Kelly Barnhill won the 2017 Newbery Medal for her luminous fantasy, The Girl Who Drank the Moon. After a story collection for adults, she returns to young readers’ literature with The Ogress and the Orphans (Algonquin, March 8), set in a once-lovely town whose library has burned and whose citizens have sunk into suspicion and selfishness. It is ruled by a greedy mayor who, readers learn early on, is a dragon who’s assumed the skin of a human—not, as others of his kind have, simply to expand his perspective through living the experiences of others, but to use that understanding to take advantage of them. When crisis draws the town’s anger to the ogress who lives peacefully on its outskirts, the mayor seeks to exploit the citizens’ nativism in ways many readers will find all too familiar. But the mayor is no match for the orphans at the town’s heart. Barnhill spoke with Kirkus via Zoom from her home in Minneapolis; the interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It was a sheer pleasure to sink into another Kelly Barnhill.

It was a strange experience, because I didn’t think I was going to write another book, and this one sort of came out of nowhere.

Can you talk a little bit more about that?

To be fair, I’ve said that before. Friends of mine have lost count of how many times I have given up writing forever. When The Girl Who Drank the Moon came out, I was very disassociated from it, [and] when the whole [Newbery] business happened, I was extremely unprepared. This [was] the book that I had turned in to my editor with a letter of apology, saying, I’m really sorry, I think people are going to hate this book. It was all very destabilizing, because there were books that I thought would win [but] didn’t, and there was that whole sense of imposter syndrome. And also, Trump was elected, and the country lost its mind, and I was feeling really self-conscious about what the purpose of my voice was and what the purpose of my work was and that maybe it was OK if I didn’t write another book again.

I did the other things that everybody else did. I went on marches, and I wrote letters to my representatives, and I just thought maybe that’s my role now: to take care of my family [and] my neighbors in the new reality. But I have these stacks of notebooks, and I love writing longhand. There’s a new daily work that I’ll do just for myself: I will write fairy tales, just for myself. And one day, I wrote one that just didn’t feel the same as everything else. It stuck with me in a different sort of a way. I wrote little bits and pieces here and there, and then I put it all together, and I typed it up.

I was finishing [the manuscript] around the exact same time that [George Floyd] was murdered by police. And my city erupted in a collective response of rage and pain and sorrow and frustration. People just started donating groceries and diapers and menstrual products and cleaning products and anything else that we could think of that might be helpful. There was this profound community response that I feel [has been] left out of the narrative. It made those next few months of going back and forth [with] my editor just that much more [meaningful].

You could not have had the Mayor say, “I, alone, can fix it,” by accident.

Trump has really given children’s authors everywhere a great service, because all those years our editors were like, Oh, this villain is too cartoonish. Or Isn’t this a bit on the nose? I feel like everything since 2016 has been a little on the nose, you know what I mean? But looking back on it, it turns out there’s all kinds of scurrilous individuals who also said that they alone could fix it. And maybe we should learn from that.

Did you and your editor go back and forth about how much that’s on the nose to leave in?

Mostly I was given pretty free rein on the Mayor. Turns out the Mayor was really easy. But that’s the thing, though. I mean, the strongman ideology is on the rise frickin’ everywhere in the world right now. You and I associate it with Trump, but it will be somebody else someday. And it has been other people in the past. And it currently is other people right now who are using that same phrase. We are having this expression of fascism happening in America right now in the guise of book banning.

You could not possibly have anticipated that your book would be coming out at a time during a wholesale attack on freedom of information.

It’s awful. It’s awful. It’s awful. It is unpatriotic. The idea of a public library, that’s ours. There were great libraries in Europe, but there was no analog to a public library, where you get a library card and you get to read whatever—that’s amazing. The idea of anybody attacking a library or trying to diminish a library feels so deeply un-American to me. How dare you? Oh, it makes me so mad.

There’s a line I just can’t get past. The dragons wear the skins of other creatures so that they can learn empathy. But then you tell readers, “Even empathy can be transformed into a weapon.”

That is such an uncomfortable truth, right? I really do believe that those of us who are in the business of stories—we write them, we write about them, we stock library shelves with them, we give them to our students—are all in on this idea of the power of stories and the power of empathy. And all of that is true, right? But the thing is that we have to look at the other side of that. Our brains are built for narrative. We think in story, we remember in story, we plan for the future in story. But we also hate people in story, too. Every human atrocity that has happened throughout the history of the human animal has always been [cast] in story.

I write books for children, and I feel this really strong moral obligation to not lie to children. Yes, I want a child who reads my book to feel in care, like whoever wrote this book for them really wants to hold them close and wants them to have a good and happy life and wants them to have everything that they need to be a thoughtful, understanding, and empowered person. But I also want them to understand that some people choose to do bad things, and we don’t know why that is. I know that there’s going to be adults that read that bit and are going to be like, Why are you wrecking it, Kelly Barnhill, jeez, what’s the matter with you? But I think that it is important [for kids] to have a frank understanding of how good things can be used for bad purposes and how not-so-good things can sometimes be transformed to be good, too.

I love how you talk about holding your readers in care.

For me, reading a middle-grade book is the funnest thing that a person can do. I, the writer, I am holding that child [reader] in care. But I am also writing the book for some other adult who is also holding that child in care and is thinking about building a world that is more just, more fair, more kind, and more responsible. We don’t always get there, but we do hope for it.

Vicky Smith is access services director at Portland Public Library in Maine and a former young readers’ editor at Kirkus.