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Squeetus exclusive: Jennifer L. Holm

I am so honored to host today two-time Newbery Honor medalist Jennifer L. Holm. She rocked the Newbery with her very first book, Our Only May Amelia, then drank again from the silver goblet for Penny from Heaven last year. She has a super fun graphic novel series for young readers (I'd say 6-11 year olds) called Babymouse, and if you're a lover of historical fiction, look no farther than her popular Boston Jane series. Her latest, Middle School Is Worse than Meatloaf is subtitled "A Year Told Through Stuff," and indeed there's no actual narrative. The book is about a year in the life of Ginny, a seventh grader, which we learn by reading her school essays, report cards, bills, scribbles on her notebook, post-it notes from mom, the occasional comic strip done by her older brother, etc. Unusual and completely captivating. After I read it, I showed it to my sister, who sat on the couch and ignored everything going on around her until she'd finished it, then she promptly showed it to her husband. Jennifer Holm is made of the very best stuff--an extremely fine writer, who writes with grace, truth, humor, adventure, and fun, and doesn't sacrifice story for quality. Here's our conversation:

SH: I don't know that I've ever read a book in the same format as Middle School is Worse Than Meatloaf, and yet the storytelling flowed so easily. I felt like I was Ginny sometimes, and other times like I was a PI piecing together her life from the clues. So fun. What were the challenges in writing this book? Or what is an interesting question you keep wishing someone would ask you about this book that no one has 
yet?

JH: It was such an odd book to write. So much of it came from this "box of stuff" my mom had kept from my childhood. She was a total packrat (you should see her basement.) She kept all this ephemera of mine--from the usual stuff like photos and report cards to plain weird stuff like notes I passed in class
(where did she find these?) and hall passes for when I was sent to the guidance office (apparently I needed a lot of guidance.)

I think the biggest challenge was to make the actual layout feel three-dimensional. I didn't want it to be a diary book. I worked with an awesome illustrator, Elicia Castaldi, and she told me that she lived in fear
of the packages I would mail her. I would literally send her junk from around my house (like plastic easter eggs, and fridge magnets, and Christmas lights!) But she was a terribly forgiving and incorporated much of what I sent her into the book.

I guess the question I wish someone would ask is: why does Ginny's older brother communicate to her in comic strips? Answer: because my brother Matt (illustrator of BABYMOUSE) did this when we were kids. I still have a bunch of comic strips he drew for me.

[AWESOME! I wish I'd thought to ask that.]

So, tell, what's it like to get a second Newbery Honor? Is the silver even shinier? Was it even more exciting than the first or different in an unexpected way?

<Happy sigh.> It's so much shinier. I think because every book I've written since OUR ONLY MAY AMELIA has been so much harder to write. This doesn't make sense, I know, but there it is. What made it really wonderful for me was that my dad was able to attend the Newbery banquet. He was ill during the banquet when I received an honor for OUR ONLY MAY AMELIA.

You've done the Babymouse series and now Meatloaf. I'm a huge fan of visual storytelling, both as a reader of graphic novels myself and as a proponent for those readers who struggle with purely textual books. Do you read graphic novels for fun? What do you find most satisfying about working with visual storytelling?

I'm a huge fan of comic books, from a young age. Matt and I like to say that our dad weaned us on PRINCE VALIANT and FLASH GORDON. I'm fortunate that reading comics is now, ahem, "research". Also, one of my first jobs when I was a recent college grad was working for a visual effects production
company, back in the day when animation was hand-drawn. And then I went on to become a broadcast producer and produced animation, so that experience has come in handy.

I'm really enjoying the new FANTASTIC FOUR lately (who knew, righ?) And I'm a big fan of Grant Morrison who wrote WE-3, the most mind-bending graphic novel evah. Read it with a box of tissues.

I think it's very satisfying to not be confined to just words. Since I work with my brother, I have a lot of involvement in the lay-out, style, etc. So, that's a lot of fun for me.

How is the reality of being a published author different than what you might have imagined when you were young?

I always assumed authors wore beautiful gowns and went to hoity-toity literary events and ate bon-bons. The harsh reality is that it is a pretty lonely career. You're sort of forced to isolate yourself in order to write. I've had to teach myself to be disciplined about writing. On the upside, though, I get to wear my pajamas to work!

How do people in your neighborhood and people you meet outside the business react to learning what your profession is?

Well, the kids in the neighborhood are on to me. They usually show up when my box of author copies shows up so they can get their free books (I need to start asking for more author copies!)

Generally, people are very nice when I tell them what I do for a living. Although, once, an adult author asked me when I was going to write a "real book"? Luckily, it was at a dinner, and my mouth was full, so I couldn't respond.

Let's look at the evidence, Jenni:
1. We both write novels for young adults
2. We've both co-written with our husbands
3. We've both written graphic novels for young readers
4. We've both received a Newbery Honor
5. We both have a toddler boy and a baby girl
6. We're both (objectively) super cute
So...are we the same person? And if not, why aren't we best friends at 
least? And what can I do to solidify that BFF status?

7. You forgot: we are both covered with spit-up.

Thank you, Jenni! You are a gem.

The leap before the fall

Yesterday I turned in a first draft (really a fourth draft) of my new book for adults to my editor. It's currently titled The Actor and the Housewife and is weighing in at 106,000 words. And I have no idea what genre to call it. I hope she'll know. Then not three hours later I received a UPS delivery of the fourth Bayern book ms with notes and editor letter. So for four hours I was free! Free!...and now back to work.

The new adult book has been fun. The fourth Bayern book has been hard. Really hard. I'm cringing to get back into it. So I'm going to just dip my toes in first, to feel the temperature, then slowly lower in my legs by reading the manuscript in paper form as quickly as a reader might. Take notes. Get the general feel. Then after all that, after I get a really good idea of what I want to do, I'll start the slicing and dicing. It needs much work. I need to be brave to face it. Bring it on, Scary Green Manuscript Monster! I've faced you before, and I'll be victorious again! HA HA HA!

(...yipes!...)

Spring chick

I feel young. I do. I don't feel that much different than the teen girls I meet. Then I stand back and see that I'm a mom to two children and go, "Whoa! How did that happen?" But when I stand back a little further, I realize that I'm not, actually, that close to the teenagers of today. A few examples:

• As late as high school, in class we watched filmstrips in class, the sound provided by a cassette player.
• I didn't have email until graduate school.
• In high school, I wrote my reports on a typewriter (electric at least, no manual).
• My first cell phone was in graduate school. I got it via a special plan through my father's work, and I had 45 minutes of talk time per month.
• I still find myself referring to a keyboard (the musical instrument) as a "synthesizer"
• When I was four years old, I was one of the kids on Romper Room for a week.
• I watched a Ronald Reagan/Jimmy Carter debate on TV.
• Our first VHS had a plug-in remote--that is, the remote was connected to the VHS by a long cord.
• I remember the Challenger explosion.
• I never thought the wall would come down.
• I saw Goonies in the theater three times.
• I remember when Nerds candy first hit the market--it was exciting!
• I stayed up late one Friday night with my older sister and watched the original broadcast of "Thriller."
• I grew up terrified of Soviets invading, of nuclear bombs, and was sure Red Dawn would happen in my town.
• My mother dressed me and my sisters in matching, bright green, bell bottom jumpsuits.
• I think I voted for Gary Hart in the first primaries held after I was old enough to vote. That was pre-scandal, I'm pretty sure.
• The first computer my family owned was an Apple IIe, and the monitor was monotone--green. I loved that machine. That was where I first started to write books.

So, I'm old? Or something? Oldish. Naw, I'm still sassy and young. Ignore the facts! You just can't deny how you feel.

Squeetus exclusive: Linda Sue Park

This week we bring you the always fabulous Linda Sue Park. She most deservedly received a Newbery Medal for her book A Single Shard, the story of a young homeless boy in long ago Korean who watches the skilled potters at work and longs to make pots of his own. Just before interviewing Linda Sue, I read Project Mulberry--set in modern day, a girl and her best friend take on an ambitious school project--raising silk worms in the city. Since the interview, I had the chance to read an advance copy of Keeping Score, to be published this month, and loved it just as much, if not more, than the others, and decided to postpone posting her interview until Keeping Score was coming out. After reading it, I emailed her to say, "I love, love, love it! I love Maggie, and the wonderful exploration of prayer and superstition, sports and god and friendship, obsessions and choices. You write with such lovely simplicity that somehow is rich with complexities and thoughtfulness. I rarely read more than one book by any author because I'm a slow reader and there are so many books I want to read--but this is my third LSP. I'm a huge fan." Linda Sue's writing is flawless. Her storytelling style is so light, so melt-on-your-tongue, that you think you're getting a simple little tale, a quick-and-easy read that flows by in no time, until all of a sudden you realize she's given you a meal on the sly. Powerful, heartwrenching, insightful, funny, intelligent, life-changing stories that read as simply and swiftly as comic strips--no one does it like Linda Sue, and I am in constant awe. And now, here she is, the grand dame herself.

SH: I have to ask you about Project Mulberry. In between each chapter, the main character has a conversation with you, the author. This is so brilliant! I love how you somehow balanced this metafiction moment so that it doesn’t detract from or compromise the story, and yet is a fascinating insight into the writing process. As a writer, I loved it, and I imagine kids must really love it. So…(you can see what a genius I am at this whole asking questions thing…) can you tell us something about this section, how it came about?

LSP: Lots of writers say that their characters talk to them. This hardly ever happens to me. My characters do not talk to me. I used to get really jealous of writers whose characters talked to them. My characters only talked when I was making them talk in the story.

But Julia was different. I don’t know why, but she started talking to me. And once she started, she wouldn’t stop. She talked to me all the time. She talked to me when I was trying to go to sleep at night, and when I was out driving around, and when I was in the grocery store, and sometimes even when I was in the bathroom! She talked to me so much that she was driving me crazy, and I was very sorry that I’d ever wished for a character to talk to me.

Julia was almost never happy when she talked to me. She didn’t like the way the story was going. She didn’t like her little brother. She thought I was way too hard on her. She also asked a lot of questions—why did that chapter have to go like that? Why couldn’t she have a little sister instead of a little brother? The questions she asked were usually good ones, and they were on my mind a lot as I worked on the story.

Like all writers, I sometimes get stuck when I’m working on a story. ‘Sometimes’ for me means about every other day. I would get stuck and I would sit there and stare at the screen and my fingers weren’t typing anything and the page was staying blank. I needed to get my fingers going.

So I started typing out the questions Julia was asking me, and I started typing out answers to them as well. And more and more often, as I would be typing out these questions and answers, I would get ‘unstuck’—I’d figure out what I needed to do next, and I could continue working on the story.

This started happening regularly: I’d get stuck, I’d type out a conversation between me and Julia, I’d get unstuck, and I’d go on with the story. It happened so often that the typed conversations started to feel like part of the story too. So about a third of the way through the book, I decided to include them. And that’s why there are those sections in between the chapters of the book.

SH: Do the people in your neighborhood know your profession? What kind of reactions do you get from people outside this business on hearing that you’re a children’s writer?

LSP: Most of my neighbors know what I do because there are several families with children on the block, and I've visited their schools. Also there is a retired librarian a few doors down. But we've lived here for fourteen years now, which means that many of them knew me *before* I was published, and I don't think they think of it as a big deal. I think they mostly wonder why my yard always looks so terrible. (I do not have a green thumb. I have a black and shriveled thumb.)

Outside the biz, I usually introduce myself as a writer. Then of course people always ask if I'm published, and I say yes, and then they ask what kind of books I write and I say novels, and then I say that my novels are mostly for young people. I think this fools them momentarily. (I guess most folks don't want to be thought of as old people.)

I kind of enjoy tracking their responses, but when it comes right down to it, I don't really care what they think. I love what I do, and children's writers have the greatest fans in the whole world. As far as I'm concerned, the real question is, how come EVERYONE isn't writing for young people? But I'm glad they're not, because I think only the BEST writers should write for young people. (Like you!)

SH: If you could do something dangerous, impossible, crazy, with no ill consequences for anybody, what would it be?

LSP: Space-walk. Like an astronaut (as opposed to what I often do when I'm pondering a story, which is to walk spacily). But that will probably never happen, so second best would be sky-diving.

(Hmmm...seeing the earth from above, in both cases. I am a very short person. I think this means that I have a Napoleonic complex.)

SH: Is there anything about being a writer that would have surprised you before you were published?

LSP: The talking part. That so many people would invite me to give presentations and come to hear me speak. It makes me very nervous, and I spend hours and hours on my presentations in an effort not to disappoint them, but no matter how much I prepare, I still wonder why in the world anyone would want to hear what I have to say about anything.

SH: The hot rumor I heard at the secret writers deli is that there's a new Linda Sue coming out soon. Tell, tell!

LSP: Oh, I'm so glad you asked! I have a book coming out this spring (in March), called KEEPING SCORE. I've been a baseball fan my whole life, and I've always wanted to write a baseball story. KEEPING SCORE is about a girl named Maggie (YAY for girls named Maggie!), who lives in Brooklyn in the 1950s. She's a huge fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. A family friend named Jim teaches Maggie how to keep score of a baseball game--you use a system of letters, numbers, and symbols to record every play. (It's fascinating if you're interested, and completely mystifying if your'e not.) Then Jim gets drafted into the army and has to go fight in the Korean War. So it's a baseball story that morphs into a war story.

I am SO excited about this book. I have to say that at the moment, it's my favorite of all the books I've written. I can't wait to find out what readers think about it!

Thank you for your generosity in doing this little chat! Another thing you should know about Linda Sue is, she is a complete and total delight. I've had the opportunity to meet her a couple of times and I have a teeny crush on Ms. Park. She just so rocks. And even cooler--I'm going to the ALA annual conference this year and will be doing a Readers Theater with Linda Sue, Norton Juster, and Eric Rohmann. I don't know how I fooled everyone into thinking I belong in that all-star line-up, but don't tell on me! 'Cause I'm psyched.

An ideal husband

Here's the thing, ladies--if you're going to get married someday, it's kind of important to pick the right guy. Allow me to list a totally random collection of traits you might want to look into.

• A sense of humor, and how. If he can make you laugh everyday, and you can make him laugh, and you both laugh together, that is a serious bonus. Wait, bonus nothing, that's essential.
• He should have really great genes. That's hard to tell up front, but it'd be nice once you have kids to have beautiful, smart, awesome ones.
• You might want to think about finding someone strong. Like, outlandishly strong. Superhero strong. I imagine it'd come in handy around the house.
• Also he should be smart. He should understand things you don't and be able to explain them to you without making you feel dumb, so you can keep learning. And he should be interested in learning new things from you, so both your horizons are expanded.
• And he should be gentle and loving, and care more about you than himself, and look for ways to make you happy.
• He should have integrity--know what he believes and stick to it, but also have an open mind and be willing to consider new ideas.
• Nerds are cool--but opt for a self-aware nerd, one who can laugh at his own extraordinary nerdiness, like, Star Trek convention level of unimaginable nerdiness. Serious, serious nerdiness. Imagine the hours of laughing nerds can provide in the home.
• Bald is nice. You don't have to keep buying him new combs all the time or wait while he puts in hair gel. He can just shine his pate and go.
• And wouldn't it be nice if you were, say, an author, and he happened to read your books and genuinely like them, and what if he also happened to be brilliant at giving feedback and helping you to make them even better? That would be awesome.
• Wait, let's go a step further--what if in addition to all that, he himself was also a genius at writing and you could actually write books together? Wow, that's almost too much to hope for, but fun to think about.

Whoa, you know what's weird? I just realized that all those points describe someone I know--my own husband in fact. That's amazing! Wow, he must be really, really cool.

Happy anniversary, honey. You've made the past eight years into the life I always hoped I'd have. I love you so much.

Reading actually is fundamental

President Bush's budget is proposing cutting funding from Reading is Fundamental, a program that puts millions of books into children's hands. A child's literacy is directly linked to having age appropriate books in the home. If you feel strongly about supporting this program, too, please follow the link where you can write a letter to your representatives in congress and senate.

Nathan Hale pointed me to an interesting article that posits, a creative person doesn't have to be a superstar to make a living doing creative things--all they need are 1000 True Fans. (Later in the article, it explains that book writers need a lot more, since our cut from a book sale is so small.) I love the idea of 1000 True Fans, and what it means to be a True Fan as opposed to a Lesser Fan. It makes me wonder how many I have. I truly have no idea. It could be five or five thousand for all I know. But some interesting thoughts there for those of you hoping to make a living at the impossible.

Happy International Women's Day! One of my best friends is passionate about supporting the charity mentioned in the article. I want to help out too. This year is going to be a year of active good deeds. I can't wait. More soon.

Winning losers

First, the very cool James Dashner is donating all his royalties from copies of The 13th Reality that are sold in the first week of publication (which would be now, I think). More details at his blog.

Dean and I were talking about wanting to read some graphic novels that had been recent award winners.

"But which kind of awards are they?" I asked. "The kind that awards to really great reads, or the kind that recognizes the genre breakers and innovative styles?" I.e. the kind that might be "important" but also "boring." Personally, I think there's room for both kinds, both contributions to literature are vital to keep it alive and growing, but also keep readers reading. But as a reader, I want to read the rippin' good tale most of all.

So my question is, do you select your reading list from the winners of certain awards? Do you always trust the Newberys, the Pulitzers, the NBAs? Do you shy away from the Hugos but embrace the Nebulas, or vice versa? Are there obscure awards that you think always choose really great books? My new favorite awards are the CYBILS. What do you mean that's because they chose book of a thousand days? I scoff at your unfounded accusation! Those peeps just know good reads, that's all I'm saying.