Looking Forward to SCBWI New England’s Spring Conference

SCBWI New England’s annual spring conference is coming up on 14-16 May 2010, and registration has opened here.

I’ll lead two workshops at that conference, on:

• what it means to write within genres.
• how scripting graphic novels differs from writing picture books.

I proposed the latter workshop because it was on the list of topics that attendees had requested in previous years. I figured I’d been collecting information about the topic, studying comics scripts, and trying out ideas, so I’ll have plenty to share. And if people with more experience proposed a workshop on the same topic, the organizers would choose them instead.

This month I saw the full conference program, and realized that the organizers had recruited an award-winning comics creator to lead another workshop about graphic novels…Matt Phelan.

Of course he has the great advantage of being able to draw and write, which produces a different process. The conference organizers did a swell job of arranging his appearance before Roger Sutton announced that The Storm in the Barn won the Scott O’Dell Award, which both raised the book’s profile and set me to questioning whether the story leaves the realm of historical fiction for fantasy. And now I may have the chance to discuss that question with Matt Phelan himself!

This is the second year in a row that Roger has gotten me in mildly warm water this way. Back in 2008 The Horn Book invited me to review Road to Oz, the picture-book biography of L. Frank Baum written by Kathleen Krull and illustrated by Kevin Hawkes. I generally liked the book, but questioned the overall narrative and what I felt was a stylistic quirk in Krull’s text.

Last July I went to California for the Winkie Convention of Oz fans, and one of the speakers was…Kathleen Krull! In fact, due to the randomness of seating in the Asilomar dining hall, we ended up sitting next to each other at lunch. Half a second of frozen time after glances at name tags, and then we had a fine discussion.

But really, I have to watch out for Roger.

It’s a Floor Wax and a Dessert Topping!

This week’s “Notes from the Horn Book” includes editor Roger Sutton’s quick interview with Matt Phelan, creator of The Storm in the Barn. It starts with the news that Storm won this year’s Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction from a panel of judges that include Roger, who wrote:

After some blogosphere discussion about whether The Storm in the Barn, a graphic novel with some ambiguous fantasy elements, was historical fiction [that would be me], I decided to see what the author/illustrator himself thought. . . .

Do you think of The Storm in the Barn as historical fiction?

Yes. I also think of it as a supernatural thriller and a family drama and a Jack tale. But when I was writing it, I only thought of it as a story. It wasn’t until after it was finished that I could step back and try to label it. It was a story first and foremost, even before I decided it would be a graphic novel.

Which is indeed how stories should start out. I’m just not convinced that any book can combine “historical fiction” and “supernatural thriller” at their core, but The Storm in the Barn certainly starts off by recreating life in the Dust Bowl in a most, well, graphic fashion.

Roger also asked about the differences between illustrating a picture book and creating a graphic novel, and this was Phelan’s reply:

From an illustration standpoint, they are fundamentally the same. Both are about rhythm and tone. The page turn is important in both. The illustrations have to convey the beat of the scene (or panel) in a clear and effective way. Of course, the really big difference is the number of illustrations needed for a 200-page graphic novel. The drawing time is much longer, and you need to stay focused and disciplined month after month.

It looks like I might have a chance to ask Phelan such questions myself this May.

TOMORROW: And that could be awkward.

The Plot in The Storm in the Barn

Though I recognize the historical research that Matt Phelan put into The Storm in the Barn, I don’t see it as a historical novel because ultimately it turns not on what happened or could have happened in the past, but on something that physically could not have happened. So what do I think of it as a fantasy?

As a fantasy narrative, I think The Storm in the Barn offers a powerful but ultimately distorted picture of a historical period (anachronistic Oz quotation aside). But I don’t think its plot holds together in fantastic terms. And that’s a big reason why for me the supernatural dimension doesn’t make up for the story’s break away from history.

First, the villain is flat, even by the standards of abstract personifications. I never got a clear idea about why the storm is refusing to rain. He wants to preserve himself from dissolution, yet he’s spending his extra days of existence hiding out in a deserted barn. Maybe the storm’s got a really good book he wants to finish or something, but in this case personifying the Dust Bowl drought as a character doesn’t illuminate the historic event or add depth to the story.

More important, I don’t see how Jack’s triumph over the storm resolves his problem as the book’s first half lays it out. Those pages show us older boys teasing Jack, the community excluding him from events like the rabbit-clubbing festival (which turns out to be less fun than it sounds), and his father not letting him help fix farm machinery. His only friends are his sisters and a chatty drugstore owner.

That character, as I recall, ties Jack’s problems to the drought: because there are no crops growing, Jack has no chance to do farmwork that proves his competence, and he’s therefore stuck in the role of a little kid.

[Extra credit question for 9th-grade social studies: As an allegory, how does this relate to the New Deal’s emphasis on making jobs for unemployed Americans through the NRA, CCC, and other programs?]

By defeating the storm in the barn, the book shows us, Jack not only brings rain; he also proves his value. But his problem was a social one—how other people perceived him. And the story offers no reason for people to perceive Jack differently after the rain returns. No one knows about his fight with the storm. Jack’s little sister is the only other local who saw the storm, and she already looks up to him. There’s no clue that any adult would even believe in a personified storm, and thus in Jack’s heroism.

Compare this resolution to, say, Rowan of Rin, by Emily Rodda. That fantasy also involves a community endangered by a drought, an environmental problem embodied in the fantastic form of a cranky dragon.

A small group undertakes a quest to fix the problem, and circumstances force them to take along a timid boy whom people don’t think much of. Over the course of the adventure, however, young Rowan surprises himself and his companions by revealing a spine of steel. Ultimately he alone fixes the problem and ends the drought. And everyone sees what Rowan does.

A Different Standard for the Dust Bowl?

Matt Phelan’s The Storm in the Barn is set in the Dust Bowl of the late 1920s and 1930s. It does a fine job of evoking that environmental catastrophe. I wasn’t so impressed with how the book’s plot was resolved, with a jump into the supernatural. The young hero appears to end the drought and fix his personal troubles in a way that the laws of nature made impossible for real children of that time and place.

Would reviewers be as quick to praise an equally fantastic treatment of other historic tragedies? In particular, I wonder about depictions of the Nazi Holocaust. Would critics, librarians, and teachers be as comfortable with a novel about that history that offers such an unreal resolution?

In The Devil’s Arithmetic, Jane Yolen used the fantastic element of time travel to introduce a modern girl (and, through her, modern readers) to the horrors of the Nazi death camps. At the end, the heroine escapes being killed by traveling forward through time to her home. And that produced some objections.

In an editorial for the Bulletin of the Center of Children’s Books in 1988, Roger Sutton praised aspects of The Devil’s Arithmetic but, as he’s acknowledged, “took issue with the fantasy aspect of the plot.” Specifically, he felt that ending undercut the historical reality:

Time-travel fantasy can be an honorable form of historical fiction, but how effective is it as an introduction to the Holocaust? . . .

Jane Yolen has written a powerful, not easily forgotten, story, but is it a story about the Holocaust? The horror—and the history—are betrayed by the essentially comforting vision of the story and its time-travel form. . . .

This optimistic, neatly rounded lesson fits comfortably into children’s literature, a genre that, despite well-known exceptions, demands a hopeful conclusion. How much hope can be extracted from the Holocaust?

I saw something similar in The Storm in the Barn. It offers hope for young Jack, and a sense of accomplishment he badly needs. But that comes about entirely at the fantasy level: Jack defeats the personification of the rain (who’s a rather easily defeated personification, as these things go) in a physical tussle atop a windmill.

More recently, many people objected to John Boyne’s fabulistic treatment of the Holocaust, The Boy in Striped Pajamas, because it, too, offered historically impossible hope. (Others loved the book for the same reason.) As of tonight the novel’s entry on Wikipedia argues:

it is not historical fiction. The very premise of the book - that there would be a child of Shmuel’s age - is, according to critics, an unacceptable fabrication that does not reflect the reality of life in the camps.

The Storm in the Barn is also a fabrication, even more obviously since one doesn’t need to look up histories to see the unreal elements. But no one has called Phelan’s book “unacceptable.” Indeed, it just received the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction.

The Dust Bowl and the Nazi Holocaust are separated by a decade at most, so I don’t think our different attitudes toward those events are based on how fresh their memories are. Instead, I can think of several other reasons for the difference, including:

• The lack of human villains in the Dust Bowl, meaning that the personification of the storm doesn’t absolve anyone of responsibility.
• The lack of any small or vocal groups denying the severity of the Dust Bowl.
• America’s powerful agricultural and economic recovery after the Dust Bowl.

But what happens if climate change becomes a major problem in daily life? In that case, treating an environmental catastrophe as fodder for a fantastic fable might raise as many objections as those fantastic treatments of the Holocaust.

The Storm in the Barn as a Fable

Last Friday I wrote, “I see The Storm in the Barn as a fable that’s set in the Dust Bowl,” which prompted Monica Edinger at Educating Alice to write:

As for me, a fable points to a specific moralistic message and I don’t get that with [Matt] Phelan’s story.

I don’t think that’s the meaning Phelan had in mind when he chose the term “fable” to describes his book, as in this exchange from a November interview with Comic Book Resources:

CBR News: Matt, you’ve described “The Storm in the Barn” as a fable - why do you find that particular word appropriate for your book?

MATT PHELAN: I just checked with Merriam-Webster online and saw that their definition includes the phrase “a legendary story of supernatural happenings,” which works well for my purposes. In my mind, a fable also denotes a smaller, quieter tale than a Myth or Legend. I was hoping “The Storm in the Barn” would have that sort of feel to it.

Many other reviewers have used the same term, including:

• Graphic Classroom: “a dustbowl fable”
• Fuse #8: “It’s a fable.”
• Comics Should Be Good: “Phelan is basically telling a fable”
• Educating Alice itself: “both fable and historic”

Which is not to say that the term “fable” comes without pitfalls, especially when authors take that approach to major historical events. Three years ago, another historically set book expressly labeled a fable, John Boyne’s The Boy in Striped Pajamas, prompted Roger Sutton to write:

And if children’s writers would just stay away from the fables, already, they would save us ALL considerable trouble. Making a story (The Gift, by Robert Morneau) about transubstantiation into one about pumpkin pie enlightens us about neither subject. Making a story (Bravemole, by Lynne Jonell) about the World Trade Center and terrorists into one about molehills and dragons demeans all concerned.

Phelan has explicitly denied the goal of making The Storm in the Barn tell the history of the Dust Bowl in fable form. As I’ve quoted before, his introduction says, “I wanted this book to be set in the Dust Bowl but not a story directly about the Dust Bowl.” He was instead aiming to create a small “legendary story of supernatural happenings.”

TOMORROW: Are different standards at work?

Fantasy and the Bounds of Historical Fiction

The announcement that Matt Phelan’s The Storm in the Barn won the Scott O’Dell Award for historical fiction for young readers apparently prompted some questions about whether it was eligible even though it’s in comics form. Which were quickly and rightly batted down.

But award judge Roger Sutton’s response also prompted new and more incisive questions. And by “incisive,” I mean, “from me, among other people.” Roger wrote:

As far as I’m concerned, historical fiction is an invented tale which not only takes place in the past but proposes to shed some kind of light on an actual event or situation of historical import.

His colleague Claire Gross replied, “I would think that the main reason Storm in the Barn might be ineligible for a historical fiction prize is not that it is a graphic novel but that it contains a significant element of fantasy. I suppose the fantasy element does not detract from its historical evocation...”

I think the fantasy element may not detract from Phelan’s evocation of Dust Bowl America, but it certainly gets in the way of shedding light on that ”situation of historical import.”

The Dust Bowl was an ecological crisis that led to an economic crisis. The Storm in the Barn portrays the latter development, with families moving, the hero’s sister suffering from a lung disease, and farmers’ desperate attempts to bring on rain. However, the book portrays the ecology through a personification of the storm that’s decided to keep its rainfall in a carpet bag. And the resolution of both crises appears to involve a small boy fighting the storm for the bag atop a windmill (with, so far as I could tell, no allegorical resonance).

Of course, that resolution is easier to depict (especially in graphic form) than long-term meteorological shifts or changes in U.S. farm policy, and it gives more agency to the young hero than if his father had moved his family to Long Beach and found work in a factory. But those other possibilities are part of the history of the Dust Bowl, as opposed to a fantasy of it.

Let’s imagine a book about a current ecological and economic crisis, such as tropical deforestation, climate change, or influenza pandemics. Let’s imagine the book evokes that crisis, and then shows a child fixing it by wrestling a supernatural being. Would such a novel really “shed light” on our situation today, or would it come across as a trivializing escape?

I see The Storm in the Barn as a fable that’s set in the Dust Bowl, just as Edward Eager’s Half Magic is a fantasy set in the 1920s. Both books are informed by their historical settings, but that doesn’t work the other way around: they don’t offer a reliable view into history.

At least not the same way as some other fiction for young people published last year:

• Jacqueline Kelly’s The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate (“Kelly, without anachronism, has created a memorable, warm, spirited young woman who’s refreshingly ahead of her time.” —The Horn Book).
• Alan Gratz’s The Brooklyn Nine (“an impressively cohesive mix of sports, historical fiction, and family history” —The Horn Book).
• Sherri L. Smith’s Flygirl (“good, rousing period fiction” —The Horn Book).

Serious Comics and Talking Animals

Matt Phelan’s The Storm in the Barn is showing up on a number of “year’s best” lists, but my feelings on its magical plot machinations match those expressed by Jessica Bruder in the New York Times Book Review:

Jack finds himself face to face with the Storm King, an evil spirit who withheld the rain to win power. . . . Jack finally wins a climactic battle on top of a windmill, and it starts to rain. He’s saved everyone. Unless you go with a possibility suggested earlier in the book: Jack has “dust dementia” and has imagined the whole thing. Either way, the fight doesn’t feel all that redemptive.

Both this book and David Small’s Stitches allude to classic works of Victorian children’s literature, and that’s another way that the latter seems much stronger to me.

In The Storm in the Barn, Jack’s sister reads descriptions of a desert from L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz. As I noted earlier, Phelan found those passages through Wikipedia, and his quotes are anachronistic—the kids’ mother couldn’t find the phrase “Deadly Desert” in that book because it didn’t appear till a later one. That’s just a symptom of how that literary allusion feels nailed on rather than organic to the story.

In contrast, David Small’s use of Alice in Wonderland in Stitches has clearly grown from his own childhood love of that book. Allusions are integrated throughout the story. First he shows himself as a young boy playing as Alice, getting to escape “to a land of talking animals, singing flowers and dancing teapots.”

Later, Alice’s nightmarish shrinking and growing informs one of the adolescent David’s recurring nightmares (shown through stat panels) as he struggles to escape from a confining house.

Finally, the White Rabbit comes on the scene as a therapist who provides the book’s breakthrough—without, of course, ever losing track of the time. It turns out David was in the nonsense world all along. Unlike The Storm in the Barn, Small’s Stitches is about sorting out the real nightmares from the fantastic ones, not mixing them up.

American Comics and the Fantastic

Yesterday I suggested that Matt Phelan’s graphic novel The Storm in the Barn is garnering better reviews than we’d expect if the same magical plot—child fixes the Dust Bowl drought by conquering the embodiment of Rain—had appeared in prose. (Or in a verse novel, as Karen Hesse used for her Dust Bowl novel, Out of the Dust.)

I listed a couple of elements that might make a fantastic story seem more appropriate: age of reader, gender of protagonist. But I left out the biggie: the fact that The Storm in the Barn is in comics form.

American culture has more fantastic expectations for comics than for other forms of print storytelling, and is therefore quicker to accept supernatural or unreal elements when they appear in panels.

First of all, comics can put fantastic events right in front of our eyes. It’s easier to suspend one’s disbelief when one is seeing a man fly, a duck talk, or the embodiment of Rain fighting with a Kansas farm boy.

In a prose novel, and especially in a verse novel, writing about the Rain as a character would be taken as a metaphor. (“That’s called ‘personification,’” the rhetoricians would say. “And that dialogue is an ‘apostrophe.’ And it’s still going on. And on.”) But when we see the Rain’s angry face and clutching hands, we accept it as a character within the story.

Second and probably more important, American comics magazines have historically been dominated by fantastic genres: superheroes, horror, monsters, science fiction, funny animals. Of course, there have always been American comics that stick to a realistic world: stories of romance, crime, teenage life, and so on. But in the US, forms of the fantastic have dominated and to a great extent come to be seen as the form’s default setting.

Even the most serious topics can thus get a fantastic treatment in American comics. Take the work of Art Spiegelman. Maus adopts elements of the talking-animal genre to dramatize the Holocaust. In the Shadow of No Towers draws from Winsor McCay and other comics geniuses to depict Spiegelman’s psychological, philosophical, and political struggles after the terrorist attack on New York in 2001.

The first graphic novel to crash the ALA prizes for younger readers, Gene Luen Yang’s Printz Award-winner American-Born Chinese, intertwines mythology, memoir, and what looks at first like an unrelated tale of growing up in a way that would be even harder, and possibly more off-putting, in prose.

(Eleanor Davis’s Stinky, a Geisel Honor Book, offers a monster and uses comics tools for “showing the invisible.” But that book’s not such a useful example of contrast because its traditional analogues—picture books and early readers—often have elements of the fantastic as well.)

The comics medium, I posit, let Phelan tell a story set in the Dust Bowl that would have been impossible, or at least greeted quite differently, if he’d tried it in prose.

Not Directly about the Dust Bowl?

My favorite part in Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse’s Newbery-winning novel in verse about the Dust Bowl, is ****SPOILERS**** when the teen-aged heroine, Billie Jo, corners the embodiment of the Rain in an old barn and fights him into opening his carpet bag.

By releasing the thunder and lightning in that bag, Billie Jo forces the Rain back into his natural state and restores the landscape around her family farm. Although the book doesn’t say so explicitly, I think the return of the rain also means that Billie Jo’s sister won’t die of that lung disease.

Okay, that’s not what happens in Out of the Dust. It’s what happens in The Storm in the Barn, the new graphic novel by Matt Phelan.

In Out of the Dust, Billie Jo’s mother burns to death, the child she’s carrying also dies, Billie Jo’s own hands are so burned that she can no longer play the piano, and she runs away from home, only to turn back in order to end the book with the requisite sense of hope. (I told you there would be SPOILERS.)

In fact, if Hesse or anyone else had offered a literary novel about the Dust Bowl whose plot turned on fighting an embodiment of the Rain on top of a windmill, I suspect most reviewers would deem that story not serious enough for its setting and topic. Certainly critics have questioned whether children’s fantasy was an appropriate medium for addressing the Holocaust or other periods of great human suffering.

The Storm in the Barn’s plot doesn’t even include what I recall Ellen Howard calling “price of fantasy”: young Jack doesn’t have to make any trade-offs for how he benefits from magic. (Some might say that he and his family have already paid a price, however, and deserve a break.)

That fantastic, wish-fulfilling plot hasn’t stopped The Storm in the Barn from garnering rapturous reviews. Here’s a sampling of positive notices from Shelf Elf, A Fuse #8 Production, and Comics Should Be Good! And on a page-by-page basis it’s very affecting.

To be sure, The Storm in the Barn was created for somewhat younger readers than Out of the Dust. It’s about an eleven-year-old boy (action!) instead of a fourteen-year-old girl (feelings!). In the author’s note Phelan states, “I wanted this book to be set in the Dust Bowl but not a story directly about the Dust Bowl.”

I’m just asking, would that possible for a serious prose novel? Could someone writing for young people today create a novel set during, say, plantation slavery, but insist that it’s not directly about plantation slavery, offer a plot that ends the suffering of that system through supernatural means, and still gain reviewers’ praise?

TOMORROW: Fantasy and the comics form.

“I naturally thought of Oz”

There may even be a rule that the closer American children’s books come to Kansas, the more they have to allude to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and/or its sequels. Case in point: Matt Phelan’s graphic novel The Storm in the Barn, set in Kansas in 1937.

Phelan wasn’t a childhood Oz fan. He told the comics website Newsarama, “I didn’t actually read the first Oz book until I took a college class on children’s literature. I was surprised about how truly weird it is.” But once he decided to tell a story inspired by Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl, Phelan felt a need to bring in the Oz books:

Since the story is set in Kansas, I naturally thought of Oz, so I named his sister Dorothy. I thought that a girl named Dorothy who lived in Kansas at that time would naturally be interested in the Oz stories, so having her read the books seemed natural.

That quotation comes from Kelly R. Fineman’s conversation with Phelan, and she went on to write:

Whereupon I praised Matt’s knowledge of the Oz stories and confessed that I’d only read two, maybe three of the books as a kid, and Matt confessed that he’d pretty much done the same, but that plot summaries on Wikipedia drew his attention to Ozma of Oz because of its reference to a desert.

Initially, Matt read the book “just to read it”, but the references to the Deadly Desert turned out to be perfect for incorporation into The Storm in the Barn, which is set in Dust-Bowl Kansas where it hasn’t rained for years. Add to that the benefit of the Oz books being subject to fair use, and text from Ozma found its way into Jack’s story as well. Says Matt, “I just lucked out that it worked.”

(Actually, all books are subject to fair use, even when they’re under copyright. L. Frank Baum’s Oz books are in the public domain, and thus subject to any use, even “unfair.” Not that this use is unfair. It’s quite a nice use indeed.)

Ironically, the “references to the Deadly Desert” in the Wikipedia article and in The Storm in the Barn itself (Jack’s mother looks at the book and uses the phrase) don’t actually come from Ozma of Oz. That 1907 book refers to “the deadly, life-destroying sands of the desert” around Oz. The phrase “Deadly Desert” appears first in The Road to Oz (1909). The author David Alvin composed Wikipedia’s entry on Ozma of Oz using facts established in subsequent books.