In our one-on-one interview, British author (and HarperCollins UK children’s book editor) Lake opens up to SLJ about his reaction to the YMA win, his inspirations for such a complex undertaking, the importance of staying true to oneself, and his next projects on the horizon.

What was your reaction to the Printz win? Are you familiar with that award?
I’m ashamed to confess that, though I knew of the Caldecott and the Newbery, I had only vaguely heard of the Printz and it wasn’t enormously on my radar. And anyway, I just assumed that The Fault in Our Stars or Code Name Verity  would win it… and I’m still living in fear of John Green fans turning up on my doorstep with pitchforks. [laughs] I assumed that the fact that [In Darkness] was obscure was why they had chosen it, that The Fault in Our Stars had enough of the purse, I guess.

Did you know that many in the audience at the YMAs were shocked Fault did not win?
I’m not surprised! I could kind of tell from Twitter as well, and because I work in publishing, I just thought it was an absolute lock for that award. I haven’t read Code Name Verity  yet but it is on my pile to read, and I read The Fault in Our Stars and I loved it. He is kind of an inspiration.

I think of anyone who writes young adult fiction, [John Green] changed what it was possible to do in a young adult book. When I started out at HarperCollins, Looking for Alaska was one of the first books I read, and I read all of his books. 

What inspired you to write this story?
It was two separate strands. The first: I did a Masters in linguistics and one of the nodules was on Creole and those kind of languages and so that got me interested in Haiti and reading about people like Toussaint L’Ouverture, and reading Wade Davis and Zora Neale Hurston. That was 10 years ago but that fascination with Toussaint L’Ouverture was kind of percolating at the back of my mind.

He is this absolutely extraordinary figure. He was 53 when the revolution started; he had, up until then, looked after horses. And he taught himself to read, taught himself to write, and ended up becoming a general very quickly and then rose to lead the revolutionary army. He was a very intelligent, driven man; he defeated not only the French army but also the British and the Spanish as well, and he ended up freeing the country. For a long time I just thought that was absolutely extraordinary that a man who is 53 could just completely reinvent himself in that way. So for ages I wanted to do something about him but I wasn’t quite sure what it would be, and I didn’t want to write a biography.

The second thing was the earthquake—and the utter horror that most people felt, that this terrible humanitarian tragedy happening to a country that had already had such a bad history. And particularly, it was when two or three days later, the news started doing stories on people who had dug out of the rubble. I saw one of them being interviewed on TV and they said ‘There was a point there where I couldn’t tell whether I was thinking thoughts or speaking aloud.” And I thought that was just the most extraordinary thing for someone to say. In fact, I stole it and used it for Shorty in the book.

How did the interwoven story start to flow for you?
I just became fascinated—or obsessed—with the idea of what that might be like and, since I couldn’t arrange for my house to fall down around me, I thought the only way that I could experience it was to write it down and explore it imaginatively. So I just started writing the story of Shorty and his voice came very quickly, and then I just had this unshakeable idea that was also the story of  Toussaint L’Ouverture. I just was convinced that there was something that linked these two characters.

Toussaint died in a French dungeon, so at a certain point in time this boy and this man are metaphorically and literally in the same place—they’re both trapped underground in the darkness.

The only thing that is dividing them is the mere fact of 200 years of time. I think time can sometimes be kind of porous and thin, so it was that idea of these two people who are in the same place. And then as well, I am very interested in voodoo—real voodoo as opposed to movie zombie voodoo, this whole notion of being ridden by spirits and being possessed.

It all just fit together then because I thought suddenly, that there’s an explanation for why, at the age of 53, he abruptly [became] this great military leader. So lots of things suddenly fit into place and in quite a satisfying way, and I just had to sit down and write furiously for about 6 weeks.

This book is so complex and so dark; were you surprised that it became a YA book?
I was more surprised that anyone wanted to publish it at all! With the “Blood Ninja” books, I approached it as someone who worked in publishing, and I was thinking that there are lots of books like Twilight but there isn’t as much for boys, and everything about it was very conscious and deliberate, trying to design something that might suit the market. Whereas with In Darkness I was writing it for me, really. I think, to be honest, that my agent didn’t really think anyone would want to publish it either. But Bloomsbury were hugely enthusiastic from the outset. Here I was completely ignoring what publishers might want and suddenly they very quickly wanted it. Maybe there’s a lesson in there.

In  Darkness  in the UK was published as an adult book and a young adult book. It’s the same book but with different jackets; it’s increasingly something that is done in publishing in the UK. Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner has young adult version and now it’s coming out as an adult edition, and they do that with people like Patrick Ness. I think people are still trying to work out this genre and where the boundary lies between young adult and adult. I didn’t really know who the book was for, and neither did my agent. So it was sent to adult lists and young adult lists. Essentially, I’ve always written for younger teenagers, and this was the first young adult [title].

Can you speak about the role of hope in the story?
I very consciously wanted it to be a hopeful book. I don’t know if I one hundred percent succeeded because a lot of reviews focused on how incredibly miserable and violent the book is—and it is in many ways—but I always saw it as a hopeful book, and it doesn’t have an unhopeful ending. So that was always very much the intention, and consciously the intention. Everyone has difficult things that they’ve gone through in their lives and, for several years before I wrote the books, there were several difficult things in my life and I’d moved beyond them.

And so I supposed I wanted to, without wanting to sound too evangelical, say something to teenagers about how you can move past bad things that happen. And yeah, I very much wanted it to be a message; we ended up using it as a strapline on the UK edition of the book, this idea that—on this planet anyway because we circle the sun—there’s always light on the other side of darkness and you don’t have to wait for very long for darkness  to be replaced by light.

What projects are you are most excited about working on next as author or editor?
Ooh…There are two actually, one that I’m editing for HarperCollins that’s coming out early 2014 is a YA, beautifully written book by a young, male British writer, who I kind of think could be the British John Green. And that’s amazing. It’s a debut, and it’s astonishing.

And the other thing is my book, which hasn’t come out in the states yet, called Hostage Three (Bloomsbury, fall 2013). That’s about a girl who lives in London; her father is a banker. He’s lost his job and he buys this super yacht and decides that they’re going to sail around the world with the girl’s stepmother. Her mother has died in uncertain circumstances not that long before; she hates the step mother so it’s kind of a fairytale element and then they get about 3 months into their journey and they’re kidnapped by Somali pirates. Then to add to all the complications she thinks she’s falling in love with the youngest pirate…and it all just then goes horribly wrong, obviously, as it would. It’s much more of a straight thriller than In Darkness but I’m proud of it, so hopefully people will like it!

And so I’m kind of two books on from In Darkness, weirdly, and the thing that I’m most excited about, that I’m writing now, is tentatively called Your Little Princess; it’s actually set in America. The entire story is constructed around a massive twist; the teenage protagonist gets hit by a car, this then triggers her mum discharging her from hospital, bundling her into the car with all their belongings and saying ‘we’re going on the run.” And the mystery is why they suddenly have to run.

So I’m sticking to the genre of thrillers with an emotional first-person core to them.

Has the experience of being an author changed you as an editor?
Yes, it has actually. Mostly in the sense that it has made me much, much more sensitive in the way that I couch what I’m saying, because I am hyper aware now how even the most softly phrased suggestions can feel devastating for an author. It’s made me express things very carefully, and as much as possible in conversation rather than in writing. It’s made me very, very aware. I can’t edit myself, and so I absolutely have to have someone else who reads it who can say ‘the shape of this isn’t quite right’ or ‘there’s something missing here.’ I genuinely think that all writers need an editor.

Since the YMAs, have you seen an increased interest from the U.S.? The awards are critically important to the library and publishing worlds.
So I terrifyingly gather! I [have] spent a lot of time on the phone to people, lots of sudden renewed interest and I gather that they’re reprinting it. It does make an impact in that way. I didn’t quite realize that at first, but it does seem that suddenly I’m spending a lot of time on the phone, which is nice!

I was listening to NPR, and I heard a review of Carolina Clay [The Life and Legend of Slave Potter Dave] by Leonard Todd. I thought, this is just an incredible story. It’s hard for me to know why it affected me so much, but my daughter’s a potter, and I’ve worked with clay all my life. He was a writer and I’m a writer, but I’m not heroic like Dave.

What made him heroic?

He dared to write on pots at a time when he could have been killed for that, and he signed his name. That’s just an amazingly courageous act—and subversive. But it’s also quiet, because he wasn’t saying anything—he was writing it. His ability and his talent gave him that kind of confidence and power, because he knew that if he was killed, who was going to make the 40-gallon jars?

You grew up in Cincinnati during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Did that help draw you to Dave’s story?

Oh, absolutely. I grew up in a neighborhood where I still live, close to downtown Cincinnati, which was predominantly African American at the time. All my friends were African American. We all remember the race riots, which happened about a block away from where we lived. I remember hearing things breaking and being with my African-American friends, and their parents being super-nervous and coming out all the time and telling us to stay on the grass and not to leave the yard.

Not much is known about Dave. How’d you find so many details about him?

It’s funny, I was talking to a friend of mine who writes biographies, and she doesn’t put anything in them that isn’t a fact. My biography really crosses that line and some people may not consider it a biography, which is fine with me.

The Library of Congress calls it a biography.

I couldn’t write the story of Dave without putting in things that I didn’t know he said or anyone else said, because there isn’t any record of that. There isn’t really another way to write the story, because all you have are bills of sale [of slaves] and these cryptic couplets [that he etched] on pots.

Your book feels so incredibly personal.

It’s interesting that you said that. When I worked on this book, I spent a lot of time feeling choked up and I couldn’t talk, or if the phone rang, I choked up.

What touched you the most?

It was the separation, the scenes where people are separated from people they love.

So many children and spouses—including Dave’s—were sold at the drop of a hat, and they never saw one another again.

That’s what really choked me up more than any sort of physical violence.

Do today’s kids understand how dehumanizing slavery is?

In a lot of ways, we’re failing our kids. Just recently, I went to a school to talk to a group of fourth graders, and one asked what I was working on.

I told her a little bit about Dave, and I showed her a slide of the woodcut of him on the auction block that’s in the book, and she said, “You mean he was being sold?” They’d done a whole unit on slavery, but she didn’t know that. And I said, “Yeah, slaves were bought and sold,” and she was stunned. Then she looked at me, and said, “Well, I hope the people that bought him were nice.”

What do you hope kids take away from the book?

I just want kids to realize there are a lot of ways to do what you believe is the right thing to do, and it doesn’t have to be screaming and yelling and fighting, or in any way violent.

There’s a woman who saved my mother during the Holocaust. She was a very quiet person and nobody’s ever heard of her. If I had to pick somebody, she’s the hero of my life. But she did what she did because she thought it was the most ordinary thing to do.

It’s very ordinary to want to write and read and express yourself. But because of the times, Dave couldn’t do that. So he became a quiet hero. If more kids knew about things like that, maybe they’d feel stronger themselves—and they could also do the right thing.

To read a starred review of Etched in Clay (Lee & Low), turn to page 117.

Photo credit: D. Feingold

In addition to best-selling mysteries and thrillers for adults, James Patterson also writes for young readers, and he’s extremely proud of his “Middle School” series. The latest entry, I Funny, is told from the point of view of a middle schooler who uses humor to help him cope with a physical handicap and the loss of his family. In this case, laughter really is the best medicine for Jamie Grimm, the narrator of I Funny.

Your series for young adults, like “Maximum Ride” and “Daniel X,” have been checked out so many times from my library that they’re falling apart. What makes them so popular with teens?

Well, when my 14-year-old son, Jack, was younger, I told him that I expected him to read every day during his summer break. Jack was never a huge reader, but his mother and I told him that we would make sure he had really cool books to read. Cool books are ones that he wouldn’t put down and when he got done he would ask for another one. When kids are younger, we want them to read, read, read, and they will only do that if they like what they read. Kids in middle school need books with stories that move along, stories that they love, and pages that practically turn themselves so kids won’t pick up a  book and say that they don’t like it and they don’t like reading. I think that books need a lot of meat in them. For example, Maximum Ride is really about a couple of things beyond the story line like dealing with being different. It is really about kids taking responsibility for their own lives. My most popular books are the Middle School books.

Why did you create the website Read Kiddo Read? Has it made a difference in kids’ lives?

Absolutely! Part of my interest in creating the website was watching Jack grow up and watching his attitude toward books.  Even with his friends who are very bright, it has always been a struggle to get them to read at least on their own time. That is a big stimulus for me. As individuals we cannot do much to help the health care crisis, budget situation, or global warming. Unfortunately, we spend a lot of time just talking about these things, which doesn’t help anything, and I am big on doing stuff. As individuals, we can most times get the kids in our houses reading or our grandchildren reading, or we can even help our local school get more books. So doing something to get kids reading is a big deal for me. I have been trying other things too, like working with independent bookstores to hold essay contests, where kids write about a book that most affected them. I have set up over a 100 scholarships at different colleges across the U.S., and they are all for teachers.  We plan to double this number in the coming year. We have even set up a program at Vanderbilt University to bring in kids every Saturday to help improve their reading skills. I am testing an after-school program in four middle schools in Palm Beach County to get kids help with their reading, and we pumped 700 to 1,000 books in all these schools. If we can get a cadre of kids reading, the teachers will notice when their reading improves and more kids will start reading and over time this will improve the neighborhoods. I do all of this because I can. We must help kids build good habits and break down bad ones. Getting kids to read will not happen overnight. We must keep at it and get the right books into the right hands.

Why does the “Middle School” series focus on humor?

Humor is one of the ways to get to kids. Combining the prose and illustrations makes the book more like a movie, and that’s a cool thing. All the Middle School books are good stories. I think that I Funny is my best.

I like I Funny‘s  main character, Jamie Grimm. Could the story have played out the same way if he wasn’t in a wheelchair? Are you worried that some people might be offended because he makes fun of his handicap?

I like the idea of a kid having a terrible break in life, rising above it with comedy, but yes the story would still be valid if Jamie didn’t have a handicap. Nobody should be offended by this book.  I am not big on political and social correctness, because I think it is more important to be a good human being.

Which gets us to the contest for the Funniest Kid in America. What kind of response are you hoping for? How does the contest relate to your literacy work?

Some kids are going to be brave enough to submit videos, but we are going to put a lot of videos up on the website for kids to watch and that should be fun. I recorded a bunch of short pieces with Zach Gordon, who was in the Wimpy Kid movies, to introduce the idea of the contest. We want to get kids attention and hopefully this will help them start building the habit of reading.

Elizabeth Kahn is the librarian at Patrick F. Taylor Science and Technology Academy in Jefferson, LA. She writes reviews for School Library Journal and Library Media Connection as well as a blog to chronicle the happenings in her school library at Tales from a Loud Librarian.

Listen to Jonathan Bean introduce and read from Building Our House.

In the two books he’s authored, the artist Jonathan Bean has placed a child in the center of a warm family and a bustling world. Yet despite all the activity surrounding his young protagonists, Bean’s stories exude a sense of quiet and comfort. In his most recent title, Building Our House (FSG, 2013), readers witness the construction of a house from laying the foundation to installing the fixtures. With the help of family and friends—and lots of hard work—Bean’s “small crew” transforms a “weedy place” into a home.

Author Jonathan Bean

So, tell me, were you one of those kids who had to stop and study every backhoe and pick-up truck you saw?

I don’t think I was. My grandfather owned an excavating company, so I have early memories of being on equipment with him and watching him work. Of course, this was always very exciting, but for some reason I wasn’t the sort to fall head over heels for machines even if, now, they are buckets of fun to draw.

Like your earlier picture book, At Night (FSG, 2007), the child in Building Our House is at the center of a loving home, and a wide world. Yet, despite all the activity happening around them, your characters (and stories) convey a feeling of serenity. Can you talk about that?

I am always happy to hear people say this! When I was a young, aspiring illustrator, Wes Adams, my future editor at FSG, told me my portfolio work was rather cold. I knew that that quality would never fly in children’s books, and so I set out to decide what to do about it. In the end, I realized I needed to be less controlling with my process, to allow some entry point for surprises, humor, joy, or empathy. In that way, I discovered that my illustrations or stories couldn’t be manufactured, that there needed to be a more organic connection between my work and the memories or feelings that were already there. I must have been on the right path, because it wasn’t too long before Wes offered me a contract for At Night, which was the centerpiece of my new portfolio.

The many details you include about building a home are so well integrated into House. They’re sure to fascinate children who want to read every book about construction sites as well as those who lean toward fiction. Did you set out to tell one story over the other?

No, I didn’t. In fact, I knew early on that I wanted to tell both stories. That was the biggest challenge, finding a way to fit all the essential house-building steps into the book without it becoming a dry instruction manual. Fortunately, I had all the family photos and stories to fall back on if things needed spicing up. For instance, the truck named Willys in House is the actual model of Jeep that my parents relied on to transport materials. (A tidbit like that could launch its own story.) I had the luxury of getting to choose from a smorgasbord of such details.

As well as illustrating the step-by-step process of building a structure, your art tells a few of its own stories: the addition of new family member, the change of the seasons, and the passage of time, while details such as a pine tree perched atop the house frame are so playful. Do you have a sense of where you are going with the art before you start? Which stories will be told through illustration?

Often those anecdotal stories develop as I sketch out the primary story. I like adding them, first, because it’s fun! But also because it creates the feeling that, like in the larger world, the little world of the picture book contains surprises and details that are there to be found, if only time is taken to slow down, look, and listen.

While no one would call this a message book, I think there are a few lessons that kids will take away. Families require teamwork (“small crew of four”), even the youngest can contribute, and that to create something solid–or of lasting value–takes time and effort. Were these ideas you were hoping to communicate?

I agree that those messages are there, but I couldn’t really say I thought about them much, if at all. On the one hand, creating a story is a process of intense concentration and awareness, but I also believe that it should contain an element of mystery, even for the creator. There are things I often learn looking back at the completed project, as I am right now.

There are also messages in your parent’s comments, “Measure twice to get it right” and “A good plan for a good house.” (Truisms educators are sure to appreciate.) Were these actually their maxims?

No, I made them up for the story. However, I have, many times, seen my dad measure two or three times to get it right, or watched my parents plan carefully for a new project. I have a lot of respect for them: they are generally more comfortable in the trenches than on the soapbox.

Author Jonathan Bean

I love the photos at the end of the book depicting the building of your family’s home. You were quite small in them. Do you have any memory of that time?

I do remember a few things. I recall quite well the trailer we lived in, since my sisters and I spent much of our time there. I also have a clear memory of climbing to the second floor of the unfinished house. That memory probably sticks because the stairs weren’t in yet and the climb up scaffolding, even with Mom at hand, was frightening.

And one last question: Is the house still in your family?

Yes, it is. In fact, for the first big book signing we had an open house publication party and invited friends from all over to see the actual house and hang out with my family.

Building Our House (Bean)
©2013 by Jonathan Bean

Listen to Jonathan Bean introduce and read from Building Our House.

Photo montage: Background from the first Clifford book;
Norman Bridwell by Rich White.

Imagine walking down a street. Exhausted after a workout. Heading toward your car. A dog suddenly appears a quarter of a block ahead. But not just any dog. This one is 66 feet long and 44 feet high.

That’s what happened to me.

That briefest flash of time between seeing Clifford and realizing that I was looking at a parade balloon was magical and delicious. As editor of the Clifford books from 1984 to 2009, I’ve had many magical moments with the big red dog.

I’ve read most of the Clifford books dozens of times. I’ve read some of them hundreds of times. I’ve read them as an editor to prepare them for publication, as a mother to entertain my daughter, and as a Sunday school teacher to spark conversations about pro-social behavior.

The Clifford books are about kindness and good works. They are about making mistakes and being forgiven for them. They are about unconditional love. And they are funny. I still crack up whenever I turn to the page in Clifford the Big Red Dog where a sheepish Clifford holds a car in his mouth, and the text reads: “He runs after cars. He catches some of them.” The artwork is expressive, poignant, and endearing.

So how big is Clifford? Very big. More than 126 million Clifford books are in print in 13 languages. And an animated Clifford TV series is in its 12th season on PBS Kids. This month marks the 50th anniversary of the first Clifford book, Clifford the Big Red Dog.

And February 15 is the 85th birthday of Clifford’s creator, Norman Bridwell. Kind, modest, and easy-going, Norman, both author and illustrator, is as lovable as his pup. He lives with his wife of 54 years, Norma—that’s right, Norma—in Massachusetts, on Martha’s Vineyard, in a 120-year-old farmhouse. The doors and shutters are painted red in honor of Clifford. Norman and Norma have two grown children (Emily Elizabeth, who appears in the Clifford books, and Tim, who appears in The Witch Next Door) and three grandchildren.

Earlier this year, I spoke to Norman about his remarkable career, his knack for creating pitch-perfect humor for young children, and what makes Clifford (and his creator) tick.

Dog days: Bridwell and his daughter,
Emily Elizabeth, circa 1964.

How would you describe Clifford?
He’s a loving dog. He’s very loyal to Emily. And she’s loyal to him. He tries to do the right thing. He has good intentions, but his size makes him clumsy, so he causes damage. And then he’s forgiven. All children would like that—to be forgiven for the mistakes they make.

Do you see any of your own characteristics in him?
You know, people have said, “Clifford is a lot like you,” but I’m not really that good. I’m not really that nice.

Well, I would disagree with you, Norman. I worked with you for, like, 25 years and I think you are that nice!
That’s kind of you to say. I don’t like to hurt people. I do my best to avoid that. No matter which side you’re on, I’m on it. I really feel I don’t really deserve this. If there’s such a thing as success being handed out to people because they are good and deserving, I don’t really deserve it. I’ve just been very fortunate.

Do you identify with Clifford’s awkwardness when he gets into trouble for being too big?
Well, I was… I am pretty clumsy. I’m constantly bumping into things. Or I toss something, and I think it’s going to land on a chair, but it slides off the other side.

I think I’m going to do something clever, and it winds up a disaster. I guess I am like Clifford that way. I was terrible at sports. I was the last one chosen to be on any team. I have many unfond memories of being forced to go out on the basketball court during gym class and trying to shoot a basket and embarrassing everybody.

How did you come to create Clifford?
Clifford began as an art sample to show editors. I was hoping I could get a job as an illustrator. I did about 10 paintings. One was of a little girl standing under the chin of a big red dog and holding out her hand to see if it was still raining. I was rejected everywhere I went. One editor, Susan Hirschman, said that my work was too plain. She said, “You may have to write a story, and then if they buy the story, you could do the art. She pointed to the sample of the girl and the dog and said, “Maybe that’s a story.”

In about three days, I tried to think of all the things that would happen if you had a giant dog. I made him a little bigger than in the sample, and my wife, Norma, named him Clifford after an imaginary playmate she had when she was a child.

I made a dummy, and Norma made a cover for it. I took it to a publisher, where it went into a slush pile. Lilian Moore saw it and knew it wouldn’t be taken by that publisher, but she also knew that Scholastic was starting to publish original paperbacks for its book clubs. Beatrice de Regniers accepted it.

What did you get paid for the book?
I got $1,000 for the book and I think $750 to do the art.

The original price of the book was 35 cents. How long did it take you to earn out your advance?
Two years.

Three days is a very short time to write a book. Is it easy for you to write?
The first one was easy. The others got more difficult. The second Pbook I did was called Zany Zoo. It wasn’t a Clifford book.

How did the second Clifford book come about?
I said to Beatrice, “Would you like to see another one?” And she said, “Yes, if you have an idea, bring it to me, but I’m not going to just take anything.”

I wrote Clifford Gets a Job, and it did well, so I said to Beatrice, “Maybe I should try another one.”

And she said, “Well, you know, we’re not running a Norman Bridwell book club.” She said, “You can try some more, but don’t count on my taking them.”

The Clifford books did surprisingly well. One day Beatrice called me up and said, “You know, we’ve changed our minds. We do want to do a Norman Bridwell book club.”

She said again, “Don’t expect everything to be accepted,” and she stuck to that.

Do you remember any titles that she rejected?
You know, it’s been a long time now. They weren’t very memorable… Clifford trying to clean up, trying to protect the environment. That was too preachy. She didn’t like that.

I said to her one time, “Maybe I should be putting a message in these books,” and she said, “You’re not a message person. You just entertain them.” So I did as I was told and just tried to make kids laugh.

What’s your process?
When I have an idea, I sketch it out in thumbnail sketches—just the action from page to page. When I have the drawings done, I think of the words that go with them. As you know, the words don’t exactly match the picture, which, I think, is funny to the children. The words don’t just describe what is going on, but the kids can figure it out.

What is your studio like?
Cluttered. It’s filled with Clifford products Scholastic has given me [such as plush toys, puzzles, games, clothing, and stationery]. I have a desk and a telephone. With an 11-by-14-inch pad and a pencil, I’m in business. I had a studio built kind of late in life, around 12 years ago. I thought I’d jinx myself if I built one before.

How did your kids respond to Clifford while they were growing up?
It was just something that Dad did. It wasn’t anything really special. They had other books that they liked much more than Clifford. In fact, on the Internet, my son says his favorite children’s books were by Dr. Seuss. My daughter didn’t realize Clifford was popular until she went to college. I’d given her a Clifford reading rug that she put in her dorm room. The other girls saw it and said, “Oh! Clifford!” When my daughter asked, “How do you know about him?” they said, “Everybody reads Clifford!”

The original Clifford books were black and red, measured eight-by-six inches, and had a landscape orientation. In the ’80s, the books were reformatted to a full-color, eight-by-eight format. Would you talk about that?
I guess the original books didn’t show up well in bookstores. When Dick Krinsley joined Scholastic, he converted the books to eight by eight so they could be displayed on a rack.

It amazes me that some people have said, “You know, I liked the early art better.”

Some artists object to changes in a book’s original design or format. But you were very cooperative.
If I thought my work was beautiful or very artistic, I might feel differently, but I feel that the purpose of my drawings is to get the point of the story across. So I am perfectly willing to have somebody else’s advice on color and format.

What was it like to grow up in Kokomo, Indiana?
It was quiet. It gave me plenty of time to think. I walked to school in the morning, I walked home from school at night, and, all that time, I was making up stories in my mind. Imaginary people. Imaginary places. And then in the evening I’d sit down and draw pictures to go with the stories I thought of during those walks.

I was a very gangly, skinny kid. My nicknames were Muscles because I had none—I was just a skeleton with skin—and Ovaltine, which is a chocolate drink that kids were supposed to drink to make them gain weight.

So you have always been a visual storyteller, even as a child.
Drawing was the only thing I was really interested in. My father would bring paper home from the factory. They were order forms that were plain on the back. I would draw all kinds of characters and adventures. I wasn’t really good at anything else. My high school shop teacher took the tools away from me after about three weeks. He said, “You’re going to hurt yourself! Go get some paper and sit over there and draw.” I did, and I was very grateful for the chance to do that.

Did you go to art school in Indiana?
Yes, I did. I went to art school for four years, but it didn’t prepare me for the real world of commercial art. I had to learn that when I got to New York.

Why did you move to New York CIty right after you graduated?
I couldn’t find any work in Indiana, but I had friends who were going to Cooper Union. They said, “Better to be out of work in New York than out of work here. Come along.” So I went along and wrapped packages at Macy’s for a while. I worked for a lettering studio and then for a necktie fabric-designing firm. And then finally, I got work making cartoons for filmstrips and slides.

What kinds of cartoons were they?
They were for sales meetings and promotions. A writer would write a script and the cartoonists would try to add humorous situations. We did work for Arrow Shirts, American Standard Plumbing, and Maxwell House Coffee—all sorts of products. The hardest part was convincing the salesmen that what we were drawing was going to be funny. They usually didn’t get the jokes.

Working on those cartoons must have been good training for a future picture book author and illustrator.
I had a lot of fun trying to inject humor into a very dry script. It was good practice.

Nobody ever said, “Hey, that’s good,” or “Thank you.” You just did it. It went out the door. You never heard anything about it. But when I did the books, children began writing to me. I thought, “This is great. Somebody noticed.” Kids let you know if they like something.

The Clifford books have humor young children can enjoy and can understand. It’s very hard to write humor for that age group. What’s the secret of your success?
I read one time about a silent film comedian whose name I can’t recall now, but he was very popular. He was a very funny guy, and then somebody told him how good he was, and he got to thinking about it. And when he started thinking about what he was doing, he ruined it. Instead of acting upon his natural instincts, he began planning, and things fell apart.

Do you have a favorite Clifford book?
I always liked Clifford and the Grouchy Neighbors. A lot of children have neighbors who complain, “Don’t come into on my yard! Don’t step on my lawn!”

I thought that could happen to Clifford. The characters look like my mother’s neighbors back in Indiana, but the fact is, they were very nice, considerate neighbors. I hope they never noticed that the grouchy neighbors look like them.

Grace Maccarone is Holiday House’s executive editor.

Future editions of Aristotle and Dante will display merit seals for the Pura Belpré Author Award for excellence in depicting and celebrating the Latino cultural experience, the Stonewall Book Award for literary excellence in depicting the LGBT experience, and a Michael L. Printz Honor for the best writing in teen literature. Likely, the novel’s cover will have to be slightly redesigned to incorporate these various honors, “a great problem to have” for an author, Sáenz jokes.

SLJ caught up with Sáenz in between his meetings as chair of the MFA bilingual creative writing department at the University of Texas at El Paso for a revealing chat about his reaction to the YMA wins, his personal inspirations for Aristotle and Dante, his writing process, and his next YA project.

How do you feel about being selected by three very different YMA committees?
It was like a mirror of me! It made me very happy in a profound way. It was all the communities that I claim: the gay community, the Latino community, and the mainstream community. I’m part of the mainstream. I was educated and integrated into America by going to school, and when I went to college in the 1970s there were no Mexican-Americans. But I didn’t feel left out; my friends loved me. I was integrated. So even though I’ve always claimed the Mexican/Chicano community, and I’ve been aware of racism, I have not lived a segregated life.

What inspired you to write Aristotle and Dante?
I was married for 15 years, but I really had to come to terms with my own sexuality at the age of 54. One of the things I had to come to terms with is that I was sexually abused as a boy. It’s not that I didn’t remember; it’s that I didn’t want to think about it. The thought of being with a man was unappealing, so it took me a lot of therapy and time to come to terms with my life, and me.

So I thought I wanted to write a gay-themed book, I thought that I wanted to write a book about a young boy who really didn’t know that he was gay. I mean Ari really doesn’t know it. That’s the theme—what does he know? So I created this situation, and I thought about what names I would give them, and I love the name Dante and I teach the Inferno a lot. And “Ari” is not uncommon among Latinos, or at least Mexican Nationals. So I just started to write this story and I wanted it to be set not in the present time, because I think it’s easier now for boys to admit they’re gay. In the 1980s I don’t think it was so easy, and I didn’t want to have all this texting stuff in the book.

And the first thing I wanted to write about was the relationship between Ari and his mother.

How have your experiences shaped the story?
I wanted to represent two very different Mexican-American families. These are families that I knew—there are working class families like Ari’s, and professional Mexican-American families and it’s not a phenomenon. There are professional families and they’re never portrayed; there’s lots of anti-Mexican rhetoric that says we’re all illegals, all recent immigrants. None of this is true. I just wanted to portray a normal Mexican-American family—and they’re very American. I wanted that contrast because I wanted my audience to know that there is a wide variety of Mexican-American experience in this country. But I also wanted to make it feel real. They are real people. I really fell in love with both the mothers. I always fall in love with my characters, but I know women like this. They love their sons and just because they aren’t always wise in the way they love you doesn’t mean they don’t love you. Ari’s mother is very loving but also very controlling—in a loving way, but controlling nonetheless.

Was it a conscious choice to include so many caring adults in the story?
I think that young men need father figures; one way or another they’re going to find them or get them, and (hopefully not) suffer for it. I’ve mentored a lot of young men that have had terrible relationships with their fathers and I’ve been a stand-in, albeit an academic one. But it’s been a privilege for me to be in their lives and I think that impacts my writing.

Maybe too much young adult fiction is about teens that are in a world apart from adults and that’s just not true for a lot of teens. And Mexican-American teens have good parents—it’s just not true that you are ostracized if you are gay. It’s true in a lot of Latino-American families but it’s also not  true in a lot of Latino-American families. My novels are so hard, all of them. I wanted to write something tender. I thought, “I don’t want to write something hard.” Part of it is that I’m such a sentimental man and you wouldn’t know it from my work. And I’m afraid of being sentimental and I was afraid of making this into a sentimental novel, but I thought I could do it. I could make it feel real and make the characters feel real. That was the hard part for me. I like to think I pulled it off.

What is your writing process like? As a college professor, how do you find the time?
I write on Fridays, and I get up early and I write in the mornings, because once office hours begin, I’m just busy busy. Luckily, where I live the walk literally takes 7 minutes. I like being department chair actually; I’ve grown into it. But I’m just a really old-fashioned teacher. I don’t teach online. I’m not against it—a lot of MFA programs have online classes—but it’s not something I do.

I love what I teach and I like young people. I know some writers feel that the teaching takes time away from their writing, but quite frankly it’s never hurt my writing. And my students read the books! And my nephews and nieces read them and analyze me. I get a big kick out of it.

What are you working on now?
The novel I’m writing is about a young man who is adopted (his dad is a Mexican-American gay artist) but he doesn’t feel adopted at all. One of my nephews is adopted, and he doesn’t wonder about his real family at all. So this kid is telling a story about how he came to be and the rest is how he watches this family as they go through this crisis; the matriarch of the family, his grandmother, is dying. He is in pain but he is a watcher, watching his father deal with this loss. We also learn how he came to be adopted in this family. In one of the opening chapters, his father asks him once if he ever thinks of his real father, and he says, “Yes. You’re my real father, and I think about you all the time.”

It’s going to be a painful novel in some ways with the automatic story line of the grandmother dying, but it’s the journey of him watching. Like Aristotle and Dante, it’s a love story between this young man and the family that he’s been adopted into, and how his love for them and their love for him is so profound. And of course I need to write that novel because my mother died a year ago.

I’m very excited about it. I love to write and I love to figure it out. It’s like you’re learning your craft all over again; each project is new and you learn something new. And I just sold a book of short stories for adults and those are not tender. Those are hard. That’s my world. I think I live between violence and tenderness. I think we all do. So I just try to incorporate that somehow into my art.

Tanya Lee Stone’s search—for photos and facts—has led her in surprising and rewarding directions. “To me, visual storytelling is as important as the text,” Stone has said, and that is certainly true of Courage Has No Color: The True Story of the Triple Nickles: America’s First Black Paratroopers (Candlewick, Jan. 2013). Through text and images the author paints a fascinating portrait of the African Americans who trained as part of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion under First Sergeant Walter Morris. Seventeen of those 20 men came from the all-black 92nd Infantry Division, whose roots could be traced back to the Buffalo Soldiers of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. The author spoke to Curriculum Connections about her research, and the Triple Nickles’ extraordinary legacy.

What attracted you to this topic? Did it have any relationship to your work on Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream (Candlewick, 2009)?
These stories are related in that they are both about extraordinary people, relatively unknown individuals, whose work paved the way for others. Change happens slowly—and it’s often due to individuals such as these. We owe them tribute.

When you begin a nonfiction work, do you have a sense of where you’re going, or do you let the research guide you?
The research did guide me, as did feedback from Marc Aronson and Hilary Van Dusen, who said, as they did with Almost Astronauts, “This story is too big for a picture book.” I tend to think cinematically, so I’m looking at the story through the points-of-view of the Triple Nickles’ and [their leader, First Sergeant] Walter Morris. What are the margins that inform those perspectives? That helps me shape my boundaries. Unfortunately, it took almost 10 years to write the book!

You interviewed Morris, as well as a number of the women represented in Almost Astronauts. It’s amazing to think that these events didn’t transpire that long ago.
It wasn’t that long ago. I think we have come a long way—and have a really long way to go. That’s why it’s important to highlight these stories. We can be proud of our achievements—and have them motivate us to do a whole lot more.

Your notes on your work on the identities of the Triple Nickles who did not graduate, and how you resolved inconsistencies discovered in your research, were fascinating.
That was so thrilling [figuring out the three men who hadn't graduated]! The first person I called when I made sense of that information was Ed Howard. He’s the historian at Fort Benning [where those first black paratroopers trained]. After the book was finished, Ed and I kept working to track down the information that was eluding me. I found two of the men through a document that noted who was paid when.

Is detective work also involved in photo research?
On occasion, a photograph is in opposition to a “fact” you have unearthed earlier. You have to use your journalistic skills to figure out the truth. Even in the archives, the labels are sometimes incorrect. There’s a photo of the 761st tank battalion (the camera is looking down into the tank as a man looks up), that has been mislabeled for decades. When I got to the 761st tank battalion section, I went back to the library. In the end, I agreed with who I believed was the most trusted scholar and relabeled the photo; [in my book] the label is different than the one attributed in the National Archives.

It is like being a detective. In order to be authoritative, everything must be verified.

Were there events that you uncovered that surprised you? I had no idea that balloon bombs launched from Japan were landing in western states such as Oregon, for instance.
I had no idea about the balloon bombs, either. I could have gone on and on about them. To include information about these weapons and to not provide background on the Japanese-American internment camps seemed wrong, [but] I also was aware that I had to balance these pieces with the rest of the story.

This is complicated material and the challenge was to select what was pertinent to the paratroopers’ story and would give readers the context they needed. There’s an unending wealth of stories to tell.

So many of the events we know of history depend on timing—when the many small actions of people come together, as you point out.
When change happens, we tend to forget that many events preceded it. There’s another parallel between Almost Astronauts and Courage, in that people sometimes say to me, “But [the Triple Nickles] didn’t get sent into combat” with a tone in their voice that suggests, “Why are you making such a big deal out of this?” What these men accomplished was of their time. If you’re looking at it through a 21st-century lens, you miss it.

Many children aren’t [aware of how the rights we enjoy now] were achieved. That’s why I spend the amount of time I spend on background.  With context, on their own, children can get to, “Wow, that’s a big deal.”

Listen to Tanya Lee Stone introduce and read from Courage Has No Color.

How did you feel when you found out you had won Edublog’s Lifetime Achievement Award?

I had totally and utterly forgotten I had been nominated. At one o’clock in the morning someone tweeted “Well done!” And I have to admit, I asked, “What have I done?”

What do you do on your blog?

The blog is a record of all of our events and training days at schools and conferences. We also put up links to resources we’ve discovered. Most of them are free and, hopefully, useful. But it’s not about the resources, it’s how they can be used. That is the basis of my being: enabling children of all ages and abilities to take off and fly.

Can you tell us about your background?

I taught for 25 years, eight of which were spent in a school located in the third highest social deprivation area in the south of England. That’s where I learned the majority of my craft. I had to find ways to engage, motivate, and inspire those children; to change their perceptions of themselves into people who can be, and want to be, writers and learners. These were children who had possibly never seen what enjoying learning looked like. That is a crucial part of what we encourage teachers to do now: when doing our demo teaching sessions, in schools and around the world, we encourage colleagues to sit in among the children, mucking in, modeling the enjoyments of writing, and so much more.

In 2005 I was nominated for a BECTA (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) ICT in Practice Award. Increasingly, I was being asked to work with schools and educational authorities to find ways to use technology to raise teaching standards. For the last seven years, I’ve been traveling up and down the UK all around the world with my partner, Sarah Neild, presenting and looking at bringing the curriculum even more alive.

How did you come to start using games in your teaching?

About 12 years ago, I was diagnosed with I have Adrenomyeloneuropathy (AMN), which began attacking my central nervous system. It’s not stopping me yet! I now walk with a cane, which forms an interesting lesson starter, as children come up with inventive things to say about my stick, which I call “Mr. Walker.”

Around the time I was first diagnosed, I was given Riven, the second game in the Myst series. While my daughter, Ellie, sat on my lap, wandering through these worlds and talking about these beautiful landscapes in such an expressive way—even though she was only little—I realized that I could use them in school to encourage my children to pick up words, and juggle them, too.

Now you’re known as “the Myst man.” Why?

Yes. I find that slightly surreal, as we do a huge amount of other things too. The Myst games form a significant part—but only one part—of what we do. We work with schools on the games-based side of learning but also looking at lot of different online technologies, always with an essential permanent focus on the learning that springs from them.

How do you use gaming worlds to help children write?

We use games as a stimulus. When we are teaching writing, the idea is to get children talking about the game and to gain confidence, find words and play with them, and from that springs an amazing amount of inventive compositions.

Children are very plot centric-when they are writing. It tends to be “and then I, and then I, and then I.”  What I do is try to help them develop, often without them even realizing, a sense of setting, character, and atmosphere as priorities to bring plot alive.

While teaching, we project one of these moving worlds up on a large screen, a remarkable living world, perhaps with leaves struggling to escape the bushes, and birds dancing with the wind. I think I then startle people by making no reference to it for a long time. We talk about everything else but the world behind me, such as guessing why Mr. Walker is full of holes.

We slip into the landscape almost without them knowing it. By then they’re desperate to talk about what’s on the screen. But now it is no longer a screen; it forms part of where we are. The key element is that we don’t move for a long time. We aren’t playing the game. Quite a while in, I might ask, “Shall we go for a walk? Before we go, how about we have a go at remembering where we are now? Do you know, one of the best ways to remember something is to write it down? Can you squeeze in a simile here or a metaphor there? Go for it! Write like the wind (only neater, because the wind has dodgy handwriting)!”

Without realizing it, even the most reluctant writers are writing. As they do so, I reassure them of one or two things. One: There is no right or wrong idea. Two: Don’t worry about your spelling. And I really do mean, “Don’t worry. Get it down. Go for it!” I don’t want them to fret and mess up a stunning description.

Can you share an example or two of how this works in the classroom?

We use many other things as a stimulus. I often take children into Epic Citadel, a free app on the iPad, to create an unpopulated setting, and then we populate that place with characters. I begin to tell a story while we’re doing that, and the children get involved in the storytelling. I use stories as boxes in which to put lots of tools and techniques. We might use iPad apps, such as Pottery HD Lite, to create objects that bring the story alive. We might explore a site like Snappywords to discover alternative vocabulary. The tools and the stories are constantly changing.

How has your work impacted kids on an individual basis?

I often work in special schools. We were at a school for children with profound learning difficulties, and I took children on a virtual trip to the beach using a projected computer game. We were in a land from the game Myst III: Exile and were experiencing a stunning beach setting. We also had buckets of water in the classroom, sand, and hair dryers for the wind.

There was a seven-year-old boy in the group who had never spoken a word in his life. He was making sand castles against the virtual backgrounds, making sounds like “Puttitin puttittitin.” He was so desperate to talk that his teaching assistant was kneeling down with him, crying. He was building a sand castle and “putting it in.” Then, with his sandy hands, he discovered the interactive whiteboard showing the beach. He found my laptop and discovered that if he pressed the up, down, left and right arrows he could navigate around this virtual world. He found the mouse and began exploring even more. He was so calm about it. The rest of the class was standing around him, talking about this place. He then figured out how to open a virtual door and exclaimed, “I did it!” He could control a virtual world. Those are small steps for a majority of our children, but this was enormous for him.

Another time we were at a school for children who had been excluded from other schools for behavioral reasons. There was a boy who’d displayed severe violent behavior elsewhere. I had created a scene using Myst IV: Revelation and we were standing in front of a quite ominous scene, with an upturned ship.

Within seven minutes, he was asking questions, and, by the end of the session, he was producing writing of such beauty it would melt you.

He said to me afterwards, “I just didn’t think I could write anything like that. This is first time I’ve ever done it. Hopefully I can knuckle down to it and remember how do to this in all of my other challenges.”

What tips do you have for other teachers who might adopt your method?

You have to be very careful about age-appropriateness with any game or online tool you use. But then, take your time. Don’t rush forward. An amazing amount of learning comes from even tiny movements in a digital sense.

What are some of your favorite worlds to work with?

Jules Verne’s Return to Mysterious Island, Dear Esther, Wild Earth, and Wild Earth: African Safari, a Wii game.

Any apps you especially like right now?

Tag Galaxy, which builds wonderful collections of images, as the basis of non-linear discussion. Lino, which enables children to plan or record the results of research collaboratively. Tagxedo, which creates living, dancing word clouds. It’s like the marvelous Wordle, but with even more style. It isn’t all about the words, though: tools like Psykopaint and Tiltshiftmaker allow us to bring worlds alive in imaginative ways too.

Photograph by Tallulah Photography.

In The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen, his older brother brings a hunting rifle to school to kill his merciless tormentor—and then takes his own life. Where’d that idea come from?

There were two books of Wally Lamb’s that I pulled little things from. But in The Hour I First Believed, the protagonist’s wife is at Columbine when the boys open fire. There was a line in that book about the fact that one of these boys had an older brother and for some reason it just kind of punched me in the gut, and I thought, “Oh, my god, I never thought about the fact that these people—and in that case, one of them actually was a monster—but these people have their own families. They have siblings. What would it be like for the surviving brother?

Why is there so much humor in such a troubling story?

I can’t write a book without humor, and this was certainly as dark as I have gone in any of my books. What really worked for me is that the story is told in first person. When you’re dealing with a 13-year-old boy and his perspective on life, at that age, we tend to be very self-centered, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. There are going to be things that make readers laugh in terms of his interactions with other people, his impressions of other people, because they’re his private thoughts. So when Henry is first meeting his neighbors and Farley and Alberta, that’s a very natural way to bring humor into the story, even though Henry never thinks he’s being funny, of course.

Did you use humor to deal with the world while growing up with a single parent in Ontario, Canada?

Oh, my God, that’s such a great question! Nobody’s ever asked me that before. Yeah, I did. I was a performer from a very early age. We would try to get parents to sit down and watch a play that I had made the neighborhood kids rehearse and memorize. I think I actually had a little book of kids’ plays that my mom had given me. And so I would force all the other kids into participating, and we would put on performances, and they would involve really bad jokes.

Henry’s family and his friend Farley are huge pro wrestling fans. How’d you write so sympathetically about a sport that you’re not really into?

I was having lunch with a writer friend, and he said—and I think Alberta says this in the book—that wrestling is “like a soap opera for guys.” Suddenly, the penny dropped for me. I thought, OK, that makes a certain amount of sense. Now I understand why people might enjoy watching this.

You got your first break writing TV screenplays after serving snacks to the cast of Degrassi Junior High. Were your muffins any good, or were you a lousy baker like Henry’s sassy girlfriend, Alberta?

That’s really weird that you asked me that, because I don’t think I’ve ever made that connection before. I didn’t make the muffins, I bought them. But the kids on Degrassi wrote a poem to me at the end of the first season. It goes like this: “An ode to Susin, the Brand Muffin Queen, we eat them, we die, then we turn green.”

Sadly enough, after we first spoke, there was another school shooting.

I was devastated by the news. I got a message from a woman who lives in Connecticut that moved me beyond words. Here’s what she wrote: The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen has really had me thinking after these recent horrific events at Sandy Hook Elementary. One big problem I had prior to reading this book was that I was ignorant of the feelings of a shooter’s family members. It has helped me to pray for the members of the Lanza family who are also suffering at this terrible time.

Photographs by Teri Fullerton

When William Alexander recently walked across the stage at the National Book Award ceremonies to accept this year’s award for Young People’s Literature, he joined a very small group of writers who have won such an award for their first novel. But Goblin Secrets (S & S, 2012) isn’t at all his first published work. He’s the author of many short stories printed in journals such as Weird Tales and Interfictions.

Will lives in Minneapolis, in a writerly neighborhood within walking distance of excellent coffee, amazing Mexican food, and a library. “We’re also close to a lake,” he writes, “but everyone in Minnesota lives close to a lake.” His writing day begins when his son goes off to preschool. “Then I drink coffee, bandage my wounds from the pre-preschool struggles, and put on some music. The cellist Zoe Keating makes excellent soundtracks for fairy tales.” He writes in “a strange little room,” taken up mostly by his desk and his bookcases. Will’s wife, Alice, recently built him a standing desk, with the kind of floor mat cherished by professional chefs; he can stand up all day on it. His collection of masks lines the walls.

Will and Alice and their two children have one pet: Nyx the polydactyl cat. “Like most cats, she understands that books are filled with things we were never meant to know. She curls up on the pages of whatever I’m trying to read, always. I’m sure she’s only trying to protect me.”

Will writes through the day until “I look at the time and realize that I should have picked up my son from preschool by now.” We are all grateful for his son’s patience, for it has led to the splendid Goblin Secrets .“When I sent Goblin Secrets out into the world, I hoped it could possibly communicate my sense of theater—what it is, what it does, and why it’s important,” he writes. “And I hoped it would be fun to read aloud.”

It does, and it is.

GDS: In your acceptance speech—which was very gracious, by the way—you quoted Ursula K. Le Guin.
WA: Thanks! That line is from her book of essays Cheek by Jowl. I’ll repeat it here. It’s worth returning to, over and over again. She writes that “the literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore offers hope.” We need to remember that the way things are is not the only possible way that they could be.

Let’s talk about the goblins. Did George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin provide a starting place for your own, who are quite unlike the goblins of, say, The Hobbit?
Absolutely. Along with Jim Henson’s film Labyrinth, with all of those goblin puppets designed by Brian Froud. There is something so gleeful and wonderful about them—even if they are dangerous. I wanted mine to be consistent with goblin lore, full of mischief and trickery. And the thing I stole from Henson and MacDonald is that goblins used to be children. They haven’t been swapped for children, as in fairy lore about changelings. They’re kids transformed.

In the novel, the goblins are often referred to as the “Changed”; Rownie is “an unchanged child” and sometimes reaches up to see if his ears are becoming pointed to discover if he is “changing.”
I’m pretty sure that this fear and curiosity about monstrous transformations explains the endless popularity of vampires and werewolves, too. They’re the monsters that you might become, so they make perfect metaphors for all of the changes we actually experience while trying to figure out who we are.

Your goblins are also outsiders: they are outside the world of Zombay, unaccepted there even though one of their missions is to protect the city.
This is what connects my goblins to actual actors at various points in theater history. It’s a disreputable, mischievous, goblinish profession, and a vital one. In Shakespeare’s day they were barely considered people. But they were also the only ones outside the nobility who could legally wear silk. All sorts of rules reversed onstage. And theatrical mischief also takes its responsibilities seriously. You have to get your cues right. You have to pull the ropes at precisely the right time or else the wrong piece of scenery falls into place, and in that moment nothing else is more important. Nothing could possibly be more important than the painted landscape on the other end of that rope. So theater folk may be mischievous, but there’s also a dedication and a clear precision to what they do; it’s not all irreverent foolishness. It can even be heroic.

To perform and to be heroic, these goblins don masks.
I interviewed some master mask makers while researching the book, and tried to learn as much as possible about the mythic and ritual origins of masks. In ritual the mask can stand in for powerful forces that we have no control over—the hunt, or the weather, or the river that might flood and kill us all. But if we can give those forces a voice and a face, then we might be able to interact. We still don’t have any control, but at least we can have a conversation. And in performance we can take on some of the qualities we’re afraid of.

Which is why Rownie becomes the giant when he puts on the giant’s mask, and why he becomes the fox at the end of the novel by putting on the fox’s mask—and so taking on some of the qualities of the fox.
Absolutely. It can be a privately transformative ritual as well as an ancient, public attempt to communicate with angry weather. The giant mask comes from one of my favorite theatrical exercises, an especially useful one for children’s workshops. You get everybody to walk in a circle and give them vivid, impossible metaphors: “Walk like your feet weigh five hundred pounds. But you’re used to it. They always have. Now walk like your head is full of honey. Now walk like your hair is on fire, and always has been.” This is great for giving each character a distinct way of moving. One of those basic exercises is “Walk like a giant.” Some stand on tiptoe as soon as you say “giant,” but they shouldn’t. “You’re already a giant. You don’t need to stand on tiptoe. You are already very tall.” That’s a useful walk to learn. No one ever bothers you when you stand like a giant, no matter how tall you happen to be.

It’s also fun to put on a mask.
Yes! Absolutely. Don’t forget about the fun. Here we are talking about mythic origins and transformation, but none of it matters much without the fun.

The city of Zombay is itself a stage for remarkable and sometimes frightening events—and it’s a stage about to be overwhelmed by the coming floods. What influenced the physical world of the novel?
After high school I saved up some money and became the clichéd American traveler with a backpack and a Eurail pass. I started in England and then headed east. Zombay probably began when I landed in Florence and saw the Ponte Vecchio. It’s a very old bridge with houses and shops on it, suspended over the river. It seemed like a magically impossible in-between place. Then, just a few days later, I was wandering through Prague and crossed the Charles Bridge. That one was covered with performers: musicians with glass harps playing intricate compositions and puppeteers and painters and guitarists and people with costumes and masks, all performing together, all making a vibrant mess of art and collecting coins in hats. Then I found the old town square of Gothic streets and spires—like those in Zombay’s Southside—in direct contrast to blocks of Soviet-style apartments surrounding the city. And I saw the clock tower of Prague. They say the prince who commissioned that clock put out the eyes of the craftsman who made it so he could never build its equal. All I had to do was put the clock tower in the middle of the bridge, and the rest of Zombay took shape around it.

Parts of the story, and the setting, read as very Dickensian to me. Is it fair to cite Dickens as an influence?
That’s fair. And flattering. I have to embrace Oliver Twist as an influence.

The orphan in the company of other orphans, all bullied and controlled by the powerful Graba…
Exactly. But the larger debt to Dickens comes from his essays and articles on urban geography, stolen from the book Dickens’ London. He went for long walks and made the invisible parts of the city visible by writing about them. Southside gets much of its flavor from those essays. In one he describes, with gentle irony, an absolutely terrible play. That helped me write about a theatrical fiasco, when my goblins attempt to perform by the docks and everything goes wrong.

Zombay is very much haunted by London. The old London Bridge was a town unto itself, like a larger version of the Ponte Vecchio. And the south side of London was a rough and disreputable place in Shakespeare’s time, so of course the theaters were there.

Most inland cities seem to have grown up around rivers. London has the Thames. Minneapolis and Saint Paul watch each other across the Mississippi. The contrast between the river and the urban world that borders it is compelling. But in each case the river is very much older than the city, and it doesn’t care about us. It isn’t a malevolent force, but it does what it does as a river, and sometimes that includes swallowing our bridges whole—just as the Mississippi swallowed our 35W bridge a few years ago. The river can swallow you without bothering to notice you. I borrowed a fair bit of nautical lore for the relationship between Zombay City and the Zombay River, the reverence and terror that sailors have always had for the sea. It takes a particular kind of courage to live next to forces larger than yourself. I suppose we always do, but it takes courage to recognize it.

But there are also forces in Goblin Secrets that do what they do for evil purposes. There’s the Mayor, for example, who takes away hearts and volition, and who’s willing to let all of Southside be drowned so he can remake it in the image of Northside. Sometimes very disturbing things happen in Goblin Secrets —not the least of which are the burning pigeons. Were you ever concerned about including varied and visceral kinds of violence in a book intended for children?
Concerned, yes. Hesitant, no. I figured it was important to write what the story needed first, and then soften it later if the audience demands. Then I decided it was important not to soften it. Everyone points out that fairy tales are always dark, and everyone is right, though every few years we still have a big, public battle about it. We’ve been having that particular argument for thousands of years. Plato favored censorship. Aristotle didn’t. Puritans tried to ban theater throughout Shakespeare’s career; they insisted the stage was both dangerous and foolish, a vile and disreputable kind of lying. And it is both dangerous and foolish. That’s its power. Shakespeare admitted to the foolishness in Midsummer and the dangers in Tempest—his two fantasy stories. Both theater and fantasy are still stuck in this conversation, whether we’re talking aboutHarry Potter or Dungeons & Dragons. The argument gets even more heated when kids are in the audience.

We need to give those kids more credit. Violence and darkness in books for children creates a necessary framework of emotional possibility. Cruel and horrible things might happen in a novel, but the young reader—even a young reader to whom nothing especially horrible has happened—will recognize the reality of those dark things and their presence in the world. In his or her world. The politics of the playground are cruel and horrible enough. In a story, they can experience those events and emotions vicariously, from a safe distance.

And what does that give a young reader?
Stories are actually the only way to wrestle with such things from a safe distance. We do a terrible disservice to young readers if we deny them that chance. They need a richer sense of possibility.

Fictional pain works like a vaccine. You inoculate yourself to tragedy by learning that tragedy exists, as in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. That book forces readers to make sense of a senseless death—hopefully before they have to do so in fact. And everyone has to eventually. But books can give warning, so when young readers encounter full-blown sorrow it might not be an utterly new experience. It might not be overwhelming. Things like it have already happened to fictional characters they’ve loved.

This is what A. E. Housman says of sad and dark poetry in “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff,” when he writes that “if the smack is sour,/ The better for the embittered hour.” And he concludes the poem with an anecdote about Mithridates, who made himself immune to poison by taking small doses each day—suggesting that reading bitter poems helps, as you say, to inoculate against the devastation of later sorrow.
Exactly! Perfect example. In Goblin Secrets, the puppet show works the same way. It warns both Rownie and the reader about what happens later. That’s also basic foreshadowing, so it follows the standard rules of drama—but those rules all have more than one purpose. It’s an unjust mistake to deny children the full emotional range of fictional experience. We arm the reader as best we can inside the story, and afterwards they might continue to be armed.

And not to keep going back to Housman—except that I really like this poem—but he would affirm this as well. His narrator speaks of using ale to create a tale about a good world where everything is fine, but when he wakes up, “I saw the morning sky:/ Heighho, the tale was all a lie;/ The world, it was the old world yet.”

There’s another important side to all of this. Young readers might have experienced tragedy already. In that case we aren’t offering a vaccine or a warning. Too late for that. But we can offer solace. Trauma is alienating. If you read something that parallels your own experience, then you’re no longer alone. And the inexplicit parallels offered by fantasy can be especially useful. A direct, literal representation of trauma might turn out to be more of a trigger than a comfort. Some things you can only get at sideways. Tolkien insisted that allegory is an inferior form of storytelling because it lacks that metaphoric quality that invites multiple understandings, and Le Guin once summed up all of fantasy and science fiction as “metaphor made literal.”

I should probably point out that Goblin Secrets isn’t entirely composed of sorrow and pain! There’s a bit of fairy tale violence, it’s true, but I hope the book is also fun. Goblins are fun. We shouldn’t forget about the fun.

You mentioned the need for a “richer sense of possibility.” Can you give us some hints about this in your next book?
The next book is called Ghoulish Song, and it’s set in exactly the same time and place as Goblin Secrets. Zombay is a big city, and there’s always more than one story happening at once in a city. This story is as much about music as Goblin is about theater. The protagonist is Kaile, the young girl who brings a basket of bread to the goblins when her father tosses them out of his alehouse. The book repeats that scene from her point of view. Rownie makes a cameo, along with several other characters from the first novel, but the second one is still meant to stand alone.

And so one story can become many stories. And now that you’re back home after the National Book Awards?
Now I’m back to teaching classes, changing diapers, reading to my toddler son—with all the character voices—and finding time to write.

Gary D. Schmidt was chair of the 2012 National Book Award committee for young people’s literature. His most recent novel, Okay for Now (Clarion), was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and the winner of SLJ’s 2012 Battle of the Kids’ Books tournament.

Sarah Beth Durst

Donna Rosenblum, librarian, Floral Park (NY) Memorial High School, does everything she can to get her teens engaged in reading and writing, and author visits are always on her mind. Local YA author Sarah Beth Durst was already scheduled for a visit when Superstorm Sandy came whipping in. Undaunted, Rosenblum bumped the date forward to early December. That’s when Durst spoke at the Floral Park Memorial High School (FPM) library. The appearance was the sixth installment of the FPM’s READS program, which Rosenblum initiated to bring students, staff, and parents together for author visits.

Durst is the author of the young adult novels Vessel, Drink Slay Love, Enchanted Ivy, and Ice, all from Simon & Schuster, as well as middle grade novels Into the Wild and Out of the Wild from Penguin Young Readers. She has twice been a finalist for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s (SFWA) Andre Norton Award, for both Ice and Into the Wild. At READS, Durst discussed why she became a writer, the writing and publishing process, and her own personal experiences as an author. She encouraged students to articulate ideas, write about what they love and keep at it no matter what. Durst focused on writing strategies that work for her but also discussed those of other authors she is friendly with, and how what works for one person does not necessarily work for another. After speaking to the crowd of 80 people, Durst answered questions and signed books. About 16 copies of her books were provided courtesy of the Floral Park Memorial High School Parent-Teacher-Student Association and raffled off to attendees. An additional 25 copies of her books were sold.

Check out this video to hear Durst talk about the story behind her latest title, Vessel, published in September 2012, also from S&S.

This week, authors Rita Williams-Garcia, Jarrett J. Krosoczka, and Mac Barnett share their stories of the season with SLJ. Last week, we heard from Julie Andrews and her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, along with author Liz Levy.

Rita Williams-Garcia

Rita Williams-Garcia and family

It was winter 1990, and my husband was preparing to go off to Saudi Arabia for Desert Storm [as a platoon sergeant for an engineering brigade, responsible for 52 soldiers who did battle damage assessments]. I asked my mother what she had sent my father when he was in Vietnam. She said, “Candy, cookies and nothing but good news.”

Our daughters, Michelle, 6, and Stephanie, 2, signed a card for their dad while I put together a tin box of cookies and candies, along with a photo of the family with a promise that we’d all be together SOON?. The night before we went to Floyd Bennett Field for his deployment, I stuffed the tin in Peter’s duffle bag along with a note: “Do not open until Christmas.”

We said our goodbyes and waved while trucks loaded with soldiers drove off. Then I bought a houseful of toys for my children, including a jungle gym with a slide which sat in our living room.

On Christmas morning I videotaped Michelle reading the Nativity story and mailed that to Peter along with a video of a New York Giants football game. Of everything, he remembers the tin box with cookies and candy on Christmas.

Jarrett J. Krosoczka

“I just don’t like Christmastime,” my grandmother Shirley would say as she leaned back in her chair at the kitchen table, taking a drag from her cigarette and a sip from her coffee. “I just think about all the people who don’t have nothin’, ya know. The parents who can’t buy presents for their kids. The people who you see on the news whose houses burn down on Christmas night. Then I think about all the women who get beaten by their husbands.” She would shake her head, but not before taking another puff of her unfiltered Camel, allowing the smoke to cover any hint of the pine needles in the adjacent living room.

Jarrett J. Krosoczka

Holly jolly.

Our halls weren’t exactly decked with the cheery sentiments of Christmas carols. We had a tinsel-draped tree filled with ornaments left over from the 1950s and ’60s. A few holiday items were placed atop side tables—an animatronic Santa and a porcelain Christmas tree that played “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

“Time to take down the toys,” my grandfather Joe would mutter as he retrieved the few boxes of Christmas decorations kept in the garage. Joe’s job was to get the ornaments and set up the tree. The rest was up to my grandmother and me. Later, it was just my responsibility to trim the tree. As I hit adolescence, neither Joe nor Shirley saw any point in decorating when we’d only be taking everything down in a few weeks. Despite their aversion to covering the house in holiday décor, I would eagerly hand-draw Santas, candy canes, wreaths, and even mistletoe and place them throughout the front hallway.

Their dreary dispositions aside, they made sure I woke up every Christmas morning to an embarrassment of riches. A Smurf Big Wheel, collections of Transformers, ThunderCats, and G.I. Joes, a Nintendo, and, of course, always art supplies. There was nothing that made them happier than to see me happy. It’s what they dedicated their twilight years to. Aside from the many presents they lavished upon me, they gave me the greatest gift of all—a stable home, with two parental figures who loved me unconditionally.

It was just before Christmas of 1980 when I came to live with my grandparents full time. I had just turned three years old, and Joe and Shirley had already been taking care of me for the majority of my life. It had become clear that their daughter was never going to be stable enough to care for me, and the decision was made that I would live with them permanently.

I remember seeing the light of the Christmas tree through my tears as Shirley sat me down to explain that I would be living with them now and that I wouldn’t see my mother for some time. I remember her asking me what I liked to eat, so she could make sure I had my favorite meals. I told her that I liked meatball sandwiches. To distract me, she told me to pick out one present from under the tree and open it. Without missing a beat, I hopped off her lap and chose a box. I unwrapped it furiously. A tan Tonka pickup truck. I loved that truck and played with it endlessly.

Now I have a family of my own. And I, like my grandfather, grumble about getting the “toys” out of storage. But this is because my wife, Gina, has twenty-four red-and-green plastic bins filled to the brim with holiday cheer. It would have given Joe a heart attack. My two daughters will smile ear-to-ear on Christmas morning with the magic and wonder of the season. I will set out a porcelain Christmas tree that will chime out a tune and warn us all that we “better watch out.” And I will think of my grandparents, who gave me so very much at Christmastime.

Mac Barnett

When I was four I wanted a cuckoo clock for Christmas.

We lived in a small town and my mom didn’t have much money. My mother didn’t know where to buy a cuckoo clock, and if she did find one, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to afford it.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a bicycle?” she would ask.

Mac Barnett

“How about Skeletor’s Castle? That would be a good gift,” she said.

“Or what about a nice regular clock, with a neat design on it?”

“No. I want a cuckoo clock.”

I didn’t know why she was so concerned. The cuckoo clock was Santa’s problem, not hers.

A week before Christmas, we went to see Santa at the mall. Standing in line, my mom asked, “Have you thought about what you’re going to ask him to get you for Christmas?”

What was wrong with this woman? I wanted a cuckoo clock.

Finally it was my turn. I climbed on Santa’s lap and gave him a drawing I’d made for him. It said, “I LOVE YOU SANTA.” (Always a good idea to flatter someone before you ask him for a hard-to-find gift.) We went through the usual small talk and then Santa asked, “Well, little boy, what do you want for Christmas?”

“Santa,” I said, “The thing I want most in the whole world is a cuckoo clock.”

Behind my back, my mom stood right in Santa’s eyeline, grimacing and slicing at her neck with her hand. Santa met her gaze, nodded, and looked down at me.

“Well…” said Santa. “That should be no problem. My elves are very good at making cuckoo clocks.”

I was overcome with joy as a man in reindeer antlers hustled me off Santa’s lap.

My mom was in a foul mood the rest of the day.

Of course, at the time I didn’t know the whole story. And I still don’t know why Santa did my mom dirty. All I know is that on Christmas day, I got a cuckoo clock.

Earlier ‘Holiday Memories’: 2006 ,2007,  2007, 2008, 2008, 2009, 2010,  2011.

Artist and children’s book illustrator Nonny Hogrogian won her first Caldecott Medal in 1966 for Always Room for One More (Holt, 1965), the story of a generous Scotsman who welcomes guests into his little home. She then won her second in 1972 for One Fine Day (Macmillan, 1971), the humorous retelling of an Armenian folk tale about a red fox who steals milk from an old farm woman.

Born in the Bronx to an Armenian family, Hogrogian earned a Caldecott Honor in 1977 for The Contest (Greenwillow, 1976), also based on a tale from Armenia.

Hogrogian talked with SLJ about the medals, her work, and cold New Hampshire winters.

What do you remember about winning each medal?

When I won the medal for Always Room for One More in 1966, I was working at home as an illustrator four days a week and as the art director for Scribner’s children’s book department for the other three days.

Friends from Scribner’s began to call me in the afternoon asking me if I had any news about the award. I said “No,” and continued with my work.

Much later, I received the call from the Caldecott committee chairwoman, Winifred Crossley, and was excited beyond belief. I called back my co-workers at Scribner’s, who had been waiting for me to hear the news. They told me to hurry on down to the office, where they were waiting to have a celebration. It was great.

In 1972, I was newly married to the poet and writer David Kherdian, winner of the 1980 Newbery Honor for The Road from Home: The Story of an Armenian Girl (Greenwillow, 1979). We had just bought a home in New Hampshire and we were broke. The winters there were very cold, and we weren’t sure that we had enough money to pay for oil through the winter.

We were both rather impractical. After looking over many picture books published that year, I told David that I thought I deserved the medal for One Fine Day, a folk tale I had retold and illustrated. He didn’t take me seriously.

At around midnight, we went upstairs to bed when the phone rang and the news came that I had in fact won the Caldecott Award for One Fine Day. We were jumping up and down and dancing on the bed, we were so happy. The next morning I called my editor, Susan Hirschman, to ask whether we might get an advance on the sales, and, of course, she said “Yes.”

What do you remember about the ceremonies?

I was very nervous at the Holt awards party preceding the 1966 event, so nervous that I lost my voice. The sales manager at Holt took one look at me and said, “You need a drink.” He presented me with one and later another. It helped a lot, and by the time I gave my speech, I looked out at the audience and realized that they were friends, and I was totally relaxed.

What impact did winning the Caldecott have on your career?

The Caldecott Award changed my life. It meant that I would not have to work in an office again. I would be able to work at books I loved in my own home without worrying too much about paying the rent. In addition, I would be able to pick and choose my own material and even tell my own stories, so that I could be totally involved with the material.

Where do you keep your medals?

David and I have moved many times, and for safekeeping, my early work is stored at the University of Southern Mississippi, and my later work and my medals are at the University of Connecticut.

Any other special memories from those times?

We have enjoyed our life and our work, with many thanks to Caldecott.

Listen to Michael Hearst introduce and read from Unusual Creatures

Michael Hearst makes his children’s book debut with Unusual Creatures (Chronicle, October, 2012). His definition of said species? “An animal that looks, sounds, smells, or acts in a way that makes you stop and say, ‘Whoa, dude!’ What’s up with that?” Here Hearst discusses this highly visual look at animals from around the globe and his fascination with these offbeat creatures.

How did you arrive at the 50 animals in the book?

It was tricky. I’d constantly jot down animals I learned or read about. I’d mention the book to friends and family, and people would say, “What about this animal? Have you heard of this one?” With 5200 species listed, I had to whittle it down for the book. If there’s a sequel, I have more.

Unusual Creatures (Hearst)
© 2012 by Noordeman

There’s a nice balance of the air, land, and sea animals….

I released my album, “Songs for Unusual Creatures,” first, so I knew I wanted to include those 14 animals. Looking at my selection, I tried to see if there were too many of one or the other—amphibians, reptiles, etc.,…it wasn’t as easy to find unusual birds!

How did you decide on the narrative voice? There’s lots of information—and humor—here.

It’s just me. It’s not different from my conversation with you right now. I wrote this book to entertain myself. The book was originally pitched [as an adult title]. I’m 8 going on 40. I’ve come to grips with it.

You approach the factoids through poems, “platyfacts,” pop quizzes, etc. How did this happen?

When I was in junior high in Virginia Beach, VA, I loved to flip through Ripley’s [Believe it or Not!], which had information in diagrams and bubbles. That was something I wanted to go for. Do you remember safari cards? They had an animal on the front, with a section highlighted and scientific classifications. I sent my designers [Arjen Noordeman and Christie Wright] a package of them, as a reference.

The design of the book is really distinctive.

I’ve worked with Arjen Noordeman and Christie Wright on several projects over the years. Because I had already done the Unusual Creatures CD with them, I had to negotiate authorship and packaging. I wrote all the text for an animal and sent them instructions, such as: “Here’s where I want the animal to be, a bubble, here, a factoid in the lower right hand corner with this info,” and they took over.

Unusual Creatures (Hearst)
© 2012 by Noordeman

You make extreme facts easy for kids to relate to, such as the bee hummingbird’s ability to drink eight times its body mass as equivalent to “if you or I drank four bathtubs full of water every day.”

I owe that to my wife. She was constantly reminding me, “Put that into perspective for a kid.”

And in the book you’re not afraid to say that you—and scientists—aren’t sure why something exists in nature.

At the book release last month, someone asked me about the hagfish. Is it in the fish family, or is it in the eel family? I didn’t know, I said, “Let’s look it up.” It’s not in either, as it turns out; it’s in its own family. A skull with no spine. The truth is, a lot of these species were dead ends.

Unusual Creatures (Hearst)
© 2012 by Noordeman

So, what’s your favorite animal?

There are a few I really have become attached to. I went down to the Lemur Center in North Carolina to work on a film about the aye-ayes. They were so fascinating to me. I kept looking at the slow loris [nearby] and completely fell in love with them. They’re slower than a sloth. To reach out and grab a piece of food takes them three minutes. Then they come slowly back, place the food in their mouth and chew.

The [inclusion of] the anteater in the book was the result of conversations with Maia Weinstock, [she had a picture of Salvador Dali with his giant anteater] who sold me on the animal, plus the fact that they line up with their young and walk on their knuckles.

TeachingBook.net resources on this interview »»»

Listen to Michael Hearst introduce and read from Unusual Creatures

Photo by Claudio Marinesco

Best-selling author Harlan Coben is the only mystery writer to have won the Edgar Award, the Shamus Award, and the Anthony Award. Last year, Coben dove into the world of YA with Shelter, the first novel in his “Mickey Bolitar” series (Putnam).

SLJ spoke with the Newark, New Jersey-born author about his new teen protagonist and his Jersey roots.

With 50 million books in print worldwide, you are definitely considered prolific. So why enter the YA market with Mickey Bolitar?

Several reasons. First, I’d seen a lot of popular young adult books dealing with vampires or wizards or dystopia, but I hadn’t seen any do what I do–stay-up-all-night thrillers based in the real world.

Second, I have four children, ages 11 to 18, and I wanted to write something that would appeal to them.

Third, I had a great idea for a story in which the hero was in high school. That’s the biggest difference between my adult novels and my young adult novels–the age of the protagonist. It would be a mistake to simplify or talk down to this audience. They’re simply too smart.

Tell us about Mickey and the second book in the series, Seconds Away, released in September.

High-school sophomore Mickey’s life is a mess. His father died before his eyes, his mother is in rehab, and he is forced to live with an uncle he doesn’t much like. When one of Mickey’s closest friends is shot, Mickey and the rest of his team need to solve the case–because the next victim may be one of them.

Mickey also learns more about the scary old lady who lives down the street and about the death of his father–if indeed his father is dead at all.

Myron Bolitar, the main character in your books for adults, happens to be Mickey’s uncle. How would you describe their relationship?

Tense, at best. Mickey blames Uncle Myron for what happened to his parents.  Plus, while adults may think Myron’s sentimentality is nice, his nephew finds it cloying. But in the end, these two need each other, so the interaction between them gets pretty interesting.

Many teens read your adult books.  Have you found that many adults read your novels written for teens?

Yes! I think that’s the best–when the parents and the teens can share and love the same book. It leads to some great family moments.

Have your own children given you any assistance in creating the teenage characters in this series?

A ton. The incident where Mickey first meets his buddy Spoon is word-for-word what happened to my son Ben on his first day of school. Here’s a good writing and parenting tip: Drive the carpool. It is amazing what you will overhear.

I see that you are active on social media, especially Twitter (@HarlanCoben). Do you consider tweeting a form of creative writing?  What was your most creative tweet?

Oh, I don’t know. I have a love-hate relationship with all social media.

You are from New Jersey. Tell us about your friendship with other “Jersey Boys,” such as Governor Christie and others?

I grew up with Chris. We played on the same Little League team, coached by Chris’s dad, when we were 11. During our senior year of high school, he was president of the senior class and I was president of the student council. You’d have been able to guess which one of us would end up as governor and which one would make up stories for living.

You attended Amherst College during the same period as other notable writers, graduating in 1984. Was there anyone at the school whom you consider a mentor?

Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday, 2003) fame was my fraternity brother. We still see each other often. He is really a terrific, funny, engaging guy. I lived on the same floor freshman year as David Foster Wallace, whom I miss in many ways, and Mark Costello, who wrote The Big If (Norton, 2002). Christopher Bohjalian (Midwives, Harmony Bks., 1997) was two years ahead of us. The Screenwriter Suzannah Grant was in my class, as was Bill Amend, author of the Foxtrot comics.

These are all great people, and I’m proud to be a part of this group.

The golden bow tie that Paul O. Zelinsky created from gold Caldecott stickers.

To mark the upcoming 75th anniversary of the Caldecott Medal, School Library Journal is speaking with past recipients of the prestigious award. Here, illustrator Paul O. Zelinsky, winner of the 1998 Caldecott for Rapunzel (Dutton, 1997) and three-time honor recipient for Hansel and Gretel (Dodd, 1984), Rumpelstiltskin (1986) and Anne Isaac’s Swamp Angel (1994, both Dutton), talks about his working process, the awards ceremony, and “the call.”

Tell us how Rapunzel came to be.

As soon as Rumpelstiltskin was published, people were telling me how much they liked my book Rapunzel. I would say, “Thank you very much, but I think you mean Rumpelstiltskin.” Eventually I decided that if I actually did a Rapunzel, I wouldn’t have to keep correcting people.

I also wanted to follow Hansel and Gretel and Rumpelstiltskin with a third tale from the brothers Grimm. Why Rapunzel? I thought the story was compelling and mysterious, and I was interested in learning to paint hair.

What was it like receiving the phone call telling you that Rapunzel had won?

I had been called to jury duty, and if the judge hadn’t released me, the Committee’s call would have reached my answering machine.

I was curious to know which books would get awards, but confident that one of them wouldn’t be Rapunzel. After all, Hansel and Gretel had been a Caldecott Honor and so had Rumpelstiltskin, and that was clearly enough.

My wife Deborah had hopes for Rapunzel that I didn’t. I was taken completely by surprise. Words can’t describe how little I expected the call from the committee.

When I picked up the phone and a man’s voice asked to speak to Paul Zelinsky, I suspected it was some long-distance phone company trying to get me to switch carriers. It was John Stewig calling from New Orleans with the Caldecott committee, telling me that Rapunzel had won. Then in the background, the committee cheered.

I got very dizzy and confused, but I gathered myself together. When I hung up, I phoned Deborah’s school (she was teaching second grade in our local public school), to give her the news. When she saw a school aide come into her classroom holding a note, she began to cry.

Do you recall any other highlights from the ALA conference that year, aside from the awards ceremony?

My wife lost her wallet in a taxi. We had breakfast with a classmate I hadn’t seen since high school. My daughters were 14 and 10.

The conference and banquet were at the Washington, DC, Hilton Hotel. In a private back room they served very big, strong drinks before the beginning of the dinner. There was a passageway from that room to the stage area of the ballroom, which had been walked by all sorts of presidents and amazing historical figures whose photos lined its walls.

What do you remember about the ceremony? 

Karen Hesse was the Newbery winner, and Russell Freedman received the Wilder Award. There were a lot of speeches. I made sure to use the rest room beforehand, having had one painful ALA experience many years before.

The Caldecott Committee members came wearing silly hats representing either long blond hair or the cap my Rapunzel prince character wore. They were carrying huge plastic scissors to cut the hair.

I came to the dinner in a garment I had bought at a garage sale in college for $5. It was a tuxedo from the 1930s, which fit perfectly. I was wearing a cummerbund I’d made from gold Caldecott stickers. By sticking the medals to each other, front to back, with a little bit of overlap linking one to the next, I made a nicely sturdy-feeling swath of gold. I also made a golden bow tie out of the stickers.

When I was at the podium and delivering my speech, the cummerbund started to come unstuck. My body heat was loosening the glue. I kept surreptitiously pushing the medals back together as I gave the talk.

How did winning the Caldecott impact your career?

I felt like I was already in a pretty privileged situation before the Caldecott, with three honor books. But I think this still made a difference in terms of attention, speaking requests, and so on. I don’t believe it really affected what books I took on, or was asked to do, or how I worked on them. The medal also increased the number of people and organizations coming to me with charitable requests.

Where do you keep your medal?

It came in a beautiful wood box, lined in blue velvet, which I keep on my dresser.

Do you think there is more public awareness of the award today?

I remember one librarian whose great mission was to eliminate these awards. Her principle was that they encourage a personality cult based on winning, which is alien to the actual purpose of children’s—or any—literature.

She had a good point. I visited one school where I was introduced as someone who was famous and had won a prestigious medal, and if the students only work hard enough, they could also be famous and win medals. But the Caldecott leads children to read books, and eliminating it would hardly make the world a better place.

I sourly regret that the Today Show has stopped bringing in the Caldecott and Newbery winners on the air the morning after the awards are announced. But awareness of the Caldecott and Newbery is huge. I don’t know whether any other award, literary or otherwise, does as much to support the sales and lifespan of a book.

Do you have a favorite young illustrator that we should be watching as a future Caldecott contender?

Questions about favorites almost always stump me—see, for example, the Favorite Color page on my website. A lot of amazing illustration is being done these days, and naming young illustrators would make me feel that I was skipping over the large number of not-so-young ones who deserve the Caldecott even more. That said, a couple of names, very unfairly leaving out a talented multitude, might be You Byun or Julian Hector.

Any other special Caldecott memories?

The Caldecott Medal spawned a whirlwind of a year for me, and I loved it.

In How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (Houghton Mifflin, 2012), Paul Tough challenges the generally accepted notion that academic achievement rests primarily on the types of cognitive skills measured by IQ tests. Could it be that success is, in fact, more dependent upon non-cognitive skills or character traits such as grit, self-control, zest, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity? And if so, what does it mean for well-intentioned but perhaps flawed educational reform designed to lift children out of poverty by focusing on improving student performance on high-stakes math and reading tests?

Tough walks readers through research that falls squarely on the side of teaching kids to persevere, especially kids whose poor economic circumstances contribute to off-the-charts levels of stress, uncertainty, and disadvantage. (Just consider this statistic: “more than seven million American children [are] growing up in a family earning less than $11,000 a year.”) Along the way, the author introduces the administrators of the affluent Riverdale Country School, an independent day school in Riverdale, NY, and the KIPP Infinity Charter School,which serves kids in West Harlem. Both are using the research Tough so effectively summarizes to encourage growth in student achievement and behavior, albeit with different approaches. Readers also meet Elizabeth Spiegel, a chess teacher whose urban, public middle-school chess team has won national acclaim, and whose teaching methods get adolescent kids to think before they act, an important lesson for success in chess and in life.

Thanks to Paul Tough’s reporting, the research presented in How Children Succeed is finding its way to administrators, teachers, and parents, and the author graciously agreed to answer some questions about his book for SLJ’s Curriculum Connections.

A fundamental question has to do with how we define success. What are the most important indicators? 

I don’t attempt to give one single definition of success in this book. I want my own child to have a happy, meaningful, fulfilling, productive life, and that’s what I want for other children as well. That inevitably involves some markers of material success, like educational attainment and income, but it also involves more nuanced indicators of success, like satisfaction and fulfillment.

The most important fact about the definition of success used by the educators and scientists that I wrote about in How Children Succeed is that it is long-term. What these researchers are finding is that short-term academic success—high scores on standardized tests—often don’t correlate with long-term academic success, like college graduation.

If we want to improve outcomes, whether for individual kids or for the whole educational system, we need to focus more on long-term success and on the skills and traits and experiences that will help more students get there.

Schools have lots of experience measuring cognitive skills—which seems fairly simple when compared to measuring character strengths, such as grit and zest. Aren’t these skills open to subjective observation and interpretation? 

Yes, that’s a big challenge for anyone hoping to create a system to help develop these skills in children. There are some reliable tests, like Angela Duckworth’s grit test and traditional psychological measures of self-regulation. But when it comes to qualities like zest and curiosity, we mostly have subjective, observational ways to measure those qualities. The KIPP schools are trying to get more scientific about it, and they’re providing rubrics to help teachers identify and cultivate these character strengths. So far, though, that’s a work in progress.

That said, I think teachers (and parents) are pretty good at knowing which kids have more or less zest and curiosity, even if their opinions are necessarily subjective. KIPP uses a “character report card” while the Riverdale approach is more subtle.

Why are they using different methods and do you expect they’ll be equally effective?

I think they’re using different methods because of their different school cultures. KIPP schools have always been pretty experimental places, where administrators are constantly trying new ideas and strategies. So it was relatively easy for KIPP’s leaders to introduce the character report card (though it still took them a few years to develop it). The Riverdale community values tradition and stability, and so it may be more difficult for them to make big changes, even when the school leadership is behind them.

It’s hard to say which school’s methods will be more effective. I tend to think that KIPP’s approach will be more likely to contribute to KIPP’s ultimate goal, which is 75 percent college-graduation rates for their middle-school students—but that’s partly because KIPP’s ultimate goal for the program is clearer at this point than Riverdale’s.

I don’t think experienced teachers will have many “aha moments” when they read about the positive impact of strong parent/child relationships in early childhood. However, the idea that character traits are malleable in adolescence should be welcome news for middle-school teachers.

I agree. I had thought before I started my reporting that I would mostly be writing about early education, and I was surprised by how many of the programs I wound up reporting on were in middle and high school. But it’s striking how often these programs—most notably OneGoal—are able to help students make profound changes in their trajectories even late in high school. I think there’s some solid support for this idea in neuroscience. The prefrontal cortex, which controls many of the mental skills that we often describe as character strengths, remains malleable later in life than almost any other part of the brain, well into adolescence and even early adulthood.

If research confirms that present efforts to raise kids out of poverty by emphasizing cognitive skills are misguided, how can schools (and parents) move in a new direction, especially when the government is spending millions of dollars on new performance assessments, promised to be up and running for the 2014-15 school year?

I think it will take both a legislative shift and a cultural shift for us to put more emphasis on non-cognitive skills or character strengths in education. The emphasis on standardized tests in Race to the Top and in many state laws gives teachers and principals and school systems incentives to focus on the narrow band of cognitive skills that those tests measure, and to ignore other skills that are at least as important for long-term success. So we need to reform those laws in order to encourage teachers to teach all the skills that kids need to succeed.

But I don’t think this is simply a matter of legislative change. While we’re waiting for those reforms, I think individual teachers and parents and school leaders can do a lot to steer their children and their classrooms toward developing the character strengths they need to succeed.

A chapter of your book follows Elizabeth Spiegel who teaches and coaches the winning chess team at IS 318, a school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with a majority of kids from low-income families. What makes those kids champions?

More than anything, I think it’s their hard work. They are an incredibly dedicated and determined group of young people, and they work harder to achieve their goals than any other group of middle-school students I’ve encountered. I think their dedication is rooted in the teaching strategies of Elizabeth Spiegel. She has found a powerful way to help them look honestly and straightforwardly at their own mistakes and failings and to learn from those mistakes. In the process, I think not only is she teaching them valuable chess knowledge, she is also helping them develop their character strengths. It’s the combination that makes the team so successful at chess tournaments.

Throughout the book, you report on specific young people who cope despite grueling poverty and seemingly unbeatable odds. And you write about a few who are hanging on by a thread. What’s the most important lesson we can learn from kids like Monisha, Mush, Keitha, and Kewauna?

I think their examples tell us two things. The first is that the environment that kids grow up in matters a tremendous amount in their outcomes. No children in this country should have to grow up with the kind of deprivation and stress and trauma that those four kids experienced in their early years. More than anything, we need to develop a better social-support system in this country for disadvantaged children and families, one that focuses on the early years but continues through adolescence.

The second is that young people can succeed even when they do grow up in very difficult circumstances. But they can’t do it alone. They need help from a committed adult, whether that’s a family member, a teacher, a mentor, or a coach. I think about the kind of dedicated, compassionate, focused support that Keitha got from her mentor, Lanita Reed. That was what made a difference for her.

Right now we have interventions in high-poverty neighborhoods that reach some of those kids some of the time. But that’s not nearly enough; we need a much more comprehensive program to help kids growing up in deep poverty, one that gives every child the tools and support they need to succeed.

Rebecca Stead
Photo: Joanne Dugan

Where did the idea for Liar & Spy come from?

I began with just a glimmer of the main character, Georges. And then the story grew, fueled mostly by my memory of school and childhood.

I heard that you initially wrote the book for younger kids. Why’d you change your mind?

I didn’t actually write it for younger kids, though that was my initial approach. But there was just too much material. I needed more space to unpack it.

Liar & Spy is a much quieter book than your Newbery-winning When You Reach Me (Random, 2009). Was that intentional?

Yes and no. I never thought to myself, “And now, I will write a quiet book!” But as soon as I began to recognize the characters in Liar & Spy, I knew it would be different from When You Reach Me.

Many people read a book with the expectation that the emotional impact will line up with the story’s “big events.” But Liar & Spy isn’t written that way—for me, the book’s loudest moments are in the aftershocks, places where the characters drop their guards and allow themselves to be vulnerable.

Safer and Georges have a complicated relationship. What message were you trying to send about friendships?

I’m rarely trying to send a message, but I think if there is a message to be taken from their relationship, it’s that friendship is messy sometimes.  Forgiveness may be necessary.

What inspires the quirky characters in your books?

I’m big on specificity when it comes to characters, because they usually reveal themselves in small details. But I feel the same way about actual people. Maybe it’s just how I see the world.

How do you write so convincingly in a kid’s voice and make your characters so real?

None of it is easy for me, because the discovery of the story is such an agonizing process. And finding the characters is part of finding the story—it’s all intertwined.The story is written on the characters, I think—you have to be able to read their experience in their actions and their words. And that’s why writing, all of it, is hard.

Both Liar & Spy and When You Reach Me are set in New York. Tell us about your connection to the Big Apple and why your books tend to take place here?

Ha! Well, it’s the most obvious connection:I grew up in New York City and have lived here my whole life. Observation and memory are 90 percent of my writing, and most of my observations and memories were made in New York…if I thought I could write convincingly about life in a suburb or in the country, I might do it. But so far, I can’t. The truth is that I’m always driven by what I believe I can do pretty well. Writing is terrifying enough without adding a high wire act.

What impact, if any, did winning the Newbery have on your writing?

It made me shy about writing for a while, but it also gave me confidence. Neither the shyness nor the confidence lasted long, though.

I remember running into you and your son on the upper west side a while back. I think you said you were touring middle schools. Do your kids give you inspiration—whether dialogue or stories—for your books?

I don’t draw directly from my kids’ lives, but I’m sure that living with them informs my dialogue. I also know that watching my sons navigate life sometimes taps my own memory of childhood in ways that are helpful to me as a writer. (And I’m happy to report that we found a great middle school. Five weeks in, and he’s loving it.)

Glad your son is happy with his new school. Did you have a difficult time in middle school?

Yes, in the sense that there was unrelenting name-calling by a small group of kids. I felt that I was never really safe from them. I walked around in a state of high alert. But I had one close friend (to whom Liar & Spy is dedicated), and a handful of less-close friends with whom I killed time, and some perfectly kind teachers. When I think about it carefully, I realize that the put-downs were a tiny part of my school experience. And yet they completely colored my life at the time.

Do you think you’d still be a lawyer if your then four-year-old son hadn’t dropped your laptop?

Good question. I have no idea. I wonder about things like that all the time.

What advice do you have for kids who aspire to become writers or someone who wants to write but is either scared or has no time?

Time is an interesting issue. There are many days when I don’t write at all. Sometimes I’m grocery shopping or running down the steps to the subway and something will hit me—a line of dialogue or description, or an idea about a place where my storylines might touch. Whatever it is, I stop and write it down. Often it’s the only real writing I get done that day. Other days I’m able to do much more. But there isn’t a clear relationship between how much time I have and how much I actually write. My advice is, begin.

As for fear: Almost everyone is afraid, because when you write you expose yourself to 1) the risk that you will be disappointed by your own work, and 2) the risk that others will not understand your work as you yearn for it to be understood.

In fact, these risks are more than possibilities—they’re almost certainties. But if you think about it, these things aren’t so terrifying. Disappointment is where the work begins, for every writer. So come, join us.

What are you working on now?

A middle-grade novel. I’m at that part right before the beginning.

Listen to Karen Cushman introduce and read from Will Sparrow’s Road

Author Karen Cushman is no stranger to the medieval and Renaissance world. Her first novel, the Newbery Honor book Catherine Called Birdy (1994), examined the period from the perspective of a noble-born girl waiting to be married off, who feels frustrated by her limited role in society. Though Cushman’s latest work, Will Sparrow’s Road (November 2012; Gr 5-8, both Clarion), is set during 16th-century England, its title character lives a life that Birdy could only “[fantasize] about as she sat inside embroidering.” Bold and impetuous, Will Sparrow does whatever he must to survive. After being sold to an innkeeper by his father, the boy narrowly escapes a fate as a chimney sweep. Later, he stumbles upon a fairground where he works for a charlatan and a magician before joining up with a traveling sideshow of oddities that features a dwarf, the preserved body of a mermaid, and—strangest of all—Grace Wyse, a girl whose hirsute countenance resembles that of a cat. In this story of a young boy’s journey, Cushman immerses fans of historical fiction in the vibrant, stimulating world of the Renaissance fair.

You’ve written several books set during Medieval and Renaissance England. What compels you to return to this setting so often?

My fascination with this time period has been around for years. I started long ago with Anya Seton and Rosemary Sutcliff and progressed through medieval music and fairs, and collecting things like the 15th-century illuminated manuscript page that hangs on my wall. My father’s family is Polish, my mother’s German and Irish, so the English were certainly never heroes to either side of the family. But somehow England, the England of long ago, spoke to me.

Renaissance fairs, as recreated these days, are tremendous fun, with their period costumes, flowery “Milady”-laden language, drinking mugs, and roasted turkey legs. These events, alive with music and dance, archers and knights on horseback, are based on the traditional ones of medieval and Renaissance England, equally colorful, raucous, and outrageous. I thought it might be an interesting setting for a book.

Then while researching broadsides and ballads for Alchemy and Meggy Swann (Clarion, 2010), I discovered an odd but popular genre of broadsides—those illustrating birth defects, or, to use the language of the time, monstrous births, both human and animal. Such anomalies were often displayed at these spectacles and, presto, the two ideas came together as Will Sparrow joins a troupe of “oddities and prodigies” traveling from fair to fair in Elizabethan England.

In your author’s note, you mention that though you ordinarily write female characters, a girl would not have survived long on her own during this period. Was it a challenge to create a male protagonist?

I think the times were still brutal enough that a girl traveling alone would have been in grave danger. And in a world with so little privacy, I do not believe she could effectively disguise herself as a boy. So Will Sparrow was born. It was indeed a challenge to try and get inside the skin of a boy. In my first attempts I fear Will was more like a girl who wore pants and spat. It took a lot of observation and research before I could come up with what I hope is a not a stereotype but a realistic boy.

How much did gender shape the story? Will Sparrow’s Road has a very animated, lively tone, whereas Catherine Called Birdy evidences a more cloistered feel.

I’m not surprised that Catherine Called Birdy has a more cloistered feel. The lives of young women in medieval England were much more circumscribed and rigid than the life a young male would enjoy. It was important to me to build a world for both Birdy and Will that was honest and believable, true to their character, their gender, and the times.

Over the course of the novel, Will is sold to an innkeeper by his father, makes theft a regular habit, and often goes hungry. Is it freeing to write historical fiction, where you can place your young protagonists in far more dangerous situations than in books set during the present?

I fear some children today face situations just as dangerous as those of the past. What historical fiction does free me to do is to write about children alone, on their own, with no one responsible for them. There were no orphan homes or social workers or Child Protective Services. The options for a homeless child were dismal. Writing about children of long ago allowed me to explore the idea of being entirely on one’s own. I think young readers (and many of us older folks) are intrigued by the idea of who we are as individuals separate from our families, from our homes, from any adult help. What would we do if left to our own devices? How would we survive? Would we be whiny victims or resourceful and courageous? Would we be the same people we are now or would we grow to be different? What kind of family might we create for ourselves?

Will initially views Grace Wyse, the girl with the “face of a cat,” as monstrous but comes to realize that she is fully human. Would someone of the period be able to look beyond Grace’s appearance?

Grace Wyse was inspired by the portrait of Antonietta Gonzales on the cover of The Marvelous Hairy Girls (Yale University Press, 2009) by Merry Wiesner-Hanks. Antonietta, her father, and most of her brothers and sisters suffered from hypertrichosis, an extremely rare genetic condition that made them unusually hairy. There have been 50 documented cases worldwide since the 16th century. The Gonzales family is probably the most famous because of the number of paintings, books, and medical case histories that feature them. Unlike most people marked with such irregularities, the family was not shunned or mocked; dressed in ruffs and elaborate jewel-trimmed gowns, they were welcome visitors in the courts of Europe, though sometimes treated more like pets than people.

Most “oddities and prodigies” would have had a much more difficult existence than the Gonzales family. Few people were accepting of those who were different, who were often considered cursed, marked by the devil, or punished by God. Even physical disabilities called for abuse as Meggy Swann with her crooked legs learned. Will Sparrow was fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time with Grace and so get to know the person behind her extraordinary appearance.

TeachingBook.net resources on this interview »»»

Listen to Karen Cushman introduce and read from Will Sparrow’s Road

What made you want to write a picture book about the life of John Coltrane?

When I was 17, I bought my first Coltrane record and was moved by the heartfelt quality of his sound. I had heard about his addiction history and knew he was great player, but only years later—as I listened to WBGO, the great jazz station—did I become really familiar with his depth and range. Some time after I’d finished writing my first picture book, Jimi: Sounds Like A Rainbow (Clarion, 2010), I heard a Coltrane birthday broadcast…and it was my mother’s birthday, as well. Because of that, I felt inspired to delve into the man’s life, and again, it was the qualities of heart and tenderness—in his story and in his music—that convinced me to write about him.

Coltrane had a complicated life and your book deals with some serious topics like drug abuse and alcoholism. Did you feel they were essential to the story, and did you have difficulty addressing those issues with a young audience?

I tried to discuss those topics in a way that would lessen some of the mystery often attached to them. As a therapist myself, I know that drug use is just a side-effect of difficult things that happen or exist in a person’s life, whether it’s poverty, trauma, the loss of a parent or someone close, and various kinds of abuse. People use drugs and alcohol to try and balance out feelings of sadness, pain, lack of confidence, or confusion. It’s never really about the substances, but always about what’s underneath. For John, the loss of all the men in his life (father, grandfather, uncle), at an early age, left him vulnerable to a certain loneliness—even emptiness—that was temporarily relieved by alcohol and drugs, despite his spiritual nature or maybe even because of it. He was a very sensitive teen—like many of the kids I work with today—and the power of his story lies in the fact that it’s a very human tale, about losing one’s way and finding it again. Kids can understand these things if we’re honest and straightforward in our talking or writing about them.

Tell us about the research you did for the book? What surprised you most about Coltrane?

I did a lot of reading about Coltrane’s life, from a variety of sources. This wasn’t simply to understand the arc of his life, but to benefit from different perspectives on the man and insights into his character. What surprised me most about Coltrane’s life were the details about his childhood. He was deeply affected by his father’s and grandfather’s deaths, and suffered panic attacks, tremendous self-doubt and grief because he lost his footing, part of his emotional foundation, at the age of 12/13. And of course, this was only intensified by living in the Jim Crow South. As a child, I experienced some emotional challenges of my own, and I still marvel at how people survive such powerful—and seemingly destructive—forces.

Spirit Seeker deals with spirituality. Are you spiritual yourself or did you include it because it was a big part of Coltrane’s life?

I’ve always been very drawn to the spiritual side of things, from my early exposure to Christianity to a deep interest in Eastern philosophies—Buddhism and Taoism—as a teenager and adult. I also nearly died as a result of an accident when I was 24 years old, and that experience changed my life in profound ways. It was a spiritual moment for me, and became a touchstone of sorts for everything that followed. Coltrane had a similar experience when he decided to stop using drugs—he experienced a revelation—and it put him on a new path, one that led to his work with Thelonius Monk, his reunion with Miles Davis, and his development as a band leader and composer. A Love Supreme is really all about his spiritual transformation, his rebirth, and the gratitude that he felt for being able to use and develop his talents. It’s a jazz lovesong, and you can hear Coltrane himself speaking the words “A Love Supreme, A Love Supreme,” over and over. It’s also about a personal approach to the Divine, and how each of us interprets that connection.
You’re a clinical social worker and psychotherapist who works with kids and teen on issues like addiction. How does it influence you as a writer?

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m really still 16 (though my wife might put the number considerably younger than that). I love teenagers because I tune into that age frequency, which is filled with longing and hopefulness, a search for the ideal. Teens want so much to believe in the goodness of the world, but they’re easily disappointed and often have trouble sustaining confidence in themselves, or faith in other people. And who can blame them? Which is why they need to be given inspiring examples—like John Coltrane—in books and movies. Teens are very susceptible to inspiration.

What do you think is the appropriate age that parents should start telling their kids about substance abuse?

So many parents I know—well-meaning parents—send mixed messages to their kids about substance use, and especially about drinking. Sure, it’s funny to see Cheech and Chong carrying a three-foot joint, but when adults start telling “war stories” about their adventures at Woodstock or Bonnaroo, we can’t blame kids for wanting to experiment. And teenagers will experiment—they want to learn about life on their own—but if we talk to them while keeping a cool head, the lines of communication can remain open. Teenagers also have advanced B.S. detectors, so if we say one thing and do another (like get drunk at a party or smoke a joint in the basement), then they feel there’s a double standard. Most of all, kids want adults to be consistent, honest, and reliable, and while none of us is perfect, it’s important to match our words to our behaviors as parent, caregiver, teacher or mentor. There’s really no perfect age for discussing substance use with kids, because every child has different needs and experiences. Ideally, it should be an ongoing conversation.

What do you hope kids take away from Spirit Seeker?

The book isn’t didactic, just a story of one person’s persistence, a desire to do the best he can with what he’s been given. Everyone’s best is different, of course, and we may feel that some people fall short of what they could accomplish. But life is more subtle and rich than that—things aren’t always so simple—and we can never say where someone will end up, given sufficient support and encouragement. Coltrane would have been the first person to thank all those—musicians, family, and friends—who helped him along the way, all of whom he saw as embodying Spirit in one form or another. We’re very much interdependent on one another.

You’ve also written books about Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. Can you explain your fascination with musicians?

Music and musicians are fascinating! I love music and can never really get enough of it, given my taste for just about every genre: world music, jazz, pop, blues, symphonic, rock, folk, country, bluegrass and electronic. John Cage, Eminem, Bessie Smith, Bartok—I could go on forever—they’re all fair game, depending on the mood I’m in. Only problem is, if I listen to something intently and repeatedly during the day, I hear it all night in my sleep!

How does Rudy Gutierrez’s illustrations enhance your words and how closely did you collaborate?

I wish I could take credit for choosing Rudy, but that honor goes to my beloved editor, Lynne Polvino, of Clarion. She has a great talent for pairing picture book authors with illustrators, and even though she graciously asks my opinion, it’s not really the author’s call. Picture book authors and illustrators are pretty much kept apart (for their own good and the sake of the book!), but Rudy asked that I be present when he brought in his paintings/illustrations. So the folks at Clarion had his paintings—some of which were 5 feet high by 3 feet wide—set up around a large conference room when I arrived, and one look took my breath away. At that moment, I realized that the book wasn’t about me, or Rudy, or maybe even about John Coltrane, but about the themes of Art and Spirit that are at its core. I’ll also say that Rudy has a big heart, full of Spirit, and his sincere dedication to Coltrane’s story and music shows in those incredible images.

What are you working on now? Maybe something on Billie Holiday? I know my kids would love that.

Funny you should say that, because I always wanted to do a picture book on Billie but never found a way that made sense. Fortunately, Carole Boston Weatherford did write about her—for a teen audience—with Becoming Billie Holiday, a powerful, beautiful book. As for my present projects, I recently sold a picture book text called Bird & Diz, about the creators/creation of Bebop, and also finished a picture book text on Charlie Chaplin, another fascinating subject. See—I don’t just do musicians!