KATZ, Welwyn Wilton 1948-

PERSONAL: Born June 7, 1948, in London, Ontario, Canada; daughter of Robert (an electronics manufacturer) and Anne (a nurse; maiden name, Taylor) Wilton; married Albert N. Katz, 1973 (separated, 1989); married Peter Bangarth (an archaeologist); children: Meredith Allison; stepchildren: Aurora Bangarth. Education: University of Western Ontario, B.Sc. (mathematics, education), 1970. Hobbies and other interests: Playing the flute, sailing, reading myths and legends, finding recipes that incorporate herbs she grows, knitting.

ADDRESSES: Office—346 Blackacres Blvd., London, Ontario N6G 3C9, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer. South Secondary School, London, Ontario, Canada, teacher, assistant head of mathematics, 1970-77. Past refugee coordinator, Amnesty International; treasurer and member of the steering committee, London Children's Literature Round Table; former researcher, Girls' Group Home of London.

MEMBER: Writers' Union of Canada, Canadian Society of Children's Authors, Illustrators and Performers.

AWARDS, HONORS: Book of the Year runner-up, Canadian Library Association, 1985, for Witchery Hill, 1986, for Sun God, Moon Witch, 1988, for False Face, and 1989, for The Third Magic; Ruth Schwartz Award finalist, 1987, for False Face, and 1988, for The Third Magic; International Children's Fiction Prize, Trillium Award finalist, both 1987, Max and Greta Ebel Award, Junior Library Guild (New York, NY) selection, selected one of School Library Journal's Best Books, and a Pick of the List from the American Bookseller, all 1988, South Carolina Young Adult Book Award finalist, 1990-91, all for False Face; Governor-General's Award finalist, 1988, for False Face, 1991, for Whalesinger, and 1995, for Out of the Dark; Governor-General's Award, 1988, for The Third Magic; included on Society of School Librarians International Best-Book List, 1990, for The Third Magic, and 1991, for Whalesinger; Short Grain Award, 1992, for You Can Take Them Back; Book of the Year finalist from the Canadian Library Association, 1993, for Come Like Shadows, and 1996, for Out of the Dark; Vicky Metcalf Award, from Canadian Authors Association, 1994, for entire body of work; Ruth Schwartz Award, 1996, for Out of the Dark; Mr. Christie Award finalist, and Blue Heron Award finalist, both 1996, and Red Cedar Award finalist, 1998, all for Out of the Dark; Red Cedar Award nominee, 2002, for Beowulf.

WRITINGS:

The Prophecy of Tau Ridoo (juvenile), illustrated by Michelle Desbarats, Tree Frog Press (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), 1982.

Witchery Hill (young adult novel), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1984.

Sun God, Moon Witch (young adult novel), Douglas & McIntyre (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1986.

False Face (Junior Literary Guild selection), Douglas & McIntyre (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1987, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1988.

The Third Magic, Douglas & McIntyre (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1988, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1989.

Whalesinger, Douglas & McIntyre (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1990, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1991.

Come Like Shadows, Viking (New York, NY), 1993.

Time Ghost, Simon & Schuster/Margaret K. McElderry (New York, NY), 1995.

Out of the Dark, Groundwood (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1996.

(Adapter) Beowulf, illustrated by Laszlo Gal, Douglas & McIntyre (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1999.

Contributor of short stories to publications, including "You Can Take Them Back" to Grain magazine, winter, 1992; "Cat Mundy's Magic" to the Canadian Children's Annual, 1988; and "Their Joyous Strain" to the London Free Press, December, 1988.

SIDELIGHTS: For Welwyn Wilton Katz, it was the books of J. R. R. Tolkien that changed everything. She once commented, "I found that it was possible, using words alone, to create a whole world, a marvelously complex and unreal world that other people could believe in." Katz has used her interest in myths, legends, and the supernatural to weave stories that incorporate both current problems most teenagers face—insecurity and parental divorce to name just two—and timeless mythological themes that play out the conflict between good and evil. Whether on their home turf or transported to another time or planet, her characters deal with evil outside themselves or within, when the protagonist becomes the unwitting prey of evil powers.

Katz, a fifth-generation Canadian, credits her Scottish and Cornish ancestors with her abiding interest in Celtic myths. Unlike many writers, Katz does not recall writing very much when she was young. One exception was a high school final exam in which she was asked to write for three hours on one of five topics. "I spent two hours trying to decide which of those awful topics I would choose," she once commented, "and the remaining hour 'taking dictation' from some inspired part of my brain, the words simply flowing out of me . . . . It was one of the most exciting experiences I've ever had." But even with the excellent grade she earned and the thrill of this feeling, it took a long time for Katz to try her hand at writing again.

An honors student in mathematics, Katz became a high school teacher, a position she held until she was twenty-eight. She found it difficult to adjust to being in the classroom, though she liked her students and made a good salary. She tried several makeovers—pierced ears, contact lenses, new clothes—but still felt awkward in her chosen profession. Uninspired, Katz worried that her whole life would continue on this steady, dull course and, as she remarked, "it gave me the creeps."

It was at this point that she read Tolkien; the immediate effect was that Katz decided to write an adult fantasy novel. Initially, she devoted evenings and summers to her writing, but found that part-time writing didn't suit her. A year's leave of absence was followed by another, and by then she had finished her first draft, a hefty 750 pages. The ambitious story took place in a different world and had a huge cast of characters, whose complex setting demanded long, detailed exposition. By 1979, she had resigned as a teacher and used another year to rewrite the manuscript.

Katz sent it out to several publishers but none expressed interest. "When there was no one left to send it to, I cried a little—okay, a lot!—-and then put the book on my top shelf. There it sits to this day," she commented. But Katz made a very important discovery: she wanted to write. Furthermore, she learned about writing itself from doing the work, honing her technique and style. Among her characters were several children, and Katz thought she might try a children's book next.

Her breakthrough came in 1982, when her first novel, The Prophecy of Tau Ridoo, appeared. In it, the five Aubrey siblings find themselves in the strange and threatening world of Tau Ridoo, controlled by the terrifying Red General. He sends his deputies after the children, who become separated from each other. Cooky, a sorceress, comes to their aid and together they manage to defeat the evil General and to be reunited.

Witchery Hill's protagonist is Mike, whose parents have recently divorced. Along with his journalist father, Mike travels to Guernsey (one of the English Channel Islands) for a summer visit with the St. Georges, who are family friends. Mike's friendship with the eldest daughter, Lisa, reveals surprising turmoil beneath the apparently calm surface of her family life. Diabetic and fiercely attached to her father, Lisa suspects her stepmother is not only a witch, but trying to gain control of the local coven. The job of vanquishing the evil powers set loose on the island and destroying the coven falls to Mike, who must also reconcile himself to a less-than-perfect relationship with his father. A contributor in Publishers Weekly lauded Katz for holding the reader in "thrall," concluding that Witchery Hill "is a knockout, with each character deftly delineated and a socko finish." John Lord, writing in Voice of Youth Advocates, echoed this view, praising Katz's use of the setting, with its Stonehenge-like standing stones and its invitation to adventure in a world of facts interwoven with fantasy. "For the reader who needs action and intrigue," Lord stated, "this book is definitely 'IT.'"

Witchery Hill sprang out of a series of coincidences connected to Katz's chance visit to Guernsey, whose ferry docked in the small town where she dropped off a rental car. A randomly chosen hotel happened to be staffed by a woman with an interest in the island's folklore. Katz found references to witchcraft on the island as late as 1967 and came upon a manual of witchcraft in a bookstore. She decided to set her story on the island and to use a very powerful book of sorcery as the source of the witches' strife.

Historical facts were the inspiration for Sun God, Moon Witch as well. Katz read widely on the dowsers (also known as water-witches), who often reported strong electrical shocks when they came into contact with standing stones like those in the stone circles in England. Katz also recalled a family story about a dowser who had discovered a spring on their farm, and she knitted the two together. In Sun God, Moon Witch, Thorny McCabe is underwhelmed by the idea of summering with her cousin Patrick in an English village. But she soon discovers that the village is engaged in a controversy over the ancient stone circle of Awen-Ur. Like Witchery Hill, Sun God, Moon Witch revolves around the protagonist's struggle to keep evil from taking over the world.

False Face tackles a different kind of ethical dilemma—the appropriate handling of cultural artifacts—as played out against a difficult family drama. Protagonist Laney McIntyre finds an Indian mask in a bog near her London, Ontario, home. The tensions in her house following her parents' recent divorce are symbolized by their different reactions to Laney's find: as a successful antiques dealer, her mother encourages her to profit by it, but her father, a professor, encourages her to donate it to a museum. Meanwhile, the mask itself appears to be emitting corrupting powers that only she and her Indian friend Tom seem able to stop. Voice of Youth Advocates reviewer Rosemary Moran pointed out that the novel is "steeped in Canadian lore" and that the characters embodied the difficulties of dealing with different cultures "with enough suspense to keep the reader involved until the climax." A Publishers Weekly contributor found that Katz "welds the supernatural element onto the family's conflicts with grace and competence."

Katz describes The Third Magic as a kind of predecessor to the King Arthur legend. The novel took her about three years to complete, much of it spent constructing Nwm, an imaginary world, in as much detail as possible. Morgan LeFevre, a fifteen-year-old, has accompanied her father to Tintagel to assist with a television documentary on the King Arthur legend. Centuries before, Morrigan, a sister in the matriarchal society of Nwm, had been sent to Tintagel, fated to become Morgan Le Fay. Because of her resemblance to Morrigan, Morgan is transported to Nwm, confronted by two warring forces of magic. To Margaret Miles of Voice of Youth Advocates, Katz tried hard but failed to find a new twist to the Arthurian and Celtic-based fantasies and wrote that Arthurian fans "may be interested in some aspects . . . but are likely to find it rather less magical than the classics of the genre." Although Robert Strang, in reviewing the book for the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, complained of a plot "convoluted even by genre standards," he found it to be a "unique recasting of a legend."

Katz changed direction a bit with Whalesinger, which looks at the relationships between humans, animals, and nature. Set in spectacular Point Reyes National Seashore in northern California, Whalesinger features two teenagers with problems, both of whom are involved in a summer marine conservation program. Nick is an angry young man eager to blame the team leader for Nick's older brother's death in a shipboard explosion, and Marty is a learning-disabled, lonely girl who has an empathic bond with a gray whale and her calf. Katz uses the coastline as emblematic of nature's power—the action climaxes in an earthquake; and history—there are references to an accident that occurred centuries before when Sir Francis Drake visited the area. A critic in Publishers Weekly chided Katz for a "veritable bouillabaisse of fishy plot developments," finally determining that she "has gone overboard." School Library Journal's Patricia Manning, however, applauded Katz for her "complex pattern of science, personalities, a lost treasure, and a whale mother with an ailing baby" and pronounced the book "intriguing."

With her interest in the supernatural, it's no surprise that Katz would find herself drawn to Macbeth, and making full use of the play's reputation among theater people for being cursed. Teenaged Kinny O'Neill, the protagonist of Come Like Shadows, has a summer job with the director of the Stratford, Canada, Shakespeare festival. When she finds the perfect mirror prop, Kinny has no idea that it contains the spirits of the eleventh-century witches that destroyed the real Macbeth. The company travels to perform in Scotland, the witches by now in modern dress and using the apparently helpless Kinny to further their plot to renew their coven. Barbara L. Michasiw wrote of the book in Quill and Quire that "Come Like Shadows is difficult to reconcile with reality. . . . This is a challenging story that will probably not be comfortably accessible" to all readers. Lucinda Sayder Whitehurst in School Library Journal also found the alternating points of view, from Kinny to Macbeth, a little difficult to follow, but felt that it would be "appreciated by drama and Shakespeare enthusiasts." Reviewing the book for Voice of Youth Advocates, Mary Jane Santos declared it "an intriguing mystery-fantasy with well developed characters and realistic dialogue."

Again and again, reviewers point to Katz's ability to use landscape and location to great advantage in her work. Her 1995 novel, Time Ghost, is set in the polluted world fifty years hence. Along with their friends—brother and sister Josh and Dani—Sara and her brother Karl accompany their grandmother to the North Pole. An argument between Sara and her grandmother catapults Sara and Dani back in time, to the late twentieth century before nature was irrevocably ruined. Booklist's Carolyn Phelan predicted that readers would be drawn to the "flow of action and emotion, the deft descriptions of the natural world, and the sympathetic characters." Susan L. Rogers in School Library Journal was impressed with Katz's "absorbing story" that delivers "a serious ecological message," sentiments echoed by a Publishers Weekly critic, who also noted the ecological message and found it "stifles neither characters nor the plot."

After a break from myths, Katz returned to the ancient Norse tales for Out of the Dark, which Children's Reader reviewer Janet Wynne-Edwards termed "satisfying." Thirteen-year-old Ben, his younger brother Keith and their father move from Ottawa to start a new life in Newfoundland, in the town of Ship Cove, where his father grew up. Before her death, Ben's mother told him many of the Viking stories, and in her honor he begins to carve a knarr (a Viking ship), the myths and historical details helping him to deal with his own problems. As Wynne-Edwards wrote, "The young reader is not subjected to an anthropological checklist of artifacts and so may well retain this history." Booklist correspondent Susan Dove Lempke described Out of the Dark as "a story of quietly rising tension, with . . . appeal for . . . boys who find Vikings so fascinating."

Katz's prose retelling of Beowulf brings the story of the ancient hero to a new generation of readers. Told from the point of view of Wiglaf, Beowulf's heir, the tale moves through generations as Wiglaf learns of the wiles of the monster Grendel and then lives to witness Beowulf's slaying of both Grendel and Grendel's mother. Booklist's Carolyn Phelan called Katz's recasting of the classic poem "graceful" and added that, in sum, the work is "a handsome volume."

Despite plots that sometimes strike reviewers as too complex, Katz consistently provides her readers with strong writing, interesting characters, and believable dialogue. She manages to work in her environmental concerns and her own fascination with ancient tales without overloading the story, earning her many awards and an enthusiastic, loyal following. "Katz's books are compelling," declared an essayist for the St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers. "She is a strong storyteller . . . and her characters are well drawn. She seems to be in tune with the adolescent psyche and is able to convey the painful confusions of that time of life in a succinct and sympathetic manner. She is harder on the adult characters who, if they are not the actual embodiment of evil, are somewhat remote and slow to understand or respond to the situations around them, almost as if life had deadened their feelings and perceptions." The critic added: "Katz's strongest books, False Face, Whalesinger, and to some extent, Time Ghost, all display her particular talent for inventive plots. . . . Her love of nature and fascination with the supernatural animates these, as well as all her novels, and her sensitive portrayals of adolescents are particularly compelling. She is always a pleasure to read."

In an interview with Raymond H. Thompson for Taliesin's Successors: Interviews with Authors of Modern Arthurian Literature, Katz commented, "Part of the reason I write fantasy is because of the magic. I choose magic because I think it's something that fascinates people, but in any case it fascinates me. I like to use magic to enhance reality. Magic is the thing that's around the corner: we can't see it, but it's there. I'm not sure that I actually believe in magic, but I think that you can use it as a writer. . . . It's always a challenge to write about things that people don't experience, and then try to make them think that they have experienced these things because they've just read about them."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 19, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, Supplement, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, 2nd edition, St. James (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Something about the Author, Volume 62, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990.

Writer's Directory, 15th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 1, 1995, p. 1573; October 15, 1996, Susan Dove Lempke, review of Out of the Dark, p. 424; December 1, 1999, Carolyn Phelan, review of Beowulf, p. 700.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, February, 1989, p. 150.

Canadian Children's Literature, number 47, 1987.

Children's Reader, winter, 1995-96, Janet Wynne-Edwards, review of Out of the Dark.

Horn Book Magazine, November-December, 1996, Anne Deifendeifer, review of Out of the Dark, p. 737.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1988, p. 1151.

Publishers Weekly, November 2, 1984, p. 77; December 21, 1990, p. 57; July 15, 1996, review of Out of the Dark, pp. 74-75; July 29, 1998, p. 234.

Quill and Quire, February, 1993, p. 36.

School Library Journal, May, 1991, p.111; December, 1993, p. 134; May, 1995, p. 108.

Voice of Youth Advocates, April, 1985, p. 48; February, 1989, p. 286; June, 1989, p. 116; October, 1993, p. 228.

ONLINE

Camelot Project,http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/intrvws/katz.htm/ (September 5, 2002), Raymond H. Thompson, interview with Katz from his Taliesin's Successors: Interviews with Authors of Modern Arthurian Literature about supernatural elements in her work.

Welwyn Wilton Katz Homepage,http://www.booksbywelwyn.ca/ (May 21, 2002).*