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Dear Jax,
Have you every gone to the zoo and thought about what it would be like to be a wild animal living all your life there? Some animals are born in the zoo and never know that others like them live in jungles or savannas or in the rain forest. Other animals come from other zoos or from the wild. Ivan doesn't live in a zoo. You may surprised to learn where he DOES live. This book, which is very soon to come out as a Disney live action movie, shows us Ivan. We grow to love him and understand him and his connection to his friend, the little elephant. This book won The Newberry Award --the most prestigious award given to a YA book. What really sets "The One and Only Ivan" apart from almost all anthropomorphic novels is that it is based on a true story. Ivan still lives today. You will be changed by his story. Ms Hesse |
On writing a story about animals in captivity. (from the author - Katherine Applegate)
"Ivan's story was so compelling and so bizarre. The fact that he had been captured as an infant from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and brought to Tacoma, Wash., to live in a mall? ... It was beyond comprehension when I first came across this story in The New York Times. The headline read, 'Gorilla Sulks in [a] Mall as His Future Is Debated.' This was about 20 years ago. They were trying to figure out what to do with this guy, and I thought, 'There's a story there, I just have to figure out how to tell it.' "
"I tried to meet Ivan. I went to the zoo. I took my 13-year-old daughter — she was about 10 at the time — and it was a very wet day. Ivan hated wet weather, and he never came out, and I sat there for hours in the rain, and my daughter was looking at me, going, 'Are you crazy, Mom?' ... I'd flown all the way to Atlanta! I was determined to see him! But at the end of the day I realized this guy actually had some control over his environment. In the old days would he have been able to go anywhere? To make a choice like that? And it was really validating. I was OK that he couldn't come out. I did go to his memorial service later, though."
On Ivan's memorial service
"His keeper Jodi Carrigan told stories about Ivan. He was quite a character. He liked to wear a sombrero. He hated wet weather so he would carry around a burlap coffee bag and stick it under his butt and slide around on the grass that way. He was, um, not shy about making his needs known."
"I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?' What if you were sitting here next to me and you turned into a cat? I have a story. So I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney Aladdin and Sweet Valley and books like that. And my husband, Michael Grant, and I started a series called Animorphs, about kids who can turn into animals, and that was our big first success."
"I think we have a real obligation when we do have animals in captivity to understand their needs and to care for them as well as we can. Stella the elephant in Ivan says, 'You know humans surprise you sometimes,' and I hope that the next generation can surprise us all."
