Today’s Interviews:
Tom & Dorothy Hoobler at Chasing Ray
Mitali Perkins at Big A, Little a
Sara Zarr at Interactive Reader
Justina Chen Headley at Hip Writer Mama
Justine Larbalestier at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy
Dana Reinhardt at lectitans
Brent Hartinger at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Laura Ruby at Writing and Ruminating
Jordan Sonnenblick by Bildungsroman
Ysabeau Wilce at Finding Wonderland
Tomorrow’s Interviews:
Laura Ruby at Miss Erin
Bennett Madison at Shaken & Stirred
Shaun Tan at A Fuse #8 Production
Chris Crutcher at Bookshelves of Doom
Holly Black at The YA YA YAs
Kazu Kibuishi at Finding Wonderland
Christopher Golden at Bildungsroman
David Brin at Chasing Ray
Kirsten Miller at Jen Robinson’s Book Page
Sara Zarr at Big A, little a
Sonya Hartnett at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Posts in "Long Posts"
Summer Blog Blast Tour: Dana Reinhardt
The Summer Blog Blast Tour begins here at
with Dana Reinhardt.![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
Dana is the author of two novels for young adults: A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life and Harmless.
In Brief Chapter, Simone, the adopted child of an ACLU attorney and a political cartoonist, meets her birth mother, Rivka, for the first time. The things she learns in her encounters with Rivka challenge her concepts of belief and family.
In Harmless, three girls are caught at a party when they shouldn’t be. Their lie to explain their whereabouts balloons, resulting in the arrest of an innocent man and their town and school rallying around them. Emma, Anna, and Mariah learn that a lie that may seem harmless can do a lot of damage.
I’ll have reviews of these two books later this week.
And now, the interview!
You mention in your bio on your website that you worked as a reader for a young adult line at a mass-market paperback house. How has this experience influenced your writing career?
That was a long time ago… so much has happened in my professional life since then, but it did teach me very clearly what a good book was not.
In A Brief Chapter In My Impossible Life, Simone’s mother is a lawyer for the ACLU and Simone helps her with her work. Did your law school experience help you with writing these parts of the book? How?
In A Brief Chapter In My Impossible Life, Simone’s mother is a lawyer for the ACLU and Simone helps her with her work. Did your law school experience help you with writing these parts of the book? How?
My background in law probably had a much bigger influence on my writing than working for the publishing house did. For one thing, it helped me hone in on what I issues I felt passionate about. But also, building a legal case is nothing more than compelling story telling. You arrange the facts in the way that sets forth your argument and generates sympathy for your side of things. Whether it’s a judge, jury or a reader, your task us the same– make that person care about your characters and feel invested in the outcome.
Simone’s birth mother, Rivka, was a Hasidic Jew. Brief Chapter contains a lot of information about Hasidism and Judaism more generally. Did you have to do any research for this part of the book? How did you gain knowledge about these faith traditions?
Well, I’m Jewish so I had a basic knowledge of Judaism going in. My husband is a rabbi school drop out, so what I didn’t know, he often did. We have a library filled with books on every conceivable Jewish topic from history to religion. But still, there were things beyond his expertise and beyond what I could find in our library, and for that I turned to friends or friends of friends to answer more specific questions of life among the Hasidim. I was also lucky to have a copy editor who is an Orthodox Jew.
In Brief Chapter, Simone is an adopted child and struggles to reconcile her love of her adoptive family with her feelings about her birth family. How did you prepare to write about this struggle?
I don’t think I did anything to prepare for this part of the story other than to fully know and understand my characters by the time they came to confront these emotional landmines, and with this knowledge, I sort of sat back and let them work through these challenges in a way that seemed natural to who they are. I know that sounds terribly hokey, but it’s true nonetheless.
Harmless is told by three narrators, with their perspectives alternating. How did you plan the story? Did you know early on which narrator would reveal each part of the story?
I didn’t plan out who would reveal what part of the story, I just let them take turns talking and kept the narrative moving forward rather than having them go back and give their exact version of the events someone else had described. I think different perspectives on the truth can be revealed in ways other than repeating different versions of the exact same events. I had ideas going in about what role each girl would play in the lie, and how each would deal with the pressure of keeping secrets, and none of these ideas panned out. They each went in directions I hadn’t anticipated.
The main characters in Harmless attend a small, private day school. Why did you choose this setting instead of a public school or larger private school?
I wanted to tell a story about good kids doing something bad. I wanted the main characters to be the kinds of kids people tend to assume are immune to making such enormous mistakes. I wanted to show that kids in private day schools don’t have all the answers.
I also wanted these girls to feel they had a lot at stake in perpetuating lies, and sometimes a smaller, more insulated environment creates a sort of pressure cooker where it’s easy to lose perspective on what really matters.
What is your favorite genre of books to read? How has that influenced your writing?
I don’t have a favorite genre, I just like books that are well written and have a good story and say something honest. I like books that are complicated and unexpected. I like to feel like the characters are alive while I’m lost in the story. I aim to do all these things when I write.
I’m not saying I accomplish these things, I’m just saying this is what I aim for.
——-
Thanks for joining me, Dana!
Eager for more? You can find Dana at Interactive Reader on Wednesday and at Bildungsroman on Friday.
Summer Blog Blast Tour, Day One
The Summer Blog Blast Tour is underway! The tour lasts from today through next Saturday. Each day I’ll be posting a round-up of the interviews.
Today’s Interviews:
Gene Yang at Finding Wonderland
Tomorrow’s Interviews:
Here at
Tom & Dorothy Hoobler at Chasing Ray
Mitali Perkins at Big A, Little a
Sara Zarr at Interactive Reader
Justina Chen Headley at Hip Writer Mama
Justine Larbalestier at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy
Dana Reinhardt at lectitans
Brent Hartinger at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Laura Ruby at Writing and Ruminating
Jordan Sonnenblick by Bildungsroman
Ysabeau Wilce at Finding Wonderland
For the full schedule of interviews, click here!
Poetry Friday
In honor of the end of school and in light of the fact that I have an in-service workshop today, I'm posting poems about school.
I found a whole collection of school-related poems at poetryteachers.com. My favorite is "My Teacher Loves Her iPod." I also like "My Teacher Sees Right Through Me." "Confession" is another fun one. I'm not posting quotes because they're all too short.
There's another collection at Funny Poems and Children's Poetry. I like "My Teacher's Voicemail Message":
This is Mrs. Crane and I'm pretending I'm not home.
I wish you pesky little kids would just leave me alone.
Read the rest here.
"The Last Day of School" is fun, too.
Summer vacation is starting today.
The teachers are shouting out, "Hip, hip, hooray!"
Read the rest here.
Enjoy! Today's roundup is at The Simple and the Ordinary.
Thinking Blogger Award
Back in May, Kelly at Big A, little a tagged me with the Thinking Blogger Award. Thanks, Kelly!
The award originated at the thinking blog. Here are the rules:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to the original post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).
Here are five blogs that make me think. If you’ve received the award before, feel free to pass it on to someone else.
1. educating alice - Monica always makes me think about my own teaching and how I can improve it.
2. A Year of Reading - Franki and Mary Lee also post a lot about teaching and school visits by authors, spurring me on to further reflection.
3. Wild Rose Reader - Elaine Magliaro provides Classroom Connections for children’s poetry with several of her posts.
4. HipWriterMama - Vivian recently made me think in her post, Girl Power: At What Price?
5. Chasing Ray - Colleen makes me think so much, my brain hurts.
Summer Blog Blast Tour: Preview
Far too often I’ve heard a student say, “I don’t read." To the end of hearing those words replaced with “I love to read,” I’m joining Colleen Mondor’s Summer Blog Blast Tour. Here’s the scoop on the tour from Colleen herself:
Starting next Sunday, with an interview posted at Finding Wonderland with 2006 NBA finalist and Printz Award winner Gene Yang, there will be multiple blogs in the kidlitosphere conducting multiple interviews for the following week. We will average ten interviews a day with authors like Justine Larbalestier, Brent Hartinger, David Brin, Hilary McKay, Christopher Golden, Kazu Kibuishi, Chris Crutcher, Holly Black, Kirsten Miller and Shaun Tan. Between Yang’s interview on Sunday and the last one with Justina Chen Headley on Saturday there will be over 50 author interviews posted. These authors include multiple genres (SF, Fantasy, Mystery, Romance, Drama), multiple formats (prose, graphic novel, manga) and for mutliple audiences (boys and girls, straight and gay). Many of the authors agreed to more than one interview although fans should not be worried - the bloggers were careful to make sure that different questions were asked each time. In the end we hope to provide a wealth of information about how these authors create, the kind of books they write and what they have to offer to new readers and long time fans.
We plan, quite simply, to rock the literary world.
Here’s my schedule:
Monday, June 18
Dana Reinhardt
Thursday, June 21
Kazu Kibuishi
I’ll post links to the other interviews as they appear. The full schedule will be available at Chasing Ray tomorrow.
Thank you so much to Colleen for organizing the tour and inviting me to participate, to the other bloggers for sharing their interviews, and to the authors for answering our questions!
Women Writers and Male Readers
Colleen at Chasing Ray pointed me to an interesting article entitled “Still not an equal partnership” at The Times Online. The gist of the article is that despite the fact that women seem to read more than men, men seem to be read more than women.
Gender as a subject fascinates me, mostly because I don’t understand it. The article speaks for itself. I don’t have much to add to it. It addresses primarily literary fiction, and I do find that aspect interesting. What about genre fiction? I’d be interested in seeing the numbers on that. One of the “problems” with fiction written by women is that its subjects - motherhood, domestic life, relationships - don’t interest men. But again - what about genre fiction? Sprawling adventure stories with women as writers or protagonists? How is that the same or different? Stories about motherhood, domestic life, and relationships don’t really interest me, and when I write, I don’t write about motherhood or domestic life. I do write about relationships, because loner characters can’t take a story very far. Women are more willing to identify with a male protagonist in any form of media - books, television, video games - than men are to identify with a female protagonist. What’s that about? I think it goes back to the unfortunate devaluing of the feminine. I feel like most of the major feminist problems - suffrage, the glass ceiling, harassment - have made great strides, and that the battlefront of current feminism is one of the mind and the arts.
I find this article’s comments especially fascinating. They are, as far as I can tell, all from men who are defending either their disinterest in literature written by women or saying the article is outright wrong.
This quote does upset me:
“Middlebrow writing by women is full of feminist garbage. A man need only read a couple to get the flavour. Writing by men is much more varied."
Firstly, I’m not sure what “middlebrow writing” means. Secondly, declaring writing by men to be more varied is not saying anything particularly new or startling. Unfortunately, men have a much longer literary tradition than women do, with rare exceptions; no one need remind me that Sappho was a woman. When you’ve had more time to do the work, of course the work will be more varied.
In addition to being curious about this with respect to genre vs. literary works, I’m also interested in children’s and young adult literature and how gender comes into play there. See my Weekend Wondering a couple weeks back. How much do boys read? When they read, who are the authors? Who are the protagonists? I don’t ask about girls because I feel like I know more about them, having been one. Perhaps next year I will take some informal polls of my students to find out if they read and what they read.
Do you know boys? Do you know what they’re reading? Would you be willing to share that information?
Pirate Reading Challenge
Oh my goodness, it’s 1:30 pm. When did this happen?
I’d like to remind you of my Pirate Reading Challenge.
The original post is here, and the post where I introduce myself as Captain Anne Scarlett is here.
The rules are simple:
1. The challenge begins June 12, 2007 and lasts until September 19, 2007. There be significance to these dates: durin’ the week o’ June 10 in 1718 Blackbeard ran aground his ship Queen Anne’s Revenge. September 19 be International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
2. The goal be to read books about pirates. Set your own goal for how many pirate books you’d like to read. (I recommend 3 as a minimum; I meself will probably try for 14 or so.)
3. The books can be any level, fiction or nonfiction. The only requirement be that they be about pirates.
4. As you finish the books, review them.
5. Your final summary should be posted in Pirate Speak (thar’s an English to Pirate translator here) on September 19, and include links to your reviews o’ pirate books.
6. Sign your name to the ship’s articles in the comments to the original post.
I haven’t started reading my pirate books yet. I’m currently working on the first of my books to review for The Edge of the Forest; I have some training for work Friday. I will probably finish my current audiobook (Celia Rees’s Pirates!) on the drive to the training, and then hit the library on the way home to pick up Treasure Island. After that, my next pirate selections will probably be Capt. Hook and Pirate Island, because I own both of them. Then, I’ll probably start in on Bloody Jack, as it’s been recommended to me multiple times.
My goal is 14 Pirate Books. What about yours?
Arrrrr!
1. The challenge begins June 12, 2007 and lasts until September 19, 2007. There be significance to these dates: durin’ the week o’ June 10 in 1718 Blackbeard ran aground his ship Queen Anne’s Revenge. September 19 be International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
2. The goal be to read books about pirates. Set your own goal for how many pirate books you’d like to read. (I recommend 3 as a minimum; I meself will probabl
3. The books can be any level, fiction or nonfiction. The only requirement be that they be about pirates.
4. As you finish the books, review them.
5. Your final summary should be posted in Pirate Speak (thar’s an English to Pirate translator here) on September 19, and include links to your reviews o’ pirate books.
6. Sign your name to the ship’s articles in the comments to the original post.
Hoist the colours!
1. The challenge begins June 12, 2007 and lasts until September 19, 2007. There be significance to these dates: durin' the week o' June 10 in 1718 Blackbeard ran aground his ship Queen Anne's Revenge. September 19 be International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
2. The goal be to read books about pirates. Set your own goal for how many pirate books you'd like to read. (I recommend 3 as a minimum; I meself will probably try for 14 or so.)
3. The books can be any level, fiction or nonfiction. The only requirement be that they be about pirates.
4. As you finish the books, review them.
5. Your final summary should be posted in Pirate Speak (thar's an English to Pirate translator here) on September 19, and include links to your reviews o' pirate books.
6. Sign your name to the ship's articles in the comments to this post.
MORE ADVANCED OPTIONS:
1. Give yourself a pirate name. If you can't come up with your own, here's a link to some name generators.
2. Name your pirate ship.
3. Hoist your colours! Create your own pirate flag.
4. Go around tellin' people you're a "Bookaneer." (Many thanks to Pirates & Privateers for this word.)
5. Write all your reviews in Pirate Speak.
RESOURCES:
International Talk Like a Pirate Day
The Bookaneer
Pirate Flags
Pirate Books