Upper Arlington author Edith Pattou admits she’s not very good at remembering dates, but 1991 was a big year for her.
In 1991, Pattou’s daughter, Vita, was born, and her first book, Hero’s Song, was published.
In the 24 years since Hero’s Song was released, Pattou has turned out three more young adult books and one children’s picture book. Hero’s Song was the first book in the Songs of Eirren series, for which Pattou has written a sequel, Fire Arrow. She plans to return to the saga in due time.
The high fantasy of Songs of Eirren is a common marker of Pattou’s work, and it defines one of her most famous novels, East. While the former series is set in Irish mythology, East finds its roots in the Norwegian fairy tale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon.”
Though a great deal of her work draws inspiration from these fanciful sources, it’s important for Pattou to keep her stories grounded in approachable themes.
Edith Pattou
“East is about a girl setting off on a really strenuous and dangerous quest to make right something that she did wrong and to rescue the prince,” she says. “And I always loved that about the fairy tale: that it’s the girl who rescues the prince.”
For Pattou, empowering and inspirational concepts are appealing messages that recur often in her books. East offers readers Rose, the kind of protagonist readers can feel attached to and glean inspiration from.
“These young girls who read it just see how resilient and resourceful and brave and persistent Rose is,” Pattou says.
Pattou injected the same relatability into her most recent effort, Ghosting. Though the book follows eight different perspectives and uses free verse throughout, reviewers such as Anne Jung-Matthews from the School Library Journal have recommended it to reluctant readers “given the book’s realistic portrayal of a Midwestern town, the lyrical narrative and the readily relatable protagonists.”
Her relationship with her readers is a significant driving force for Pattou. This is perhaps most potent with East, one of her most influential books.
“People who read it and loved it just really loved it,” she says. “I still get these amazing fan letters from 22-year-old girls who say that they read it when they were 10 – and it’s the book of their life.”
With its tremendous following, East has recently been optioned to be a feature-length movie. Annika Karlsen, a film producer who read East as a little girl, is at the helm and now has the chance to make it into a fairy tale for the big screen.
The film itself is in very early stages, though a screenplay has been written – to which Pattou has given her blessing – and just one part has been cast.
That part, however, is an important one.
The prince in East is unique in that, for much of the story, he takes the enchanted form of a giant white bear. To achieve this onscreen, the filmmakers have cast Agee, the only trained polar bear in North America.
“And I got to go to Vancouver, Canada, and I met the polar bear,” Pattou says. “Though it’s a she-polar bear who’s going to have to play a male polar bear.”
“But it was a wonderful experience,” she says.
Like in any reader-writer relationship, it’s fascinating when these two sides come together, especially when collaborating on a project adapting one of the author’s books.
But, despite her distinctive job, Pattou has a life outside of her career.
Pattou is a member of a support system of young adult authors in central Ohio. The group calls itself OHYA (as in, “oh, yeah”), a portmanteau of “Ohio” and the acronym for “Young Adult,” and meets once per month to chat.
To those who know her, Pattou is just “Edie.” Her husband, Charles Emery, is a psychology professor at The Ohio State University and formerly worked at Duke University. They met when Pattou still lived in California, where she received her master’s degree in English literature at Claremont Graduate School (now known as Claremont Graduate University), then another master’s in library and information science at UCLA in 1983.
The couple moved from L.A. to Colorado. They lived there for a year before heading over to North Carolina, where they stayed until moving to Upper Arlington in 1994.
Pattou and Emery have a daughter, Vita (short for Victoria), named after poet and author Vita Sackville-West.
One of Pattou’s most popular works, Mrs. Spitzer’s Garden, was inspired by a letter she wrote for Vita’s kindergarten teacher. The picture book enjoyed a week on the New York Times’ Best Sellers List.
Much of Pattou’s inspiration and the information in her books comes from unexpected sources – such as the metaphor of a schoolteacher as a gardener watching her students grow, which was gleaned from the work of the real-life Mrs. Spitzer.
While working as assistant editor of a medical journal, for example, Pattou collected names of doctors and researchers from the index and recycled them later as character names in her books.
In addition, Pattou consulted her husband as well as a physician friend of a friend to learn more about physical trauma and medical procedures for Ghosting.
But Pattou says the most research she has had to conduct was for her works of fantasy. While writing East, a fantasy epic set in Norway in the 1500s, Pattou says she “did an incredible amount of research on things like mapmaking, weaving, the Arctic and polar bears.”
“I would get file folders full of information about each of those topics,” while for Ghosting, her work was limited to more practical notions, “like what high schools do for spirit week,” she says.
But, in the end, the content of her work comes from an amalgam of all the experiences, places and people in her life. Pattou’s childhood had its fair share of adventures and hardships, from inaugurating a spy organization in elementary school with her best friend, Sue, to moving to Chicago from the suburbs after her parents’ divorce.
Her storied life has sharpened the tools she uses to craft stories with emotional breadth and experiential knowledge. When writing Ghosting, Pattou sought to communicate such wisdom gained by living.
“Even if something really bad happens, you can never really be irreparably broken, and you can always move forward in life,” she says. “I think the message is always one of hope and healing.”
Zach Maiorana is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at ssole@cityscenemediagroup.com.
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