Anna Redsand is the author of the award-winning YA biography of Viktor Frankl, entitled Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living. Frankl was a Viennese Holocaust survivor who created logotherapy, a form of psychology that places emphasis on creating meaning in ones own life. Anna Redsand uses logotherapy today as she counsels adolescents in New Mexico.

Monica Friedman: How did your first reading of Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning affect you personally? Can you think of particular incidents in your life whose outcomes might have been altered by your understanding of Frankl’s message?

Anna Redsand: I’ve read the book so many times, that it’s hard to accurately identify the first time I read it, but it would have been in my late twenties or early thirties. It was an especially hard time for me because coming out as a lesbian was so completely unacceptable to my fundamentalist missionary family and church. It was a time when I often thought of suicide as a way out. Man’s Search for Meaning moved me deeply and gave me hope. It helped me realize that I had something important to contribute to the Life of us all.

MF: In your Notes, you discuss Tommy, the boy whose crisis inspired you to write a Frankl biography for young readers. How did this experience cement your certainty that you should write this book?

AR: As I wrote in the notes, I had thought of writing Frankl’s story for young people for some time, and for young people like Tommy. I suppose it helped that the summer break was just around the corner, and I knew I would have time to begin. But Tommy’s hopelessness, and my inability to do anything to change his life circumstances, just as Frankl could not change his situation, made it clear to me that there were so many parallels between Tommy’s life and Frankl’s. Frankl so clearly lived his comment about “the last of human freedoms–the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances,” that I wanted to share his story with Tommy and so many others. In my day-to-day work as a school counselor, I encounter young people with multiple tragedies in their lives, so if I were to put them in a novel, people would tell me the fiction was not believable.

MF: Can you explain how Frankl’s theories helped Tommy or other adolescents in particular? How does logotherapy work for you as a guidance counselor? Are there some aspects that are of particular use in working with young people? What elements of Frankl’s story do you most commonly share? How do your students typically respond?

AR: While he was in the camps, Frankl always tried to focus on something to hope for, something to look forward to. And when a student seems to have no way out of a difficult situation or to have little motivation, often because of depression, I try to help them find something to hope for, to hold on to. Frankl also believed that Life asks something unique of each of us, and I try to help them discover what that is for them. If I have a short amount of time, I often share the story of Frankl talking to the men in his hut on the night that the potatoes had been stolen. If I have more time, say 20-30 minutes, I tell a shortened version of his whole life. I also often have to give the students I work with a lot of background information that might be hard to imagine–for example, who the Jews are, where Europe is, what the Holocaust was. In the past some kids responded with a tone that said, “Well, that’s not me.” But now I really get into storyteller mode, and they’re usually mesmerized. They can really relate to the injustice and to Viktor’s losses, and they’re impressed with how he triumphed over them.

MF: What obstacles did you encounter in your quest to publish this book? Was there any resistance to the idea of a Frankl biography for young people? Was there any controversy?

AR: I probably sent queries and sometimes samples and proposals to at least 40 publishers. I started to realize that it would take an editor who already knew and loved the work of Viktor Frankl, and that was exactly right. My editor at Clarion, Jennifer Greene, unlike most editors, had been a psychology major, not an English major, and she knew about Viktor Frankl and shared my vision of every high school student in America reading Man’s Search for Meaning. The only controversy I am aware of, if you can call it that, was that some people thought Viktor Frankl was too obscure to be the subject of a YA biography.

MF: How did you go about recreating his story for a young audience? What are the challenges inherent in writing a Holocaust narrative for children?

AR: Viktor himself made it easy for me in some ways to recreate his life, because he was so full of life and had a great sense of humor. It can be challenging to keep young people interested in a biography beyond the subject’s youth, and of course the heart of Viktor’s story takes place in his adulthood, so it was important to bring in things like his mountain climbing and flying whenever I could. But children also naturally have a strong sense of fairness, so the Holocaust holds their interest as something supremely wrong, often unbelievable. It was challenging to decide how to include the history of World War II and the Nazis, whether as a self-contained chapter, as some YA biographies of Holocaust survivors do, or to weave it in with Viktor’s story. I chose the latter. I also felt the book needed to be truthful and detailed, but not graphic, and that was a challenge. The second chapter, which contains some sophisticated psychological concepts, was in some ways the most difficult to write, and I think young people may find it less easy to read, but I felt it was essential and hopefully thought provoking.

MF: What did you learn about writing as you completed your first book?

AR: I learned from my editor to do less foreshadowing. I’ve used that knowledge several times since. One of the hardest lessons, because I believe and have always been told that I am an excellent editor, was to get the manuscript back from the copyeditor absolutely filled with red marks and queries checking facts. I wanted to cry. I also learned to stand up for what I believed was important.

MF: Your parents were missionaries. How did your study of Judaism change your understanding of the world?

AR: I studied Judaism quite extensively with a maggid, not in connection with the writing of this book, but because I was considering converting. That is a long story in itself, and growing up within Navajo culture as a missionary kid was really the first window for me onto other cultures and ways of relating to the infinite. It’s a long enough story that I’ve put it into an essay that I’ve submitted for publication. Judaism is so rich and multi-faceted that I don’t think I can answer that question here, but I love the question, as I do all your questions and how they’re making me think.

MF: What was the most surprising thing you learned in researching and writing this book?

AR: The most surprising experience was my visit with Elly Frankl, Viktor’s widow, in December of 2002. She had prepared a beautiful, elaborate tea for me, and then asked, “Why do you want to write this book about Viktor Frankl for young people? Why can’t they just read Viktor Frankl?” I thought, Oh my, this might not go very well. Fortunately, Viktor’s former assistant, Harald Mori, told Elly that in America we have many more books written specifically for teens, while in Europe it’s expected that they will mainly read adult books. She settled into it then, and the even bigger surprise was that she gave me so much of her time–three hours, when she didn’t know me or who I was at all. I’d thought she might give me 30 minutes!

MF: How did the process of researching and writing this book affect you or change you?

AR: The year that followed its publication was very hard for me. I wasn’t thrilled at all, and I felt very detached from it, even depressed. I didn’t want to do the things I needed to do to get the book out there. Ironically, I think that had to do with my ego being involved and with the idea of self-promotion. I had to remind myself why I wrote the book–to inspire young people. And I had to draw on Viktor’s principles myself, to remind myself that writing this book and getting it out there was something that Life had asked of me, that only I could do in my particular way. When I shifted my thinking, opportunities, like this one, to share about it started to come to me.

MF: What sort of feedback have you received from young people about your book? From adults?

AR: I haven’t really talked to many young people, other than my students, who have read it. I hope that changes. My students have been inspired and have expressed how they would like to live their lives the way Viktor lived his. They’ve also wanted to know a lot about the writing process, which is fun to talk about. Adults have given me a lot more feedback. Interestingly, many have said that it enabled them to understand the events leading up to World War II in a way they never had before. They also like the way I applied logotherapy concepts in terms of today’s young people, like how finding meaning could help someone live with alcoholic parents. And they like the pictures, which, of course, I really put there for young people.