“Nothing but the great gray prairie on every side”

This year’s Modern Languages Association meeting is barely over, and it’s already time to start planning for next year’s. This call for papers came across the Child_Lit list:

“Deliver Us to Normal: Children’s Literature and the Midwest”

This panel will consider the ways Midwestern children’s literature both reproduces recognizable tropes associated with the region and subverts or challenges them, often within the same text. Like the Midwest itself, child characters and child readers are highly contested constructions, in a state of continual oscillation between adult desires for them and their own developing agencies. Located in a geographic and discursive middle, sometimes outwardly simple and often deceptively complex, the Midwest finds a fitting home in its children’s literature, which mirrors its critical concerns.

Topics prospective panelists might wish to address include, but are not limited to:

• children’s literature and competing definitions of the Midwest
• the roles of Chicago, Detroit, and other Midwestern urban centers in works for children
• children’s authors who live or lived in the Midwest
• the Midwest as a colony and/or racial and cultural contact zone
• the relationship between written text and pictures about/of the Midwest in children’s literature
• museums and other tourist sites in the Midwest with a relationship to children’s literature, such as the Laura Ingalls Wilder museums in Missouri, Kansas, South Dakota, and Wisconsin [There are a lot of ’em, aren’t there?]
• depictions of agriculture, farming, and rural life for children

Please send 500-word abstracts by March 15, 2013 to Kate Slater.

The 2014 MLA will take place in Chicago, capital of the Midwest, 9-12 January.

“Sometimes the Voice Works, and Sometimes It Doesn’t”

From Publishers Weekly’s recent long interview with Richard Peck:

You often write in the first person. Why?

I was a teacher once, and as a teacher I was painfully aware of how long students would listen to me, as opposed to each other. Writing in the first person keeps me—the alien adult—off the page and off the stage. It also provides a healthy control on language. If I wrote in the third person, too many multi-syllabic words and adult locutions would steal in. First person controls that, and it increases the intimacy of the experience, as if one young person is saying to another, “Let me tell you a story.”

What is one of the biggest challenges for you in writing a novel?

Finding that young voice which will be the right one to tell the next story. Will it be a boy or girl? Now or then? Urban or rural? I have to do casting calls—sit down and start writing in a particular voice. Sometimes the voice works and sometimes it doesn’t, and I have to know when it doesn’t.

This interview comes on the occasion of Peck’s A Season of Gifts.

“Young People Don’t Want to Read About Characters Their Age”

A few years ago I attended an SCBWI conference in California where Richard Peck was speaking. At one point he pronounced (Peck never just says something when he's making a point) words to this effect:

Young people do not want to read about people like themselves.

They want to read about the people they wish to be.

That had the snap of an aphorism Peck might have delivered in other talks and essays, so I went looking for it in his 2002 essay collection Invitations to the World: Teaching and Writing for the Young. (Some of that book had first appeared in 1994 in Love and Death at the Mall.)

But I couldn't find quite the same remark. I found some similar, less pithy thoughts on various pages of the book:

I’d wanted to hold up a mirror to my readers. I’d thought they wanted to be recognized by books. They did, but they wanted to see themselves in more interesting (less seriously challenging) settings. . . .

Whether in first person or third, a novel is told by its characters. My protagonists would have to be something more than recognizable. They’d need to be a blend of the real and the ideal. They’d have to be able to do something the readers couldn’t, or wouldn’t. . . .

Young people don’t want to read about characters their age. They want to read about people who are two years older. At whatever age they are, they believe that real life doesn’t start until twenty-four months later, when they will be fully evolved.

I think that model fits for most of the books that kids read--but not all.

One notable exception are Barbara Park's Junie P. Jones series. Junie's adventures in kindergarten and first grade are pegged for children age 4 to 8--i.e., some who are twenty-four months older than the protagonist.

As the New York Times reported a couple of years ago, some ideologically-minded adults dislike the Junie P. Jones books for their narrative voice, which is full of the grammatical mistakes of an enthusiastic but not very advanced kindergartner. They also complain that Junie is often impolite, hoggish, and generally a poor role model--again, like an enthusiastic but not very advanced kindergartner. But that's the whole point of Junie P. Jones.

Park's books are aimed at beginning readers, slightly older than Junie. The first one has publisher's copy that begins, "Remember when it was scary to go to school?..." In other words, readers are supposed to be able to look back on Junie's problems, not ahead. Of course, she can still do "something the readers couldn't, or wouldn't"--and they can watch her getting in trouble for doing that. As for the language, one convert commented over at CrunchyCon:

When Amelia was younger, I was constantly having to "edit" what I was reading to her. Now that she's old enough to read the books aloud to me, she gets a kick out of telling ME when Junie B's misusing the language.

So sometimes children enjoy reading about a person they don't wish to be.

TOMORROW: Alvin Ho--also allergic to aphorisms.

Finding Where Foundling Really Starts and Ends

Foundling, the first book in D. M. Cornish’s Monster Blood Tattoo series, tracks young Rossamünd as he leaves the orphanage for his first job. This being Fantasyland, he gets lured and knocked off course, enticed into dangerous deeds, presented with rival mentors, and so on. And a good thing, too, since ordinary job orientations aren’t that exciting. Foundling is thus a novel about Rossamünd trying to figure out his place in the world.

A few years ago, I heard Newbery-winning Richard Peck intone (he didn’t seem to simply say anything) at an SCBWI conference that after completing a novel he always goes back to rewrite the first chapter. Later he told Publishers Weekly the same:

I'll take this first chapter, and without rereading it, I'll throw it away and write the chapter that goes at the beginning. Because the first chapter is the last chapter in disguise.

I’m not sure a total rewrite is necessary, but the first chapter of a novel definitely needs to set out the threads and themes of the story that follows. It should also be where life changes for the protagonist, and thus where the story really begins.

So what’s the first chapter of Foundling? “It Began with a Fight” shows Rossamünd and another boy at the orphanage sparring with sticks. Is that the last chapter in disguise? Does it lead into the rest of the book? In retrospect, can we glimpse the threads of the wafting through the air back there? I don’t think so.

Rossamünd never has to call on his stick-fighting capability during his journey, nor other combat skills. His nasty rival never reappears in the book (though I’m sure he’ll resurface later in the series). There’s no causal link between this scene and the plot that follows; despite the chapter’s title, it’s not where “It Began” at all. And this scene has no tie to the novel’s main theme of defining one’s place in the wide world.

Furthermore, by focusing so many pages on the fight scene, Cornish seems to have left himself less space to start his story. When Rossamünd does get his job offer, in chapter 3, it’s followed by several very hurried paragraphs describing action instead of dramatizing it (no dialogue at all on on pages 40-41). Yet those actions turn out to be most important for Rossamünd’s future, more than the fight.

I think the same elements could have been combined this way for a more successful launch:

1) Rossamünd learns that he’s been selected for a new job.
2) His jealous rival pummels him unfairly in the sparring match.
3) Rossamünd’s friends on the orphanage staff (introduced largely in chapter 2) cluster round to ensure that he can take the job.
4) He departs, still a little dazed, which leads into his first adventure.

A similar problem of story structure appears at the end, though of course I don’t want to give everything away. In vague terms, Rossamünd has ended up working for a monster fighter named Europe. (A lot of Cornish’s characters share names with things or places in our world.) On page 284 Rossamünd does something that annoys Europe--he knows it would annoy her, perhaps anger her dreadfully, yet he feels he has to do it. This is thus an important step in defining himself. But now he has to accept the consequences.

And what are those consequences? On page 290 Cornish shows us that Europe still wants Rossamünd to be her helper. Score one for standing up for your values! Unfortunately, the novel doesn’t end for 22 more pages, which show Rossamünd traveling to his original job assignment. That final chapter thus becomes an anticlimax, hanging around like a last bit of pie when you’re already reasonably full and the pie wasn’t stellar to begin with.

Again, with a little tweaking Cornish could have kept up the suspense he’d created to the end. Rossamünd could have left for his assignment still worrying about how Europe felt about him, fearing that he’d cut himself off from her respect forever. At the end of his journey, he receives a note from her [page 296]. Move that to the end of the novel, make that the first way she tells him that she still respects him, and the anticlimax would disappear. Then the whole novel, from very start to very end, would be about Rossamünd finding his place in the Half-Continent world.