A Long Walk to Water
A Long Walk to Water
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Linda Sue Park on A Long Walk to Water
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The man she couldn’t stop describingThe book began not with a research trip or a pitch, but with a social problem. After her husband, journalist Ben Dobbin, brought Salva Dut to the family’s holiday party in Rochester, she found herself retelling his story at every opportunity, to anyone who would listen.
I kept telling everyone I knew about him, and it finally dawned on me that if I wrote this story I could tell a whole lot of people at once.
What she wanted readers to feel was the contradiction she felt standing in front of Salva in person. His biography on paper was a chronicle of violence and loss, but the man himself was nothing like what that biography predicted.
Once you meet him, you think, how could he go through the things that he went through and not be a horrible, bitter, twisted person? And instead he’s so calm and gentle and loving. And so the balance was in him, that a person could go through all these terrible things and still be so loving.
From the start, she regarded the project as belonging to Salva rather than to herself. The book reached her, she later said, through luck rather than intention, and the question of whose name went on the cover never fully settled for her.
A Long Walk to Water was a gift dropped into my lap through my husband’s work as a journalist. He met and wrote about Salva Dut and eventually introduced us. It was serendipity, getting to know Salva. If I had my way, his name would have been on the cover, but there were reasons he didn’t want his name on the cover. The only thing that’s invented in that book is the dialogue.
How she wrote it
A list of events, a hole in the middleSalva had already produced a written account of his experiences before Park came to the project. What she inherited was not a story but a skeleton, and the gap between the two set the terms for everything that followed.
My preference would have been for it to be called A Long Walk to Water by Salva Dut with Linda Sue Park because it’s entirely based on interviews with Salva and my just shaping the narrative and correcting the grammar. Inventing some dialogue, things like that, but it’s entirely Salva’s story and there are reasons which I won’t go into here that he didn’t want his name on the book.
She had planned to travel to South Sudan with Salva in 2008 to research Nya’s story, the fictional Sudanese girl whose parallel narrative she wove through the book. A security-related cut to the group size removed her from the trip entirely, forcing her to build Nya’s world from secondhand materials. She called it a departure from her own rules about place.
It is the first and probably the only time I will write a book about someplace I haven’t been. Normally that would be a deal-breaker for me.
That constraint shaped the second narrative strand more than any single interview. Every image of Nya walking for water came through her husband’s photographs and a videographer’s footage, filtered through written questions she had prepared in advance.
The book’s most discussed structural feature, alternating chapters between Salva’s escape in 1985 and Nya’s water-walks decades later, was not a thematic choice first. It was a solution to a narrative gap. Park wanted to write about eleven-year-old Salva fleeing war and adult Salva drilling wells, but the years between those two moments, spent in refugee camps and adjusting to American life, didn’t fit what she wanted to tell. The answer arrived when her husband returned from Sudan with photographs of young women carrying water, and she realized the well’s arrival transforms someone else’s life far more than Salva’s.
what if I introduced a second character like that whose life is about to change really dramatically? And then what if I took that character from this part of the story and moved her right up here to the beginning, alternating, so that maybe people won’t notice the hole in the middle so much? So that’s what it was. It was kind of a literary device. [paraphrased from audio]
The material she was rendering, children separated from families, bodies left on roads, months without food, was far outside anything she had experienced. She made a deliberate choice not to escalate the prose to match the scale of the events.
If you’re trying to write about very strong horror, very strong fear or very strong emotion it’s easy to overwrite it. So I just held back from that and chose to tell it as plainly as possible and to let the reader fill in for themselves and to trust the reader to do that.
The title felt right immediately and she didn’t question it. It wasn’t until after publication, when a reviewer pointed to Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, that she understood where it had come from. She had read ‘A Long Walk to Freedom’ when it was published, then forgotten the title completely before it resurfaced in her mind years later as though new.
It was totally subconscious. Until she wrote that I’m like, ‘Of course that’s where I got the title!’ But I’d forgotten about the title, I kind of forgot about reading the book, and when ‘A Long Walk to Water’ popped up in my head I was like, ‘Oh that’s like, good title!’ [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Not heroism, but a slightly better cornerShe was careful, in interviews, to separate the book’s moral weight from any demand on readers. Aware that the subject matter could tip into guilt or paralysis, she framed the takeaway in terms of scale rather than sacrifice.
I do not expect readers to march off to Africa and start doing good works. But maybe one reader will think about Salva when they’re going through their own tough time. Or maybe another reader will think, well, I can’t go off to Africa and drill wells but I can make my corner of the world a tiny bit better.
She was equally surprised and moved by what actually happened after the book reached classrooms. Students across the country raised money for Salva Dut’s nonprofit, Water for South Sudan, at a scale she had not anticipated when she wrote it. The fundraising numbers shifted her thinking about where social change actually comes from.
They’re responsible now, the readers of A Long Walk to Water, who have helped Salva raise money, they’re responsible for hundreds of wells serving literally millions of people in South Sudan. And just, I never imagined that. And it made me realize that we have this incredibly overlooked resource in this country in terms of activism, which is the power that young people have to nag their adults into doing the right thing. [paraphrased from audio]
At a TEDx talk, she drew on that fundraising data to answer directly the question she had placed in her title. Her answer was a distinction between what a book can do and what a reader, activated by one, can do.
Readers lose themselves in Salva’s story and in doing so, they find themselves with powers they never knew they had: the power to fight against the world’s unfairness. So, can a children’s book save the world? No. But the young people who read them can. [paraphrased from audio]