All Behind the Book essays

Middle Grade

Begging for just one Hanukkah miracle

Behind the Book by Joel ben Izzy
Joel ben Izzy, when he was “way too awkward to live.”

What’s the deal with the choliday of Chanukkah?

Though everyone’s cheard of it, few can understand it, even among Jews. Especially among Jews. We can’t even agree how to spell it, which is how you know it’s a Jewish holiday. In Dreidels on the Brain—written from when I was a 12-year old super-nerd magician—I spell it differently each time use it.

The ever-changing timing of Hanukkkkkah is also baffling. Three years ago it actually began before Thanksgiving! That’s only happened once and—due to quirks in the calendar—isn’t scheduled to happen again for 79,000 years. Hope you enjoyed it! This year Haanukah begins at sunset on December 24—Christmas Eve! That’s even more confusing, because whatever Kchaanukah is, one thing is clear—it is not the Jewish Christmas.

So, what is Haanukah all about? From the beginning, it’s been an uneasy melding of two stories about miracles. One was of the Maccabean revolution, with a simple moral: We kicked their butt because God was on our side. The problem was that the Maccabees went on to be terrible rulers, so bad that people decided not to include the story in any Jewish holy books. It’s true—to read about the Maccabees, you need a Christian Bible!

The other story tells how after the battle they went to rededicate the temple in Jerusalem, but only had a tiny amount of oil. Yet it lasted all eight nights—and that was the miracle.

I could go on about how confusing Qchanukah is, but I won’t, because here’s what’s important: I think I’ve figured it out—and that’s why I wrote Dreidels on the Brain.

It’s about what happened to me and my family during the eight nights of Chaaanukah, in December 1971, which is when the story takes place. It was a dark time in my life. My family was poor, my dad was sick, and I was way too awkward to live. So I made a bet with God, over a game of dreidel: All I wanted was one Kchanukkah miracle. 

Without giving away the story, I will say this: When it comes to dreidel—and miracles—God does not play fair. During that Chaanukah, my life fell apart. But, at the end of it all, I was given something I will always treasure.

I’ve always loved stories, which is why I’m a professional storyteller. And when I have a good one, I’ll turn right around and tell it. But this was different. I knew I needed to hold on to that story until the time was right.

That was 45 years ago. And now, at last, I’m ready to share the gift I was given that Haanukkah—a tale of how, no matter how dark things get, you can still somehow find light within the darkness.  

And, for me, that’s what Hanukkah—and Dreidels on the Brain—is all about. 

In 1983 storyteller Joel ben Izzy graduated from Stanford University and set off to travel the globe, gathering and telling stories. Since then, he has performed and led workshops in 35 countries. Over the years he has also produced six recorded collections of his stories, which have won awards from Parents’ Choice foundation, NAPPA, ALA and a Booklist Editor’s Choice Honor. Joel is also one of the nation’s most sought-after story consultants, supporting organizations and leaders working to make the world a better place, with clients in fields ranging from philanthropy to medicine to technology to entertainment. Joel’s first book was the highly acclaimed memoir The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness, which has been published in 17 languages and is currently in development as both a film and a musical. He lives with his wife in Berkeley, California.

What’s the deal with the choliday of Chanukkah? Though everyone’s cheard of it, few can understand it, even among Jews. Especially among Jews. We can’t even agree how to spell it, which is how you know it’s a Jewish holiday. In Dreidels on the Brain—written from when I was a 12-year old super-nerd magician—I spell it differently each time use it.

Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

A dark and twisted thriller drawn from 15 years of academic memories

Behind the Book by Joanne Harris

My grandfather was a teacher. My parents were both teachers. Their friends were all teachers, which meant that at home, their conversation revolved almost exclusively around teaching. For me, as a child, that meant a constant stream of school stories, drama and intrigue. It also meant that for many years it was more or less accepted that I, too, was destined for the teaching profession.

And when, age 9, I timidly dared to challenge this decree and suggest that I might try writing books instead, my mother showed me a room in our house, in which stood a wall of books—all by 19th-century French novelists, all having died in poverty, of syphilis and TB—after which she said to me: “And that’s why you need a Proper Job!”

And so I became a teacher. I liked it—I was good at it—and yet I kept on writing. During that time—over 15 years, most of which I spent teaching in a boys’ grammar school in Yorkshire—three of my books were published, though it was only after the unexpected success of Chocolat that I was able to give up teaching for good. And my mother’s advice served me well, for during those 15 years I was able to collect enough wild tales, dreadful scandals, quirky characters and everyday moments of drama to fill a hundred books.

I realized during those 15 years that a school is a factory of stories. Small communities so often are, and schools, with their volatile chemistry, cut off from the rest of the world by arcane rules and rituals, are a kind of microcosm, a mirror for the outside world. And it is from the events and experiences of those 15 years that I built my books—especially Gentlemen and Players, and my new book, Different Class: both set in St. Oswald’s, a fictional boys’ grammar school in the north of England. 

Knowing this, it must be tempting for readers to assume that the events depicted in my books are based on some kind of real-life event. The fact is that real life is nowhere near as plausible as fiction, at least as far as schools are concerned, and if I were to base my books on actual, real-life incidents encountered during my teaching career, the critics would scoff and refuse to believe that any such thing had happened. Having said that, schools are filled with stories; they’re communities in which tragedy and farce are only ever the turn of a page away. My teaching career saw plenty of both, and it is inevitable that certain stories, incidents and characters remained in my writer’s subconscious.

The writing process is very much tied up with memory. But St. Oswald’s is a construct, rather than a portrayal of any single place. It contains elements of schools (and universities) at which I was a pupil, as well as the schools in which I taught. Some minor incidents are based on things that really happened. The main plots, however, are mostly made-up or loosely based on current events.

As I was writing Different Class, I was also watching the unfolding of the Operation Yewtree police investigation, the results of which rocked [the U.K.] and implicated a number of TV and radio celebrities in a series of accusations of historical sex abuse. This scandal, with all its complexities, seemed to have disturbing parallels with the book I was writing. Again, I didn’t plan it this way. Ideas are like dandelion seeds, landing where the wind takes them. That year, the wind was full of tales of past and present abuses. Some of them must have made their way into the book I was writing: a story about the past, about memory and perception, about loyalty and childhood and guilt and of the dark side of friendship.

I find my “dark” books at the same time curiously satisfying to write, and emotionally and intellectually draining. But I believe that stories should contain equal proportions of light and shade in order to be meaningful. The monsters of our daily lives are not the demons and werewolves of fairy tale, but sexual predators, murderers and those who hide their malevolence behind an everyday façade. Stories enable us to face our monsters, and sometimes, learn to fight back. Facing them isn’t always easy, but maybe that’s the point.

During her 15 years as a teacher, Joanne Harris published three novels, including the bestselling Chocolat (1999), which was made into an Oscar-nominated film. Since then, she has written 15 more novels, two collections of short stories and three cookbooks. Her new novel of psychological suspense, Different Class, is set at an antiquated, failing prep school. A new headmaster arrives, bringing changes that seem more corporate than academic. While curmudgeonly Latin teacher Roy Straitley does his best to resist these transformations, a shadow from his past begins to stir—a boy who haunts his dreams, a sociopathic young outcast from 20 years before. Harris lives with her husband and daughter in Yorkshire, where she writes in a shed in her garden.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of Different Class.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

My grandfather was a teacher. My parents were both teachers. Their friends were all teachers, which meant that at home, their conversation revolved almost exclusively around teaching. For me, as a child, that meant a constant stream of school stories, drama and intrigue. It also meant that for many years it was more or less accepted that I, too, was destined for the teaching profession.
Middle Grade

Demanding hope for a younger generation

Behind the Book by Andrew Maraniss
Maraniss and Wallace
Andrew Maraniss and Perry Wallace at the RFK Book Awards, where the adult version of Strong Inside received a special recognition in 2015.
 

When I set out to write the original, adult version of Strong Inside, I felt pressure to satisfy two discerning audiences: historians and sports fans. These folks may not hang out in the same pubs, but they both know their stuff and aren’t afraid to call you out when they think you’re wrong.

I’m pleased the book, a biography of Perry Wallace, the first African-American basketball player in the Southeastern Conference, succeeded on both fronts. It debuted on the New York Times bestseller list in both the sports and civil rights categories, earned two major civil rights book awards, became the all-freshman read at Vanderbilt University, and may have been the first book covered by both the SEC Network and NPR.

But now, with Strong Inside out in a middle grade format, I may have the most skeptical readers of all to satisfy: 12-year-olds.

Talk about a tough crowd. And none more important audience.

I’ve seen the news that middle school suicides at an all-time high. I’ve read the reports about incidents of racially motivated bullying increasing since the election of Donald Trump. I’ve learned the term “reluctant reader.” I feel a country divided between rural and urban, right and left, white and black.

Yet in Perry Wallace’s story, I see an opportunity to deliver a dose of hope. Chances are, you’ve never heard of Perry Wallace. I doubt I’ll meet a middle schooler who knows Wallace’s name. But his story could not be more important at this time in history, when racism—subtle and overt—was at the heart of a winning presidential campaign.

Wallace was no ordinary basketball player. Yes, he was a star on the court: three-time high school state champion, team captain at Vanderbilt, NBA draft choice. But he has always been so much more than an athlete. As a kid, he taught Sunday School, practiced trumpet four hours a day, studied his four older sisters’ college textbooks. He was the valedictorian at Nashville’s all-black Pearl High School, earned an engineering degree at Vandy, and graduated from Columbia University law school. He watched Nashville’s 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins as a 12-year-old, met with civil rights figures Martin Luther King Jr, Stokely Carmichael and Fannie Lou Hamer while in college. Today he’s a professor of law at American University.

And all along the way, he’s overcome gigantic obstacles, seen the worst of human nature, feared that racists in a small southern town would shoot him, been taunted as a token by some black observers. He’s the most courageous—and smartest—person I’ve ever met.

I’m hopeful young students of color will discover a character they recognize and admire. I’m hopeful white kids will learn something about race and racism, empathy and understanding. I’m hopeful that kids who love sports, but not books, will find a story they can’t put down. I’m hopeful that boys and girls who don’t care about sports at all will identify with Wallace’s intellect, his sensitivity, his challenges to overcome bullying and isolation.

Call that a lot to hope for from just one story, but I know the power of Perry Wallace. I first interviewed him when I was just a student myself, a sophomore at Vanderbilt in 1989 working on a paper for a Black History class. I’ve dedicated more than half of my life now to telling Perry Wallace’s story. And it’s because I know how meaningful that story can be to people that I paid close attention to the advice I was given by those who guided me through the process of adapting this book for young readers. Professor Ann Neely at Vanderbilt, bestselling author Ruta Sepetys, and editors Brian Geffen and Michael Green at Philomel said: Respect the audience. Don’t dumb-down the story. Don’t sanitize it.

And that was on top of the advice I had already received from my father, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss: Do the real work, the reporting, the research, the interviews. And the advice from Perry Wallace himself: Just tell the truth.

Authors have always had the opportunity to bring light where there is darkness, and in this new America, we have a special responsibility to counter hate and bluster with truth. Kids, of all people, still demand it. And I know they deserve it.

 

Follow Andrew Maraniss on Twitter @trublu24 and visit his website at www.andrewmaraniss.com. Strong Inside: The True Story of How Perry Wallace Broke College Basketball’s Color Line was published by Philomel on Dec. 20, 2016, and is a Junior Library Guild selection.

Authors have always had the opportunity to bring light where there is darkness, and in this new America, we have a special responsibility to counter hate and bluster with truth. Kids, of all people, still demand it. And I know they deserve it.

NonfictionHistory

A sister’s labor of love

Behind the Book by Beverly Louise Brown

I have never thought of 13 as a particularly unlucky number, but in the wee hours of April 14, 2015, I found out just how inauspicious it could be. I was peacefully asleep in London when the phone rang.

Beverly Louise Brown and Elizabeth Brown Pryor

Beverly Louise Brown (left) with
her late sister, Elizabeth Brown Pyror.

After a few seconds, I comatosely pulled myself out of bed to answer it, assuming that my 92-year-old mother had taken a turn for the worse. The voice at the other end of the line was sobbing, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” “Is it mother?” I asked. “No,” came the reply, “Elizabeth has been killed.”

On the afternoon of April 13, my sister, Elizabeth Brown Pryor, had been driving home from the dentist down a quiet street in Richmond, Virginia, when a manic-​depressive driver, who thought he could fly his car, rear-ended her beloved Audi TT at 107 miles per hour. She was killed instantly. He walked away unscathed. 

When I arrived in Richmond, I found her study stacked high with books on Abraham Lincoln, piles of the corrected pages of Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons and a phalanx of flash drives, where she had backed up each chapter and painstakingly stored her transcriptions of original documents. 

The previous January she had jubilantly called me in London to announce that she had finally finished her work on “the tyrant Lincoln.” It had been a long, slow gestation that had begun with a chance discovery in 2008. On the day she received the Lincoln Prize for Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, she had spent the morning doing research at the New-York Historical Society. When she arrived back at the flat where we were staying to change for dinner (into my new Armani jacket), she was ecstatic. Not in anticipation of receiving such a singular honor—although she was, of course, delighted to receive it—but because she had just discovered an unpublished drawing of Abraham Lincoln sketched in a letter written home during the Civil War. As she put it, “There sits Abraham Lincoln, with a familiarity almost unimaginable today, legs folded and tall hat in place, looking for all the world like a cricket perched on the nation’s front porch.” 

What had been a brief encounter in 1862 between the president and one of his military guards turned out to not only be a fascinating tale, but a springboard for investigating a neglected but significant aspect of Lincoln’s administration. Over the next seven years Elizabeth submerged herself in the letters, diaries and newspaper articles of the 1860s, carefully piecing together six episodes that explored Lincoln’s difficulty in managing a republic. Her own quarter-century career in the State Department gave her a unique perspective on how slowly the wheels of government turn and how our Founding Fathers’ insistence on a balance of power could cause the cogs of those wheels to lock in an unwelcome impasse. Few other Civil War historians could marry personal experience with scholarly insight in such a compelling way. As she was fond of saying, she had lived “-real-time” history. It was her unique ability to tie the various threads of her life experience together and reflect upon the lessons that she had learned which allowed her to render such a vivid picture of 19th-century American history.  

When I found the manuscript of Six Encounters after her death, the text, footnotes and bibliography were virtually ready for publication. She had meticulously highlighted in yellow any quotations or page numbers that needed to be rechecked. Only the preface was missing. I undertook the task of checking the footnotes, quotations and bibliography. She had ordered four or five photographs, but left no list of illustrations. I only knew that she had once told me that she wanted “a lot of pictures.” Luckily, as an art historian, ordering photographs is one thing I know how to do. As I read through the manuscript, I tried to visualize what she was describing and set about to find appropriate images. She may have never intended to illustrate the party given at the White House in February 1862, but when I found an illustration of it in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, I knew that it would be the perfect accompaniment to her account of the event. I was also able to unearth several drawings of Lincoln that were virtually unknown in the great canon of Lincoln scholarship. 

Elizabeth and I and our sister, Peggy, grew up listening to my mother’s tales of the Civil War with rapt attention. Not that mother herself had been around then, but as a child she spent hours sitting on the front porch in Terre Haute, Indiana, listening to the tales of her great-grandfather, John J. Kenley, who saw action at the battles of Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg and Mobile. The house was full of Civil War heirlooms, including the walnut bookcase made for his wedding in 1863, the fork from his mess kit and a pile of letters, one of which Elizabeth quotes in Six Encounters. Yet, as she often said, it was not the “stuff” that got her hooked on the Civil War, but mother’s storytelling ability. Mother died just four months after Elizabeth, but for seven years she had been able to follow the progress of the book from beginning to end, listening to the chapters as they were written. 

Taking on the task of polishing Elizabeth’s manuscript and seeing it through publication was a labor of love that took me outside my own comfort zone of Italian Renaissance art. For a year I gave up my own scholarship as I grappled with learning an entirely new field of history and cast of characters. I was acutely aware of needing to stay true to Elizabeth’s vision and not imposing my own views. I simply wanted to make certain the facts were correct and do her hard work justice. I have no words to express adequately my admiration for her achievement as a historian. I only know that more than once the sheer beauty of her prose brought tears to my eyes and that I miss her with all my heart every hour of every day.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

I have never thought of 13 as a particularly unlucky number, but in the wee hours of April 14, 2015, I found out just how inauspicious it could be. I was peacefully asleep in London when the phone rang.
Middle Grade

Harlem on my mind

Behind the Book by Natasha Tarpley

“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”
       —“History Has Its Eyes on You,” a song from the musical Hamilton

On a January evening in 1969, 10 paintings were vandalized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the letter “H” (which presumably stood for Harlem) scratched onto the surface of each canvas. There was no permanent damage to the paintings. The vandalism was committed in protest of the Met’s new exhibition, “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968,” and occurred during its exclusive opening gala. The perpetrator was never caught.

I stumbled on this juicy tidbit of a story[1] while doing research for The Harlem Charade. Eureka! I immediately assumed that this unsolved mystery—complete with art, intrigue and more than a little chutzpah—would become the cornerstone of the story. But as I dug deeper, I realized that there was a lot more to this story than vandalism and vengeance.

The “Harlem on My Mind” exhibit was controversial from the very start. Protests against the show sprouted quickly. Community members and artists, including the well-known painters Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, decried what they saw as the museum’s failure to include the input of Harlem residents in the planning of the exhibition. They also criticized the Met’s decision to exclude black painters and sculptors from the exhibit, choosing instead to focus exclusively on photography, which made the show feel more like a sociological study than a fine art exhibition. A flyer in protest of the exhibit proclaimed, “If art represents the very soul of a people, then this rejection of the Black painter and sculptor is the most insidious segregation of all.”[2]

As I read more about “Harlem on My Mind,” it became clear that this conflict wasn’t about art at all. This was a battle—of life and death—over representation and the right to define and tell one’s own story. Rather than accept the Met’s definition of art, and of who they were as artists and what Harlem was as a community, those who initially protested “Harlem on My Mind” put their dissatisfaction to productive use. They built new organizations and institutions, like the Studio Museum in Harlem, and created opportunities, like artist residencies and programs to mentor new curators of color, that nurtured the creativity and careers of artists of color and helped to change the palette of the art world in New York City and beyond.

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?

The Harlem Charade is set in contemporary Harlem, decades after the “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition took place. However, I wanted to make connections between the Harlem of the 1960s and the Harlem of today, because both periods represent moments of significant change in the neighborhood. Though the issues may have been slightly different (civil rights and poverty in the ’60s, gentrification of the community today), the fundamental question remains the same: Who tells your story, and what story do you want to tell?

As Alex, Jin and Elvin, the three protagonists of the book, go about solving an art mystery of their own they—like those Harlem artists years before them—must grapple with what it means to live in a society where people have very different visions of community and progress, of the truth, of history and the future. In the process, they must also figure out what stories they want to tell, about themselves and their community.

My challenge to readers of The Harlem Charade is to learn more about their own neighborhoods and to ask questions of their families and of our local and national leaders in order to formulate their own ideas about the changes that they’d like to see in their immediate communities and in the world. Stories matter, and the stakes are high. If we don’t tell our stories, we risk being rendered invisible, washed away in the tidal wave of change. I want to inspire young people to not only discover their own stories but also to recognize and activate their power to use these stories to shape the future.

 

Author photo credit Phill Struggle.

[1] “Paintings Defaced At Metropolitan; One a Rembrandt” by Martin Arnold, The New York Times, January 17, 1969.

[2] "Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind (1969)" by Bridget R. Cooks, published in American Studies, 48:1 (Spring 2007): 5-40.

On a January evening in 1969, 10 paintings were vandalized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the letter “H” (which presumably stood for Harlem) scratched onto the surface of each canvas. There was no permanent damage to the paintings. The vandalism was committed in protest of the Met’s new exhibition, Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968, and occurred during its exclusive opening gala. The perpetrator was never caught.

FictionSuspense

The harrowing world of intelligence

Behind the Book by T.L. Williams

It was July 16, 1991, and 17 November, the Greek terrorist group, had just attempted to assassinate the Turkish charge-d’affaires in a car bomb attack. I had driven through the very intersection where that attack took place with my family, 10 minutes before the fateful event took place. Despite varying our routes and times of departure every day on our way to work, we could easily have been the victims that morning.

“In Zero Day: China’s Cyber Wars . . . I was able to draw upon 30 years of experience as an Operations Officer in the CIA to portray true-to-life operational scenarios.”

Years before, in China, I had faced a very different sort of menace. The Chinese security services viewed foreigners, particularly American diplomats, with a great deal of mistrust, even animus.  Local citizens, the Public Security Bureau, and the counterintelligence professionals surveilled their targets constantly, monitoring their every move. From the moment we left our residences until we returned home in the evening, American diplomats were under some form of surveillance. Even the housekeepers we hired to clean our apartments were required to report on their employers’ contacts and patterns of activity.  It genuinely felt as though we were living in a goldfish bowl.

In the late 1990s, I was part of the NATO SFOR Stabilization Force in Bosnia Herzegovina. There were snipers in the hills between the embassy and my location at Camp Ilidza, SFOR Headquarters. There were mines and other unexploded ordinance strewn all over the country. A misstep here, or a wrong turn there, could spell disaster. But I had a job to do and I accepted those risks as part of my everyday life as a CIA officer deployed to a war zone.

These are just a few examples of the types of threats CIA personnel all over the world face day-in and day-out as we go about fulfilling our respective missions. We accept these risks because we view ourselves as the first line of defense against America’s enemies, foreign and domestic. We have sworn an oath to defend the Constitution, and we take that pledge seriously.

In Zero Day: China’s Cyber Wars, as well as my two previous novels, Cooper’s Revenge and Unit 400: The Assassins, I was able to draw upon 30 years of experience as an Operations Officer in the CIA to portray true-to-life operational scenarios imbued with the kind of rich contextual detail that only comes from actually having lived and worked in the cultures and geographic locales that I portray. It’s the difference between gazing down on a scene from 10,000 feet and being plunked down in the thick of it. One’s senses are sharpened from participating in the real life experience on the ground, and with any luck, the author is able to transport the reader to that same place with a measure of authenticity that enriches the reading experience like no other. As John le Carré famously said, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

The methods of espionage, known in the business as tradecraft, have evolved over the years, with the most modern technological advances typically cloaked in secrecy decades after they are added to the ‘toolbox,’ unless they are somehow compromised and are thrust into the public domain. But the age old techniques of running surveillance detection routes and conducting recruitment operations remain very much the same as when they first appeared in the early days of spy literature. These methods have been bountifully described in the espionage literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. This might lead one to conclude that anyone could write a convincing scene describing the lead-up to a clandestine meeting in a high-threat counterintelligence environment, or the planning that is involved in conducting a recruitment operation against a high priority foreign target.  

Would you trust your mechanic to do your heart surgery? I’m sure that anyone could read Gray’s Anatomy and come away with some sense of where to start, but you would not want that person wielding the scalpel.  There is a reason why people gravitate to experts in all things. It is because we intuitively understand that they are the best at what they do. That’s no less true when you are looking for an authentic voice in the books you read.

T.L. Williams ran clandestine human intelligence (HUMINT) operations in Asia and Europe for over 30 years as a CIA operative. Now retired from active duty and living in Florida, he has written three espionage thrillers, including his latest release, Zero Day: China’s Cyber Wars. The CIA was so concerned about Williams’ extensive knowledge of sensitive national security information that it prevented the book’s publication for months while vetting the manuscript for classified information. 

A CIA operative for more than 30 years, T.L. Williams uses his extensive experience in the intelligence community in his latest spy thriller, Zero Day.
Middle Grade

The alchemy of story

Behind the Book by Meg McKinlay

In the isolated society of A Single Stone, only the seven smallest girls can tunnel into the mountain in search of the mica that allows their isolated society to survive harsh winters. But Jena, one of the seven girls, begins to question her society’s traditions, forever altering her understanding of the world around her. Meg McKinlay’s latest middle grade novel displays an intense reverence for the earth, the bonds of sisterhood and carefully chosen prose. McKinlay describes the inspiration for her novel as being like drops of water laden with sediment, disparate elements all building to something powerful.

The way a story comes together always feels a little mysterious to me—a kind of alchemy. It starts with a drop of something, which is joined at some point by a drop of something else altogether, and I’m never quite sure how or why certain things combine. I’m not sure I want to be, to tell you the truth. I like the mystery of it.

What I can say about A Single Stone is that its very earliest “drop” appeared when I was around 7 years old, reading The Chronicles of Narnia. In The Silver Chair, there are some gnomes who live deep underground and who express their horror of the "Overland," saying things like:

They say there’s no roof at all there; only a horrible, great emptiness called the sky.

You can’t really like it—crawling about like flies on top of the world!

This had a profound effect on me, making me think for the first time about what cultural difference really meant. I wondered how I might feel—who I might be—if I had grown up somewhere else. I think it’s from here that my main character, Jena, eventually evolved—a girl so comfortable underground she feels ill at ease outside with nothing pressing on her.

There’d be no story, though, without the other drops. The most important of these presented itself when, as a teenager, I was introduced to the work of Franz Kafka, and became very fond of his aphorisms, among them this one:

Leopards break into the temple and drink what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony.

As a teenager attending an Anglican high school and spending time in church youth groups, I was taken by this notion of how something inherently random and meaningless might be co-opted into sacred ritual. For what reason, to what end? Consciously or otherwise? And what are the consequences when that practice becomes detached from its origin?

For me, these questions are at the heart of A Single Stone, and with these two “drops,” I had the beginnings of both character and theme. But while I can see all this in retrospect, I had no sense of it at the time. I never consciously gather ideas; it’s more that these random fragments sleep quietly in the back of the mind, and at some point certain things seem to bump against each other and set a story in motion.

There are many other influences at work, too, some of which I was unaware of while writing, and probably many more I’m yet to discover. For example, my brother recently reminded me that I love rocks. It’s something I’ve inherited from my father, who always used to stop and point out interesting stones. And as a child growing up in a goldmining town, I spent a lot of time scanning the rocks around me for surface gold. It was a reader who asked whether there was any connection between this and the way the girls hunt for flashes of mica in the book. Somehow, I made neither of these links myself. And this is actually something I love about being a writer. I can’t count the number of times people have said things like, “I love the way you did this,” or “I was just wondering why you did that,” and I think, Well, but I didn’t, and then in the next breath, Oh yes I did!

For me, writing is a kind of discovery, and readers have a huge part to play in that. I can’t wait to see what a new audience brings to A Single Stone.

Meg McKinlay’s latest middle grade novel displays an intense reverence for the earth, the bonds of sisterhood and carefully chosen prose. McKinlay describes the inspiration for her novel as being like drops of water laden with sediment, disparate elements all building to something powerful.

NonfictionMemoirGraphic Memoirs

A strikingly drawn portrait of the refugee experience

Behind the Book by Thi Bui

Thi Bui’s debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, is a deeply affecting look at her Vietnamese family’s complex journey to the very country that inflicted a lion’s share of the destruction to their home region during the Vietnam War. Bui’s story ranges through many time periods: the present, her childhood in California, her parents’ extensive and exhausting process of attaining refugee status and their tumultuous time in Vietnam. Bui’s prose is carefully crafted, and her brushstrokes are similarly spare and simple, rendered in a muted palette of black, white and burgundy. The effect is immediate: Readers will be drawn into each and every frame. Bui’s minimalist approach ensures readers can’t gloss over the harsh realities of her family’s immigrant experience, but it also forces us to recognize the universal struggles and triumphs that all families experience. Fans of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis will not want to miss this incredibly relevant work. 

Bui reflects on the current political climate and encourages Americans to listen to the incredible stories of refugee families like her own.

The idea that people come to this country to steal from it is a crazy one.

As the poet Warsan Shire has attested, “No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border / when you see the whole city / running as well.”

Running for safety is one of the most basic, primal instincts we humans have. It is natural, and human, to migrate in search of security, shelter, food and a better future, perhaps a place to raise one’s children. Borders, the structures that can halt such migration, are shaped by conquest, wars and treaties, and as such are entirely man-made and unnatural.

“In my experience, people who have had a brush with death help others when they need it.”

Periodically, conflict or natural disaster—or some terrible association of the two—force large waves of people into involuntary migration. To have lived one’s entire life free of this experience is to be very lucky. To go through it, I think, peels away some layers of the veil between life and death. You realize that the stability of your world is not to be taken for granted. That things can change, and go from bad to worse very quickly, and you must be ready to grab those important to you and run, or stay and fight, and nothing is guaranteed. In The Best We Could Do, I narrate the story of my family who fled from home in a small boat in the late ’70s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In my experience, people who have had a brush with death help others when they need it. People who, perhaps because they have not had that experience, lack the empathy to extend help to refugees often say that we should be helping our own instead. But often they don’t do that either.

America, the land of such amazing contradiction that I have learned to call home, and into which I pour a significant amount of taxes, donations, labor and love, is at a crossroads. Either it succumbs to fear of “outsiders” (many of whom are just as American as anyone else) and hurts many people, or it progresses into a multicultural social experiment that will be the envy of other nations. I would like to see the latter happen, and I know that living together is a learning process. So I offer my little book, the best I could do, to put human faces and names and personal stories onto the words “immigrant” and “refugee.” And I seek out and read and listen to stories that are different from my own. It is the best way I know how to build community and understanding.

I am holding out my hand. Not to steal. Not to take. This book is an offering of peace, and a hope for understanding.

Thi Bui's debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, is a deeply affecting look at her Vietnamese family's complex journey to the very country that inflicted a lion's share of the destruction to their home region during the Vietnam War. Bui's story alternates between many time periods: the present, her childhood in California, her parents' extensive and exhausting process of attaining refugee status and their tumultuous time in Vietnam. Bui reflects on the current political climate and encourages Americans to listen to the incredible stories of refugee families like her own.

Fiction

Honoring a library legacy

Behind the Book by Romalyn Tilghman

National Library Week is April 9 – 15, 2017, and this year’s theme is “Libraries Transform.” At BookPage, we celebrate the contributions of libraries and librarians every day, but this is an extra-special time of year to honor those who promote literacy all across the nation. Romalyn Tilghman’s debut novel, To the Stars Through Difficulties, is the story of three women who create a library and arts center after a tornado devastates a small Kansas town, inspired by the real-life frontier women who helped stock the 59 libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie in early 20th-century Kansas. Tilghman’s novel opens with a quote from Carnegie that says it all: “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.”

My father insists my first trip to the library happened a few minutes after I learned to talk. Exaggeration, perhaps, but I do remember library visits before I learned to read. The Peevish Penguin was the family favorite, and we renewed it repeatedly. Later, I lived in the Nancy Drew section of the library, until I graduated to biographies of Clara Barton, Jane Addams and Amelia Earhart. The library was a Carnegie library, and my elementary school was named after the first librarian who served there. In other words, I grew up in and around and through that Carnegie library in Manhattan, Kansas, finding inspiration in the stories I found there.

Manhattan was a big city compared to most of the 59 Kansas communities that received grants from Andrew Carnegie at the beginning of the 20th century. Right there, across the Plains, before the arrival of indoor plumbing or the Model T, a literary movement took hold.

Early in my career, I visited many of those communities, not for the libraries but for the burgeoning arts councils that were forming across the state. I was struck by the dedication of volunteers who were determined to bring cultural opportunities to their communities, some who were turning their Carnegie libraries into arts centers. Places like Dodge City, Goodland and Lawrence. Determined and innovative in their efforts, they hounded the local banker for contributions and asked local farmers to dedicate “a bushel for the arts.” It didn’t take long to see similarities between these (mostly women) volunteers and their foremothers who’d managed to get Carnegie libraries in their towns.

As I traveled, I stashed pieces of information and anecdotes from those Carnegie library arts centers. When it came to write, I decided on fiction. I invented Angelina, a Ph.D. candidate in library science who sleuths the historical library minutes. I invented Traci, a hip and feisty artist-in-residence who brings the arts center to life in a contemporary setting. And I invented Gayle, a tornado survivor, who demonstrates what is most important when rebuilding a community from scratch. With the help of a journal from 1910, these three characters convey the strength and wisdom and determination of women who change their communities, as they are changed themselves.

Now we carry the world’s knowledge in our pockets and access culture on our laptops, but these buildings still burst with energy. As I popped into libraries to do research, I was inspired by people looking for jobs, checking newspapers, researching genealogy, reading to kids, grabbing the latest bestseller. Toddlers who skipped in and seniors who struggled with canes. The same diversity is true of arts centers where kindergartners dance to hip hop in one room as a barbershop quartet sings show tunes in another, or teenagers make graphic murals as quilters piece paisleys. These cultural centers, both literary and artistic, thrive with life, inspire those who enter, give us a window to the greater world and a mirror on ourselves.

The dedication page of my novel, To the Stars Through Difficulties, has a single vintage photo: the Carnegie library in Manhattan, Kansas. To that library, I owe so much.

 

Author photo credit Rachel Warecki.

National Library Week is April 9 - 15, 2017, and this year’s theme is “Libraries Transform.” At BookPage, we celebrate the contributions of libraries and librarians every day, but this is an extra-special time of year to honor those who promote literacy all across the nation. Romalyn Tilghman’s debut novel, To the Stars Through Difficulties, is the story of three women who create a library and arts center after a tornado devastates a small Kansas town, inspired by the real-life frontier women who helped stock the 59 libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie in early 20th-century Kansas. Tilghman’s novel opens with a quote from Carnegie that says it all: “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.”

You don’t have to go to college

Behind the Book by Alice Oseman

At the opening to Radio Silence, Alice Oseman’s latest YA novel, 17-year-old British-Ethiopian girl Frances Janvier shoots straight: “Being clever was, after all, my primary source of self-esteem. I’m a very sad person, in all sense of the word, but at least I was going to get into university.” Frances has always been laser-focused on getting into Cambridge, but academic success has never brought her joy. Instead, she feels most like herself when creating fan art for a podcast called “Universe City,” and when she strikes up a friendship with the podcast creator, a “partly asexual” white boy named Aled Last, their friendship is the beginning of something uplifting and important. Oseman shares a peek behind Radio Silence and how she learned to redefine the meaning of success when surrounded by pressure to conform.

I have always been a “high achiever.” A “gifted student.” “Top of the class.” Growing up, these labels defined me, completely and thoroughly. I was known among my classmates as the girl who got top grades, took extra qualifications, was loved by teachers and destined for Oxbridge. Academia dominated my identity and left little room for much else.

Going to university to study something “academic” wasn’t even a question. I’d known I’d do it since I was 9. There was no need to consider interest or enjoyment. It was my destiny. It was who I was and what I was meant to do. My parents told me that it would be a waste not to use my academic skills. My friends assured me that if I couldn’t get into Oxbridge, who else could? When I showed a slight interest in pursuing art instead, my teachers laughed at me.

So I went to a top university to study English literature.

And I hated it.

I wrote my second novel, Radio Silence, while I was studying for my undergraduate degree at Durham University. I was having a terrible time and could not understand why. The reading was dull and lifeless, the assignments were boring and painful, and I was finding no enjoyment from the very thing that I believed defined me as human being. Having been told all my life that being academic was what made you successful, rich and happy, I was terrified. Why did I suddenly hate that which made me who I was? Who exactly was I underneath that?

I looked around me and began to realize that other students were in the same position. Being at a prestigious university, I was surrounded by high achievers who believed that there was little else to which to aspire than to be academically successful—to get good grades, top scores and that certificate and graduation gown at the end. But very few people were actually enjoying it. The joy of learning was practically nonexistent. Most students didn’t even have a career in mind. They were just here to get those grades. Because that is all they were ever told they could do.

I wanted to drop out. But I had no idea who I was without academia.

Frances, the protagonist of Radio Silence, stands where I stood at 17—at the cusp of deciding whether to go to university. Like me, she is a high achiever and is expected by everyone around her to go to university and study something academic, and because of that, she keeps her artistic side a secret. But then Frances meets Aled, a boy who lives and thrives off his creative pursuits, and Frances begins to question whether academia is really the right path for her, despite everyone in the world screaming at her that it is. Aled, on the other hand, is forced into an academic university course that he does not really want to attend, and pays the price for doing so.

Teenagers today are defined by academia. Assignments, homework and exams are so intense now that they occupy students’ entire lives. In writing Radio Silence, I hoped to suggest to young people that they must fight back against those who try to write over their identities and warp them into study machines. I wanted to reach out to my past self and to those in her position—blind to the knowledge that there could be any other path for them apart from academia.

Seventeen-year-old British-Ethiopian girl Frances Janvier shoots straight at the opening to Radio Silence, Alice Oseman’s latest YA novel: “Being clever was, after all, my primary source of self-esteem. I’m a very sad person, in all sense of the word, but at least I was going to get into university.” Oseman shares a peek behind Radio Silence, and how she learned to redefine the meaning of success when surrounded by pressure to conform.

NonfictionMemoir

Letting go of a myth opens the door to a new reality

Behind the Book by Loren A. Olson- M.D.

As a child, I clung to the myth of Santa Claus until the evidence against it finally overwhelmed me and I had to let go of it. Parents reinforce the myth by encouraging children to believe in Santa Claus, promising them that if they are good, they will be rewarded.

I desperately wanted to believe in the myth of my heterosexuality, too, and I clung to it as well. I was a very good boy—doing everything that was expected of me—and society rewarded me for it. Then one day, that myth got blown apart. The barrier between my rational thought and my unconscious desires fell, allowing both sides to blend together like colors on an artist’s palette that cannot be separated again.

I began to ask myself the question I’ve been asked by others so many times: How could you not know you were gay until you were 40?

"The more I spoke with other men about their experiences, the more I recognized the commonality of the emotional pain experienced by men who censor any word, thought or behavior that might expose their same-sex desires." 

As a psychiatrist, trained in science, I went to the literature of psychology to find an answer. However, everything I read focused on much younger men. Psychologist Vivienne Cass created the classic model of gay and lesbian identity development in 1979, about the same time I was struggling with this issue. Although she suggested that healthy men could go through the process later, the model indicated that most subjects had formed a gay identity by their mid-20s. I was already 34.

I began to meet other men, many of them married with children, who were either struggling with their sexual conflicts or were somewhat further along in the process than I was. I dug deeper into the literature but found little that discussed the transition of men from a straight identity to a gay or bisexual one later in life.

I then began to examine this transition in the context of my life. I grew up in rural Nebraska in the 1950s. During this time, gender roles were rigidly defined, and being a “sissy” meant being weak and subordinate. Senator Joseph McCarthy held hearings accusing homosexuals and communists of committing subversive acts against the government. Psychiatrists considered homosexuality a pathologic deviancy. No one I knew lived as openly gay. It wasn’t that people spoke out against homosexuality; they didn’t speak of it at all. It was as if a blackout existed on all information about any healthy expression of sexuality.

The more I spoke with other men about their experiences, the more I recognized the commonality of the emotional pain experienced by men who censor any word, thought or behavior that might expose their same-sex desires. Gay men attempt suicide at a rate three times higher than the general population, some of them multiple times, and these suicide attempts often occur at the time they make the decision to come out.

I realized this story needed telling, and I thought, “Why not tell mine?” The first step I took was to do a convenience sampling of other older gay men to validate my hypothesis that the coming out process for older men is different from that of males who came out at a younger age. My findings supported my hypothesis and encouraged me to write Finally Out.

As an older gay man, I also saw the heavy burden placed on us by the stereotypes of being older, especially being older and gay. When I heard a gay man say, “I’m 82, and this is the best time in my life,” I thought, “What does he know that I should know?” So I examined the opportunities of aging and recognized the parallels between coming out as gay and coming out as old. In both cases, developing a positive identity depends upon destroying internalized stereotypes and adopting a positive attitude about our sexuality and our age.

My hope is that some of the answers I have found will offer others insights into why some men who love other men might marry and have families, choose to come out or not, or delay coming out until midlife or beyond.

Loren A. Olson, M.D., the author of Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight, is a board-certified psychiatrist with over 40 years of experience. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and has been named an Exemplary Psychiatrist by the National Alliance for Mental Illness. 

As a child, I clung to the myth of Santa Claus until the evidence against it finally overwhelmed me and I had to let go of it. Parents reinforce the myth by encouraging children to believe in Santa Claus, promising them that if they are…

A love story born from white noise

Behind the Book by Maurene Goo

There’s this thing that follows you around every day of your life if you grew up as a Korean-American kid. It invades your home every evening, it hypnotizes your parents, it is a magical link to a faraway place.

The thing is Korean dramas.

When I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles, my parents worked very hard, like a lot of immigrant parents. My dad made the hour-long trek to Long Beach at the crack of dawn to work for the Department of Defense; my mom worked so much that she would take “naps” at red lights until my sister or I poked her awake.

Hey, this was the ’80s. That kind of stuff was fine.

So, when it was evening, their escape was found in the form of dramatic yelling and crying via VHS tapes of Korean dramas. Back then, they were acquired at the local video store, a tiny hole-in-the-wall next to a Korean grocery store filled floor to ceiling with VHS tapes. The spines had titles written on sticker labels layered over previous labels. Layers because they were recorded over and over again. Sometimes you got the billionth-generation tape and had to return it because it was wobbly and unwatchable.

In my young adult novel I Believe in a Thing Called Love, the main character, Desi Lee, decides to use the “K Drama Steps to True Love” to snag her crush. When she has her epiphany, she’s surprised to see the answers in what she calls “the white noise of her life.” K-dramas were also the white noise of my life. They were always on in the background while I did homework, ate dinner or read in bed.

Because for my parents, it was their connection to Korea. Having immigrated to the U.S. right before their marriage, they were far from smoothly assimilating into American life. My mom was hesitant to complain about shitty customer service because of her poor English (which, in retrospect, was pretty good). My dad had to listen politely to my ex-military neighbor’s constant inquiries into North Korea even though he’s from the South. Both my parents reminded my sister and me, over and over again, that we were Korean. Not just American. That we should never forget it.

But when you’re an immigrant kid, you do everything to forget it. To distance yourself from that foreignness, to wriggle into your American skin. To hold your breath and hope that no one notices the whiff of Korea on every part of you—quite literally, from the scent of kimchi in your house to the way you pronounce “freeway.”

So Korean dramas were just another thing that set my family apart from others. Why couldn’t my parents just watch “Growing Pains” with me and understand it? Why were the dramas always so melodramatic and loud?

I’m not sure when I made the turn from resenting K-dramas to enjoying them. I often watched them with parents even when I didn't quite like them. Try as I might to distance myself from this part of my parents, I also felt a familiarity with the people on screen that comforted me. And so I began to like them. And when I was in high school, I had a group of Korean-American friends and we started watching the “cool” ones in earnest.

Years later, I would download them illegally during my freshman year of college. I only moved two hours south to San Diego, but they reminded me of home and I would stay up late into the night watching them, willing away my homesickness. When I moved to Boston, a city so homogeneous that it was disorienting, I found a video store renting out DVDs of K-dramas near my apartment in Brighton and would trek there in the snow so that I could wrap myself up in that white noise.

In my book, Desi uses K-dramas as a map to true love. In my life, K-dramas are always a map back home.

Maurene Goo grew up in a Los Angeles suburb surrounded by floral wallpaper and piles of books. She is the author of Since You Asked . . . and I Believe in a Thing Called Love and has very strong feelings about tacos and houseplants. You can find her in Los Angeles with her husband and two cats—one weird, one even more weird.

There’s this thing that follows you around every day of your life if you grew up as a Korean-American kid. It invades your home every evening, it hypnotizes your parents, it is a magical link to a faraway place. The thing is Korean dramas.
FictionPopular Fiction

A gem of a novel from ‘Arthur Pepper’ author

Behind the Book by Phaedra Patrick

Phaedra Patrick follows her debut novel, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper (an Indie Next selection that was published in over 20 languages worldwide), with the whimsical, poignant tale of a down-on-his-luck jeweler in Rise and Shine, Benedict Stone.

On a shelf in her pantry my mum keeps a round tin box full of beads, gemstones, buttons and buckles that she’s found or collected over the years. I’ve always been a fan of anything small, shiny or sparkly, and as a child, I spent many happy hours sifting through the box. I enjoyed examining and playing with the little bits and pieces, as did my son when he was a toddler. I suppose being a writer is a little like having a tin box in your head, where you store all your snippets of ideas to search through, and pick out, to write a novel.

When I got engaged to my now-husband, I knew that I wasn’t a diamond-ring wearer. The clear brilliant stone just isn’t me. Instead I wanted something different and visited a local jewelry shop where I found a wide silver band with a leaf design, set with a small round green peridot. I’ve worn it for 20 years and still love it. Peridot is my birthstone, for August. However, when I was younger, I felt rather envious that other months were represented by (what I thought were) more glamorous gemstones—ruby for July, or emerald for May. A peridot seemed kind of anonymous and pale in comparison.

When I initially thought of the idea for my second novel, Rise and Shine, Benedict Stone, I started to read more about gemstones. I learned that, even in ancient times, gems have different properties associated with them. Peridots are supposed to help you to let go of the past, lessen stress and anxiety, and enhance harmony in marriage—perfect attributes for an engagement ring! However, if you’re a dedicated diamond wearer, then you’ll be pleased to know that they signify honour and pure intention.

Through my research, I discovered that the ancient Greeks believed that coral was formed from the severed head of Medusa, and that jade changes color, often to shades of brown, when buried with the dead. Jasper was one of the most popular stones for making seals and amulets, and Mark Antony was reputed to own a red jasper seal ring with which he stamped his letters to Cleopatra.

And through these meaning of gemstones, my premise for my book developed and emerged. Indeed, each chapter starts with the name of a gem and its properties.

The book finds 40-something jeweler Benedict Stone stuck in a rut. In the small village of Noon Sun in England, his jewelry business is failing. He and his wife, Estelle, can’t have children, and she has moved out of their home. When Benedict’s American teenage niece, Gemma, crashes into his life, together they discover an old journal about gemstones in the attic. Gemma challenges Benedict to win Estelle back, and Benedict also begins to incorporate gemstones into his jewelry, which has a very surprising effect on the villagers of Noon Sun.

Throughout the book, we’re never quite sure whether it’s the gemstones or Gemma who helps to make Benedict’s life sparkle again, so I’ll leave that up to readers to decide. The button box still lives in my mum’s pantry. Sadly, my son has outgrown playing with it now. But if anyone in my family ever needs a spare button for a coat, or a bead for a necklace, we know exactly where to look.

Author photo credit Sam Ralph.

Phaedra Patrick follows her debut novel, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper (which was published in over 20 languages worldwide and was an Indie Next selection), with the whimsical, poignant tale of a down-on-his-luck jeweler in Rise and Shine, Benedict Stone.

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