Due to copy write protection, Linda Sue Parks 2002 acceptance speech on winning the Newbery Award for A Single Shard is not available. However, I did find the response of her editor, as follows:

From the July/August 2002 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Linda Sue Park by Dinah Stevenson

A few weeks before ALA Midwinter, Linda Sue Park sent me an e-mail: “I’ve gotten several e-mails from people congratulating me for the results of ‘mock Newberys’ that are coming in from library systems all over — Shard has been named an Honor Book a few times. I know I should be pleased, and I am, I’m thrilled to pieces, but it’s also making me completely neurotic. Sometimes I wish people would just stop talking about it.”

I understood perfectly. I have always been superstitious about awards, and I firmly believe that talking about them is a jinx. I thought that A Single Shard might have an outside chance at an honor, but there wasn’t much point getting excited about the possibility beforehand, because it could just as easily not happen. My honest answer was: “Committees are unpredictable. There is no way to anticipate the actual winners and honorees. Take what you’re getting now as compliments from enthusiastic fans, because that’s what it is. And that’s all it is.”

Linda Sue thanked me for my sage advice and claimed she felt much calmer.

Now, of course, the advice doesn’t seem quite so sage. I can’t help feeling that a truly perspicacious editor, which Linda Sue thinks I am, would have had some kind of sixth-sense warning of an impending Newbery. I didn’t have a clue. One of the things that makes working with her such a pleasure is that she is so appreciative and complimentary that I have to be careful about my hat size. Perhaps my failure to predict the Newbery will disillusion her. But not entirely, I hope.

I have been working with Linda Sue since I signed up her first book, Seesaw Girl, in October 1997. Hers is an amazing true publishing success story: from unsolicited submission to Newbery winner in three novels. She told me once that certain other writers felt she had gone about it all wrong. Apparently, beginners are supposed to undergo a lengthy initiation period of submitting projects, having them rejected, and suffering. Linda Sue simply skipped that step.

In fact, according to the conventional wisdom and protocol of aspiring children’s book writers, she did a number of things wrong. She sent her first query letter to twenty-two publishers without first researching the kinds of books they did. She said in the query letter that the children in her daughter’s second-grade class loved the story. (Professionals learn they’re never, never supposed to say anything like that, even if it’s true.) Moreover, she failed to enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope. While I was reviewing her manuscript for Seesaw Girl, she sent me a revision (she had waited a week and was growing impatient). And when I phoned to say I wanted to publish her book, she asked me whether there was any chance I was going to change my mind.

Linda Sue may have been a complete novice about submitting children’s books for publication. But she knew plenty about children’s books. An enthusiastic reader — her word is maniacal — from an early age, Linda Sue read indiscriminately and returned to her favorite books again and again. She retained a deeply ingrained sense of the pacing and structure of good middle-grade fiction, as well as some very specific memories. One of these that would become important later came from a collection of folklore retellings, Tales of a Korean Grandmother by Frances Carpenter — a reference to the fact that girls from noble families in seventeenth-century Korea were never allowed to leave their homes. This made a huge impression on her at age ten.

Something else that stuck in her mind came from one of the Little House books, which she probably read around the same time. The manuscript of her second novel, The Kite Fighters, had been accepted and was already moving toward publication when Linda Sue phoned me in something close to panic. Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder to her daughter, Anna, then nine, she came across a familiar paragraph and realized that she had unintentionally echoed its rhythm and structure in her manuscript. Did this mean she was an unconscious plagiarist — a kind of literary Jekyll and Hyde? No, I said, it meant she was the kind of reader who took things in very deeply, and I encouraged her simply to rework the offending paragraph.

After receiving a B.A. in English from Stanford University, Linda Sue worked in Chicago, went to graduate school in Dublin and then in London, married an Irish journalist (on the eighty-ninth day of her ninety-day fiancée visa), and had two children.

Linda Sue had been raised in the Midwest to be “more American than Americans.” English had been spoken at home, and she learned only a few words of Korean. Living in London, her children got to know their Irish grandparents; the other side of the family was on the other side of the Atlantic. Making connections despite huge gaps between generations, between continents, between languages, is the theme of Linda Sue’s poem called “Halmoni,” which is the Korean word for grandmother:

She speaks; my mother speaks. The sounds crackle

and reach me always a second too late. I look down

at the babe in his swaddled sleep and find the answer.

Mother, please tell her that Sean is the Irish for John,

the man who baptized Jesus.

I hear Korean, then nothing, then the noise

of laughing and crying at the same time, Jong,

a wonderful, beautiful name, such a perfect choice.

She and my son will never meet, but as he grows

he will hear her voice on the phone

and learn to answer to Jong.

After seven years in London, Linda Sue, her husband, Ben, and the children moved back to the States. Now she wanted to share with her children the Korean side of their heritage. Realizing that her Korean background was something she’d need to learn about before she could pass it on, she began investigating Korean history. A writer all her life — poems, stories, ad copy, newspaper articles, annual reports — she found her research meshing with the story idea she had been carrying with her since childhood, about a well-brought-up girl in seventeenth-century Korea eager to escape, even temporarily, the confines of her upbringing.

Linda Sue began to write. She thought the story might be a picture book, but the first draft was three thousand words and the second draft six thousand. After four months, she had ten thousand words. To her surprise, Seesaw Girl had turned out to be a middle-grade novel. Depending on how you calculate, it had taken her either six months or almost thirty years to write.

She went on to write three more novels, each growing from a nugget of information about Korean history and culture. The Kite Fighters places in fifteenth-century Korea the story of two brothers, their rivalry in their traditional roles of first (important) and second (unimportant) son and their partnership in building and flying kites. Linda Sue’s father, who told her about the Korean sport of kite fighting when she was a child, had been a second son and is a devoted kite flyer. Linda Sue considers this book in many ways a tribute to him, which made it all the more meaningful that it was he who drew the decorations that open each chapter.

The idea of a small country, Korea, being better at something — ceramics — than its larger and more powerful neighbors China and Japan appealed to her and became the basis for A Single Shard.

When My Name Was Keoko grew from a reference to young Korean men serving as kamikaze pilots in the Japanese army during World War II, and from her own parents’ recollections of growing up in Korea under the Japanese occupation. The book’s working title was The Most Beautiful Tree in the World, referring to the rose of Sharon tree that is the national tree of Korea, until Sean, then fifteen, stated flatly that no boy would read a book about a beautiful tree.

Doing the research for her books made Linda Sue “feel Korean.” She began to see aspects of her upbringing — the emphasis on schooling, for example — in the context of Korean tradition. “Suddenly a whole bunch of my childhood made sense. I was illuminating my own past.”

The response to her books makes it clear that she is illuminating the Korean past for many readers as well. She has a sharp eye for the telling details that bring the setting to life, and unobtrusively introduces and explains aspects of the culture that might seem alien, or arbitrary, to a young American reader. The bridge over the gap is often a process — embroidering a panel for a screen, inventing and constructing a Korean standing-and-jumping seesaw, building and decorating a kite, preparing clay for the potter’s hand. The reader sharing these experiences with the characters becomes so deeply immersed in their world that it can be a surprise to look up from the page and find oneself at home. Perhaps the fact that Linda Sue was learning to feel Korean as she went along makes her an especially empathetic guide.

Another bridge between characters and readers is food. Linda Sue was a food writer at one time and has won cooking contests. She has passed her interest in food along to her family — her son’s requested dinner menu for his fourth birthday included stuffed artichokes and calamari — and brings it to her books. We learn what her characters like to eat and what happens during meals. A Single Shard begins with hunger and a discovery of rice; Tree-ear’s relationships with Crane-man and with Min’s wife, Ajima, are partly expressed in terms of the sharing of food. The progress of the Japanese occupation and the war in When My Name Was Keoko is reflected in the gradual disappearance of familiar foodstuffs, and despite the privations of wartime, a broken friendship is repaired over popcorn.

As it happens, Linda Sue’s editor is also interested in food. Our e-mails often touch on recipes and menus, and an embarrassing amount of time goes into deciding where we will have lunch when she comes to New York. These meals are always a lot of fun, as Linda Sue is adventurous and knowledgeable and serious about eating without taking it too seriously. She eats salad with her fingers. She’s glad to share but only if everyone wants to. And if she orders a dish that a friend or family member loves, she will have part of it wrapped to take along and give away.

Linda Sue has the kind of effervescent generosity that can only come from a spontaneous pleasure in giving and sharing. Following the announcement that A Single Shard had won the Newbery Medal, she came into the Clarion offices with a large paper shopping bag full of wrapped packages and a list of everyone at Clarion who worked on her books — the managing editor, the designer, the associate editor, the sub rights person, the part-time marketing assistant. . . . Everyone got a present, something made of celadon ware. It’s a Korean tradition: good fortune is to be shared. It’s also very much like Linda Sue.

On that same post-Newbery visit to New York, Linda Sue asked which store had the best petites department. Petites? I looked at her, noticing not for the first time that the top of her head is more or less level with my collarbone, and registered that she is indeed what clothing manufacturers call petite. It’s an idea that takes some getting used to; her personality, her presence, is large.

Even now, months after the announcement, Linda Sue doesn’t entirely believe that she has won the Newbery Medal. She prefers to refer to it as “the N word” or “the N.” When she opened the carton of books she had ordered and saw gold seals on the jackets, she was amazed all over again: “Will I ever get used to this?” she e-mailed me. “Yes,” I wrote back, “but probably not anytime soon.”

I look across my office at the celadon vase ornamented with cranes and clouds that Linda Sue took out of her shopping bag in January and presented to me. I’m not used to this either, and I didn’t see it coming — but I get to share it even so. That, to me, is good fortune.

Dinah Stevenson is vice president, associate publisher, and editorial director of Clarion Books.