this country people get a little nervous before that. What was happening around there, before we usually hear about?

Frieda Gates: I love research and I love history so I enjoy thoroughly going into all of this; actually 16th century and of course Mary Queen of Scots was executed at that time and monks were on the run and there was a whole thing about Catholicism, particularly in Scotland and Knox who was of course popular at that time so religion was a very important element and I had to of course include it in my story. In order to get to the story of Sonny Bean and the record that Defoe tells is about Sonny Bean being a lazy kid who has a disagreement with his father, steals his fathers’ money and runs off and hooks up with this prostitute.

Then they meet up with a knight and find themselves living in a cave on the coast of Galloway. Of course I get into the wars because the knight had just returned from all the wars the Scots and the English were having and the French were involved. So history plays a big part in my novel and as I say I am a history buff so I enjoyed it all. I would look up every thing like what kind of shoes they wore or when I talk about loot I wanted to know what the loot was that they stole from the people they killed. I had to work in how they became cannibals. Why they first decided to cook and eat the child and it gets a little bit weird. Finding out what people taste like and I found that out had to inject that into the story. So it was pretty fun doing the book really but friends didn’t really want to come here for dinner worried about what I was going to serve.

Dr. Kent: Go into the story itself here. It’s the abduction of Elspeth Cummings; Sawney Beane. Give us a nutshell.

Frieda Gates: Well the abduction is purely fabrication. I had to somehow explain Sonny Bean and how he got caught so the easiest way to do it was to dwell on the life of a young girl who is captured by the family and kept alive for awhile. So then since I got into that part of the story I had to backup and say how she came to be on the road where she was abducted so it all would tie together. That’s when I really had to do research into what Scotland was like at that time, what the architecture was like, what the trades people were in, everything; even the clothes they wore and what they ate so its really a history lesson.

Dr. Kent: What got you into this in the first place? Tell us a little about your background as a children’s author.

Frieda Gates: I started out in advertising and I was an art director and an illustrator. I illustrated a book that a friend had written. I was puppeteer at the time and I became very friendly with the editor who I was working with and she said to me why don’t you write a book on puppetry and I said well I’m really an illustrator and she said oh you can do it, I’ll help you. So I wrote a book on puppetry and before I knew it in ten years I had written nine other books. It just seemed like one followed the other.

Then I started teaching how to write and illustrate for children and I realized there was no textbook on the subject so I wrote a book called How to write, illustrate and design children’s books, which I am at the moment revising because now I have to put in all the computer stuff that wasn’t in it 25 years ago. So one book sort of led to another. My husband was also a writer of textbooks so I worked with him on several textbooks he wrote in the art field and the last book I wrote for children was an Indian legend called Allies and I have a whole collection of Indian creation stories because my father was a Mohawk Indian, which is another area I’d like to write about some day.

Dr. Kent: Your father was a Mohawk Indian? Tell us more about that before you go on!

Frieda Gates: Well he’s from kanawaka, which is a reservation on the other side of St. Lawrence and they were the first field workers when the Canadian company needed to put their bearings or whatever it is on the kanawaka’s land and the only way they could do it was if they employed the Indians there. The reason they were called Mohawks is because of the French Jesuits converted the Mohawks to Catholicism and when they got the reservation in kanawaka it was predominantly Mohawk although there were other Oneida and Quoi nations but Mohawk was the language that they adopted.

Anyway the Mohawks became these you know the lower kind of workers that would be carting materials around and they didn’t like that; they wanted to get out and become riveters, which they did. There was a letter written one time saying it was like putting ham with eggs. These Mohawks were just so great at it. So they helped build that bridge and before you know it, they came to New York and they were building sky scrapers. They started a community […] so the Mohawk language, they had grocery stores where they would sell things like bear grease and the community was Mohawk and all the people working there were sky men. They had to fight for the right to live in Brooklyn because they came from Canada, and that’s a whole other story!

Dr. Kent: Wow, so you’re full of them!

Frieda Gates: A little bit yes. Well I’m a researcher.

Dr. Kent: Its really amusing speaking about all of these things. Lets talk about now how has this book been received in public? Back to the Sonny Bean, it’s a dark book but it’s great to read a dark book now and again. Its not something you want to read curled up ready for bed, its kind of spooky, but what was it like going through the experience of writing a dark book?

Frieda Gates: Well I’m fascinated by the macabre so it’s my cup of tea. I had some trouble with the ending of it, I won’t tell you how it ends but the first ending my agent didn’t like because it wasn’t what she felt the ending should be and she had me rewrite the ending. Then my editor with whom the book was finally being published said she didn’t like the ending and I said well that wasn’t my original ending, which I couldn’t find and had to rewrite it but then went back to the first ending, which my editor seemed to prefer and that’s what’s in the book. So it’s a matter of whether it should be upbeat ending or not – well, I don’t want to give the ending away!

Dr. Kent: Indeed not! It’s been a great honor speaking with Frieda Gates, she’s the author of many, many books and I’m excited to now see if I can find the children’s book to go with the Sawney Beane copy I have to see the great extent of work she’s done. This book is wonderful, put out by Cambridge House Press called Sawney Beane: The abduction of Elspeth Cummings. Thank you so much for chatting with us today.

Frieda Gates: Thank you for having me.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is going to be Bob Cesca; he’s the author of One Nation Under Fear: Fear Mongers in the Home of the Brave. We’re going to speak to him in one minute; come on back for that.

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