Sorrow Into Story

Several years ago I designed and taught a graduate course called “The Resilient Spirit; Art out of Adversity.”  Like the best classes, the preparation of the course was its own gift: for months I read books and researched artists, I watched documentaries and dance performances, listened to symphonies and lectures, attended shows in galleries, tracked down interviews with artists who’d found a way to transform loss.  From public suffering to private trauma, I studied artists across disciplines whose art had helped them heal. 

The Danish writer Isak Dinesen is quoted as saying, “All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them.”   As a child-writer, who turned to language as a way to process loss, I hold this notion dear:  “All sorrow can be borne.”  For me, whether it’s in poetry or fiction, or most recently a lyric essay I wrote on family illness, there’s a way in which my writing has nurtured my resilience, has consistently delivered me from adversity to hope.      

The real mystery for me is how this transformation happens sideways in my fiction—that is to say without intention, by chance--because I’ve never written fiction to heal a wounded heart.  And still there it is—hidden somewhere in the text—the promise of redemption, a small bright light in all the suffering, the assurance in the end that goodness will endure. 

And it’s not autobiographical—I wasn’t an orphaned child selling pony rides like Pride in Keeping Safe the Stars, or a stroke survivor like Old Finn.  I wasn’t a girl who never knew her father like Raine in Sparrow Road, I wasn’t a reclusive troubled composer like cold Viktor, or a recovering alcoholic like Gray James.  I wasn’t ever any of these people and yet their sorrows were my own.  And unlike in some of the worst suffering I’ve witnessed in my real life, in my fiction my characters can triumph. 

And triumph is enough to keep me writing through the tough times.  If I tell the story well I get to believe it—and if I’m lucky someone else does, and in this way I’m building my own resilient spirit, making art out of adversity, letting the imagination find a way to help us heal.       

“Middleview” Interview with Debut Author Ari Goelman

Posted by Tamera Wissinger

Today, Ari Goelman is joining Smack Dab In The Middle Blog for a guest “middleview” interview. Ari’s debut middle grade novel THE PATH OF NAMES, Arthur A. Levine, released earlier this month, on May 1, 2013! Congratulations, Ari!

Here is Ari’s biography:

Ari Goelman has published about a dozen short stories, most recently in Strange Horizons, Daily SF, and Fantasy Magazine.   He is a past winner of the Writers of the Future competition, and a graduate of the Clarion West writers workshop.  Publisher’s Weekly has described his work as “outstanding” and “lovingly constructed,” while The Harvard Crimson has described him as a master of “sci-fi, fairies, and the urban ghetto.” 

His academic work has been published in the Journal of Architecture, Planning and Research as well as Environment and Planning A, and has been covered in places as diverse as the Brookings Institute and The New York Times.  He lives in Vancouver with his family and the rain.

Here is a description of THE PATH OF NAMES:

Mysteries, mazes, and magic combine in this smart, funny summer-camp fantasy -- like THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY for kids!

Dahlia Sherman loves magic, and Math Club, and Guitar Hero. She isn't so fond of nature walks, and Hebrew campfire songs, and mean girls her own age.

All of which makes a week at Jewish summer camp pretty much the worst idea ever.

But within minutes of arriving at camp, Dahlia realizes that it might not be as bad as she'd feared. First she sees two little girls walk right through the walls of her cabin. Then come the dreams -- frighteningly detailed visions of a young man being pursued through 1930s New York City. How are the dreams and the girls related? Why is Dahlia the only one who can see any of them? And what's up with the overgrown, strangely shaped hedge maze that none of the campers are allowed to touch? Dahlia's increasingly dangerous quest for answers will lead her right to the center of the maze -- but it will take all her courage, smarts, and sleight-of-hand skills to get her back out again.

Here are links to Ari online: Website, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Amazon

And now it’s time to hear from our guest:

Smack Dab Middleview With THE PATH OF NAMES Author Ari Goelman

1. What does your main character, Dahlia, want?

Dahlia’s goals change through the course of The Path of Names.  At the beginning of the novel, she mostly wants to stay home, play video games and practice magic tricks.  Once she arrives at summer camp she sees two little girls walk through the walls of her cabin, and immediately becomes determined to figure out how the ‘trick’ was accomplished.  So, at first, she just wants to know how the magic works.

As the book goes on, though, she becomes more and more concerned with figuring out what happened to the girls, and more importantly, how to help them. She’s still curious, but increasingly, her curiosity is motivated by the desire to set things right.

2. What is in her way?

Ignorance.  Not just her ignorance of magic, but also her ignorance of her own need for friendships and relationships.  Plus, of course, there’s a bad guy with magic powers.  Not to mention the usual contingent of mean girls in her bunk.  And, come to think of it, her best friend isn’t exactly the most helpful guy in the world, not for most of the novel.  Neither is her brother.  Fortunately, Dahlia is not the kind of person who lets a few little obstacles - like everything and everyone - stop her.

3. Did you know right away that this was your story, or did you discover it as you wrote? How did the story evolve?

I knew right away that I was writing a summer camp story, involving ghosts and reincarnation and an old murder mystery that threatens to spill into the present.  The rest very much emerged as I wrote it.  Dahlia’s character – feisty and so independent she’s almost anti-social -- was totally not what I had in mind.  I think that she might have come out that way partly in opposition to the kind of girly heroines in the picture books I was reading my daughter at the time.

4. Was THE PATH OF NAMES always for middle grade readers or not? If so, why did you choose middle grade? If not, what had to change for it to be considered a middle grade novel?

I actually intended The Path of Names to be YA.  When I first wrote the novel, Dahlia was aged 13, and I actually aged her up to 15 on the advice of my writing group colleagues who (quite correctly) told me I needed an older heroine for it to be YA.   I found an agent (the fabulous Lindsay Ribar), and she submitted it to publishers based on it being a YA novel. 

Cheryl Klein (my editor at Arthur A. Levine) then convinced me THE PATH OF NAMES would work better as a middle grade book.  On the face of it, her reasoning was based on the lack of a strong romance component in THE PATH OF NAMES.  I personally believe that Cheryl also has magically acute editorial powers, and somehow picked up on the fact that Dahlia worked better as a thirteen-year-old.

The first thing I did to make it work better for middle grade readers was to restore Dahlia’s age to thirteen.  (Thank god for the find and replace function...)  Aside from that, it was mostly taking out curse words and eliminating the occasional reference to sex from the conversation of the older characters.  I think it was a really minimal transformation, because it basically was already a middle grade novel thinly disguised as a young adult novel.

5. What is the best part of writing for middle grade readers?

I think there’s a ton of freedom in writing for middle grade readers – they aren’t as wedded to various genre tropes as older audiences might be.  You can mix fantasy and humor and serious themes in the same chapter and your middle grade reader won’t bat an eye.  Also, it seems to me that the focus in middle grade is much more on story – the kind of ‘what-happened-next’ element of fiction.

6. Is there one MG-related question you wish you could answer about writing, your book, or the author's life, but have never been asked? Here's your chance to Q &A yourself. What did you like to read when you were in the middle grades?

Everything!  I had a terrible time in 5^th grade.  That was the year my school district switched from a junior high (starting in 7^th grade) to a middle school (staring in 5^th grade), and for me, at least, it was a terrible transition.  They didn’t prepare very well for the change, and the upshot was I went from this little elementary school class where everyone had known me since I was five, to this huge middle school, where I knew no one.  I already liked to read, but suddenly, books became my essential sanctuary.  And I read everything.

The MG books I remember most fondly are fantasy classics like The Silver Crown and The Sword and the Stone, but if it had pages and little words printed on it, I would read it. This led to me reading a lot of very bad books, but it also led to me reading dozens of terrific books.

I was somewhere in the middle grades when I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time.  I read a bunch of those very dark MG (or were they YA?) books that were in vogue back then – The Chocolate War, I Am the Cheese, etc.  I read most of Richard Peck’s books (The Ghost Belonged to Me, etc.) about teenagers who see ghosts, all of which were no doubt lurking somewhere in the back of my brain when I wrote The Path of Names.  One of my hopes for The Path of Names is that it serves some of the same purpose for MG readers today, that all those books did for me back then.

Thank you for joining us for a Middleview at Smack Dab Blog, Ari. Again, congratulations on the release of THE PATH OF NAMES! We’ll look for it on bookshelves!

Teensy-Weensy, Itty-Bitty, VERY SMALL Steps (May Theme: Getting Through Tough Times) by Claudia Mills

Like many writers, I’m an inveterate list-maker. Right now I am staring at my to-do list for May, with 151 items on the list. But – and here is the tie-in to this month’s theme on how to get through tough times – the items on this list are, every single one of them, very, very small. Whenever I am overwhelmed with the magnitude of whatever it is I need to face in my life (that is to say, all of the time), my strategy for proceeding is to break down what I need to face into the smallest possible units that I can stand facing.

For example, one of my terrifying tasks right now is editing a scholarly volume of essays on ethics and children’s literature. How could an avoidance-specialist like me tackle a task so daunting? So, on my to-do list I have these items:

1. Print out the twelve papers to be edited.

2. Make yourself look at the first one.

3. Read the first one.

4. Send off comments on the first one.

1   

Friends tease me when they see me giving myself extravagant credit for having crossed off “Print out the papers to be edited.” That is hardly worthy of a red check mark made with a self-congratulatory flourish, they say. Ah, but it is. Just as I thought the project was going to have to be abandoned as impossible, along comes a task on the list that I can actually do, in fact a task that can practically do itself as I sit at the computer simply clicking “File – Print” over and over again. As the nice pile of pages emerges from the printer, I already have a little glow of satisfaction that can carry over to the next, far scarier task on the list: “Make yourself look at the first one.” Indeed, I have sometimes given myself credit for task 1a: “Staple the papers you have printed.” Believe me, when times are tough enough, stapling twelve entire papers is a huge accomplishment.

The brilliant, wise, wonderful self-help guru Barbara Sher (Wishcraft, Live the Life You Love, It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now) endorses my small-steps strategy. Maybe I even stole it from her on first reading her books decades ago. Sher explains that it’s only natural that we experience resistance born of fear when encountering major work and life tasks, especially those that matter most to us (so that our failing to do them should not be taken as a sign that we don’t really want to do them, but as a sign that we want to do them too much). The only force great enough to drive out fear is love. So what we need to do, she tells us, is to find a portion of the major work/life task small and nonthreatening enough not to trigger that resistance. Take that one timid, tiny step. And then let yourself fall in love with the sheer doing of it. 

So today I’m going to staple these papers I’ve just printed, I am, I am! And I’ll take one shy peek at the first one. Tomorrow I may actually read the first one – well, maybe not read the whole thing, that might be too intense and scary, but read the first page of the first one. And then maybe the next page.  And maybe the page after that. My prediction: this entire huge hard task will be done a month from today, and done with ease. And how will I do it? One teensy-weensy step at a time.

Getting Through Tough Times (May Theme) by Stephanie Burgis

Like Bob (whose entry really, really moved me), writing has been my biggest savior during the tough times in my life. While I was going through a painful divorce in my mid-twenties, I barely managed to produce any fiction, but I journalled compulsively, letting out all my overwhelming, out-of-control emotions in a safe place where they could be both expressed AND contained. (This was a paper diary, not a blog! It was written absolutely just for me.)

Several years later, happily remarried and living in a different country, I was diagnosed with M.E./CFS: a longterm, chronic illness that can't be cured. Because of the illness, I had to give up my job. Many days, I couldn't even get up off my couch. I didn't know how to adjust to the new life stretching out in front of me as I lay there on the couch. I sank into despair.

What saved me, emotionally? Writing, yet again. I gave up the "serious" adult novel I'd been working on and started writing the first of my Kat books, Kat, Incorrigible, instead. Following Kat in her fabulous magical adventures, as she leaped on highwaymen's horses, battled snobby aristocrats, and caught true loves for her older sisters, made me laugh and remember how to be happy again myself. Kat's coming-of-age journey, across the course of her trilogy (which just finished, with Stolen Magic published last month) accompanied my own gradual adaptation to a new, wonderful life despite my illness.

What about you guys? What saved you in your own tough times?

Getting Through Tough Times (May Theme) by Bob Krech

A lot has been said this month about getting through the tough times of writing, but I've also experienced writing helping get me through the tough times of life.

Twenty-one years ago on a cold November evening at 5:35 p.m. my daughter Faith was born. She was born at twenty-two weeks gestation and weighed in at 450 grams. I learned that day that there are 454 grams in a pound. Not a fact I carried around in my head up to that point.

I've never been a journal or diary writer, but from that first scary night when the doctor urged us to just keep our daughter warm and let her pass on, to the wonderful ride home from the hospital five months later, I found myself taking notes compulsively as we plunged into a crash course in neonatology. I wrote down all the numbers that came flying at us; blood gas levels, respirator rates, oxygen percentages, heart rate, medicine dosages, as well as anything and everything nurses or doctors actually said.

Faith Krech, Guilford College Sophomore

I wasn't doing any of this with an eye toward turning it into articles or a book. It was like a mechanism that helped me keep a handle on everything and maintain some perspective. Soon it turned into capturing some of the moments I knew I did not want to forget. Like the first snowfall I saw from the one window in the NICU. Or the day they removed the respirator tube because she could finally breathe on her own. The writing even gave me a place to express and explore my thoughts about what was happening and maybe even why.

I know I've also used writing to explore, express, and figure out my feelings on different issues and situations in the world at large and in my own personal life, both past and present. Often it's easier and more effective for me to write it out than talk it out. Sometimes I can retreat into the writing and take a break in that imaginary world I've constructed there. It can be an escape, but also a place to work on "stuff." As well as a tool to help cope and sort things when it all gets crazy. Certainly not a bad thing to have during tough times.

“Middleview” Interview with Debut Author Polly Holyoke

Posted by Tamera Wissinger

Today, Polly Holyoke is joining Smack Dab In The Middle Blog for a guest “middleview” interview. Polly’s debut middle grade novel THE NEPTUNE PROJECT, Disney/Hyperion, releases in one week, on May 21, 2013! Congratulations, Polly!

Here is Polly’s biography:

Polly Holyoke has been imagining stories since she was in fifth grade and was a middle school teacher for many years. When she isn’t writing, Polly loves reading, camping, skiing, scuba diving and hiking in the desert. She lives with three rescue dogs, two spoiled cats and a nice husband who is tolerant about the piles of books all over their house. She thinks the best part about being an author is going to work in her sweatpants and getting paid for daydreaming!

 Here is a description of THE NEPTUNE PROJECT:

THE NEPTUNE PROJECT is set in a future where the seas are rising and wars and famines wrack the surface world. Nere Hanson and her teen companions are shocked to learn that they have been genetically altered by their desperate parents to live in the sea. Protected by her loyal dolphins, shy Nere leads the rest on a perilous journey to her father’s new colony. Fighting off government divers, sharks and giant squid, can Nere and her companions learn to trust each other before their dangerous new world destroys them?

Here are links to Polly online: Website, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Goodreads, Amazon

Now it’s time to hear from our guest:

Smack Dab Middleview with THE NEPTUNE PROJECT author Polly Holyoke

1. What does your main character Nere want?

More than anything else, Nere wants to be accepted and respected. An outcast at school, she is ignored by her peers, and even her driven scientist parents often don’t have time for her.

2. What stands in her way?

Nere has been discounted and ignored for so long, she doesn’t have much faith in her own abilities. For much of the book, she refuses to believe that she could lead her companions as they face countless dangers in the sea. But her knowledge of the ocean, her bravery and the way she looks out for others make the rest of the Neptune kids realize that Nere is a leader before she ever reaches that realization herself.

3. Did you know right away that this was your story, or did you discover it as you wrote? How did the story evolve?

Actually, I did know this would be my story. I often write about the shy but capable kids on the outskirts who long for acceptance and a chance to prove themselves. I think that’s a theme many middlegrade kids can relate to. Nere’s challenges became even greater because the other Neptune kids and even the dolphins who protect them developed such strong personalities as the story evolved.

4. Was The Neptune Project always for middle grade readers or not? If not, what had to change for it to be considered a middle grade novel?

Neptune was written for a YA audience, but the editorial staff at Disney Hyperion thought Nere was more of a MG protagonist in many ways, and I agreed with them. We did have to dial down the romantic elements and change the characters’ dialogue. Middlegrade characters, I was surprised to learn, can’t even say words like, “crap.”

5. What is the best part of writing for middle grade readers?

I love the fact that middlegrade readers haven’t learned to be cynical yet. I know they will believe wholeheartedly in even the wildest parts of my story as long as I build my world and my plot well.

6. Is there any downside?

I don’t think the dialogue in most MG novels being published today is very authentic.  I know this age well, and I know how colorful their language actually is.

7. Is there was one MG rated question you wish you could answer about writing, your book, or the author’s life that you’ve never been asked?

Actually, no one has ever asked me what I wanted to be when I was in middle school. I very much wanted to be a veterinarian or a dolphin trainer. I guess writing a book about dolphins is the next best thing! 

Thank you for joining us for a Middleview at Smack Dab Blog, Polly. Again, congratulations on the release of THE NEPTUNE PROJECT! We’ll look for it on bookshelves!