“New England Voices” for 2011, Tuesday, 24 May

Tomorrow, 24 May, the Foundation for Children’s Books will host its annual “New England Voices” event in Walsh Hall at Boston College. This event, starting at 7:30 P.M., is free and open to the public. There will even be refreshments, as well as books available for purchase and signing.

Once again I’ll introduce the four regional authors who will speak about and read from their work:

• Karen Day is a colleague in one of my writing groups. She specializes in emotional novels about middle-graders. Her latest is A Million Miles from Boston, showing how twelve-year-old Lucy’s annual summer trip to Maine doesn’t turn out at all as she’d hoped.
  
• Nancy Poydar has written and illustrated twelve picture books, including No Fair Science Fair. She taught sixth grade for over a dozen years before becoming a full-time book creator.
  
• Susan Lynn Meyer is the author of Black Radishes. This debut novel is about a young Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied France was inspired by experiences of Meyer’s father.
  
• Christine McDonnell is a picture-book author and children’s librarian from Jamaica Plain. Her latest, Goyangi Means Cat, shows a young girl coming from Korea to live with her new American family.

Come out for an entertaining evening with some of New England’s many talented authors!

A Seriously Good Funny Panel on Writing for Kids

Before my recent travels, I loaded an SD chip with some podcast files that I had lying around the hard drive. One of them was the recording of a panel of children's-book writers at the last "Winter Words" writers' conference in Fairfield, Connecticut. And I was very glad I finally took time to hear that.

I'm not saying that just because my name gets dropped at one point. (Though, depending on my mood, that might be enough to make me recommend that everyone listen to this.) Rather, this is the sort of panel that any writing conference director would love to have: lively, insightful, thought-provoking. 

The first rule for producing a funny discussion, it seems, is to invite a couple of authors with backgrounds in improvisational comedy. But for insight, you have to luck into a diverse set of smart people who love the work they do.

The panelists were:

• Karen Day, author of Tall Tales and No Cream Puffs, and a critique-group colleague of mine.
• Marc Tyler Nobleman, author of Boys of Steel and many other books, representing the nonfiction side and the picture-book side.
• Chris Grabenstein, author of the A. John Creepak mystery series for adults and the middle-grade ghost story The Crossroads.
• Brian Meehl, author of Out of Patience and Suck it Up.

One aspect of the conversation I especially appreciated was how the panelists described very different writing methods. Too often people come away from an author's presentation thinking they have to follow that person's approach. But these authors came at the challenge of writing a book for kids from every angle. Karen described how she focuses intently on her main characters' psychology while Meehl (I think) declared that that was the aspect of storytelling he tried hardest to avoid.

Our crit group had heard about this panel, but no one had the right link, so I'm grateful to have found it through Marc Nobleman's retrospective on the discussion.

Authors in Profile

Yesterday's Boston Globe featured an article about Mitali Perkins and Karen Day; I'm lucky enough to be in a critique group with both of them.

Mitali has a new series called First Daughter, about a teenager adopted from South Asia whose father, a respected military veteran, becomes a leading candidate for President of the U.S. And would that ever happen?

In the newspaper article, Mitali talks about the inspirations of her own childhood as an immigrant encountering various parts of America.

"My stories come out of the things that I experienced when I was in middle school," said Perkins. "About being between cultures."

Perkins was 7 when her family emigrated from Bengal, India, to the Flushing section of Queens, where she felt comfortable since "nearly every nation was represented," she said.

But when they moved to California, Perkins found herself surrounded by whites who had all been born and raised in the United States.

"Not one kid spoke to me for two months," said Perkins. "The principal introduced me as 'a new student from Asia.'"

Mitali also has a story about her school's Trekkers that's simultaneously hilarious and heart-breaking, which I hope she'll one day build a novel around.

As for Karen, I tease her about being a jock, but her athletic background and discipline are a big part of her writing. There's at least a little sports in almost all of her books, even if it's just the family bowling nights in Tall Tales. Karen's upcoming No Cream Puffs is about the first female pitcher in her town's Little League.

Until reading the Globe article, I didn't realize that Karen's athletic career led to her writing in another way:

Day was playing baseball with boys and traveling on an elite tennis circuit at a time when the world was taken with Billie Jean King.

Being a much better athlete than all of the boys left her isolated, said Day.

"I really didn't have anyone to talk to," she said. "I kept a journal - writing has always been a part of me that felt really safe and good."

The first draft of Tall Tales that Karen shared with the group was in diary form. Eventually she chose a different narrative voice, but I now understand how natural it was for her to start from that form of writing.

China, Tall Tales, and a Sense of Hope

So the night after I brought home Un Lun Dun from the library, Roger Sutton's post directed me to author China Miéville's recent essay in the Guardian:

There's nothing like the constant sage cliché that polemical politics has no place in fiction to make a person hanker for a bit of agit-prop. The cruder the better. Of course a lot of agitproppy art is crap, true, but then so's a lot of everything.

Irritated by the insipid and disingenuous separation of politics and art? Be reassured that it's never too early to corrupt young minds with tendentious reasoning smuggled into narrative. Fortunately, there's no shortage of political discussion in children's and YA fiction, sometimes camouflaged, often not.

In fact, I'll go further and note that children's and young-adult fiction is often judged by the values it imparts, far more often than serious adult literature. And what are politics if not values writ large?

Miéville went on:

The worst propaganda works aren't those (relatively few) books that actually do what the critics of political fiction claim it does (foreclose discussion and replace it with hectoring): they're those books which pretend -- perhaps to their authors too -- that they are above and unsullied by political concerns. What better way to naturalise all sorts of unexamined prejudices?

Unexamined prejudices like, say, the need to leave readers with a sense of hope. Which brings me to Mitali Perkins’s interview with our friend Karen Day, whose Tall Tales has just come out. Speaking of her editor, Wendy Lamb, Karen said:

She thought I left the family too vulnerable and wanted to see a happier outcome. She said she’d look at the novel again if I made these changes, but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to be realistic. I couldn’t see how to change it and stay true to my realistic conception of the novel. I fretted over this for months until finally I found a solution that satisfied me but also, I hoped, would satisfy Wendy.

As I've said before, there's nothing wrong with giving young readers a sense of hope. Tall Tales is a hard-hitting picture of a troubled family, so it's natural to want better for those kids. But it's worth examining whether our culture has a prejudice about how children's books must end. Does our model of the modern "problem novel" function like the books Miéville discusses, which claim not to be political yet reflect and reinforce unexamined political beliefs?

Writing for Youth Isn't All Pretty, Either

From the local newspaper, here's an article about Karen Day (the pretty part of this photo by Mark Thompson) and our writing-critique group.

Karen's first novel, Tall Tales, comes out next week. Among other members of the group, Mitali Perkins has a new picture book, Rickshaw Girl, and the first of a new series of novels, First Daughter. Steve Smith's working on a junior version of his fun board game, Word Sweep. Laya Steinberg is trying novels after her picture books Thesaurus Rex and All Around Me I See. And there will be more to come!