Behind the Book Archives

by Mitchell S. Jackson

Here’s a confession: It’s tough, close to no-way-no-how, for me to write something without first giving it a name. Why?

Names have always helped my ideas cohere (or at least transform from inchoate to an emerging form). Names have made me think about the pressing thing or things I want to say, and have helped me consider my reader: What do they need from the language, the characters, the story?

That being said, my novel has seen a few name changes. The first name I gave it was Luminous Days (there’s even a tattoo on my forearm to honor it). Not too long after I’d been released from prison, the place where I wrote the first few words of what I envisioned then as a fictionalized version of my life story, I happened upon a profile of James Salter in my local newspaper. Days later, I bought and began to read Salter’s famous novel A Sport and a Pastime, which begins, “September. It seems these luminous days will never end.”

Even when I didn’t know what literary fiction was, I didn’t want—or rather, couldn’t afford—a title that typecast my work.

When I read that line way back when, I was struck by the word luminous. For one, the title fit what I believed was the base hope of my characters—a brighter future. For two, no one I knew used the word, and because of that it had the air of intelligent diction and was writerly (it meant everything to me back then to sound like a writer). Even when I didn’t know what literary fiction was, I didn’t want—or rather, couldn’t afford—a title that typecast my work. Let’s keep it real, you’d be hard-pressed to find an urban fiction/street lit book called Luminous Days.

That title would’ve made the finish line if I hadn’t scrapped my initial idea of using a single first-person narrative. The new title was Letters to the Dead and Convicted, and the idea was that the narrator would tell his story through letters, some to a friend who was murdered and others to a fictionalized version of the godfather of crack cocaine, Freeway Rick Ross.

I was so psyched about my idea that I tracked down the real Freeway Rick Ross in federal prison and persuaded him to correspond with me. But yep, you guessed it, after drafting a few chapters of letters, I abandoned the idea. I didn’t have the skill to pull off an epistolary novel. So there I was, not only title-less, but also unsettled on how I’d tell the story.

Then one day in 2008 I was on a plane reading a GQ article on designer Marc Jacobs. In the article, Lucy Kaylin wrote that Jacobs “forges tight, obsessive relationships with people who can handle his compulsive need to share the residue years of therapy.” I must have read that line a gazillion times before I underlined it, sat back in my seat and smiled to myself. There was my title waving its hand at me, a giant neon hand.

The word residue was freighted in what I have come to call my former life. I know a thing or two about drug addiction, and a thing or two about small-time drug dealing as well. To be more specific, my mother struggled for two decades with drug addiction, and me, well, I peddled dope off and on for close to one of those decades.

Back then, when a smoker (that’s one of the things we called an addict) would get down to the last of their crack, they’d scrape the resin out of the pipe in the hope of procuring one last blast. Because of that, the word residue symbolized a sense of desperation, how addiction could fell a human being, symbolized the part I played in dozens, maybe hundreds, reaching that low.

I wanted to emphasize how the days made years, and those years were an era, the most affecting of our lives.

The other major reason why the title seemed fitting was because of my mother’s struggle. Her struggle is why the title includes the word years instead of days. Though they say addicts live day by day, it seemed such a slight to measure a battle of two-plus decades in that increment. Or maybe what I mean to say is, I wanted to emphasize how the days made years, and those years were an era, the most affecting of our lives.

Let me end with one last conceit. Soon after my novel became forevermore The Residue Years, I realized how I would tell the story, a story I had discovered was not mine, but ours: my mother’s and mine. It was then that it occurred to me to divide the novel between two characters. It’s been the story of a mother and son’s—of Champ and Grace’s—not-to-be-forgotten era ever since.

Mitchell S. Jackson was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. In The Residue Years, his autobiographical debut, he portrays another side of a town known for bicycles and yuppies with the story of Champ and Grace, a mother and son whose struggles with drugs threaten their close relationship. Jackson, who has an MFA in creative writing, currently lives in Brooklyn.

Author photo by John Ricard

Author Mitchell S. Jackson writes about his debut novel, The Residue Years, and how finding a title for the book unlocked its themes.

China’s original geeks

Behind the Book by Gene Luen Yang

by Gene Luen Yang

I’m fascinated by the Boxer Rebellion because I’m a geek.

The Boxer Rebellion was a war fought on Chinese soil in the year 1900. On one side was a coalition of European soldiers, Japanese soldiers, missionaries and Chinese Christians. On the other was a loose-knit army of poor, illiterate Chinese teenagers, who we now refer to as the Boxers.

Despite the century that separates us, the Boxers and modern-day geeks have a lot in common. The Boxers loved pop culture. They didn’t have movies or television or comic books, but they did have China’s long tradition of opera. Chinese opera, much like American superhero comics, told stories of brightly-costumed heroes with magic powers fighting epic battles. When the Boxers watched their heroes’ stories, they had the same impulse today’s geeks have when we read our comic books. They wanted to become their heroes.

"The Boxers and modern-day geeks have a lot in common."

Instead of making fancy costumes for cosplay, the Boxers invented a mystical ritual that they believed would call the heroes of the opera down from the heavens. The heroes would possess them, give them superpowers and empower them to stand up to the Europeans.

My inner geek didn’t just sympathize with the Boxers. I found pop culture connections to the Boxers’ Chinese Christian enemies as well. Many early Chinese converts were people who couldn’t find a place for themselves in mainstream Chinese culture. Many were women or criminals or indigent. Because their surrounding culture treated them like outsiders, they looked for a home in the stories of the “Other,” in the religious stories of the Western missionaries.

This dynamic of looking to foreign stories for one’s own sense of self reminded me of another corner of modern-day geek culture: American manga fans. Now this certainly isn’t true of all American manga fans, but a certain subculture of that subculture is made up of individuals who were treated like outsiders by the American culture that surrounded them. Their response is similar to that of the early Chinese Christians. They look to the stories of the “Other,” to Japan’s cartoon stories, for reflections of themselves.

The Boxer Rebellion was a tragedy through and through. By the end, hundreds of thousands had lost their lives on both sides. Many historians believe it to be a harbinger of the bloody century that followed. Just as significantly—to me, at least—the Boxer Rebellion demonstrates the importance of the geek’s primary concern: pop culture. After all, “pop culture” is simply a label we give to the stories we use to define who we are.

Gene Luen Yang is a Chinese American author of graphic novels and comics. His graphic novel American Born Chinese was the winner of the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award and was the first graphic novel to be a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

I’m fascinated by the Boxer Rebellion because I’m a geek.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Writing the present through the past

Behind the Book by Paul Lynch

by Paul Lynch

When Coll Coyle, a struggling tenant farmer in 1832 Ireland, accidentally kills the landowner he works for, retribution is fierce. Forced to flee the country for America, Coyle exchanges one bleak existence for another when he finds work digging the rail beds for the Pennsylvania railroad. And he’s still being pursued by the relentless overseer, Faller, who is determined to see Coyle punished. That’s the premise of Paul Lynch’s powerful Red Sky in Morning. Here, Lynch shares the inspiration for this carefully crafted and highly praised first novel.

I spent years trying not to be a writer. I gave it my best shot. I gorged on the literary greats and believed it would be folly to try and emulate. Better to quit while you are ahead, I thought, and avoid any embarrassment. I took the dream I had carried all my life and quietly buried it.

I wrote music and played in a band. I became a sub-editor on a national newspaper and learned the technique of writing and editing. I became that newspaper’s film critic and honed consciously my grasp of narrative. I began to notice that though I loved deeply what I was doing, my soul was not singing. Something deep in my spirit was not being addressed. My weekly film essays were developing a decidedly literary bent. I was starting to sound like a frustrated novelist.

"I wanted to strip Irish history of its clichés and find in it something meaningful for a new generation."

I had an epiphany on a hillside on Lipari when I was 30. I knew in that moment I had failed in my bid not to be a writer. That my psyche was starting to buckle. I knew in that moment that I would write for the rest of my life. I rushed back to my hotel and began to write my first short story.

Bubbling deep was the wellspring of a novel. I had watched on Irish television a documentary called The Ghosts of Duffy’s Cut. What happened at the railway dig near Malvern, Pennsylvania is a mystery. In 1832, 57 Irishmen arrived in America and went to work on the Pennsylvania Railroad. A few months later, every one of them was dead. Cholera had struck the camp, but it is believed that what took place was mass murder. A good many of these men came from the area of Donegal where I grew up.

Something powerful struck. It was 2009. Ireland was sliding into economic depression. People were beginning to emigrate again. I saw in Duffy’s Cut a moment in history that could speak with the power of myth. I wanted to strip Irish history of its clichés and find in it something meaningful for a new generation that found itself angry and powerless.

I had to learn to carve writing time out of my hectic week. I wrote on my day off and at evenings. I used up all my holiday time to write. I wrote through numbing tiredness in the hope that what I put down would later make sense. I learned that once you commit your consciousness to the page, it can always be rewritten. That the real work of writing is rewriting. So I rewrote and rewrote until I could hear the book hum.

It took me just under three years to write Red Sky in Morning. When I started writing the book, I had a full-time job and neighbours each side that were long-settled in the area. By the time the book was finished, I had lost my job, the newspaper I worked for had collapsed, and both of my neighbours had emigrated to America. While the past had become the present, I was writing the present through the past.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Tracing the life of a trail-blazing ancestor

Behind the Book by Alex Myers

by Alex Myers

There were many things I liked about my Grandmother Puffer’s home: cartoons on television (We didn’t have a TV at home: hippie parents.), Cheerios for breakfast (ditto), and all manner of ancestral relics. There was a genuine family tree—branches wider than my arms—and artifacts like a chair that Myles Standish had sat in (and in which we were not to sit) and a bugle that had been played at President Wilson’s inauguration. More than all this stuff, there were the tales my grandmother could tell.

Every April, on Patriot’s Day, we’d go with my grandmother to see the re-enactment of the battles of Lexington and Concord, and, once back at her house, I could count on her to tell Deborah’s story. “Can you imagine?” she’d say. “She so wanted to join the army that she ran away and put on men’s clothes. I guess she had watched boys her age go off to be soldiers and wanted a chance to serve. But can you imagine?”

I was certain that, if the Revolutionary War started up again, it wouldn’t take me half a minute to pull on some britches and join the army.

I could. I was 6 or 7 or 8, a little girl. But even then I knew that wasn’t exactly who or what I was. And I could imagine Deborah quite well. I could picture how her skirts and apron and lace cap must have felt: just like the tights and dress and pinafore my mother made me wear to birthday parties. I absolutely knew that Deborah, from her spinning wheel, had looked at boys in her town marching off with the militia the same way that I looked at my brother when he went racing out the door to play with BB guns, while my friends brought over Barbies. And I was certain that, if the Revolutionary War started up again and someone rode on a horse through my town ringing a bell and proclaiming that the British were coming, it wouldn’t take me half a minute to pull on some britches and join the army.

That said, it wasn’t until I was 17 years old that I figured out I was transgender—to finally say that I was a man and would live the rest of my life as one. I remember that it felt hard: difficult to explain to people, tough to imagine exactly how I would manage all the legal and personal details. It was unspeakably nice to have Deborah’s story there, waiting for me. What a comfort to know that someone had done this before, had crossed this line—done it in 1782, well before gender identity was a concept—and had family that was still proud of her to this day.

When I sat down to write Revolutionary, I read my grandmother’s volume of family genealogy and then Alfred Young’s history of Deborah. And I counselled myself: this is Deborah’s story, not your story. I wanted to let her character emerge fully, without bearing the imprint of my own. Yet, so often as I wrote, I thought—she would have worried about using the bathroom . . . she would have glowed when someone called her “young man”. . . just like me. There were many times when I felt that point of contact through the page.

There were, however, just as many spots where our stories diverged. I wish I could have had Deborah turn west at the end of the novel; I would have liked nothing better than for her to continue living as a man and to find a little farm out in the new Ohio territory, even if that meant living the rest of her life alone. That’s what I would have wanted to do. But that isn’t what she did. She went home, to an aunt and uncle and to a place that she’d missed. She went home and married and had children and became Deborah again—something I could never imagine doing. Yet, if she had not . . . I wouldn’t be able to write her story.

Born and raised in Paris, Maine, Alex Myers was raised as a girl (Alice). He came out as transgender at 17 and earned degrees from Harvard and Brown before attending the Vermont College of Fine Arts to study fiction writing—where he began his debut novel. Revolutionary is the story of his ancestor Deborah Samson Gannett, who disguised herself as a man in order to join the Continental Army and fight the British. Myers currently teaches English at St. George’s School, where he lives with his wife and two cats.

Memoir

Memoir

Behind the Book: A very personal take on the self-help industry

Behind the Book by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro

by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro

When she set out to write a book about Americans' long-standing interest in self-improvement, writer Jessica Lamb-Shapiro was forced to confront a painful event in her own family history. The resulting journey forms the heart of her insightful and often funny new book, Promise Land.

Truth be told, a book about self-help was the last thing I wanted to write. My father, a child psychologist, had been writing self-help books since I was a child, and subjecting me to self-help culture for just as long. Self-help was about as interesting to me as the homemade cooperative board games my father and I used to play (no one wins). But when my father signed up for a weekend workshop with one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul authors, I was intrigued. It seemed odd to me that someone with so much experience writing self-help, who was smart and thoughtful and by normal standards successful, could still be seduced by the promise of improvement.

"Thinking about my mother’s suicide while writing a book about self-help suddenly seemed not just ironic but incredibly, regrettably, relevant."

Going to that conference with my dad reminded me how funny and absurd self-help could be, and at the same time how meaningful or tragic. It reminded me that self-help is not about Tony Robbins or Eckhart Tolle, but about the countless individuals whose irrepressible, unrelenting desire to improve sustains them. I’ve always been fascinated with the never-ending aspect of the American Dream. I also wanted to explore the idea that people who didn’t read self-help books were still affected by self-help culture, how it’s part of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Once I looked into the history of self-help and found out Victorians loved it, I was sold on the topic.

For a few years I struggled with the structure of the book. I had the idea that I could look at different genres of self-help—books on parenting or grieving or dating—but it ended up feeling flat and repetitive.

When I started looking at books on grieving, I couldn’t help but think about my mother’s suicide when I was a young child. My father and I had barely talked about her death, and reading those books gave me a sense of community and continuity and made me feel like less of a motherless weirdo. Thinking about my mother’s suicide while writing a book about self-help suddenly seemed not just ironic but incredibly, regrettably, relevant.

Not only had I started a book about self-help, which I hadn’t really set out to write, I was now writing a book about a taboo subject in my family, which no one wanted to talk about. On top of that, I had a real aversion to “memoir,” and it seemed especially ridiculous for someone in their 30s to write anything resembling one. Worse, I had been writing a book that was supposed to be funny. You know what’s not funny? Mother suicide. I felt like I had been batting a piñata, but instead of candy and toys severed human limbs fell out. Children screamed, and everyone left the party.

On the plus side, adding a memoir element solved my structure problem. A pyrrhic victory.

I’ve always liked that about writing, the way it can blindside you. The way you can blindside yourself. This is why I titled my prologue “On Missing The Obvious.” Writing the book forced me to talk to my father about my mother. Over the years I spent writing Promise Land: My Journey Through America's Self-Help Culture, we visited her grave for the first time, and my dad started talking to me about her life, and what her death was like for him. It was difficult for me to bring up something that I knew was so painful for him, but talking about it together seemed to help. Which isn’t to say that some days didn’t end in tears and hours of watching of puppy videos on the Internet for emotional triage. But ultimately, my book about self-help ended up being a kind of self-help exercise for me, and maybe even for my dad—which, if you think about it, is kind of funny.

Promise Land is the first book by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, who has published fiction and nonfiction in The Believer, McSweeney's, Open City and Index magazine, among other publications. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and lives in New York City and Columbia County, New York.

Truth…

Travel

Travel

Drowning in butter and bacon fat: Eating and writing my way through New Orleans

Behind the Book by Michael Murphy

by Michael Murphy

For mythological heroes “the call” comes as they are just entering manhood. I was rushing toward my 60s and trying to re-direct my life after 30 years in book publishing had hit a dry patch, a dry patch the size of the Sahara Desert. Maybe the Kalahari. I don’t want you to think I’m prone to exaggeration. In my rearview mirror, I’d been a vice president at Random House, the publisher of William Morrow, and established my own literary agency, Max & Co. In front of me were roughly sewn-together jobs as a tour guide, a concierge, ghost writer, barely a literary agent, receiving a few paltry royalty checks while failing to sell any new book projects. All of these piecemeal jobs, really gigs, were not so much to keep me afloat as to drown at a more leisurely pace.

“The call” usually comes in the form of a burning bush, or at least in the middle of the night. Mine was an email. On a Tuesday. The Norton sales department wanted an update of Eating New Orleans, a restaurant guide written by Pableaux Johnson in 2005. He didn’t want to do it. Ann Treistman, a senior editor at Norton and a former editor at Morrow (maybe she was an associate editor back then—I don’t want you to think I’m prone to exaggeration), (A) knew my love for New Orleans, (B) knew I could write. As an agent I’d sold her a book where we both learned my author couldn’t deliver a full manuscript so I jumped in. And (C) it wasn’t hard to detect my love of food. I tell people I’m the same size as LeBron James, just a foot shorter.

"At the time of Katrina, there were 809 restaurants in New Orleans. At the time I’m writing, there are 1,389. No other city has experienced this explosive growth of restaurants over the past eight years. I think no other city is so food obsessed that they actually count their restaurants each week."

I was pleased to read her email request, excited about the idea of getting an advance to drown at an even less hectic pace, but uncertain. Does the world need another book about New Orleans and food? I went to Amazon.com, brought up the books category, typed in “New Orleans food” and stared at 1,544 entries. Would there be anyone left to read my 1,545th entry? Then, I typed in “vampires” and saw 35,604 entries. Maybe.

My bigger concern was not if there was a market, but who am I to write a food book in this city of so many superior chefs, restaurants and critics? I hardly have the pedigree of an official foodie. I grew up in the Midwest in the 1950s and ’60s, raised on Shake ’n Bake and Chicken in a Biscuit.

On the one hand, a hand filled with vainglory, I felt “destined” to write this book. I first came to New Orleans in May of ’83 to work with an author, and by day two, I knew I was home. At first, (The Hook) was the physical beauty of New Orleans, all the cracked plaster and balconies ”sagging like rotting lace” (I steal that from Walker Percy). New Orleans looks like nowhere else in America. The second wave (The Line) was the people. People here are remarkably friendly and will bring you in on a very deep level very quickly. The third and love-you-forever wave (And Sinker) is New Orleans’ cray-cray history, filled with bizarre events and twisted stories. I tell anyone who will listen, “New Orleans is as far as you can get from America, and still be in it.”

Through a few traded emails, my editor, Ann, and I decided a mere update of Eating New Orleans wouldn’t do well in the current market. With Urbanspoon, Trip Advisor and Yelp, there’s no longer a need for a book that describes restaurants. We decided the new book, Eat Dat New Orleans, would be built around stories. And that perfectly fits New Orleans where everyone has a story to tell, and they’re really good at telling them.

In profiles for restaurants like Galatoire’s, Eat Dat would be light on its history since 1905 and its signature dishes like Crab Maison and Trout Almandine, and instead focus on waiter John Fontenot, who’s been serving food, drink and a steady diet of cornball Cajun jokes since shortly after the Earth cooled. John would ask diners at what level of bawdiness (1 to 10) they would like their jokes during dinner. I’d write about the time Charles De Gaulle visited New Orleans. When he tried to call for reservations and was told Galatoire’s did not accept reservations, the French president complained. “Do you know WHO I am?” They replied “Why yes, Mr. President. But, do you know WHERE you’re calling?”

The next big hurdle, and it was a major one, was to decide which restaurants to include and which to leave out. At the time of Katrina, there were 809 restaurants in New Orleans. At the time I’m writing, there are 1,389. No other city has experienced this explosive growth of restaurants over the past eight years. I think no other city is so food obsessed that they actually count their restaurants each week.

To include all restaurants would require a book the size of the old two-volume Oxford English Dictionary. I decided to stay within the city limits. Choosing the final list would test my integrity. What to do about Acme Oyster House, Cafe du Monde and Mother’s? These are far and away the most popular spots for tourists, recommended by every cab driver and tour salesperson huddled in a kiosk booth. But for most of us living here, they are no better than a local version of Applebee’s or T.G.I. Friday’s. They feel about as must-do as going to Vegas to hear Wayne Newton sing "Danke Schoen" one more time. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Acme and Mother’s, it’s that we can do so much better. A simple rule in New Orleans is that if you see a line waiting to be fed, don’t go.

I signed my book contract in mid-May. My manuscript was due September 15th. Forget about an intense writing schedule, that’s a whole lot of eating in a very short time. And this was New Orleans’ eating. Here we offer Praline Bacon at Elizabeth’s, Maple Bacon donuts at Blue Dot Donuts, Buckboard Bacon Melt at Cochon Butcher, Quail stuffed with Boudin, wrapped in Bacon at Atchafalaya, Bacon, duck and jalapeno poppers at Borgne, the Oysters Slessinger, grilled with Bacon, shrimp and Provel cheese at Katie’s, and for dessert, Praline Ice Cream with Bacon at Green Goddess. By the end of writing my first draft, I had gained 12 pounds and looked like a bearded Shelley Winters impersonator, or as I think they prefer to be called, Shelley Winters “tribute artists.”

My four-month journey through our culinary landscape also introduced me to many new favorite restaurants like Maurepas, Casa Borrega and Killer Poboys, renewed my vows to love and honor older restaurants where I’d eaten long before there was a book contract, and reminded me, in so many ways, why I love New Orleans.

Food here is not nutrition, it’s a lifestyle. It’s an art.

Having accepted “the call,” I am now in “the yelling” phase. My book is on the shelves. I’m doing all the usual things to let readers know it’s there: four bookstore signings, two panel discussions, annoying email blasts, shoutouts to meetup groups, an author page on Amazon and a Facebook page for the book. I was thrilled to get over 170 Facebook "likes" on Eat Dat’s first day. But then I saw that Jesus Christ had more than 12 million likes. The Beatles have more than 38 million. (John Lennon was right.) And Justin Bieber has 63 million. Competing with 1,544 other books about New Orleans food seems a lot less daunting than competing with Justin Bieber’s likes.

Michael Murphy, a book publishing professional, has been a vice president at Random House, publisher of William Morrow, and founder of the literary agency Max & Co. By day two of his first visit to New Orleans in 1983, he knew he was home. He finally moved to New Orleans in 2009 and will never leave.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book.

For mythological heroes “the call” comes as they are just entering manhood. I was rushing toward my 60s and trying to re-direct my life after 30 years in book publishing had hit a dry patch, a dry patch the size of the Sahara Desert . . . “The call” usually comes in the form of a burning bush, or at least in the middle of the night. Mine was an email. On a Tuesday.

World Fiction

World Fiction

Behind the Book: The difficult daughter

Behind the Book by Janie Chang

by Janie Chang

A single act of defiance from a daughter. An impulsive decision from a father, made in a burst of anger. A life changed forever.

“There’s a scene in your story that’s unrealistic. The one where your main character’s marriage was arranged so quickly. In those days, matchmaking could take years, especially between old, wealthy families.”

This was the feedback from a family friend who read the manuscript for Three Souls during its early stages of editing. This friend grew up in a very traditional family and had majored in Chinese literature. If my novel’s depiction of Chinese family life in the years before World War II passed her critical judgement, I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Grandmother was married under such unusual circumstances that the story of her betrothal made its way into family legend—and into my novel.

However, the scene she had flagged as unrealistic was actually based on a true event. It is in fact almost a word-for-word retelling of how my grandmother became a bride. Grandmother was married under such unusual circumstances that the story of her betrothal made its way into family legend—and into my novel.

Grandmother was born into a wealthy, progressive, and well-educated family. At the turn of the century, when the Qing Dynasty was drawing its last gasps, the Qu clan began sending their sons to university in Japan and Europe, and their daughters to private girls’ schools in China. Grandmother possessed a keen mind, worked hard for her grades, and cherished a modest ambition to teach school one day. Her father, however, would not allow his clever daughter a career. It was not for lack of money or because the right sort of schools were not available; there were some very well-respected women’s universities in China she could’ve attended. Women of their family, he declared, did not work.

Determined to take control of her destiny even if it meant disobeying her father, Grandmother found a surprising ally when she confided in her own grandmother. The old woman gave her money for tuition and a train ticket. But in such a large household, secrets were impossible to hide. Grandmother made her escape but only got as far as the railway station before she was caught and dragged home. She had openly defied her father’s authority during a time when the family patriarch’s word was law.

Her punishment came a week later.

In a fit of anger, her father had arranged her marriage to the son of a man he had just met on a business trip. The wedding, which followed almost immediately, sealed her fate. She moved to the small town where her husband and his family lived, far away from her beloved sisters and the cultured sophistication of the Qu estate. It must have felt like live burial.

The Qu family was considered modern because their sons were educated to Western standards. But then as now, Western values were adopted unevenly, selectively and not at the same pace—especially for women. Thus Grandmother knew there was more to life than the closed-in world of courtyards, but she had to remain within that world. She may have seethed at this injustice, or perhaps her spirit was broken after the failure of her one rebellious act. Whatever her feelings, once she was married, Grandmother quietly slipped into the role she had been raised to perform: of dutiful wife, daughter-in-law and mother.

When I began writing Three Souls, I knew it had to include this unwanted marriage and the circumstances leading up to it. The story refused to take shape until the day an image came to me: a young woman’s ghost perched in the roof beams of a small temple, looking down at her own funeral. I knew immediately this had to be the opening of the novel.

I also knew the ghost had to be the novel’s narrator because my grandmother’s sad story has haunted me since the day I first heard it. Furthermore, it felt right to make the protagonist a ghost who could not be seen or heard, unable to impact events in the real world. She was like all those generations of Chinese women who’d had to act behind the scenes, working indirectly to influence outcomes, nudging circumstances through undetected means to achieve their goals.

In life, my grandmother had no champions. With Three Souls, I wanted to give her some small token of recognition to acknowledge her talent and the difference she might have made, if not for an impulsive decision made in anger by an all-powerful parent.

Canadian author Janie Chang was born in Taiwan and grew up in the Philippines, Iran and Thailand. She now lives in Vancouver with her husband. Three Souls, her debut novel, was based on her grandmother's life in 1930s China. Find out more on her website.

Picture Book

Picture Book

Behind the Book: Short, sweet and completely unforgettable

Behind the Book by Melissa Sweet & Paul B. Janeczko

by Melissa Sweet, Paul B. Janeczko

April brings the first signs of spring—warmer days, blooms in the trees—or at least the hope of spring, if you're somewhere still suffering through the last gasp of winter. With all the changes in the natural world, it's a fitting time of year for National Poetry Month. We've been celebrating with hilarious new rhymes for young readers and even verses for babies.

Firefly July: A Year of Very Short Poems is something quite special. Thirty-six very short poems, selected by poet and anthologist Paul B. Janeczko and illustrated by Caldecott Honoree Melissa Sweet, take us through the four seasons. There's no better way to introduce little ones to the verses of Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Richard Wright and more.

We asked Janeczko and Sweet about their favorite poems from Firefly July:

Paul B. Janeczko, editor

Pick a favorite poem in this book? Oh, my. That's the anthologist's delight: I get to include all my favorite poems that fit a particular collection. But let me offer two of my favorites: "In the Field Forever" by Robert Wallace and "The first September breeze fluttered" by Liz Rosenberg. Like the other poems in this book, they show a reader that a good poem is built on a clear and vivid image, one that appeals to the reader's senses.

Beyond that, they were written by poets that don't normally write for children, and I want my young readers to reach a bit, so I always include poems written by poets not considered to be "children's poets."

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Melissa Sweet, illustrator

Making the art for Firefly July went very smoothly until I came to my favorite poem: "Window."

This poem captures the staccato feel of traveling by train at night, and it reminded me of taking the train from Maine (where I live) to New York City—a very scenic ride.

The art took a few tries before it expressed what I wanted.

The first attempt was to make one big picture, then divide it up into by drawing windows on top of the painting . . . but there wasn't enough detail or variation in the scenes.

Next, starting with the dark background and pasting down each window separately . . . it was too messy and not cohesive enough.

What was missing? Making a list of imagery I remembered from previous train rides: street lights, backyards, woods, towns and cities, roads, nocturnal animals, harbor with fishing boats, rivers, a clock. People all ages reading books, dozing, looking out the windows.

On the final try, I concentrated on each train car, one at a time—Who was in it? Where were they going? What did they see?—and painting very loosely, letting the watercolor softly tell the story.

The final piece reflects the quiet elegance of a train at night, each moment a new scene rambling by. It became my favorite spread, and I happen to know it was Paul’s favorite, too!

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FIREFLY JULY: A YEAR OF VERY SHORT POEMS. Compilation copyright © 2014 by Paul B. Janeczko. “Window” from Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg, copyright 1916 by Holt Rinehart and Winston and renewed 1944 by Carl Sandburg, reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. “In the Field Forever” by Robert Wallace from Ungainly Things. Copyright © 1968 by Robert Wallace. Used by permission of Christine Wallace. “The first September breeze fluttered” by Liz Rosenberg, used by permission of the author. Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Melissa Sweet. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.

Firefly July is something quite special. Thirty-six very short poems, selected by poet and anthologist Paul B. Janeczko and illustrated by Caldecott Honoree Melissa Sweet, take us through the four seasons. There's no better way to introduce little ones to the short poems of Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Richard Wright and more.

We asked Janeczko and Sweet about their favorite poems from Firefly July:

World Fiction

World Fiction

For Afghani girls, a glimpse of freedom comes at a price

Behind the Book by Nadia Hashimi

by Nadia Hashimi

Born in America to Afghani parents, author Nadia Hashimi grew up hearing her parents’ stories of the thriving Afghanistan they left in the 1970s. But when she finally visited decades later, she found a struggling country that bore little resemblance to their memories—especially in the way women were treated. Because of the increasing restrictions on female freedom, the custom of bacha posh, the practice of dressing a daughter as a son, has become common. Hashimi’s first novel, The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, traces that modern tradition back to its possible origin, a time when women dressed as men to guard the king’s harem. Here, the author explains how these two cultural flashpoints inspired her debut.

In 2002, I took my first trip to Kabul, Afghanistan. I was accompanied by my parents, who had left the country in the early 1970s, a peaceful and progressive time in the nation’s tumultuous history. We reunited with family, explored conditions of local hospitals and searched through piles of rubble where a family home once stood. It was a bittersweet experience for us all, especially my parents, who often felt foreign in their own homeland. This was not the country they had left behind. The decades of war in Afghanistan set the nation back in a devastating way. My mother and her sisters all attended college and worked alongside men in the airline industry, international organizations and engineering companies. From what we have seen on the news in the last few years, it is hard to imagine such an Afghanistan ever existed.

I was raised in a family that valued education above everything else. As a woman, it’s painful for me to hear that girls were barred from attending school under the Taliban regime. It’s heartbreaking to hear that girls and women have become victims of the country’s many plagues: opium addiction, widespread corruption, poverty, domestic violence and child marriage.

These are not problems unique to Afghanistan. They are found all around the world, in developing and developed nations. But in the landscape of a country ruined by decades of war, these crises have exploded.

The custom of bacha posh allows girls to dress as boys until puberty, but does a taste of freedom make the restrictions of life as a woman harder to bear?

I happened to read a New York Times article that explored the Afghan bacha posh tradition (converting young girls into boys by cutting their hair, changing their names and donning boys’ clothing). The community accepts the charade because there is a collective understanding that a family needs sons to have honor and to have someone who can go to the market freely or work outside the home. It struck me that the bacha posh tradition was an incredibly problematic practice. It gave young girls a taste of life as a boy in a deeply patriarchal society. But what would happen when that “boy” hit puberty? That’s when these boys are converted back to girls, sent back into their homes and stripped of the liberties they enjoyed for a few years.

Is it better to have tasted that liberty, if only for a short time? Or does that make life as a woman even harder to bear?

The article also touched on a time in Afghan history when women were disguised as men to serve as guards for the king’s harem. A storyline began to form in my mind, linking two different girls, in two different times, both dressed as boys in Afghanistan. Rahima is a young bacha posh who is married off by her opium-addicted father to a local warlord. Her great-great-grandmother, Shekiba, is an orphan of the cholera epidemic who is forced to rely on her own strength and determination to survive and finds herself serving as a guard in King Habibullah’s harem. Rahima’s will is strengthened by learning her ancestor’s story. She knows she is the legacy of a formidable woman, and that knowledge helps her survive her bleakest days. Through their connection, I wanted to trace the history of women in the country.

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell is a novel with two stories steeped in tragedy, but if you put your ear to the ground, you can hear the rumblings of a brighter tomorrow coming. I could not bear to tell the story if I did not believe that to be true.

Afghanistan was once a country where sisters held the same potential as their brothers. Things fell apart in the years of bloodshed, and girls have suffered unimaginably. I wanted to give a voice to those girls of Afghanistan, the ones who are bartered in marriage before their time, denied a chance to sit in a classroom and turned into mothers before they can live out their childhoods.

Change is coming, though. We have our first female pilots, generals, political leaders, performers, scientists and athletes in decades. I am hopeful that they will forge the way to a future where Rahima’s story will be a tale from Afghanistan’s darker past.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Memoir

Memoir

Behind the Book: Telling my grandma’s remarkable story

Behind the Book by Cathy LaGrow

by Cathy LaGrow

It was summertime, the world slow and hot, when I first learned Grandma’s shocking secret. My baby boy was almost three months old. He and I had not yet gotten the hang of breastfeeding, but were getting there. I was exhausted. My brother Grant called with the news.

“Grandma has a long-lost child,” he said. “When Grandma was just 16, she was raped by a stranger and got pregnant. She really loved the baby, but she gave her up for adoption. That was in 1929. She’s always missed her baby. Anyway, that daughter, who’s 77 years old now, just found Grandma. They’re going to be reunited in a few weeks.”

Author Cathy LaGrow (right) with her long-lost aunt, Ruth Lee (left), and grandmother Minka Disbrow.

This narrative was interrupted by a great many “What’s?!” from me.

At some point, my brother mentioned that one of our six new cousins was an honest-to-God astronaut who’d been to space four times.

Grandma was now 94. I’d known her all my life. She was dignified, strong, uncomplaining. I could never have imagined this: a monumental secret, a beloved, lost child.

Grandma and her daughter had their joyful reunion that summer. Several years later, after I’d had another baby and waded through another long round of diapers and interrupted nights, one of my new cousins, Brian, suggested that the reunion story would make a great book.

“I’ll put some stuff together,” I told him. “I’ll do some research and writing, and then maybe we’ll find somebody to author the book, and I can turn everything over to them.” Grandma was very healthy, but she’d just turned 100 years old. There was no time to lose.

Grandma was now 94. I’d known her all my life. She was dignified, strong, uncomplaining. I could never have imagined this: a monumental secret, a beloved, lost child.

And so it began. Grandma lived 500 miles away and had no computer, so I typed pages of questions: What were your parents’ full names and birthdates? Why did they come to America? I’d mail off the questions and she’d return them within days, answers printed in her careful penmanship.

With my two small boys tumbling underfoot, it proved impossible for me to work from home. I started driving to the local library on evenings and weekends. Sometimes I’d hurry home at my sons’ bedtime for sweet goodnight kisses. Other times I’d still be at the library when the staff dimmed the lights at closing time.

I pored over details of early 20th-century life on the South Dakotan prairie. I checked ship’s manifests, consulted historical train schedules. I searched through online records: newspaper articles, county graphs, weather bureau statistics. Grandma and I spent two long weekends together, recording hours of conversation.

And I wrote. Paragraph by paragraph, Grandma’s life began to take shape. As I fell more deeply in love with the story, I realized that no other author would take more care of it than I would. Although my credentials consisted of a single published story and a modest blog—which I used mostly to discuss geeky things like particle accelerators and black holes—it became clear that I was going to write this book.

Summer days passed with me tucked away at the library while my guys played at a park, or fished at the river. I tried to ignore the sun beaming gorgeously beyond the windows. At home, laundry piled up. Stacks of research papers sprouted on tables. Last fall, I spent Thanksgiving alone at home, kneeling on the carpet, pages spread around me. As I edited, I ate handfuls of microwave popcorn and tried not to miss my boys, or the turkey they were eating at their grandparents’ house.

When it was time for Grandma to review the bulk of the manuscript, I booked a plane ticket so I could hand-deliver it. She still lived in the same cozy Californian apartment that I’d visited as a child. Back then, I’d always be dashing off to the nearby beach, trailing beach towels and sand buckets.

Now, my nerves jangled. I’d poured my heart into this project for nearly two years, and I’d done it for her. Although I’d taken great pains to be accurate, I wondered if I’d gotten a million things wrong, anyway. What if Grandma had to slash sentences on every page? The publisher had assigned a tight deadline. There wouldn’t be time to start over.

I handed her the chapters, a highlighter, and a pen. “Mark anything that isn’t right, Grandma,” I said, “and I will change it.” She read late into the night. The following morning, she gave the chapters back to me, and I began to flip through. This was the moment of truth. I turned page after page.

Grandma had changed exactly three words. She loved the book. I’d gotten it right.

Cathy LaGrow has been married to her high school sweetheart, Dan, for almost 25 years. She is a licensed, nonpracticing U.S. Customs broker and a piano teacher. She lives in Oregon, where she's often found in the kitchen baking or curled up in a chair reading. Cathy's mother is Minka Disbrow's second child, born nearly 18 years after the baby Minka gave up for adoption.

Picture Book

Picture Book

A stutterer finds his voice among animals

Behind the Book by Alan Rabinowitz

by Alan Rabinowitz

Alan Rabinowitz is a champion of wildlife conservation. He is president and CEO of Panthera, a nonprofit wildlife organization devoted to protecting big cats. As he shares in his charming picture book for children, A Boy and a Jaguar, Rabinowitz's passion for defending wildcats comes from the struggle to find his own words as a child.

My entire childhood and adolescence was characterized by the inability to speak. Until I finally was given the tools to manipulate the hard contacts in my mouth when I was a senior in college, I was not able to speak a full sentence or communicate a full thought fluently—except to my animals.

I remember feeling as if I lived in two very different worlds. The world of “normal people,” in which I felt apart and dysfunctional, yet which dominated my waking hours, and the more comfortable world of my animals. Strangely, it was the world of my pets, whom I could talk to and express myself that was the real world to me. While I felt completely normal and fluent inside my own head, the only living things that seemed to understand that, who listened without judging me, were my animals.

Eventually it became easier to avoid even trying to speak, to avoid the uncomfortable looks, the snickers, the pity of the human world. I remember being sent home from school early one day after being taken to the nurse’s office. Called on to speak in class by a substitute teacher, I had purposely dropped a pencil under my desk, bent down to retrieve it and stabbed the point of the pencil into my hand. Retelling the story to my animals that night, I thought nothing of the pain in my hand, but I reveled in the small victory at not having to be embarrassed and shamed once again in front of my classmates. The animal world saved me. And I made a promise as a child to help save them, to give them their own voices, if I ever found my own.

This book is not simply about my childhood and finding the voice that I so desperately sought to help my animal friends. This book is about all young people who feel discarded, misunderstood or ignored. Finding strength through adversity, young people need to see that what makes them different can also make them stronger. This book is about victory. The victory of realizing that what sets you apart empowers you to seek out your dreams and achieve any goal you set in life.

Alan Rabinowtiz collaring a jaguar in the Brazilian Pantanal.

Alan Rabinowitz is a champion of wildlife conservation. He is president and CEO of Panthera, a nonprofit wildlife organization devoted to protecting big cats. As he shares in his charming picture book for children, A Boy and a Jaguar, Rabinowitz's passion for defending wildcats comes from the struggle to find his own words as a child.

Meeting a survivor of modern slavery

Behind the Book by Abby Sher

by Abby Sher

The harrowing and horrifying stories of human trafficking are not something we necessarily want to read—we would like to believe that we live in a world without slavery—but they are stories that need to be heard. In her powerful book Breaking Free, Abby Sher has collected the true stories of Somaly Mam, Minh Dang and Maria Suarez, three women who survived servitude and have become leading activists in the anti-trafficking movement. Sher shares a story from the research for Breaking Free, when she met Minh Dang, whose abuse occurred in a quiet suburb of California.

If I were a trafficking survivor, I wouldn’t trust me either.

I used to write sketch comedy for a living. I have been known to tweet about potty training my toddler. Why was I calling Minh Dang—survivor, activist and recently named a "Champion of Change" at the White House—to chat about her experiences?

Because once I heard her story, I couldn’t unhear it.

We both grew up in neat houses with rose bushes in our front yards. We both loved peeling off dirty shin guards after a soccer match. We both collected stickers and stationery.

The only thing was, at night, Minh’s parents were molesting her from the time she was 3 years old. Then selling her body at a local café. She was enslaved and/or abused by them for 17 years before she was able to break free.

Before I dialed her number, I read all of her blog posts for Don’t Sell Bodies. Then I reread them, studying her every comma or question mark. I felt like she was in the room, sitting next to me. Everything she shared was so vivid and intimate. When she wrote about rehumanizing survivors, or finding ways to relate to even her perpetrators, I thought, This woman is a superhero.

Then I read her next piece, which said, Don’t call me a hero. Call me human.

Easier said than done.

It’s so hard for me to talk to someone I admire without getting stammery and silly. If I see a celebrity of any kind, I usually blush or pretend there’s something super interesting about the floor. With Minh, I knew that would be kind of an insult to idolize her, because what she was writing was all about our collective humanity.

Lucky for me, she sent me a message that she was going through a rough time and needed to cancel our phone date.

I wrote back saying that I was here, and I only wanted to help, not to pry.

An hour later, we were on the phone, both feeling a little raw and shaky.

We talked about the weather. We talked about our favorite color. We talked about comedy clubs and dating and yes, I even mentioned potty training.

When I hung up I felt giddy, like I had a best-friend crush.

A few weeks later, I was walking up to her cottage in Berkeley, California. It was one of those so-perfect-I-have-to-pinch-myself days where the sun and the blooming flowers were laughing out loud.

I knew from pictures that Minh was naturally beautiful, but even more so in person. She had dark, intense eyes and a short bob framing her face. No makeup, but long hoop earrings glittered when she spoke. She immediately invited me to sit on the couch together, and we just started gabbing. She asked me how my flight was and offered me some frittata. I couldn’t help it—I asked her if we could be best friends. (She still hasn’t answered me on that one yet).

Over the next two hours, Minh taught me the most important lesson ever (no offense to all my great teachers and mentors through the years.): We are all human. We are all the same. So as Minh says, the first step in making a real change in anti-trafficking starts with self-love. To believe in Minh is to believe in humanity.

Each of the women in this book is astoundingly brave and fierce. They are also incredibly human. And somehow, they trusted me. It was an honor to write their stories.

Thank you, Abby!

The harrowing and horrifying stories of human trafficking are not something we necessarily want to read—we would like to believe that we live in a world without slavery—but they are stories that need to be heard. In her powerful book Breaking Free, Abby Sher has collected the true stories of Somaly Mam, Minh Dang and Maria Suarez, three women who survived servitude and have become leading activists in the anti-trafficking movement. Sher shares a story from the research for Breaking Free, when she met Minh Dang, whose abuse occurred in a quiet suburb of California.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

The road to ‘That Night’

Behind the Book by Chevy Stevens

by Chevy Stevens

With her 2010 debut novel, Still Missing, Canadian author Chevy Stevens established herself as a writer who can tranform small fears into ultimate nightmares. Her new novel, That Night, evolves a tale of high school bullying into a story of revenge and twisted girl-world secrets.

In 1998, due to false testimony from classmate Shauna and her posse, high school sweethearts Toni and Ryan went to prison for killing Toni’s younger sister, Nicole—a haunted girl with well-hidden secrets. Seventeen years later, Toni and Ryan are out on parole and determined to clear their names—but Shauna's bent on sending them back behind bars. Writes our reviewer, "Chevy Stevens’ account of what it’s like to be powerless—whether as a grounded 12th-grader or a prison inmate—is pitch perfect (and relatable to anyone who’s ever been a teen)."

Stevens shares a look behind the curtain into the changing tides of her writing life:

Some people say that certain songs remind them of a time in their life. For me, it’s each of my books. When I started Still Missing I was in a transitional stage, not happy in my career, my relationship or my house. I started writing the book on my old computer in the upstairs bedroom of the character home I owned. The temperature was inconsistent, and I was either too cold or sweltering in the summer. Six months later, I sold that house, and continued writing in the office at my townhouse. I can still close my eyes and see Post-it notes stuck all over the wall from when I was mapping out the sessions.

When I rewrote all the session openings, I was now single. I rented a cabin on Thetis Island, taking long walks with my dog, Annie, then writing some more. I know exactly which paragraphs I wrote when I was there. If I read them again, I’m transported back to that island, to those days when it was just us.

Not long after I signed with my agent, I met my husband, who was living down in Victoria, about an hour and a half away from me. At the time I’d gone back to work in sales, having used up almost all my savings, and I’d stay with him or a hotel when I was working in the south end of the island. I’d get up early to write on my laptop in his office, trying to be quiet so I didn’t wake him, or I’d come home to my hotel room at lunch, sneaking in a few lines before my next appointment. I was also planning our wedding during this time, excited about the beginning of my married life and my writing career.

Never Knowing was written while I lived at our townhouse, now sharing an office with my husband, our chairs back to back. It was a chaotic time in my life, trying to balance the marketing leading up the publishing of Still Missing, and then my beloved dog, Annie, became very sick. I’d write while she slept on the couch in the office. I’d glance over often, agonizing whether her breathing was okay, how she was feeling that day, if she needed medication. A lot of the stress I was feeling went into that book.

When I was writing Always Watching, I worked through my grief over having lost Annie and my own questions about the universe and whether there was a Heaven, and if I would see her again. We sold our house, and I wrote with boxes stacked around me, then at my friend’s kitchen table while we stayed there for a few days, then finally on my computer in my new office. Toward the end of the book, I found out I was pregnant. For the final three months of that book I had to take long naps on the floor in my office, constantly nauseous. Finally the book was finished—and I was out of the first trimester!

I have my best memories of the time when I was working on That Night. I loved being pregnant, the energy, the clarity of thought. Initially I wrote in my office every day, but the more pregnant I became, the more uncomfortable my seat. Finally I had to work downstairs at our table—for some reason that chair felt better. I remember that fall, looking out at the leaves coming down in our backyard, feeling the baby move in my belly. I also got a cold and spent the last trimester sneezing all over my keyboard.

In December of 2012, I was close to finishing the last draft—and close my due date. If the baby held off for another week, I’d be done, but she thwarted my plan and I went into labor on her due date. I didn’t start work on the book again until late January. I remember all the breaks for nursing, the exhaustion. I had to start the day late, and then take afternoon naps, and still work in the evening some days. I was beyond tired, but head over heels in love with my daughter. Thankfully my husband was also home during that time, and he was with Piper whenever I was writing. A few months into the start of my fifth book, Piper finally started sleeping through the night, and my days gradually returned to normal.

Now it’s spring, and I’m working out in our travel trailer, my dog Oona sleeping quietly beside me. I will finish this book in the next couple of months, probably part of it while on tour, then I’ll start my next book, and the next stage of my life. I don’t know how either will unfold yet, but I’m excited to find out.

Thank you, Chevy!

Author photo credit Suzanne Teresa.

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