A few months ago, Henkes joined School Library Journal as opening keynote speaker at our annual Day of Dialog (DoD), in which he told the children’s librarians, publishers, and children’s book authors and illustrators in attendance that he was a lifelong book lover and, in fact, “built by books.”

SLJ is happy to be sponsoring another event featuring the author, an exclusive webcast live from Bank Street College of Education in New York City next week, on September 17, 2013. As we look forward to hearing him speak and answer questions from kids, parents, and teachers, SLJ sat down with Henkes for an in-depth chat about his career so far, his creative process, and his next projects.

Can you tell us more about your lifelong relationship with books?
From the very beginning, I grew up in a house that didn’t have very many children’s books, but going to the library was very important to my mother, and we went to the library the same way you’d go to the grocery store or to school. So it was part of life. And I grew up loving books.

You’ve spoken before about the importance of sharing books with children. Can you tell us more about your experiences reading aloud to your kids?
I had a large collection of children’s books, and when I became a parent I was, I think, at the very beginning very stingy with my books because they were in perfect condition, and I knew what happened to the books my kids “read.” But the same person inside me knew that that’s what books are for. And I think it has been wonderful to watch my kids grow up with books. I’m sure I’ve made many mistakes as a parent but every day, [reading aloud to them] was one thing that I think was so right, and it exposed them to a lot. I think it broadened their horizons. I think it made them more empathetic.

How did you choose which books to read aloud to your kids?
Some were things that I wanted to read, that I remembered loving and I wanted to share it with them. They also read independently, but sometimes they would have something that they would want me to read aloud as well, and they would decide what they wanted. We chose them in different ways.

What were your favorite books growing up?
I loved Call it Courage by Armstrong Sperry. I loved Beverly Cleary’s books. I went through a phrase where I really loved Garth Williams illustrations, so the head children’s librarian at the Racine [WI] public library would show me books that he had illustrated. Those books were favorites. What else did I love? I went through different phases as I suppose all kids do, but I loved Charlotte’s Web—how could one not? And I remember the Henry Reed books—they aren’t very much around now, but I remember loving those. I read them to my kids! They’re still loved.

What about books of your colleagues that you newly discovered as a parent?
You know I read Harry Potter aloud. It was fun! It was! My son was also a huge Redwall fan. One book that they both really loved was James Marshall’s Rats on the Roof. It was a huge, huge favorite. I read aloud Kate DiCamillio’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, that was fun. And I read Vera Williams’s Scooter aloud when they were a big younger, and that was a big hit.

How do you create your characters’ unique voices and personalities?
I think about my characters long before I begin writing, and I really try to get a very clear picture in my mind who they are—how old they are, what they like. I try to create that whole family. And then when I feel pretty confident about them, I will jot things down, not writing the story yet but really just writing down facts about the character so by the time that I do begin writing, I’m pretty certain who they are. And if I begin too soon for me, I’ll quickly find it out.

Do you make scrapbooks or storyboards?
I have notebooks and folders. I often will have a notebook and I’ll make little tabs for the characters and write down my facts about the different characters in their section, and add to it and refer to it. And sometimes I don’t use a  lot of it. It’s not in the book per se, but it’s still helps me know who they are. Sometimes I will write down what a character’s favorite color is or favorite food, and it won’t end up being in the book, but it helped me create him or her.

So, in a way, you are conducting research for your characters?
Someone once asked me about the way kids were taught to write in schools—prewriting, etc.—and at first I thought I don’t do any of that, but then I realized that I do all of it. I just do it differently. I don’t think of it as prewriting, my notebooks about characters.

[But ] with Billy Miller, in the third section, it was based on a restaurant my kids loved when they were little that I hadn’t been to in years, so I went one day by myself for lunch, with my notebook. So that was research! But when I hear the word research, I think of it differently.

Your notebooks sound like they would make a great kit lit exhibit!
I did an exhibit at the CCBC with my novel Protecting Marie, and I had the notebooks, and I even had a few handwritten paragraphs and how they morphed into the finished book. It was nice for me to go back and organize it. And again the thing that was most surprising to me was that there was so much of it. It was the first time I looked at it, I suppose, in a more academic way.

What inspired you to write The Year of Billy Miller?
 The last novel I had written was Junonia, and it was about a 10-year-old girl, and I really had spent a lot of time with her, and so I thought I wanted to spend time with a boy. I had just finished doing the three “Penny” books, beginning readers, and even though they were longer than picture books, there was a lot of art, [so]  I really wanted to do a novel or a chapter book. And because Junonia was set on an island and she was an only child, I wanted something different. I knew from the start there would be at least a sibling. That book was a away from home, so I wanted it to be a book at home—wherever, whatever home was—and so that’s sort of the way I began this book.

 So you wanted a more domestic, familiar book?
Yeah! And those are the kinds of books I’m drawn to anyway. All of my books—even one that took place on an island—I still think of them as pretty small, domestic stories. The one thing that is sort of funny to look at is the list, when I’m trying to come up with names. I had pages of names! I wanted him to have sort of a common name. I loved the internal rhyme. It just sounded right.

Is there a lot of you in the character?
I volunteered in my kids’ first- and second-grade classrooms once a week. I think all of the characters have a piece of me in them, but I was really trying to remember that and channel that experience, when my son was 7 and my daughter was 3. I really made an effort to stay in Billy’s head. It’s in the third person, limited, but I wanted to remember he’s a 7-year-old boy. I wanted the prose to reflect that.

He does have a great vocabulary.
Yeah! But I think reading to one’s kids allows him to have that. One thing I would love when I read aloud [was] when my kids would ask, ‘What does that mean?’ It would open the door to not only what a dictionary is, but [for them] to try to guess what it means. And that was wonderful.

But for Billy Miller, I tried really hard to not dwell on descriptions that Billy wouldn’t, and I love describing things, and I really had to hold back. I think I’m an artist first, and I love describing things, but I really had to watch myself. I had to cut as I went.

Do you think you will write a Billy  sequel?
I’m thinking about it…he’s still in my head. But I don’t know yet! I have a couple thoughts, but for me, one of the greatest joys about working on a novel is creating the characters, the family, the setting. And to have it already be done sort of takes away one of my greatest pleasures. There is something so satisfying about creating that whole new world.

Which is easier to do, a picture book or a novel? What’s your process like?
If I’m working on a novel and I’m getting towards the end, I sometimes think, ‘Oh I wish I was working on a picture book. They’re so much more fun and they’re easier!’ And then, if I’m working on a picture book and I have to redo a picture four times and I’m not loving it, I’ll think ‘Oh a novel is so much easier. It’s just words, and I can write in a coffee shop and I can go anywhere.’ [laughs]

I do like them both, but there are days when I think the other is easier or more fun. With a picture book, I always get to the point where I think the words are perfect before I do any kind of drawing. I don’t even let myself sketch anything until I have the words.

Do you have a favorite character or characters from your books?
I have to say that I do. I love Lilly, and I think she lends herself to story quite well. I’ve gone back to her a couple of times, and that’s been nice. Right now, [maybe] because it’s still really fresh, I do have a soft spot in my heart for Billy Miller. I do like him.

The book has been getting nice reviews so far.
Yeah, it’s been really nice! And I think it’s interesting because one never knows. I think some of the books of my own that I love most sell the least. It’s funny how that works. I don’t understand it.

I have a fondness for Junonia, I think in part it’s because it’s set on Sanibel Island, and we’ve gone there every year since my son was 6 months old, so it’s really become a part of what my family does. I wrote a lot of it during the winter, and it was really wonderful. Every day I could escape to this sunny blue warm world; I really remember that very vividly. I’d have to go out and shovel, but I could come back in and be on the beach. It was nice.

What can you tell us about your next project?
I have a picture book written called Waiting for Spring that my wife, Laura Dronzek, is going to illustrate. We’ve collaborated twice before, on my books Birds and Oh!
And I’ve just written the words for a picture book that I am illustrating myself.

How intense is the collaboration with Laura? Do you brainstorm together?
No! I try not to really say much of anything, to let it go. Laura can do with it what she wants. I really want it to be hers as much as its mine. It is [hard] at the very beginning, but once it’s gone—as long as I have something else to work on—then it’s great! I do like to just focus on one thing. And now that I have my thing to work on, it’s time.

You are known for your many animal characters, especially mice, but each one is its own unique person, its own mouse.
[laughs] Yes! I hope.

Can you tell us more about how those came about?
The first four books that I did had humans as the characters fairly realistically rendered, and the fifth was Bailey Goes Camping. My texts were starting to become more humorous, and I thought I could better tap the humor in the words by drawing more loosely and using animal characters. I tried rabbits for Bailey Goes Camping, and I liked it.

The next book I wrote was A Weekend with Wendell, and I wanted to try something else. And I sketched several different animals and I thought, ‘Oh! Mice would be fun!’ And I had such a good time with Wendell that the next book I wrote was Sheila Rae the Brave, and I wrote Wendell into the story. And Sheila Rae the Brave was really the first book of mine that had a bigger sales bump than the other ones, and I really had a good time doing it, so I kept doing it. But it wasn’t anything that I planned.

If someone would have told me some 30 years ago, ‘When you’re 52, that you’re going to have 13 books with mice,’ I would have [denied it]. It just happened, it did! [laughs]

My career just happened very slowly and steadily. I was young when I began, too, so I’ve had a lot of time to grow. But I think it would be really difficult to have the first book be a smashing success. I’m really grateful for the slow steady way things progressed.

Attend the Kevin Henkes LIVE webcast event on September 17 for a chance to win one of 25 signed copies of his new book The Year of Billy Miller, courtesy of HarperCollins.
It’s not too late to register! Click the link below to sign up:

With a rattle and a roll, award-winning author and artist Brian Floca takes readers on a ride across the country on the Transcontinental Railroad in his latest book, Locomotive (S&S, September, 2013). Floca’s lively text and detailed watercolor images paint a picture of these magnificent iron horses and the small towns and breathtaking landscapes they steamed through. Along the way, the author packs in information on how these machines operated, the people who worked and traveled on them, and how the Transcontinental Railroad changed America. Here the author discusses his longer-than-anticipated journey to Locomotive.

Tell us how Locomotive came to be.

A very early version of Locomotive was all about how the steam engine operates. I had little idea where [the book] was going or where it would be set. In asking those questions, I came to the Transcontinental Railroad, which totally upended the focus of the book.

You include a wealth of details in the book—sometimes you mention or draw a nugget only in passing. How did you decide what to include and what to leave out?

Momentum…I wanted to keep it in the narrative. An early scene about laying the rails was in and out of the book 10 times. The piece about the train’s construction feels so essential, yet it’s really its own story. Using it as the preamble for the trip felt right. If I had started with the idea of writing about the Transcontinental Railroad, I would have made a [very different] book.…In the end, I arrived at the trip in the way that a passenger would have experienced it. This book [is] about riding the train and what that felt like.

Were there any surprises in your research?

‘Locomotive’ ©Brian Floca

It was all surprise, which made it fantastic, and also difficult at times. Among the many things I enjoyed was [the language]—the phrase “double header” [is the term for two engines working together up a steep grade]. “Highball” is an old railroad signal to indicate that the way is clear; that’s where the drink comes from, though that didn’t make it into the book! Another surprise was how brightly painted, how beautiful the steam engines were. I expected them to be black, gray, and brown, but the companies were proud of them—they were the face of the company. These machines were the cutting-edge technology in their day and transforming the country. Someone commented that they were trying to “civilize” the technology, with Renaissance Revival details around the windows.

You traveled the path of the Transcontinental Railroad, and some of the photos you took attest to an unchanged landscape. Did those observations inform your work?

Absolutely. I had a very simple idea of what the landscape would be like before I took the trip—I was going to show the train approaching the Rockies, winding its way toward a wall of mountains. One of the things I learned making the drive was how ingeniously engineered the line was; you never have that moment when you’re on the Transcontinental Railroad route. [The tracks] wind their way in at the gentlest slope, near Cheyenne, WY. I would have [had that wrong] if I hadn’t made the trip. Almost everything that has to do with the landscape is indebted to that trip—even the endpaper elevation map.

‘Locomotive’ ©Brian Floca

In contrast to trips taken in your books Lightship (2007) and Moonshot (2009, both Atheneum), the path of the locomotive gave way to new cultures growing up around it and displaced others—the Chinese who came to work on the Central Pacific line and the Cheyenne, Pawnee, and Arapaho. And the African-American Pullman porters were an essential part of the rail system. The Transcontinental Railroad really changed America, in perhaps unanticipated ways, didn’t it?

Some of the most trying stretches in creating the book were spent thinking about how to address the more difficult issues that arrived with the train, especially with regard to Native Americans. The story of the porters is a fascinating story, one with difficult aspects, too, but with some positive aspects as well. The porters were men who might have been emancipated just five years earlier—and they’re not enjoying the journey the way a passenger might; they’re working, they’re enduring discrimination, but at the same time they’re crossing the country and their horizons are expanding. They are, it’s been argued, the beginning of the black middle class. There were so many ways in which the train transformed the country.

Brian Floca discusses his research for Locomotive and reads a scene from the book in this audio recording, courtesy of TeachingBooks.net.

‘Locomotive’ ©Brian Floca

They live in Far Rockaway, an isolated neighborhood plagued by gangs but graced by the ocean. AnnMarie’s favorite things are singing in choir and hanging out with her friends.Then she falls for Darius, an older boy with his own recording studio, and ends up pregnant at 14 with a boyfriend who hits her.

One day AnnMarie notices a flyer announcing open auditions for an indie film. She takes the leap and lands a leading role. Subtitled “A Novel, Based on a True Story”, On the Come Up is just that. Recently I interviewed filmmaker Hannah Weyer about writing her first novel.

Can you tell us about the young woman whose life inspired your novel? How did you come to know her?

Almost 15 years ago, my husband, Jim McKay, made his second feature film, Our Song. It is a wonderful story, filmed entirely on location—mostly in Crown Heights, Brooklyn—and mixed actors with non-actors, neighborhood onlookers, and a local marching band. I know for both of us it was one of the most gratifying experiences we’ve had in life because it was what produced our treasured and long-lasting friendship with Anna Simpson, who inspired me to write On the Come Up.

At the time, Anna was a 15-year-old girl living with her mother in Far Rockaway, Queens, a neighborhood often defined by its social isolation, Section 8 housing, and violent crime. Even though Anna had been untrained as an actress and was due to give birth a month before filming began, four call-backs and many discussions later, Jim cast her to play one of the lead roles in the movie.

I had recently completed a documentary and was hanging around the Our Song set with a video camera, documenting little moments with the cast, crew, and neighborhood kids. It was there that Anna and I first became friends, though our upbringing, age difference, and day-to-day preoccupations could have kept us apart.

I was in awe of Anna’s determination, and her ability to juggle the job of acting with caring for her newborn. When I thought back to my own teenage years, my life seemed to dim in comparison. Nonetheless, something clicked between us—maybe it was her charm, sense of humor, and honesty, but we found ourselves in a lasting friendship that has deepened over the last fifteen years.

At what point did you decide to write a novel based on her life? Did you ever consider writing a nonfiction account instead?

It was a few years ago at a family picnic that the first seed was planted. As Anna and I were catching up, I told her I was in between film projects and trying my hand at writing short fiction. She said, well you know I have a story to tell and we laughed because I knew it was true—in her relatively short life, she did have a story, lots of them, in fact. I thought about Anna, her neighborhood and the people she grew up with, how she fought to upend her social isolation, put money in her pocket and raise her child, to defy the downward drag of domestic violence that seemed to be her fate.

I wondered about all the small ways individuals find to level the playing field, turn a volatile home into a stable one, or simply find happiness when a sense of well-being isn’t the status quo.

Over the next several months, Anna and I sat and talked. We collected hours of recorded interviews and it soon became clear that her fearlessness would become the dominant trait of the main character of On the Come Up. I decided to draw from several key events—the birth of her daughter, her role in Our Song, and her eventual departure from Far Rockaway—to structure the novel.  Using these real events as signposts, I began to string together a fictional story about a girl’s rite of passage, an odyssey from one place to another. In a world where dreams of escape are fed by endless stories of overnight success, celebrity, and stardom, sometimes the struggle is as simple as finding your way off the block.

Fictionalizing opened up a personal space for me to bring my own musings to play. My creative interest in examining family structures, the function of boundaries, and the question of escape moved the story away from biography, and toward an imagining of a protagonist and a world in which these themes could be developed and explored.

How did you master the urban language of the novel?

Besides working on films and screenplays, each year for the past dozen years, I spend part of my time as a guest teaching artist or one-on-one mentor in high schools, after school programs, or for media arts youth organizations. Being around teenagers, I find it especially engaging to listen to how they joke and tease, to their particular phrasings or colloquialisms, how they disguise their feelings or fears, how they jostle to express themselves.

I was also very much influenced by the interviews Anna and I made together, and it became clear, early on in the writing process, that it would be Anna’s voice, and not my own, that would become my muse.

What is it about AnnMarie that made her aspire beyond expectations—to go beyond the norm for those growing up in her isolated neighborhood?

I really don’t know where strength of character comes from. Are people born with backbone, with higher aspirations, or yearnings and curiosity? Or is strength of character something that can be nurtured, brought to play in a young person’s life and made meaningful?

I do know that I gave this quality to AnnMarie because I saw it in Anna Simpson, just as I’ve seen it in other teenagers I’ve spent time with over the years, young people who apply themselves, defy expectation, and prove beyond a doubt the usefulness of simple, daily conversation and contact between grown-ups and children at the cusp of adulthood.

AnnMarie’s story has fairytale elements—some might say that if it wasn’t based on truth it would be too far-fetched. Yet, AnnMarie’s struggles are realistic, even mundane. And her successes do not make over her life. How did you balance engaging storytelling and reality?

Interesting thought. I might disagree though that AnnMarie’s story is far-fetched. If you think about it, every day thousands of kids go on auditions for movies, for singing or dance competitions, or for reality TV contests, like American Idol or The X Factor. But we only hear about the success stories that make the news. AnnMarie’s story is really about what happens before and after the audition, the movie premiere. She goes on with her life, enriched by the experience, but still faced with the challenges most people are up against: how do I find work, how do I make a stable home, how do I find happiness and love?

Despite the fact that this novel is published for adults, do you have hopes or expectations for its success with teenagers?

Yes! I think AnnMarie is a character that teenagers can relate to and will want to spend time with.  What becomes clear as you sink into the story is that AnnMarie is just a regular kid. She likes music, wants love and friendship. She dreams. She has beefs with other kids, sometimes physical, sometimes verbal, and won’t back down from a fight. She is at times naive, pig-headed, brash, single-minded, and yet she has this remarkable ability to be optimistic about life, a quality that helps her face down conflict and climb over spatial barriers, and keeps her asking questions about her place in the world.

It’s true she might have more drama than the average teenager but not by much—most kids have dealt with bullies at school or on the block, have encountered a domineering grownup who exacts control. Some have been pregnant or have friends who have become pregnant. Some have had boyfriends who have cheated and who have felt betrayed.

I think On the Come Up is the kind of story teachers can bring into the classroom to share with their students. AnnMarie’s story lends itself to discussions about class, identity, family histories, generational patterns, domestic abuse and/or the relationship between social isolation and violence in contemporary urban America.

It’s been my experience that young people can and will rise to the intellectual occasion when the material feels emotional and relevant, when characters appeal to them on some visceral or personal level.

See the SLJ review of On the Come Up, published on the Adult Books 4 Teens blog.

Aprilynne Pike: Well, hello James. Nice to see you too. Why yes, I am looking lovely today.

JD: Oh, are we supposed to do hellos and stuff in this?

AP: Yes.

JD: Hello then.

AP: Weren’t we talking about my new book?

JD: You’re impossible.

AP: I know.

JD: Okay, so, Earthbound. What’s it about?

AP: It’s about Tavia, the sole survivor of a plane crash who can make stuff.

JD: Like . . . crafts? I love crafts! Does she make those cool glass bead necklaces? I have this one I wear to bed that—

AP: No, James. Not like crafts. Like matter out of thin air. She’s a goddess. But cursed.

JD: Oh. Yeah. Well, I hate crafts.

AP: …

JD: Don’t look at me like that. You put two guys in your book after promising you wouldn’t, didn’t you?

AP: It was an accident! Seriously!

JD: Sure it was. But the important question is, are there any Grievers?

AP: No, that’s your book.

JD: How about mazes?

AP: Your book again.

JD: How about a movie coming out on Valentine’s Day next year?

AP: Still your book.

JD: Oh, yeah . . . How about guns?

AP: Some of those.

JD: Explosions?

AP: Those too.

JD: Dead people?

AP: I’m afraid so.

JD: Sounds like my kind of book!

AP: No.

JD: No?

AP: No. Too much kissing.

JD: Gross.

AP: How many kids do you have?

JD: Don’t change the subject.

When readers of nonfiction see the names Sy Montgomery and Nic Bishop on the cover of a book, they know they’re in for an adventure. Together this author and photographer dream team has written about and photographed expeditions on the trail of snow leopards in Mongolia, tarantulas in French Guiana, and the kakapo in New Zealand. On a recent trip, the two traveled with Pati Medici to the Pantanal Wetlands in Brazil, described as “the Everglades on steroids,” and home to tick swarms, pumas, wild pigs, giant amadillos, and the elusive tapir.

Why are scientists interested in the tapir?
The tapir is South America’s largest land mammal, and it’s what’s known as a “keystone” species: an animal whose lifestyle profoundly affects the health of its ecosystem, which makes it important to all the other animals and plants who share its habitat. Tapirs love fruit and they transport the seeds in the fruits they’ve eaten far from the trees on which they grew. Pati calls the tapir “the gardener in the forest” because it “plants” (complete with fertilizer) the seeds that grow into trees upon whose fruit many other animals depend. So tapirs are integral to the rainforest ecosystem. Yet very little is known about them—including how best to protect them.

The tapir looks almost prehistoric. Tell us about them.
A tropical animal with a long, flexible snout (which it can use a snorkel when it swims) and a stout body, four hoofed toes on front feet and three on each in back, the tapir looks like a cross between a hippo, an elephant, and something prehistoric. But tapirs aren’t related to elephants and hippos. Because of their flexible snouts, some people think they’re anteaters, but they’re not; their closest relatives are rhinos and horses. But the tapir is prehistoric; it has remained unchanged since the Pliocene, more than four million years ago, when mastodons and giant ground sloths roamed North America, and the first humans had not yet evolved in Africa. Tapirs lived all over Europe, Asia, and the Americas then. Now they’re found only in South America and Southeast Asia.

Your trip brought you to the Pantanal wetlands in Brazil, a place that has been described as “South America’s Serengeti” and “the Everglades on steroids.” What challenges did that environment present?
One challenge was all that water. This is the world’s largest wetland, and so many areas are difficult to reach because in the wet season, they are flooded. It also presents a danger to a tapir if you dart one outside a trap. Tapirs often flee to water, and this can be very dangerous for the tapir if it rushes into water for safety and then collapses from the tranquilizer.  Another was the heat—especially when we had a tapir in a trap. Normally they would be in the shade of the forest or the cool of the water by mid-day; we were eager to get them out of the traps as soon as possible anyway, but after early morning, we were especially worried that hot temperatures would add to the stress. And for us, the ticks were a nuisance—they were thick as flocking on our pants, and their bites were itchy!

What sort of team must be assembled for this sort of mission?
Our team was headed by Brazilian scientist Patricia Medici and included her Brazilian field assistant, a Brazilian-American darting specialist, a French zoo veterinarian, a Brazilian specialist in animal diseases and parasites—plus photographer Nic Bishop from New Zealand and me from New Hampshire in the States.

What modern technology did the team use to track the animals?
We followed the tapirs with radio telemetry and tracked them with collars transmitting GPS information to orbiting satellites. We searched on foot, by car, and with motion-sensing remote cameras. And we (and off site, some of Pati’s other colleagues) used microscopes, PCR, powerful computers and other lab equipment to look at their blood, classify their ticks, and analyze their genetics.

Once a tapir is captured, what happens next?
We would dart the animal to tranquilize it, so it wouldn’t be frightened while we examined it and affixed a radio collar to its neck. It was thrilling to be so close to a tapir, we could touch it. But we had to work fast. You don’t want to use too much tranquilizing drug—but you don’t want your 400-pound tapir to wake up in the middle of an exam, either!

You noted in the book that one of the scientists’ goals was to find out how much roaming space tapirs need to survive. What did they discover? What other information do they hope to learn as they continue to study these animals?
Pati hasn’t crunched her data yet, as she is hoping to get more tapirs and more years of information before she analyzes it all for a large sample size. But it’s known that often animals of the same species have different space requirements in different habitats. Tigers, for instance, in the cold Russian far east may need 10 times the space that tigers in the tropics might use. As Pati points out, tapirs live in lots of very different kinds of places—from high mountains to the Amazon. Tapirs live in five different types of habitat just in Brazil alone. So it’s necessary to study them in each of these habitats to see what their needs are.

Was this a successful trip?
Pati said she thought this was the most successful of her research expeditions yet! Before Pati and her team left the field, they had captured and collared three new tapirs and microchipped another; recaptured three old friends; collected tapir poop, skin, hair, and blood; and located other tapirs with sightings, camera traps, and telemetry. It was just fantastic to be part of it!

How did it compare to some of your other trips to learn about animals: snow leopards in Mongolia, the tree kangaroo in New Guinea, the kakapo in New Zealand?
Each trip has different challenges and delights. The snow leopard work in the Altai Mountains of the Gobi demanded hours of difficult, high-altitude hiking on rocky scree—and as result we got incredible views of this stark and gorgeous landscape. To even get to the area where we’d look for tree kangaroos in the cloud forest of Papua New Guinea, we had to hike to 10,000 feet on slippery mud for three days, bringing with us everything we’d need, including tents and scientific equipment, for two weeks. We didn’t camp in Brazil for the tapir book—we stayed in a comfortable fazenda on a cattle ranch, with beds and showers. But it was a very dramatic book. At first it seemed our dart guns and anesthetic wouldn’t work. We were capturing tapirs but couldn’t collar them. What was going wrong? That was part of the scientific challenge of field work, and figuring out the problems was something Pati’s team did beautifully.

Sy Montgomery, the tapir. From ‘The Tapir Scientist’ (Montgomery) Houghton Mifflin.

Any comment about the two recently named tapirs traipsing about the Pantanel: Nic Bishop and Sy Montgomery?
Both tapirs have been spotted repeatedly since they were collared, and Sy Montgomery has been seen with her new baby.

I understand you just returned from scuba diving in the Pacific with octopuses. Is another book in the works?
Indeed! The next book to appear will be Chasing Cheetahs, which Nic and I researched in Namibia together last summer at the Cheetah Conservation Fund’s African headquarters. In the South Pacific I was researching a book on octopus, working with underwater photographer Keith Ellenbogen to record how a team of researchers from Canada, Alaska, and Brazil are figuring out how octopuses’ personalities affect their food choices. No kidding—one of the things the team did was give each octopus we found a personality test!

I learned to scuba dive for that book, even though we ended up finding most of our octopuses in very shallow water in which we could snorkel—but I plan to use my scuba skills to work with Keith on a book on great white sharks after that.

The Tapir Scientist by Sy Montgomery, Illustrated by Nic Bishop (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013; Gr 4-8.)

Sy Montgomery reveals her passion for animals in this mini-documentary, courtesy of TeachingBooks.net

Please tell me about the inspiration behind Somebody Up There Hates You—I understand it grew out of a short story, but your dedication in the foreword  leads me to believe there is a greater personal connection.

Yes, this novel grew out of a short story called “SUTHY Syndrome” that I wrote some years ago. The story was published in the Bellevue Literary Review, one of my favorite literary journals, in 2009.  After the story came out, I thought I’d heard the last from Richie—but, no. He just kept on talking in my head and he let me know that he had a great deal more to say and to do. So I expanded the story into the novel, adding many new characters and events but keeping the time frame of 10 days for the whole story to take place.

But you’re also right that the real origins of this book go back much farther, to the many times that I stayed with my son in Babies Hospital at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. There, I met all sort of kids—sick, wounded, all hurt in some way. The ones who have always stayed in my mind—and my dreams—are the teenagers, who were both heartbreaking and hilarious. Full of wit and spirit and rebellion, even in the face of devastating illnesses. I’ve never forgotten their voices. That’s really where Richie and Sylvie came from.

Richie, believing this to be his last lap through a hospital, takes Marcus Aurelius’s advice to heart: “Wait for death with a cheerful mind.” And a mischievous mind as well, wouldn’t you say?

Absolutely.  Richie, no matter what his physical condition, is still a seventeen-year-old boy who likes to laugh and who likes to disobey the rules, especially rules that make no sense to him. He has a keen sense of absurdity and a sharp wit. He’s just like any other teenage boy—full of passion and sexual longing. And he has a deep desire to pack as much living as he can into whatever time he’s got.

Early on in the book, I became very aware of Richie’s use of his sense of smell to get a “read” on something or someone. His Uncle Phil, coconspirator in springing Richie from hospice on Halloween night, is described as smelling like “bacon and marijuana smoke and outdoors air.” On the way back to the hospital, Richie again notes the smells—”Exhaust, dead leaves, wetness from the storm drains, and beyond all that, the river.” His Grandma smells like “perfume and hair spray, cigarettes and a little bit of sweat.”

That’s an interesting observation. I hadn’t really thought about it but I do tend to use images of smells in my writing, perhaps because smell is such an evocative sense, one that can transport us to different times and places with one whiff.  Also, it makes sense for Richie to rely on smells to read people, since his eyesight is failing. And he’s in a place where smells are often stale and sterile. So when Richie finally gets to go outdoors, he really inhales the whole rich atmosphere because he misses it so much. And the same holds true when someone comes in from the outside world:  Richie has a deep appreciation for the new air that they carry with them. It’s like a gift to him.

Sylvie is the only other teenager in hospice, and she and Richie quickly become the darlings of the ward. But her illness seems to have come on quickly, while Richie describes himself as the “Incredible Dying Boy” and has been in and out of hospitals since he was 11 years old. It obviously affects their acceptance of the terminal nature of their disease, and the reactions of their families. What made you decide to set it up this way?

I wanted Sylvie and Richie to be very different, in many ways. Sylvie comes from a wealthy family; she was a pretty, popular and successful private school girl before she became sick.  Richie was raised in near-poverty by a single mom and has some fairly disreputable relatives (like his Uncle Phil). Out in the “real world,” Sylvie and Richie would never have been a couple, would probably never have even met. But, here, in the world of hospice, they have been thrown together under the most intense circumstances. So they bond, in all sorts of ways. And, yes, it’s true that Sylvie in no way accepts her diagnosis as terminal. She is fierce in her belief that she will survive. This may be because she hasn’t been sick as long as Richie but her ferocity is also part of her essential personality. She is, in many ways, her father’s daughter; Richie says that both Sylvie and her father have dragon’s blood running in their veins.

I really love the way you played with Richie’s character through the other characters’ nicknames for him. Edward, the tender-tough nurse, calls him Richard. His grandmother calls him Richie Rich, after the comic book character. Uncle Phil treats hims like royalty, calling him King Richard and addressing him as “my liege.” Did you plot this out, or did it just happen as those characters developed?

I had no plan to have various characters use different terms for Richie but as characters entered the book, they just naturally started in using their own pet names for him. I think that the names they choose do help to characterize the people who interact with Richie; the nicknames help to establish individuals as different and each relationship as unique. Phil, for example, tries always to make a game out of their time together; he’s always, in his own way, trying to distract and entertain Richie. That is Phil’s way of showing love. He’s never sappy or sugary, but always funny and a bit outrageous. Phil also has another way of showing his strong feelings for Richie and all of the other hospice patients, and that is through his drawings.

Despite his seemingly powerless position, Richie actually puts a lot of major changes in motion for those around him, some on purpose, some accidental—pushing together his mother and her estranged mother, forcing the issue of getting restitution from his long absent father, and by chance, the cop assigned to guard him has a long-standing crush on his mother. I felt respect for Richie, not pity.

I’m so glad that you feel respect for Richie. I do, too. He’s managed to grow up in this short amount of time. He’s fallen in love and done everything in his power to protect the girl he loves.  He’s tried to provide for his mother, to make her life a bit easier when he’s gone. Richie, by the end of the book, has accomplished what he set out to do, under enormously difficult circumstances. He hasn’t planned it all but he takes advantage of every opportunity to help the people he loves get by when he is gone. For me, Richie really is a hero.

Respected for her adult short stories, Hollis is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. She is Professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY and teaches for the Fairfield University MFA in Creative Writing Program. Her latest collection of short stories, Corporeality, was published in January 2013 by Able Muse Press. She lives in Kinderhook NY.

Seamon, Hollis. Somebody Up There Hates You (Algonquin Young Readers, Sept.  2013, Tr $16.99, ISBN 9781616202606) Gr 9 Up.

So, let’s talk debt. Apparently our country has some. Do you think the debt crisis could someday hijack the society we live in?

I think it already has! About 40 million Americans have student debt. So not even counting medical bills and credit cards and car payments, young people are entering adulthood with huge debt burdens. Right now about 35% of student debtors under 30 are having trouble making their payments. That’s about 2.4 million young adults who are viewed, in the language of debt, as delinquent. I think that has a huge impact, not just on how you enter on the path to adulthood, but even in terms of how our society imagines of us. I feel like 30 years ago a conversation about YA that used the word ‘delinquent’ would be talking about S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. Now it goes without saying that we’re talking about debt.

Dude, let’s not even get started with student debt. I’m already seeing it have a crippling effect on my former college mates. And speaking of the effect debt has on young people—Proxy asks a compelling question: what effect does financial debt have on us as humans? What was your inspiration for writing a novel with a central theme of the impact of debt?

It’s a theme in Proxy because I’m fascinated with how debt impacts our relationships and by the morality we assign to debt—the idea of owing a debt to society or that good people pay their debts and bad people don’t.

I couldn’t agree more. Having debt is so linked now with one’s character. It’s a warped view that overwhelmingly favors the rich.

Like in Game of Thrones: “The Lannisters always pay their debts.” It’s a promise and a threat! And a luxury they have that the peasant class doesn’t.

Agh, Game of Thrones! Don’t remind me….

Even in our time, you can lose your house because of debt; your car, everything you own can be taken by the repo man. Somehow, a debt overrules every other obligation and we accept that, even though there’s no reason it has to be that way. It’s not an innate moral feeling we’re born with. Even when we talk casually, people say things like, ‘I owe you one,’ and ‘Can I borrow a stick of gum?” and “extra credit.” Owe, borrow, credit. The language surrounds us and we rarely question it.

Did you always know you wanted to write a novel about debt?

Nope! I knew I wanted to use a medieval concept of the Whipping Boy in a futuristic setting—that concept was there in the beginning, but I didn’t know how some poor kid would end up a whipping boy, or how some rich kid would end up having one… then, looking at my own student loan bills, it seemed like debt was the obvious answer! Debt makes you a proxy.

In creating the system, though, I wanted Syd and Knox to have very different ideas about what it means to owe something to someone. For Knox, debts are basic questions of societal order—you owe something, you are a debtor until you pay it back. That’s just the way it works. The person on the other end of it doesn’t really matter. Syd can’t ignore the person on the other end of his debt, but he also doesn’t see him as a human being, just as an instrument of his suffering. In a way, the story is about these two boys learning to see each other as whole people, rather than as parts of transaction.

That’s one of my favorite things about Proxy, the development of Knox and Syd’s relationship. It’s no secret that I love stories that throw together two people from opposite sides of the tracks and force them to understand the other person’s point of view.

Empathy is a major project of everything I write, even—and perhaps especially—in a world as brutal as Proxy’s. I think it’s such an important journey for teenage characters to go on, seeing that they are not the center of the universe and that their perspectives are not the only ones that count.

I think you do this magnificently.

Thanks! You do it so well with June and Day in Legend; it’s nice to know Knox and Syd can keep up. You think they’d get along in real life?

I could see Day and Knox butting heads a lot, what with their egos! But I think Day would take a liking to Syd immediately; they come from similar hardships and would totally get each other. June might empathize more with Knox’s upbringing. Or she might just end up muttering with Marie in the corner about boys.

I guess she would understand his point of view, but probably not sympathize. When we meet Knox, he uses people for his own enjoyment—that’s basically the extent of how he interacts with people. It’s all transactional to him.

On that note of relationship, let’s talk about Syd. Another unique thing about Proxy is that your main character, Syd, is gay—and yet the plot does not revolve around his sexual orientation (or consequences thereof). He simply is. Publishers Weekly said that, “the matter-of-fact presence of a gay lead in an action driven story is welcome and overdue.” What impact do you hope having a gay main character in an action-packed YA-thriller will have on the genre?

I have no idea, but I like to believe we are in an age when no single facet of your identity limits the kinds of stories you can see yourself in.

In real life we’ve knocked down closet doors from pro sports to the military, and on TV we have gay vampires, and gay show choir singers, and gay kings and swordsmen (can you tell I watch Game of Thrones?), so I like to think, possibilities are opening across genres for all kinds of people to be in all kinds of stories. As a gay man who loves action movies, I always wanted to see an action hero I could identify with that way. It’s not part of the ‘plot’ of Proxy, but it is part of who Syd is, how he sees the world. It affects the story (spoiler alert: Syd doesn’t ‘get the girl’), but it doesn’t dictate the story. In that sense, his sexuality is something new for this kind of book.

But there have been gay characters in all kinds of YA novels for a while now, from Cassie Clare’s “The Mortal Instruments” series (S & S), for example, or David Levithan’s entire body of work, or Bill Konigsberg’s. Malinda Lo was writing sci-fi and fantasy with queer characters while I was still learning the Dewey Decimal System.

All fantastic writers with fantastic books who have paved the road! I’m thinking especially of Malinda’s Adaptation (Little, Brown, 2012).

Yes! There are countless pioneers before me in this. So many pioneers that I feel like I’m probably less pioneering, as arriving with a lot of luggage at well-populated frontier spa.

And now I’m picturing Syd looking rather anxious at a frontier spa.

I can’t picture Syd in one of those robes! He’d be so uncomfortable.

I bet he’d enjoy himself once he’s on the massage table. Nobody leaves a Swedish massage unhappy!

I don’t think Syd likes strangers touching him. He has trust issues.

On second thought, you’re right. Knox probably gets Swedish massages daily, though.

Knox is right at home with anything decadent.

Knox is an interesting (and risky) character to write. He’s not exactly likable, for one—at least, not when we first meet him. I loved his transformation, though. Any specific inspiration for his character?

Me.

As scary as it is to admit, I am (or rather was) far more like Knox than Syd. First of all, Syd is handy—I am not. Syd knows how to fight. I don’t. Syd grew up hard and grew up poor. I grew up, like Knox, with an excess of privilege and comfort. Syd is not in the closet, but as a teen, I was. Knox, as a defense mechanism, as a response to the smothering cutthroat world of wealth he lives in, keeps the generous parts of himself hidden. That’s his closet. He isn’t hiding his sexuality, he’s denying his empathy. Denying a part of yourself can be destructive. It was for me. It is for Knox.

Also Knox is dashingly handsome and, well… I think it goes without saying he’s based on me there too.

He’s also a total smart ass.

Guilty!

I never would’ve guessed it, dude (she says with a straight face…). Now, you used to be a librarian. How did your background inform the creation of Proxy?

I’ve wanted to write for teens for a long time. Even before I was a YA librarian, I worked with adolescents in war-affected areas, and I was always amazed by the capacities of young people to shape the world even as they were still shaping themselves. I was amazed by the power stories had to get these young people through some truly horrific experiences. Whether it was the Eastern Congo or a slum of Bangkok or an isolated enclave in Kosovo, storytelling was a vital part of the life of every young person I met.

Next time we hang out, I must sit with you and hear details about your past work. It’s absolutely fascinating. When did you find yourself drawn to YA literature?

After I burned out on that sort of travel and started serving teens at New York Public Library, I fell in love with young adult literature. I fell in love with the process of matching the right book to the right kid at the right time, and seeing what an unexpected story could do for a teenager, whether it was armor against the blows that this world deals out to the young, or whether it ignited new ideas or confirmed secretly felt old ones, or just provided pure joyous imaginary wandering. I knew I wanted to be a part of creating those experiences. There’s nothing easy about being a teenager and there shouldn’t be anything easy about writing for teens. Everything is in flux and writing means getting into a dialogue with the flux. It can get bumpy. And that’s where it gets fun.

I should add, for all the big ideas in Proxy, my main concern was, truly, that it actually be fun. My writing philosophy was kind of, when in doubt, blow something up.

I think we might have similar writing philosophies.

I think we do! Get the pages turning and let the reader decide what matters. So there’s talk of debt and poverty and forgiveness and empathy, because they matter to me, but there are also genetically engineered armies and killer robots and a joke about making out with a horse.

Okay, so now I have to ask—

The horse joke is NOT autobiographical.

Okay okay! Just curious.

Before we’re through, I need to make a confession. I changed a main character’s name as I revised Proxy from “Mary” to “Marie” because of you. What can I say? You made an impression on me that I had to honor with a seriously passionate and deeply flawed character about whom I shouldn’t say much more, for plot reasons. Except that her flaws bear no relation to you.

I’ll add, aware of the irony, that I’m in your debt.

I am so flattered by Marie’s character! She’s awesome, especially with her flaws. I love it. Who doesn’t love a character with flaws? And you can pay your debt by always letting me read your manuscripts ahead of time.

It’s a deal! I’ll gladly be your proxy. Just don’t get in too much trouble. For my sake.

Want to hear more from Alex? Sign up now for SummerTeen: Hot Books for Young Adults, an all-day virtual event featuring 6 panels and 18 young adult authors! Can’t make it on July 24? Not to worry–register now and we’ll let you know when the event archive is ready for on-demand viewing.

At one time or another, most of us have struggled with weight or body image issues. Ann Gilardi, the 16-year-old narrator of K. A. Barson’s 45 Pounds (More or Less) (Viking, July 2013) has made it her goal is to lose that number of pounds by her aunt’s wedding, less than three months away. It quickly becomes clear that Ann has been down this road before. Aside from the time the teen spends with her Gram, Ann never quite feels that she fits in—be it in her clothes, at work, or within her own family. However, by the novel’s end, the insight this plucky protagonist gains about herself and her family outweighs the pounds she sheds.

What were the seeds of 45 Pounds?
I’ve been working on the book since 2006. At first, all I wanted to do was tell the story of a girl who was heavier in her own mind than she was in reality. Many books have protagonists who aren’t overweight but think they are; Ann is overweight and it has affected her social life, but the issue is more nuanced than that.

Ann’s mindset is so believable. Have you worked with teens who struggle with body image and eating disorders? Have you grappled with these issues yourself?
All of the above. Some of Ann’s internal thoughts are 100 percent me; I hate to admit that. The feelings are real, and I still struggle with them. I homeschooled my children in a cooperative and had classes that included my kids and their peers. Some of what is in the book came from them—not specific children, but bits of dialogue and the way in which they thought out loud.

As the book progresses, we see that Ann’s mother has her own body image issues.
Ann’s mother Suzy thinks she’s doing the best for her child. She would never call Ann fat, and she never says cruel things to her daughter. She sees being overweight as a hindrance to Ann. Part of my goal was for girls to realize that mothers have pure intentions, even if the things they do don’t necessarily come across that way.

What Ann picks up on are the subliminal messages that her mother sends out. Once she develops compassion for her mother, she recognizes that the woman was really directing these comments at herself.
Ann’s turmoil was internal….She was viewing [her weight and her family life] through a lens that was skewed.

As Ann waits for her S2S [diet] system to arrive, she says: “I’d better eat all the crap I can now, because once I start on S2S there’ll be no more real food for a long time.” It so perfectly captures the universal propensity to procrastinate.
I think those lines every day, unfortunately: “I’ll think about that tomorrow, but today I’ll do what I want.”

Ann needs to lose 45 pounds in order to conform to her “ideal weight” by the wedding. But it’s not until her focus turns from counting calories to adopting a healthy lifestyle that she is able to make some progress.
[Those weight charts are] kind of dangerous. Your “healthy” weight may vary [depending on which diet program you subscribe to or what doctor you see]. With my character, I wanted the focus to be on health rather than vanity.

You could hand this book to readers who might not have these issues, and they would enjoy Ann’s sense of humor and her struggle to fit in.
There are many people like Ann…. The cliques aren’t necessarily mean to Ann, but they’re not including her either. Some of it is Ann, too. Had she stepped up a little bit, out of her comfort zone, they’d have included her.

Raynee is such a winning character. She risks losing her popular friends to do the right thing by Ann. That’s rare, isn’t it?
Bullies…[are often] people who are scared or threatened. Here comes Ann and she’s buddying up to Raynee, and between the two of them, they are growing in confidence. [Raynee's friend Courtney is thinking,] “And what if she comes here and upheaves everything?” It was Courtney’s own insecurities, not Ann. I don’t think there was anyone [in the book] who was just evil.

What is your next novel about?
A cosmetology student who’s controlling in her own life, and expects a high bar from everyone around her until everything falls apart. She has to figure out what she’s done to contribute to it. Ann and Raynee make a cameo in the new book.

Listen to K.A. Barson introduce and read from 45 Pounds (More or Less), courtesy of TeachingBooks.net.

Photo by Sonya Sones

Longtime School Library Journal blogger Elizabeth Bird, the New York Public Library’s youth materials collections specialist, can add published author to her name this year. Her festive debut picture book, Giant Dance Party (HarperCollins, 2013), is about a girl who overcomes her stage fright by teaching blue fuzzy giants how to dance. SLJ caught up with Bird recently to discuss her unique path to publication, how her work as a children’s librarian informed her experience as a first-time author, and whether Lexy and the giants will be making a repeat performance.

Can you tell us about your path to publishing Giant Dance Party—from writing the manuscript to publication?
It all began in 2009. I had already intended to write a picture book, but I’m the kind of person who waits for the universe to dump something directly into my lap, which is exactly what happened. So when they give people advice about how to get a picture book published, don’t listen to me. My story is strange and wonderful. I found an email from the illustrator Brandon Dorman. I love his work so much. I had mentioned him several times on my blog, and included him on an end-of-the-year roundup list of best book jackets for his work on Jack Prelutsky’s The Wizard (HarperCollins, 2007). He’s just the nicest man ever born. Brandon emailed me and said, ‘Hey, let’s do a picture book together. You write and I’ll illustrate.’ He just had one stipulation: ‘I want to do giants leaping.’

And I responded, ‘Ok!’ We came up with three different picture book ideas, all of which involved giants leaping in some way. He presented them to his editor at Greenwillow, and they picked up two of them, which was remarkable! I got my full two-book deal.

Brandon is the [busiest] man in the world. He does the covers for all of the good books out there, like the “Fablehaven” series (Atheneum), and pretty much every fantasy title on the shelves today. We just couldn’t schedule it. Then our editor left Greenwillow, and whenever that happens you’re left in limbo. We ended up with Virginia Duncan, who turned out to be a godsend. She took one look at my manuscript and said ‘we’re going to have to make some changes.’ And thank God she did; she had the greatest notes. When we began the project, the giants were gross and disgusting, like typical giants. And now, they’re furry and blue. There’s something about furry blue giants that kids adore. I hold up this book in front of kids and they just gravitate towards it like nothing else. The giants’ clothes have never changed, but the giants themselves have become seriously fuzzified.

That took about four years, then.
There were a lot of starts and stops along the way. And then publication dates get pushed back. You think you’re coming out one season and woops, no, you’re coming out on another season. As it turned out, my 35^th birthday was the book release day, so it was fate. It was ‘happy birthday to me.’

What was it like working with Brandon Dorman as an illustrator, especially with your unique relationship?

Usually you submit a manuscript to a publisher and the publisher pairs you up with an illustrator. Author and illustrator usually have no contact at all, working separately with their own edits. Our [collaboration] was very strange in a way. He would send me sketches of what he was thinking of, and I would email him storylines. A few things changed without us being in contact. The blue furry giant thing happened when we were between editors. I didn’t have much say in that, but I was very happy with it. It worked out incredibly well.

And I don’t know how often this happens, or just that Greenwillow is very invested in the quality of their books, but they had me go through the art when it was almost done and I was able to give notes. For example, at one point Lexy was writing with yellow paint, and I couldn’t see the letters very well. And I mentioned that I’d like a little multiculturalism in a scene with a group of girls, and they changed that. I was allowed to make changes to the art because Brandon is a digital artist. That would not have been possible, or even an option if I was working with someone like Paul Zelinksy, who works with more traditional methods.

Do you think your work as a librarian informed your experience as a debut author?
Absolutely. On the one hand, it informed the writing. The book had to be something that could be read aloud. Not every book has to be read aloud to a large group, but it really helps, particularly when you’re doing bookstore appearances. I’ve seen authors and illustrators use PowerPoint, music, and all sorts of things for presentations. I knew that it would just be me reading the book. I do involve furry blue dance warmers and have kids do a dance party, but I needed the words to work. It had to be a story I could read aloud over and over, so that a parent could potentially read it over and over, and not get sick of it.

On the other hand, I was prepared to read in front of groups, because as a librarian I have to do storytimes as part of my job. So far, I’ve had to share Giant Dance Party to classes of three-year-olds one day, and a group of eight- and nine-year-olds the next. And I also have read for adults. You have to be able to read for any group. And each time you have to do it in a different way, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I didn’t have my children’s librarian experience. They don’t tell you that to publish a picture book you have to be a performer.

Tell me a little bit about your life after publication. What kind of promotion did you have to do?

For all that I do promoting other people, it is hard to promote myself. It’s hard to go out there saying: ‘Look at me. Me, me, me.’ I kind of already do that in my line of work, but when I usually promote myself, I’m also talking about library events or free programs. But this time is different, because I’m asking people to spend money on me. There’s actually a really good blog, called The Shrinking Violets Promotions, done by two authors who were really shy in terms of self-promotion, which focuses on very simple things that writers can do.

Slowly, I’ve been getting more comfortable with it. It’s fascinating what now constitutes book promotion. Of course you have to make your book video, so I made four. And they involve me being a giant and demonstrating the four different dances highlighted in the book. That was fun. And the publisher had a request that didn’t occur to me: create a Pinterest page for Giant Dance Party, so I did that. I had never created a Pinterest—let alone Tumblr—account. Now these are things that you kind of have to do. My sister made me a website, which is fantastic. On it, I have a teacher’s guide, and recently my publisher asked me to add Common Core guidelines, which I will be doing next. That’s the advantage of being a librarian: I have access and knowledge of these things already.

Now that you’ve had a picture book published, does it change the way you review books on your blog?
Book reviews are a huge part of my blog. There’s another dance picture book this year called Flora and the Flamingo (Chronicle, 2013) by Molly Idle. I had to stop myself from saying, ‘if you buy only one dancing picture book this year, buy that one’ and say instead, ‘if you buy two dancing picture books, buy mine and Flora’. And that’s what I’ve done at my appearances: share related picture books about dancing, parties, and giants. I usually suggest titles like Flora and Jack Prelutsky’s Awful Ogre’s Awful Day (Greenwillow, 2001).

In terms of how I review picture books, my respect for published authors has increased tenfold. You can respect how well an author does something, but until you try to do it yourself, you really don’t respect them enough. My appreciation has also increased for writers of easy readers. It’s like writing a haiku. If you can write a good easy reader such as Mo Willems’s “Elephant and Piggie” titles (Hyperion), then you are a god, as far as I’m concerned.

What would you like children and parents to take away after reading Dance Party?
The book is based very much on my own youth. I took ballet and Scottish dance classes as a child. Lexy, the main character, has stage fright, and is afraid of performing on stage. She finds a way to overcome her fear by helping other people. Dancing with a group was not a problem for me, because on the stage you can’t see the faces in front of you. I didn’t suffer from that particular stage fright, but I was afraid of speaking in public. I want people to take away from the book the fact that these things can be overcome. If you have a fear of some sort, you’re not stuck with it for your entire life. Lexy as a character is very proactive. She thinks that she’s avoiding the problem, but in fact it’s leading her to the solution. And I think that’s actually not a bad way of tackling your problem: hitting it from a different side.

I can’t imagine you having stage fright.
Isn’t it crazy? I was the quietest. In school I never said a word in class. Even now, if you put me in a classroom setting, I never will speak. It’s sort of a holdover. It took me a long time to get over that. I credit librarianship for helping me break out of my shell.

How did you come up with the name of Lexy?

I have a niece named Alexa. The main character was named Alex at first, and then I realized that it was probably not a good idea. She was much younger when I first started the book, but she’s going to pass out of the picture book world very soon. There’s a reason writers don’t put their nieces, nephews, or children’s names into books. I didn’t want to set a precedence for my kids, who would one day ask me, ‘Why is my name is not in a book? You put Alex’s name in the book.’ So I amended it slightly. Let’s just hope that my daughter never catches on to that.

Will we be seeing Lexy and the giants on another adventure?

Probably not with the giants. Spoiler Alert: There are leprechauns at the end of the book. And when they get to the end of it, kids assume that there will be another story, and it will involve leprechauns. But not all books with an ambiguous ending lead to a sequel. Mo Willems’s Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus (Hyperion, 2003) ends with him seeing a truck and wanting to ride it, but there is no sequel with him driving a truck. There are definitely more picture books in my future, but I don’t know if it will be a sequel. We’ll have to see.

The Sea of Tranquility

Some of the story is told from Nastya’s point of view, some of it is told by Josh. The gradual building and deepening of their relationship is beautiful to read, especially their struggles to trust each other and to accept the intimacy of being loved.

I welcomed the opportunity to ask Katja Millay a few questions about her debut novel, The Sea of Tranquility.

What was the original inspiration for your novel? Did you begin with a particular character? With what happened to Nastya? Did you know it would become a love story?

The first thing I actually put on paper was Nastya’s attack scene.  Though it doesn’t come into the book until well past the halfway mark, it was the catalyst for the rest of the story. It was important for me to understand what had happened to her and to keep that in mind throughout the writing process because that incident affected so much of what she had become.

Everything began with Nastya. I lived with her in my head for a while before even trying to form a story. At that point, she fascinated me and I was just getting to know her. I was haunted by this very childlike, yet obsessively focused, teenage girl with an extraordinary talent and vivid expectations for her future. Then I imagined her after everything she had defined herself by had been taken away.

I was intrigued by the idea of talent and ability and how that forms our identities and sense of self.  It’s so common for us to define ourselves by what we do, not necessarily by who we are. Nastya’s entire identity and sense of worth was wrapped around her musical talent and then it’s lost—and really it isn’t even the talent that’s lost. Is she suddenly not talented because her hand can no longer play?  In her mind, she still had the ability.  She hadn’t lost that gift; she lost the means to express it. I equated that feeling to the way we feel in a dream when we know we should be able to scream but we open our mouths and our bodies betray us and no sound comes out; it’s a feeling of pure impotence. That’s how she feels with the musical ability trapped inside her with no way out. I imagined that level of frustration would be maddening for anyone, much less a fifteen-year old girl without the maturity or life skills to handle such a loss. The book began as a way to explore the effects of that.

I knew from the beginning that I would write it as a love story.  I’ve always been drawn to reading slow-burn romances where the relationship takes its time to build and develop naturally.  As I wrote TSoT, I wanted to see Josh and Nastya fall in love and I wanted to experience that with them. When I’m reading, I like to reach the end of a book and feel like I understand why two characters fell in love, because I was able to watch it happen. That’s how I hoped readers would feel at the end of TSoT.

The title has multiple meanings as the book progresses, and it means different things to Nastya at different points. Could you talk about The Sea of Tranquility?

Years ago, when I first learned what the Sea of Tranquility actually was, I felt a distinct sense of disappointment. I thought, Really? That’s what it is? I imagined Nastya feeling the same way, but to a greater extent because she had created a set of expectations that were rooted so much more deeply.

The Sea of Tranquility is a symbol of the disillusionment that Nastya is experiencing when we meet her—a sense of disappointment and the loss of possibility. Her life carried the promise of a bright future defined by music but reality has delivered something wholly different; just as the Sea of Tranquility promised a serene, beautiful body of water and instead delivered a “big, dark shadow on the moon.”

In some ways, I likened the Sea of Tranquility to the optical illusion that Nastya is described as in the text. Its implications shift depending on our perceptions over the course of the story. I referred to the book as The Sea of Tranquility as I was writing, but I always considered it a working title, not actually believing I would use it.  But by the time I finished, it had become clear that it reflected so many of the story’s themes in a way that nothing else would. Once I realized that, I knew that I couldn’t possibly call it anything else.

I am struck by how real—and lacking in cliché or stereotype—the teen characters are. How did you go about creating believable young people, from Josh and Nastya to their siblings to the kids at school?

Thank you!  One of my favorite parts of writing is developing characters and having the opportunity to get inside their heads and figure out how their minds work. I spent part of my career teaching high school and that experience provided me with vital insight into the world of teenagers—the way they speak, the maturity and naïveté that are at war within them during those years, the tough exteriors that often hide vulnerabilities and insecurities. That understanding ended up being invaluable to me and I tapped into it quite a bit.

I imagined all of my characters as real people. It sounds simple enough but it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of characters as characters and when that happens they tend to become a type. Real people are complex and what you see is rarely what you get. I tried to keep in mind how often we meet someone in real life and construct a set of expectations based on what we encounter on the surface only to learn that, once we delve further, there’s much more to them. I never wanted to leave my characters on that surface level.

Developing backstories, for not only the main characters but the secondary ones as well, was also key. Even knowing that much of what happened in those backstories would never make it into the actual book, it was important for me, as a writer, to know their pasts so that I could understand their motivations and behavior. Characters aren’t born the moment they appear on the page. They’ve lived lives before the story begins and those lives have created the people they are. A person’s past experiences impact how they think and view the world, which in turn affects their decisions and determines how they act and react to the situations they’re placed in.

Josh is very mature and sounds older than his years at times. Could you talk about him and the voice you found for his chapters?

Finding Josh’s voice was a bit of a balancing act because in some ways he’s older than his years and in others he’s very much the teenager he is. At one point in the text, Mrs. Leighton refers to Josh, saying that he, “may seem like a very old man sometimes…” and I think that’s true.  I thought of him as weighed down by experience.  He’s had to endure rites of passage that many adults haven’t even gone through yet and with every one of those losses he gets a little older and a little more alone.  The magnitude of what he’s gone through makes things like high school seem trivial and yet he simply goes on, going through the motions of day-to-day life mostly because it’s easier than having to give it any thought.  While Nastya rails against her lot in life with bitterness and anger, he dissolves into his with a sense of resignation and acceptance that what is, simply is.

His self-preservation mechanisms are also firmly in place. People leave him alone so he’s convinced himself that he wants it that way and accordingly developed the abrasiveness that we encounter when we first meet him. But while he may have a deep level of understanding when it comes to death and loss, underneath that he’s still a 17-year-old boy and he really doesn’t have the rest of it figured out, especially when it comes to relationships. He makes mistakes. He’s far from perfect. He still has growing up to do and we see some of that maturation happen throughout the book. His relationship with Nastya allows both of them to be the teenagers they should be—to go on dates, to fall in love, to have a little bit of the normalcy that many of us take for granted.

What were the challenges of writing a novel around a character who chooses not to speak?

The fact that Nastya didn’t speak was actually a challenge and a blessing at once. Readers tend to crave dialogue and it’s an invaluable tool in character creation and story momentum. When you lose that tool, you have to compensate. For me, it became about developing Nastya’s inner voice so that it was rich enough to hold a reader. You spend a great deal of time in her head, so I had to stay constantly aware of her thoughts and ensuring that they were building her character, letting the reader get to know her and giving them clues along the way—advancing and enlightening. Nastya made things a little easier on me though because she always had something going on in her head. She was opinionated and observant and the wheels never stopped turning. So even though she wasn’t speaking, she always had something to say.

The blessing of spending so much time in Nastya’s head is that I was able to paint a detailed picture of who she is while giving readers the means by which to understand and connect with her. The tricky part was that all of Nastya’s secrets also live in her head, and I couldn’t let them out too early. So it was a very delicate line I was walking—trying to keep the reveals coming at a steady pace, without giving away too much too soon.

How did you go about maintaining suspense for 448 pages, especially when the entire book is about two people? The pacing of the development of the central relationships and Nastya’s healing are perfect. Could you talk about your process?

I’m not sure I could call what I had a process. Much of the book was written by hand, out of order, in pieces and moments. I’d scribble it down in half-scenes and random lines of dialogue and visual images, not even realizing at the beginning that I would end up with a book. At one point, I sat down to write an outline but it was a laughable attempt. I ended up scrapping it and just continuing to do what I was doing.

Once I had the majority of the pieces down, I finally embarked on putting it into the computer and I remember looking at the blank screen and then at my husband and saying, “I don’t know where it starts.” That moment was almost paralyzing for me. I began rearranging and ordering everything I had on paper.  I knew the thematic thread that was going to carry it from beginning to end and I knew the character arcs which, in my mind, were the most important elements.  That thread and those arcs provided the real framework for me.  Then it was a matter of filling in the holes and connecting the dots.

As far as the reveals are concerned, many of them were small and subtle. I wanted the information to come at a steady pace so that you felt you were always getting a piece of the puzzle even if it didn’t make sense yet. There was a blog that did a structural breakdown of TSoT several months ago and the author used the term “Greteling” to describe how the information was disseminated throughout the book and I loved that. I thought it was such a visually descriptive way to discuss how the clues are dropped like breadcrumbs that the reader has to follow to make it to the end.

In terms of the pacing, much of that was determined by the characters. As their trust in each other gradually increased, so did the amount of information they were willing to part with. Josh’s secrets aren’t quite as dark and certainly not nearly as buried as Nastya’s, so I knew they would come out into the open first. When it came to both of their stories, I simply allowed the details to emerge organically in a way that mirrored the pace at which the relationship between them developed.

Your novel appeals equally to teen and adult readers. Why do you think that is? To what do you credit its crossover appeal?

I’ve been so thrilled with how the book seems to have taken hold with both teen and adult audiences. I think the crossover appeal can somewhat be credited to the universal themes at work in the book. While the characters may be teenagers, they’re dealing with situations and life events that often come later. There’s also the exploration of the concept of identity and figuring out who we are. I think that’s something that many of us, even as adults, still struggle with.

In addition, in its simplest form, it’s a love story; it’s a story of acceptance and growing up. At its core, the story is one of friendship and family, faith and fate, choices and chance and I believe those things transcend age barriers.

Please see the SLJ starred review of The Sea of Tranquility, published on the Adult Books 4 Teens blog.

Tom McNeal always wondered if he could handle “the complications of a ghost story.” At the same time, he was also intrigued by the idea of using a fairy-tale structure. In his latest novel, Far Far Away (Random, June, 2013; Gr 6 Up) the author smoothly melds the two to create a suspenseful, haunting tale. At its center is the folklorist Jacob Grimm, stuck as a ghost. He’s dead, but unable to reunite with his brother Wilhelm, who predeceased him. Jacob believes if he can help save the young Jeremy Johnson Johnson he may be able to move on. Here McNeal discusses his beguiling, macabre work.

What appealed to you about the fairy tale set-up?
In fairy tales, the situation changes but the characters don’t. They tend to be stereotypes: the simple but kind youngest son, the girl whose true character isn’t seen. What you basically have are flat characters that couldn’t sustain a longer [story]. In thinking about them and reading about the Grimm brothers, the idea popped into my head: What if Jacob, the elder Grimm, became a ghost? That idea evolved…[until] the ghost story and the fairy tale collided and merged.

The idea of a benevolent ghost is an interesting one, too. Jacob is almost a fairy godfather figure to Jeremy.
I loved writing in the voice of Jacob. I’ve never written a novel in first person. Normally you have the constraints of a narrow point of view, but a ghost can observe lots of things. I found that really freeing. The story started with the characters—Jeremy and [his classmate] Ginger—and with the understanding that the ghost would intercede or try to protect them. I knew they were going to wind up in a basement, and I knew it would end happily—in accordance with the form—but I wasn’t sure how.

You easily navigate the inner workings of a contemporary town, with phones and televisions, while still honoring the childhood experiences of exploring and pulling pranks in what feels like a safe place—until the children’s disappearances. How did you strike that balance?
As carefully as I could. I didn’t want cell phones. I worried about any kind of modern technology, because I didn’t want to spend a lot of the book explaining how Jacob perceives these devices. In an earlier version, there was quite a bit of that, and it was distracting. It’s a fairly contemporary setting, but there are no benchmarks of time.

Were you always a fan of the Brothers Grimm? You know so much about them, especially the little-known facts that come to light in the Uncommon Knowledge game featured in the book.
No! I read fairy tales like everyone read fairy tales. I loved the idea of peering into your fondest hopes. You go out and do something good or generous and you win the king’s daughter and live in a castle. Or  looking into into your worst fears—being abandoned in the woods. Or being cut up and put in a stew by your stepmother—really, really, dark, ghoulish things—but then everything is reconstituted and made whole, and you can go about your day. The business of fairy tales is fascinating. Our attraction to them is universal.

I knew very little about the Grimm brothers until I started researching them. I thought they’d written the fairy tales. I know a lot more about them now. The lifelong affinity of one brother to the other was really what was interesting to me.

Most, if not all, of the Brothers Grimm tales involve someone confronting evil full on and moving through his or her fear. Was that something you wanted to work with from the beginning?
Yes. I wanted Jeremy and Ginger to be tested in a severe way and to respond to the situation as their characters would, within their belief systems—that their reliance on their personal strengths would allow them to persevere, and, in the end, prevail. In an early version Jacob was the one who almost single-handedly saved them. I changed that later on—I wanted Jeremy and Ginger to participate to a greater extent in overcoming what is described in the book as evil.

And through their ordeal, it’s the stories Jeremy tells that sustain them.
Yes. That was all new in the last version. You would have thought that would be there from day one.

There’s a wonderful observation that Jacob makes, “Every day, a child steps away from the parent by the littlest distance, perhaps just the width of a mouse whisker….”
Yes, it’s a very subtle, slow thing that happens. [As a parent,] you don’t want to admit to that. You want to believe that your children need you as much as you need them. That was one of the things that was really fun about inhabiting this first-person ghost—it gave me a way to put down on paper the things I observe and think about.

From TeachingBooks.net, listen to Tom McNeal introduce and read from Far Far Away

It’s no secret that kids often don’t keep up their reading skills over the summer. Can you comment on the extent of that loss and why it’s especially damaging for kids in low-income neighborhoods and schools?
What we know is that any child who fails to read during the summer break will lose some reading proficiency. We also know that children from low-income families routinely lose two to three months of reading proficiency every summer while middle-class children gain about a month. This creates a three to four month gap every summer. From grade one to nine children from low-income families lose two or more years of reading proficiency, during the summers when school is not in session. According to Alexander and Entwisle this means that more than 80 percent of the rich/poor reading gap accumulates during the summers. They also note that children from low-income families gain as much reading growth during the school year, when schools are open, as middle-class children.

What particular obstacles do low-income students encounter more often?
The basic problem seems to be…access to books. Children from low-income families own fewer books than middle-class children and, according to Neuman and Celano’s research, middle-class kids have 10 places to buy books in neighborhoods for every one place located in a low-income neighborhood. Our work has shown that school libraries differ, classroom libraries differ, and book-lending policies differ in schools attended by low- and middle-income children. In every case, it’s schools attended by low-income children that come up short in terms of creating easy access to books for children.

We completed a longitudinal study of the effects of providing children from low-income families with 12 to 15 self-selected books every summer. The children attended 17 different schools, all schools where at least 85 percent of the students were eligible for free lunches. The children were in grades one and two when we began the study and three years later we compared the reading achievement of children who were randomly selected to receive summer books with those children randomly selected to serve as the control group, and received no books for summer reading.

What we found was that providing self-selected books for summer reading produced as much or more reading growth as attending summer school! For the poorest children the effect of our summer book distribution was twice as large as attending summer school. The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy has rated our study as reliable and powerful.

We now have the evidence that improving access to books for children from low-income families can have a positive and powerful impact on their reading development. Our evidence suggests that policy makers might reconsider summer school policies, especially for low-income children. Instead of spending a thousand dollars per student to support a summer school program, perhaps support the expenditure of $100 per student to provide kids with books they can and want to read.

Why aren’t current efforts to close the reading achievement gap working?
Current efforts to close the rich/poor reading achievement gap are not working because in most schools that focus is on the wrong target. It now seems true that how much students learn during the school year is not related to which schools they attend. However, schools that enroll many children from low-income families report lower achievement every year when compared to schools enrolling few poor children. But as Alexander and Entwisle pointed out, that lower achievement was already present when the children began school. Children from low-income families start kindergarten about six months behind middle-class students.

Then every year the poor children lose three months reading proficiency during the summer vacation period, basically because they don’t read during the summer. Middle-class children gain a month every summer because they do read during that time. Thus, by third grade, children from low-income families are a full year behind middle-class children; by sixth grade they are two years behind, by ninth grade they are three years behind, and by twelfth grade, children from low-income families are four years behind their middle-class classmates (see NAEP data). All this happens even though poor children gain as much during the school year as middle-class children!

Until schools (and state and federal policy makers) understand that the problem is not located with the school, or the teachers, or the lessons that poor children receive, I doubt we will make much progress in closing the rich/poor reading achievement gap. It seems clear that we could narrow this gap but there appears that little attention ts being paid to the only effective strategy currently available—improving the access children from low-income families have to books they can and want to read.

Can you talk about the importance of text complexity in building reading skills?
As far as “text complexity” is concerned, be cautious. We have a century’s worth of research indicating that if you want to lower reading achievement and reading motivation then you should give students books that are difficult for them to read. I am unsure why text complexity was seen as a solution to the problem of too few students developing reading proficiencies necessary for college success. I am even less sure why most of the improvement called for in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) asks K-4 teachers, as Hiebert has noted, to produce 80 percent of the improvement. Our fourth graders have improved their reading proficiency over the past two decades while our twelfth graders’ scores have declined. If the CCSS aimed primarily at secondary teachers and targeted the quality of their lessons and the complexity of the texts they use, then I could better understand what the CCSS is supposed to do.

Nothing good will come from making third grade texts even harder than they currently are. Nothing good will come from evaluating text complexity using Lexiles. Nothing good will come from the new computerized testing schemes, except that some vendors will be making a lot more money from their educational products.

Given the importance of making sure that kids continue to read over the summer months, how can schools with restricted budgets implement summer reading programs? Can you describe a program that’s both effective and affordable?
My first question when I am asked about addressing the summer reading problem is this: Does your school ensure that every child has taken at least 10 books out from the school library on the final day of school? There is nothing more problematic, for me, than kids with no books to read and schools with libraries filled with books that no one will read over the summer. So my advice always begins with “Empty out your school library before the final day of school.”

Folks often object, especially school librarians. “We will lose too many books if we allow them to take our books home for the summer.” My response, generally, is “Balderdash!” Schools must stop worrying more about protecting their books from children than worrying about children having such limited access to books. Yes, cleaning out the library will result in some books not being returned. But our experience suggests this is typically less than 10 percent of the books loaned. In my mind that is a small price to pay for the improved reading achievement that is observed when poor kids have books to read over the summer.

School and public librarians are in the business of connecting kids with books. In fact, we tend to be pretty passionate about it. What role do you see us playing in eliminating reading achievement disparity?
My first piece of advice would be to get over the issues of checking books in and out of the library. Get over past due fines for books not returned on your schedule. Get over serving as the protector of the books. Get involved in putting as many of your books in kids hands as possible.

I meet librarians who I love because they feel it is their calling to put books in kids’ hands. To provide books for children’s bedroom libraries. Librarians who rarely check out books but, instead, distribute the books they have to anyone willing to take one. These librarians are my favorite folks.

You’re absolutely right–too many books sit unused over the summer months for all the wrong reasons. But lots of librarians don’t give a hoot about the occasional lost book and jump for joy when a child reads for pleasure. Beyond putting books into kids’ hands, how do we become true collaborators in this important work?
I’m not sure there is any single way to become “true collaborators” in the mission to put books into the hands of children from low-income families. I’ve observed public libraries where there are all kinds of outreach and support for low-income families occurring. But I’ve also observed public libraries where nothing of the sort was happening or even on the agenda. The same is true with school libraries and school librarians.

What I think might be helpful is for every library to identify how books are being loaned to children from low-income families….Not always, not every library but, in general, [I observe that] poor folks don’t use libraries as much as middle-class folks. I’m not sure why.

Maybe ALA needs a special interest group for librarians “who don’t give a hoot about lost books.” Maybe creating such a group could transform libraries into settings where more poor folks would feel comfortable and welcome.

If you could improve how schools and libraries approach summer reading, what would you consider the most important steps to take?
I would say that we must help librarians understand that kids are more important than books. I am sorry if that offends some readers. Sorry, but not asking for forgiveness, because I see tons of books in school and public libraries at the same time that I see hundreds of thousands of children from low-income families with nothing to read.

We can complain that parents of low-income children do not bring their children to the library. Complain that these parents do not take advantage of the many programs the library provides. And so on. Or we can admit that most of our libraries are designed to serve middle-class parents and that is a primary reason that middle-class communities are far more likely to have public libraries than low-income communities, have more children’s books than libraries in low-income neighborhoods, and more likely to be open later and more hours every day.

We can complain, or we can change our approach and work to ensure that we spend most of our time, energy, and money on placing books in the hands of children [that need them]. We know from the work of Melosh that locating and stocking a bookmobile and then visiting low-income communities (in this case trailer parks in rural areas) is a way to distribute books to kids who would likely never get one and at the same time improves their reading achievement.

Librarians should box up many of the books stored in their libraries and take those boxes of books out into the community. Take the books out to give them away and tell folks who take them that you hope they will return them after they have read them. Make it easy for children from low-income communities to put their hands on books they want to read, make it easy to take such a book home.

References:

Alexander, K. L., Entwisle, D. R., & Olson, L. S. (2007). Lasting consequences of the summer learning gap. American Sociological Review, 72(2), 167-180.

Allington, R. L., & McGill-Franzen, A. (2013). Summer reading: Closing the rich/poor reading achievement gap. New York: Teachers College Press.

Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy (2011). Evidence summary for annual book fairs in high-poverty elementary schools. . Washington, DC: Author.

Hiebert, E. H., & Mesmer, H. A. E. (2013). Upping the ante of text complexity in the Common Core State Standards: Examining its potential impact on young readers. Educational Researcher, 42(1), 44-51.

Melosh, G. (2013). Stemming summer reading loss in high-poverty primary grade students during summer vacation break. In R. L. Allington & A. McGill-Franzen (Eds.), Summer reading: Closing the rich/poor reading achievement gap. New York: Teachers College.

Neuman, S., & Celano, D. (2001). Access to print in low-income and middle-income communities. Reading Research Quarterly, 36(1), 8-26.

Jorie is already living elsewhere when the story starts. While the reader gets introduced to Jorie through James, it soon becomes apparent that he doesn’t really know that much about her. It’s ironic that Mrs. Yao, a teacher who “is trying to stay invisible,” is the person that knows Jorie’s darkest secret.

In a parallel universe, I’ve likely written a book about Mrs. Yao. She only has a short amount of page-time, but she’s a crucial representation of how teachers can’t always absorb everything students throw at them even if they want to. My good friend and author, Matthew Quick, has discussed the emotional toll teaching can take on people and, while I’ve never taught in a high school classroom, even at the college level it can be a challenge. Students will share their anxieties, they will need help, they will need advice or someone to say things will be okay. It’s difficult to be that one person for so many without falling into their emotional turmoil.

When James realizes he must see a human therapist, he knows he needs to ask his parents to pay for it. When he tells them “I have anxieties,” his father’s response is “Don’t we all.” How important is it in the story that James must find a way to get to therapy, no matter what?

I think it’s very important to the story for both a boring reason and a profound, character-based reason. First, boring: the plot needs obstacles. If his parents pay for it, then he doesn’t need a job, he doesn’t feel as much pressure, etc. This isn’t to say a book with supportive parents, like Ned Vizzini’s novel (It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Miramax, 2007), for instance, can’t work. But James has to learn to stand up for himself, to take his mental health into his own hands. Further, he’s not going to succeed by doing this alone, which is why I am so pleased by the reviews and responses that highlight how the novel doesn’t provide easy answers. I believe great stories don’t provide easy answers. So, while James believes he can help himself, he still has to accept the help of others. Success requires both internal and external assistance.

In real life, things are a bit different. There might be legal obstacles to getting into therapy without parental consent, especially if suicidal tendencies are involved—but I was less concerned with the legal reality of our world and more with the test of James’s character. What would James do to save himself? What would convince him he has to survive? He doesn’t simply do it—Jorie is his guide and her well-being, not simply his, becomes the goal. And in the end, without spoiling anything, he learns his true responsibility.

James becomes obsessed with convincing the principal to allow Jorie to come back and finish high school. His parents are of no help, and neither is the administration. I thought of Don Quixote.

I like the comparison though Don Quixote wasn’t in my mind as I wrote! If anything, Douglas Coupland’s novel Life After God (Washington Square,1995) influenced me. It’s one of my favorite of his pieces. It’s not quite a novel. It’s sort of a short story collection. While the central focus is not mental illness, it explores depression, anxiety, alienation, loneliness in a way that is electric.

James goes to the mat for his friend Derek when the older woman Derek is having an affair with seems to be cheating on him. How did that whole turn of events come to you?

Derek began as kind of a jerk as I drafted the novel. Then, I realized that Derek was doing his best to help James without really knowing what James was going through. James doesn’t actually open up about how he’s feeling to Derek, yet calls Derek his best friend. When Derek gets James a job, it’s a huge favor (it gets James out of the house). And I didn’t even plot it out ahead of time. I wanted James to get out of the house, too!

More importantly, when James screws that job up, he needs to face the consequences. And it causes James to appreciate his friend in a new way. So, when James helps Derek out in that somewhat over-the-top manner, it’s a great juxtaposition to the way Derek has slowly, subtly helped James.

Beth King is like pure oxygen for James. She’s adorable, smart, and loves poetry. He can hardly believe it when they become friends. She’s a very different sort of woman than the others in James’ life.

Beth was a tricky character to write. I’m not sure she totally comes through with depth until the scene in the restaurant that James thinks is a date. She’s sort of aware that James has an issue, but she has no idea what to do to help him. So when she agrees to go to this restaurant she’s doing what James and Jorie both do: they try something. It’s an attempt with only the knowledge that trying something is better than nothing. It’s her way of reaching out a hand. She’s letting James know that he’s being heard.

Sadly, James interprets it as romantic not platonic, but, again, OBSTACLES!

I found the scene where James picks up tiny pieces from a broken dish (thrown by his mother) to be very Zen. Does this signal a major turning point for him?

For me it absolutely does and I am very glad you cite it as a Zen moment. Symbolic interpretations abound in this moment, but at the very least I want people to understand that James cannot be easily fixed, but he’s going to be okay. Especially if he can slow down time or his sense of time rushing forward. Look at it this way: he sees the broken pieces and he can pick them up. But only one at a time, and gently. Very gently.

Of course, ending the novel in that moment would’ve been too solitary; I planned all along to end the novel with a song of celebration similar to the song-of-self opening chapter. So we get two moments at the end: the solitary moment and the celebratory song of connection. The interior and the exterior. This time James is blasting positivity outward, into the world, because he’s got some joy to spare.

Photo: Catherine VanCuren

Evan Roskos completed his MFA at Rutgers University–Newark in 2009, and currently lives in Collingswood, New Jersey. He was named one of Narrative’s 20 Best New Writers, and has had stories in Best Fiction, StoryQuarterly, and other literary journals. Visit his blog at www.evanroskos.blogspot.com.

Meg Medina was bullied in junior high school. The girl never assaulted her physically, but she harassed Medina, who noted, “It was a horrific experience.” In Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass (Candlewick, April, 2013; Gr 7 Up), 15-year-old Piddy Sanchez doesn’t even know her aggressor and it’s unclear why Yaqui has targeted Piddy—it may be that Yaqui’s boyfriend commented on Piddy’s arrival as a transfer student to their school. “You can be bullied for any reason. For being too smart, too developed, too beautiful, too artistic,” said Medina. “It comes down to what enrages the person who’s doing the bullying. As soon as you stand out in any way, it becomes a liability.”

You really get to the heart of bullying—that it’s often the fear of violence, as much as actual violence, that devastates the victim. Yaqui doesn’t even appear on the page until several chapters in. How did you accomplish that?
I had to make a decision about whose story it was going to be. I could have devoted an entire novel to Yaqui. That need to be so destructive doesn’t happen by accident. Yaqui may have even emerged as a sympathetic character. But I wanted to write the story of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a bully’s treatment. When you have a conflict with someone, it’s like radioactive energy is in the room. All you can think about is that person’s presence. It crowds out everything else.

And then Piddy’s friends fall away; they don’t want to be guilty by association.
There’s so much fear about being an outcast in school, of being the lone zebra that the lion will take down. It sucks everything out of a person, most of all the person’s sense of self-worth. Piddy wants to be a scientist. But the bullying takes away her sense of self and she starts making risky decisions, and begins spiraling down. That was difficult to write; it was hard to watch the Piddy suffer.

Piddy’s observation seemed in part to underscore her sense of alienation: “Yaqui and me, we should be two hermanas, a sisterhood of Latinas…instead, we’re worlds apart.” Tell us more about that.
In the United States, we’re Latinos. Everywhere else, we’re Cubans, or Ecuadorans, or Dominicans. I think within the community there exists lots of stereotyping. If you are bookish, or light-skinned, are you a Latina? When you think of a Latino look, most people think we have this one look, but of course, …we’re talking about a diverse group of people, by education, by economic class. (The topic has come up on Twitter quite a bit lately.)

Piddy’s often defending herself as a Latina. The notion of violence—certainly the level that Piddy’s on the receiving end of—comes from a place of rage, wanting to hurt, wanting to put down. Yaqui is lacking some important traits in terms of compassion and empathy.

Is that part of the reason why Piddy returns to her childhood friend Joey, in her old neighborhood—for some sympathy? He’s a complicated character.
There’s an innocence in Piddy and Joey’s relationship that begins to get mixed up in the sexual. Joey’s such a ball of wax. Is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy? I think at his core, this is a boy who wants to be good, and who wants to be a good friend, but he’s so pulled by everything he’s seen [and everything that's going on in his life]. I wanted to highlight the razor’s edge that exists for the two of them—when we begin to leave our childhood behind and our relationships suddenly begin to change; we start to look at them through a different lens.

Are there challenges particular to a novel, versus picture books such as your Tía Isa Wants a Car (Candlewick, 2011)?
With picture books, I think of poetry…. With a young adult novel, I’m really just following the character. It can be an inefficient way to write. I think, well that got me nowhere. Some people have an idea for plot and then populate it. What’s infinitely interesting to me is the person, and then how the person reacts.

What I also wondered was, won’t readers have questions about Yaqui, and how much do I want to say about her? What’s the risk of bringing her in? I thought she was too big, too rich a character. It allowed me to have a laser-like focus on Piddy. Maybe I haven’t forgiven the girl who bullied me.

So many times we wanted Piddy to confide in someone—her mother or her mother’s best friend, Lila.
I think we ask a lot of kids, to trust the adults to help them figure out some of their problems. There’s no way one of the adults in Piddy’s life could have followed her around and kept her safe. In the end, readers see that a girl can be pulled into a situation she has little control over; she can make terrible mistakes and still come out OK on the other side. That’s important for teens to know. Many of us think that the mistakes we make are permanent, that they mark us for life. That doesn’t happen to Piddy.

Listen to Meg Medina introduce and read from Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass.

On the heels of being named the recipient of the CSK Award yet again for his latest book, I, Too, Am America (S & S, 2012), Collier invited School Library Journal  into his home and studio in Hudson Valley, NY—where CSK Award-winning illustrators James Ransome and Charles Smith also live—for a tour and interview about his life, his art, and the creative process.

You’re known for using detailed collages in your illustrations. Are you a collector of various items that you can use for this purpose?
Well, I am always on the lookout, but mostly I just use old fashion magazines for their patterns and inspiration for creating mood or light. I will see a pattern on a dress and also see the color schemes. I incorporate the collage in my work; there is no real rhyme or reason on how. There isn’t more watercolor than collage or collage than watercolor.  It just has to feel right.

Do you storyboard your books before beginning to create the artwork?
I do a quick storyboard [but] I drive editors crazy because when I bring in the original artwork it doesn’t look like the storyboard. Something else happens in the process of making the art and the collage. New ideas come into play that seem to be more important to me or more profound to the text. I follow that. The storyboard just gives me a semblance of where I think I am going but I really never know until I start putting it together. I leave that door open to make sure it happens.  I don’t want to be steadfast to any ideas I had a month ago. I want to see what happens on the fly.

You have used the lives of real historical figures as the basis for some of your books.  What type of research do you conduct before creating your artwork?
For Dave the Potter, I was so intrigued by this brand new history that I went to the plantation in Edgefield, SC. I needed to go there because there really wasn’t much on the Internet or the libraries about Dave. I wanted to see the ground that Dave walked on and the sky he walked under and I wanted to be in his presence and I wanted to hold the pots that he had signed and did poetry on. I had to figure out, Where do I go? How do I get there? Who do I talk to? You feel your way through. I just started to talk to people and the story started coming through.

When I do a book it will embody a distinct light that would be reflective and be a character as well. Dave the Potter shows the earthiness of Dave and the pottery. It has a gritty feel about it. It is put into a historical context of new and exciting history. It is a celebration that history is alive.

Can you tell us more about the important role that poetry plays in many of your books?
I have had the good fortune to do books with both Nikki Grimes and Nikki Giovanni. It was like getting a graduate degree. My work feels lyrical. In many ways, it feels like music. It picks up a flow, rhythm, and a staccato. All that stuff that is in poetry, it speaks in my work as well.

When I do a project that combines the two. It gives the artwork language and words that are readily accessible. There is a visual storyline that happens separate from the text and runs parallel with the words instead on mimicking the text.

Which of your books was the most challenging to create?
John’s Secret Dreams (Hyperion, 2004) about John Lennon, was the most challenging because I really wasn’t a Beatles fan. I was too young to really know the Beatles. I did not follow Lennon’s music. There was a lot of footage on this guy and I could talk to people who knew John.  What I found was that he was rich and famous and had a lot of power—but he was alone, empty and broken as a person. These are two stark contrasts that were happening at once.

I often talk to young people on the road about wanting to be famous. I tell them there is a price. I tell them that I did this book about John Lennon and we talk about it. We talk about John trying to find his clarity and peace of mind. He was protesting things outside his persona with his music. That is a decision we all have to make, what is the most important part of life. That was the entrée for me to getting to know John through his lyrics.

You have won several Coretta Scott King Awards over the years for your work. What does the award mean to you?
In the big picture, it means that I am part of a group of people who have been recognized for the work that we do in books on a grand scale. The CSK says that the artists of color are equal to anything that is being made anywhere. If you take that away, we may not get recognized.

That is a very real and sobering reality. If the CSK award wasn’t in existence, many artists would be overlooked. It has a hand in cultivating new talent.

I grew up without books with people like me in them. Ezra Jack Keats’s books are branded in my psyche. My very first book Uptown is an ode to Peter, Keats, and The Snowy Day. It was a very profound moment to get that book and to come full circle with that seed that was planted, to see it come and bloom and continue to bare fruit. They are all significant moments that say who I am right now.

Can you tell us about your upcoming book, Knock, Knock (Little, Brown; 2013)?
The author is Daniel Beaty, a New York actor. He did a monologue on HBO on Russell Simmons Deff Poetry. I saw it and said , ‘that is a book.’  I called Daniel and met him when he was doing a production at Riverside Theater. It was a one-man show and I was asked to do artwork for the production. He and I started talking about fatherhood and what happens to a kid when his father does not show up one day. I took it over to Little Brown, they loved it and the rest is history.

What is in the works for you right now?
I am doing sketches for the childhood of Quincy Jones. I am also working on a story for Henry Holt called My Country Tis of Thee. It is about how they used that song through history for different causes, such as women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and the George Washington to Barack Obama inaugurations. They changed the words throughout history, but it was all based on the same cadence and melody.

In addition to your renowned book illustrations, you also create stand-alone works of art. Can you tell us more about that?
I have been making art since age 15. That is, when I said I want to be an artist, I don’t have a plan B, and this is it.  Eventually I got a scholarship to Pratt.  I went to school with James Ransome and Robert Sabuda.  I make art and do things that are in my world.

The artist talks about how he uses family members, friends, and neighbors to inspire his artwork:

The story backs up to the beginning of September and switches to Amelia’s point of view. Her narration is interspersed with text messages, Facebook posts, and excerpts from a gossip blog. Readers learn about Amelia and her best friend, Sylvia; Amelia’s invitation to join a Grace Hall secret society, the Magpies; and the shocking lengths to which she goes to prove herself to the leaders of the “Maggies.”

Weeks after Sylvia’s death, Kate receives an anonymous text message, stating, simply, “Amelia didn’t jump.” From there the story accelerates, moving back and forth in time, between Kate’s investigation and Amelia’s last weeks. Many twists and turns follow, and readers won’t want to put this book down until they know just what happened on that roof, and why. Adult Books 4 Teens blogger Angela Carstensen talked with debut author Kimberly McCreight about Reconstructing Amelia (Harper, 2013).

The mixture of narrative voices and styles, including text messages and blog posts, is perhaps this novel’s greatest strength. Did you plan this from the beginning, or did your method of telling the story change as your worked progressed?

Every [unpublished] book I’ve ever written has been from multiple points of view and shifting time frames. There’s just something about that kind of storytelling that I find appealing. For me, this orchestral approach to narrative most accurately reflects how people experience situations and relationships. It’s never linear—not the events, not the memories, and certainly not the emotions.

The multimedia elements flowed from Amelia’s point of view. Once I was writing from the perspective of a teenage girl in 2013, it was only natural that she communicate in these various mediums and that they be as important sometimes as her face-to-face interactions. Moreover, to truly understand either a friendship built on texts or an electronic assault that can come at any hour, it helps to actually experience it that way as a reader. Plus, I just loved the idea of someone as bright and articulate as Amelia using her Facebook status updates to show her literary flourish. I like to imagine I might have done that if Facebook had been around when I was her age, but I’m not sure I’d have been that clever.

How did you work to differentiate Kate and Amelia’s voices?

Writing Kate in third person and Amelia in first helped to naturally distinguish them. I decided to put Amelia in first person to give her story greater immediacy. With Kate, I honestly wasn’t sure—as a mother—that I could handle writing about her grief in the first person. A little narrative distance seemed critical to doing justice to that kind of loss.

Beyond that, the voices simply came out very differently as I lived inside the two characters. I also edited the two threads separately. Once the first draft was finished, I worked on one voice at a time from beginning to end, starting with Kate then Amelia. And then, of course, I had to be on the lookout for the odd slip—like Kate saying “whatever.” It did happen occasionally in early drafts, but luckily it tended to jump off the page.

Why did you set the novel in a New York City private school? Did you attend a private school? If not, how did you go about researching that world?

Those decisions didn’t feel like choices so much as the way things already were. I often feel when I’m writing that I’m recording something that has already happened. That said, I did go to private school—a boarding school in Princeton, New Jersey—for high school. Even though it wasn’t an exact fit, I probably did feel a little more equipped to write about that kind of setting.

But so much of the novel is also informed by my experiences as a mother, and that has been shaped in large part by Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood where I have raised both my daughters. I know what it feels like to be walking down a sidewalk and to hope that the ambulance that has just sped by isn’t racing to your child’s school. In the writing, it absolutely made everything feel more real to me, having it set here in Brooklyn.

I also did a fair amount of research into teens, their lives online as well as in person, including bullying and sexuality. I spoke with local private school students as well to find out how they spent their time away from school, where they hung out, how they communicated—texts, Facebook, IM-ing—and what they talked about.

Did you set out to write a book about bullying, or did you begin with the idea of writing a mystery about a teen suicide and the mother’s need to understand her daughter’s motivation?

The bullying aspect of the book developed from the characters. Once I was living inside Amelia’s skin and had developed the secondary characters, the rest of the story played out in its own, tragically inevitable way.

But you’re exactly right that I was first motivated by the notion of a mother trying to understand the profound loss of a child through a supposed suicide. As my children get older and are off on their own more in the world, I’m increasingly aware of how little I know about what goes on in their lives. And they’re still so young and they tell me a lot. Sometimes, I can’t get them to stop talking.

Yet, they leave things out. Not even on purpose, but occasionally, they’ll just say something innocently that hints at some larger narrative. I’ll find myself saying, “wait, back up, tell me more about that.” Next thing you know a whole story unfolds that I might not have otherwise known anything about if I’d been distracted for that split-second, which—believe me—happens all the time. They are young still, so these dramas are mostly innocuous, but already I can see how it would be so easy not to know things. Even when you’re trying so hard to know everything.

The reality is that as much as our children feel like they are part of us, they aren’t. Every day they chart their own little course in this world. They must, and it’s our job to help them do it. That’s awe-inspiring and beautiful—and utterly terrifying. 

Was there ever a point when you considered publishing this novel for the young adult market?

I do remember having coffee with a good writer friend after I was finished and telling her that I thought I might have written an adult-YA crossover. “Is there such a thing?” I remember asking. I wasn’t even sure. I never made a conscious decision to go for one market or another, I just wrote the book I had to write.

Would you consider secrets to be a central theme of the novel? I was struck by the number of secrets being kept by both adults and teens, from secrets of parentage to secrets of sexual orientation. And, of course, the secret society at the center of it all.

Secrets and their potentially toxic consequences are absolutely a central theme of Reconstructing Amelia. The best protection for children—whether it’s from bullying, or drugs, or depression—is a honest, trusting relationship with a parent or someone they’ll speak to when things go off the rails or reach out to before they go over that fateful ledge.

For me, that openness is a two-way street. For children to be willing to share the things they’re ashamed of—and often that includes being bullied or even being the bullier—they have to know that we won’t judge them, that our love is unconditional. That’s easier said than done, I know. Because words so often aren’t enough.

But I think it helps for them to know that we’re not perfect either. That we’ve made mistakes—loved the wrong person, been unkind to a friend, lied when we shouldn’t have, trusted when we knew better—but that we survived. And that they will too.

Please see the SLJ review of Reconstructing Amelia, published on the Adult Books 4 Teens blog at http://blogs.slj.com/adult4teen/2013/04/03/weekly-reviews-debut-novels/.

Photograph by Kathryn Smith

You use nifty interactive flaps to tell the story of an unlikely friendship between a gawky bird and a vulnerable girl. How’d you come up with the idea?

When I was little, I thought that Lee Iacocca and the Ayatollah were interchangeable and that flamenco dancing was flamingo dancing. I had this amazing talent for missing the obvious. It’s a running gag in my family. I was 10 before I realized that the names of A. A. Milne’s characters—Kanga and Roo—together made “kangaroo.” Then one day, I said to my mom, “Ooh, do you get that?” And she was like, “Please tell me you’re joking?”

Did your kids inherit that talent?

When they were learning to talk and play with language, they were coming up with all of these really funny phrases, like “fire extinguisher” was “fire stinking shirt.” And I started thinking back to when I was little, and I remembered this thing about flamingo dancing, and I thought, Oh, I want to draw a dancing flamingo.

The story comes across like a choreographed dance between the two characters.

Yes, absolutely, even though the flamingo is at first an unwilling partner. [Laughs] I watched a lot of ballet performances trying to find some poses from different pas de deux that would allow the characters to interact in ways that would move the story along. But I tried not to get too hung up on what this little girl and this flamingo would look like. Instead, I concentrated on the line and the feel of the movement.

There’s so much movement in your drawings. Did you pick that up when you worked at DreamWorks?

I can’t help but be influenced by my work in animation. Animation is always about creating an illusion of movement. I enjoy bringing a sense of movement to a still image—that kind of dichotomy really interests me.

What’s up with you and Prismacolor pencils?

It’s a love affair. For starters, they have this amazing range of colors, not unlike what you would find with wash or oil paint or watercolor. You can layer them in very much the same way as paint, and they give me total control as to where the pigment goes that I just haven’t found with paint. I know some painters are just amazing with their control, but for me, it was a constant battle with paint: go here! No, I don’t want you to go over there! My goal was to make pencils do what I wanted, and Prismas are perfect for that. If they ever go out of business, I don’t know what I’ll do.

I’m amazed at how neat and clean you keep your studio in Tempe, AZ.

I’m super-compulsive. I am type A, and there’s just no way around it. I like things neat, and I like to straighten my papers. Then I straighten the paper clips that hold the papers together—I’m crazy like that. Before I had kids, the house was always totally put together. My hangers were evenly spaced and color-coded. Then you have kids and that has to take a backseat. So now even though the house is slightly messy and there are piles of laundry, the studio is my little temple of organization and peace.

The story’s about friendship and dance, but I hear you’re not much of a dancer.

No, I am not. I’m awkward like Elaine on Seinfeld. I am so heavy on my feet, it’s kind of depressing. There’s an old movie maxim that says, when you make a musical, you sing when you can no longer talk and you dance when you can no longer walk. That’s the way I feel about pictures. I can draw a picture when the words that I might have said seem to fall short. That’s my dancing.

Rick Margolis is SLJ’s features editor.

DO: Let’s just start with the cover, designed by Maria Middleton with art by Nathalia Suellen aka Lady Symphonia, which is fantastic, with many hints of the delights and horrors that are just inside. Do you think they captured your “Alice”?

AG: I love it. They captured her beautifully. I’m very visual and sometimes make my own mock book covers for fun. I always assumed Splintered would be a dark gothic cover with Alyssa as the centerpiece and some sort of symbolic details woven in, like maybe the broken toys, eye patches, and the bloody roses. Here’s the mockup I made before even having a publisher:

Granted, I was WAY off in the color scheme. But once I saw what they had done, I was thrilled. Choosing vivid colors lent a whimsical feel which is so important, so the reader goes in knowing to expect some strange silliness along with the creepiness. The model is beautiful, but also looks very innocent, like my main character. I also loved the fact that Alyssa’s face is partially covered by her hair (speaking of her hair, the model’s is exactly how I pictured it!). One thing both our covers had in common was the vision: Alyssa front and center, and plenty of subtle details woven in. The bugs and flowers who talk to her, the snaky vines, the key around her neck, and her wild and haggard expression (because believe me, she goes through some crazy stuff—she earns those battle scars).

You wrote much of Splintered while working at a school library. Did it help to immerse yourself in the lives of teens? Even without talking insects, there seems to be plenty of drama afoot in their lives.

Haha! Great point. There is a lot of drama—not to mention angst in Splintered. And yeah, I saw plenty of that working at a middle school, but I also saw a lot of preteens/teens coming into their own and finding their way. It was inspiring, and reminded me of my teen years and the growth and self-actualization I went through. I did a post recently for Dear Teen Me that hits on the highlights (or lowlights) of my school career. Alyssa probably wouldn’t be the fighter she is if I hadn’t lived what I lived or if I hadn’t met those amazing kids while working in the library. So I’d say, yeah, being there made a big impression and played a major role in the crafting of Alyssa’s story and characterization.

Alyssa’s relationship with her father is very endearing—at times, it’s hard to tell who is the parent and who is the child—while her friend (and crush) Jeb has mostly violent memories of his father. How did that affect their own evolving relationship?

Sometimes Alyssa takes her relationship with her father for granted, and even resents his protectiveness. Jeb’s always right there to set her straight. In my first draft of Splintered, Jeb had chapters with his own point of view. So when I was in his head, he sometimes contemplated how lucky Alyssa was to have a dad who cared. There might’ve even been a little envy there that contributed to him taking Alyssa’s Dad’s side on certain issues because he wanted his approval, something he never got from his own father. This drives a bit of a wedge between Alyssa and him, which is present even in the final version of Splintered.

I think my favorite scene in the book is when Alyssa figures out what her mother meant when she told her, “The daisies are hiding treasure. Buried treasure.” Did some particularly bad crochet moment in your own life inspire that?

LOL! This has to be my favorite question ever. Actually, I’ve never crocheted. But I do sew, and I also admit to having had a recurrent nightmare while growing up about a green chair that was chasing me. Whether or not it plays a role in that scene is up for debate, but I’ve always been a fan of finding unique treasure in unexpected hiding places.

Morpheus, Alyssa’s netherling and childhood muse, is funny, wicked, and dangerous. Jeb, her longtime friend and protector, is sweet, trusting, and reliable.  I love that you have Pinterest boards set up for both Morpheus and Jeb. How have fans responded to your vision of these two hotties?

The fans have been amazing. Splintered has a fan page on GoodReads now (moderated by four talented and devoted book bloggers:  Hannah at book haven, Nikki at Fiction Freak, Nobonita Chowdhury at Daydreaming Bookworm, and Soumi of Pages From My Thoughts). The hottest topics up for discussion and debate revolve around which guy is best for Alyssa.  There’s even a battlefield section. Nerf guns and water balloons are the weapons of choice (swords are banned, for obvious reasons).

What would you serve at a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party for a teen book club that has read Splintered? Roasted duck might be out of the question!

Right? And no sushi, either. I actually have a Pinterest board dedicated to this question. Anything Wonderland-esque or glow-in-the-dark tops the list.  The fluorescent cupcakes and punch are my personal faves!

I read with great interest on your website that a Splintered sequel, titled Unhinged, is due out in January 2014. Any teasers you can throw our way?

Hmmm. We’re being really sneaky and sly about the premise at the moment, but I’m offering a glimpse over at a celebratory giveaway on my blog (it’s international and running until the end of March, so if you haven’t entered, hop over and check it out!). Here are some hints I can share: a bridge in London, a key and a heart pendant, and The Corpse Bride’s wardrobe. Also, Morpheus, Alyssa, and Jeb all have their moments in the spotlight, along with a few favorite Wonderlandians, and even some new ones.

Thank you so much for having me over. This interview was a blast!

Watch for a review of Splintered in May 2013 School Library Journal and check out an overview and other suggested portal fiction reads from SLJTeen.

Emily Bazelon. Photo credit: Nina Subin.

Slate senior editor Emily Bazelon has two new professions to add to her resume this year: acclaimed book author and school bullying expert. Positive reviews have been pouring in for her first book, Sticks and Stones (Random House), a well-researched narrative that weaves together the stories of three communities torn apart by bullying along with the latest research on the issue and the most effective strategies for dealing with bullying in schools.

No stranger to deep reporting, Bazelon has covered bullying at Slate for years, yet this book is really “a different animal,” she tells School Library Journal.

“My dearest wish for this book is for teenagers to read it—either on their own or in school with teachers or, best of all, with their parents,” she says. “So they really feel like the book is a jumping off point for discussion, and especially discussion among kids and adults.”

Bazelon is offering resource guides for kids, parents, and educators plus discussion questions on her site, and has enlisted the help of a New Haven (CT)-based teacher friend, a Facing History educator, to help draft a more comprehensive teachers’ guide, which is expected to be available in June, she says.

Bazelon also sat down with SLJ to discuss this important issue. In our recent interview, she helps debunk some of the popular myths about bullying; offers insights and advice for educators, parents, and kids; and shares some of her most surprising discoveries while researching the book.

Your book presents the challenges that communities face when dealing with this issue in a very even-handed way; was this intentional?
Yes! Thank you, I really was trying for that. You know, I think there are very few real villains in my book. I think there are a lot of well-intentioned adults who make mistakes. And it’s true about the teenagers in the book, too—some of them blow it in various ways. I really tried to understand where people are coming from and to have compassion for everybody I talked to.

What surprised you about the research?
When I first started researching, I (like everyone else) was seeing a lot of coverage that was treating bullying as an epidemic, so it was both a surprise and a relief to find out that that’s not true and that the rates of bullying in several countries have not risen over the last 25 years.

What has changed, I think, is our awareness of the problem. And that has to do with the internet and some of the stories that have linked bullying to suicide, I think. What we actually know about the link between bullying and suicide [is] essentially, kids who are bullied (or kids who are both bullies and victims) are at a higher rate of suicidal thinking…but we don’t know if it’s causal. In other words, we don’t know whether they were more at risk because of the bullying or whether the bullying feeds into their greater risk. The studies really don’t establish that. So I just wanted to put that out there; it’s such an important myth to debunk, I think.

How has the internet changed bullying?
I understand why people feel that bullying is more prevalent, because I think when it’s going on, it tends to move online and offline fluidly, and so for kids who are experiencing it, you don’t get a break when you go home after school anymore. You may very well have this feeling that people are posting about you on Facebook or Twitter, and that can make the bullying feel 24/7 in a way that’s very hard for people. So in terms of the internet, I think our awareness of cyber-bullying has to do with this problem of prevalence and how it tends to spin out of control in particular kids’ lives. But I also want to emphasize that, usually when cyber-bullying is going on, there’s also something going on in person, so I think it’s wrong to think of cyber-bulling as like this brand new monster on the block. It’s much more a new vehicle than it is an entirely new breed of behavior.

Another surprising thing is that you discovered that the majority of kids do not bully.
Right. And I think that’s really important to keep emphasizing I think, because when schools do internal surveys and they show that and they send that message to kids, they then see that kids report that the rate of bullying falls further. And I think what we’re seeing here is a process called social norming, which is if you show people that a behavior is an outlier behavior, they are less likely to do it.

That’s a powerful tool.
Yes! Absolutely. Agreed.

What kinds of things are coming up in discussions? What advice do you give educators?
I think it’s so important for the whole community and the whole school to take on this problem, and educators tend to know this already. Because they know that just targeting the kids who are bullied (or the kids who bully) doesn’t work, and that you really have to bring everyone on board and figure out how to make bullying socially unacceptable, how to change the dynamic in the school so that being mean isn’t a way to score social points and become more popular—defending other kids does that instead. So then the question of course is, How do you go about doing that?

And I think there are a variety of programs that work, and I’ve outlined them on my website. What they all have in common is that they are ongoing. So you can’t just have an assembly about this problem and check it off your list. You have to keep tending to it, and you also have to really harness the power of the kids who are the bystanders, because bullying almost always takes place in front of an audience, but kids only step in about 20 percent of the time, one out of five. And when they do step in, they can stop the bullying half the time. So they are a really important piece of this puzzle, but then you have to think, Why aren’t they stepping up more? One reason is that it’s a really hard thing to confront a bully, and some people are not going to be ready to take that step.

When someone is aggressive and angry and bigger than you and yelling, saying, “Hey I think you should stop” is a scary thing to do sometimes. Sometimes kids who have a lot of social status themselves or other strengths will be able to do it, and that’s great. But other kids need other strategies. Kids who have been bullied, when you ask them what did you peers do that helped, they are just as likely to name small moments of empathy as big moments of someone standing up for them. So, for example, just asking someone if they’re okay, or sending them a sympathetic text message, or going up to them in the hallway and putting a hand on their shoulder—those are things that can really mean a lot to kids. And I think if we expand what we are now calling “upstander” behavior with a variety of strategies, we can really help kids.

Have you taken a stand on criminalization?
I’m generally opposed to criminalization as they way for dealing with this problem and I don’t want to make an entirely blanket statement, because if you’re talking about a physical assault that is also bullying, then there could be exceptions to that rule. But I think the trend towards criminalization and punishment is really the wrong way to go. We’re being reactive instead of proactive when what we should really be doing is thinking about prevention, which starts with building up kids’ sense of character and moral development and also their capacity for empathy.

And empathy can be taught?
Maybe the better way to say this is that empathy can be inspired. But it can also really be concretely discussed and I actually think storytelling is a tremendously powerful vehicle for this. So in my house with my boys (10 and 13), we have used books like Wonder by R.J. Palacio, or Moon Over Manifest by Claire Vanderpoole where you have characters who are different from my kids, and they’re going through different challenges, but my kids are so drawn to the stories that they can really imagine what the world is like from those characters’ eyes, and really come to value their feelings and emotions. And we ask a lot of questions about why certain things have happened in those books, and why people behave the way they do, and I think this does foster empathy in kids.

One of my favorite things about Wonder is that R.J. tells the story from different points of view, so you’re hearing from the child who is being bullied but you’re also hearing from his classmates who are struggling with their reactions to him, because he has this severe facial abnormality and he is alarming to look at. And there’s just a great deal of honesty in that, and you can think through what it’s like to be these different kids trying to figure out how to deal with that.

Are there any other titles that are your go-to books for this topic?
There’s a new book out called Each Kindness [by Jacqueline Woodson]; I like that book. I think it’s a good vehicle for younger kids, for thinking about social exclusion. And then the older version of that book that I loved as a child and found very powerful is A Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes. It’s very timeless, though. I think that it would still speak to kids. I definitely read it to my kids.

What feedback have you gotten so far from your book?
Most of it has been just tremendously positive. I’ve been hearing from a lot of people, especially  teachers, librarians, counselors, and principals, saying “thank you,” essentially. Because I think that people who work with kids and who are on the front lines know that these issues are much more complex than media accounts often give credit for, and so I think there was a real hunger for someone to just describe what was happening with more nuance and complexity.

Where do you go from here? What’s next for you?
I would love to write another book. I’m not sure what it’s going to be about and I want to be just as
confident in my topic as I was this time, because I really like to do a lot of legwork first so I know what I’m doing. So I feel very open-ended about it. I remain perpetually fascinated by teenagers, and so I could completely imagine another book about kids but I think it would probably come from a different angle. The question is, What’s a contribution to make? How can I move the discussion forward and approach it in a way that someone else has not already done? So that’s my challenge to figure out.

I’m actually covering the rest of the Supreme Court term for Slate, so I’m going to the arguments about same-sex marriage. I’ve always been really interested in family and kids.

Your book also has advice about helping LGBT students. Do you feel a greater sense of urgency or relevance to this, in light of your coverage of the Supreme Court?
I think that’s a really good link to make. I do think that the problem of anti-gay harassment and bullying has added urgency to the drive for full equality for gay people in all domains. And just to elaborate for a second, now that we can see gay kids are really at a higher risk, we’re also seeing an important buffer against that. It’s to instill in kids, from an early age, acceptance of different kinds of families. And so that’s a new reason for curricula that are inclusive of gay families.

Are you interested in an ongoing commitment to this issue? You seem very invested!
I want to stay a journalist at the end of this; I’m not going to turn into an educator or a psychologist. But in that capacity, I’m eager to stay involved. The other thing that’s happened since I started working on the book is that more studies have come out showing the long-term serious psychological effects of bullying, and that…just helps me stiffen my spine. There was the study a couple of weeks ago from Duke showing that kids who are bullied (and kids who are bullies and victims) have strikingly higher rates of anxiety, depression and suicidal thinking 20 years later. So, [the] teachers’ guide is really my effort to get my book out into the world in the most useful way possible, I hope, as a launching pad for discussion among kids and adults and I am very committed to that. And to traveling and visiting schools—whoever will have me—that supports that.

We’ve heard from librarians that have spearheaded reading projects where an entire community (from kids to adults) picks a young adult novel to read and then meets with the author to discuss it. Can you envision something like that for your book?
That would be fabulous. If you could help me plant that seed, I will be incredibly grateful to you. That would be wonderful to see that happen. I would love to do that.  Any community that wants to read my book, I will happily come. I love these projects. Yeah, I would absolutely love that, and would absolutely come. It would be a dream come true to see that happen.

Actually, just yesterday I started working on the teachers’ guide by going in to talk to a class. The kids, I think, can relate to the stories of the kids in my book. They’re really real, but because it’s a book that’s about storytelling, it really gives people a chance to grapple with all the choices the characters made along the way and to think about, okay, How could this story have gone better? And what mistakes the people make, and thinking about solutions in a way that I thought was really powerful.

Thanks so much for speaking with us! Our audience of librarians and other educators is always looking for these kinds of tools to use with their students.
Totally! I had a childhood librarian who changed my life, he was an incredible force for good in my life, and I will never forget him, and feel so grateful to him. So I have a deep sense of how important librarians are. I’m happy to go on at length! He knew I would come every week or two and I would take out as many books as I was allowed, and he helped me pick them. He would set aside books he thought I would like; he was just an amazing resource. He was a very kind and reserved man, and I treasured my moments with him. And he opened up a whole world of reading for me that absolutely changed my life. (I just had to go on that pro-librarian rant!)