Alex Gino’s You Don’t Know Everything, Jilly P! introduces readers to the thoughtful, ever-curious Jilly, whose new baby sister has arrived. Jilly’s sister is deaf, and in no time at all, she and her hearing family come face-to-face with a host of decisions to make about how to communicate with her. Jilly reaches out to her friend, Derek, also deaf, whom she met online. At the same time, Jilly learns from her black aunt and cousins about what it means to live a life of privilege and the ways in which she can be open to growth. We asked Gino a few questions about this thought-provoking, conversation-starter of a second novel.

You address hearing privilege and white privilege in this book, amongst other things. Did you always know the book would tackle both subjects or did the story evolve that way as you wrote?
Writing is a long and windy road. Jilly P started as an intergenerational story of deafness—Jilly’s grandmother was losing her hearing and a lot of the book was about how her story was different from Jilly’s baby sister Emma, who was born deaf. But that plotline didn’t really give much for Jilly to do—a problem for a main character, so my editor told me. But as I was revising, Derek (a deaf black kid around Jilly’s age) started to take a large role in the story. Jilly had a hard time seeing him as a full person at first, rather than as a stand-in for his black and Deaf identities. From there, the story turned into one of Jilly making sense of her privilege and how to use it well.

I spent nearly a decade as a sign language interpreter, and I especially appreciate this part in the story: Derek tells Jilly that he was annoyed by people staring at him signing in a restaurant, and she responds with “signing is pretty,” as if that excuses stares. Or as if that’s all American Sign Language, a bona fide, complex language in its own right, has going for it (“prettiness”). As someone knowledgeable of sign language yourself, have you experienced this firsthand?
Yes, and as someone who has struggled to master a language full of nuance and regionalisms, I’ve been frustrated by people who say they’ve been thinking about learning ASL because it’s “so pretty,” or they’re “so expressive” and so they’d “be great at it.” Or people who tell me they know how to sign when really they know some isolated nouns and adjectives. Do you say you speak Spanish because you can order at a taqueria? I can’t even imagine the range of inaccuracies and misunderstandings Deaf people have to deal with, even (or especially) from people who think they know more than they do.

In many ways, Jilly’s family is being tested with regard to the decision-making in their lives that they’re so used to. Derek, for instance, tells Jilly it’s not his call, nor her call, whether or not her sister should get a cochlear implant. The family is learning a lot about the deliberateness of their decisions—and the whos and whys behind them. Is this something you consciously wanted to address?
Absolutely. Parents want to do everything “right” for their children. Hearing parents of deaf babies face a lot of decisions on behalf of their infant children, often without access to information or understanding of the Deaf community. Audiologists focus on decibels and megahertz, and while many doctors now encourage families to sign, some do still advocate for oralism and lip-reading to the exclusion of the deaf child’s natural language. Cochlear implants and hearing aids are valuable tools, but they don’t turn Deaf people into hearing people. As Ella Mae Lentz says in her beautiful ASL poem “To A Hearing Mother,” “he is your son, but he is my people.”

Aunt Alicia explains microaggressions to Jilly: “It’s like the difference between stepping on someone’s foot by mistake and kicking them. Only one is mean, but they both hurt. Sometimes you don’t have to be trying to hurt someone. You just have to say the wrong thing.” In the school visits you’ve done, have you ever run across or heard about curricula that discusses racism, white privilege, etc. with students? Do you think it’s a good idea to have that as part of a curriculum in schools?
I think that discussing privilege and recognizing ourselves and others in the world is crucial to develop empathy as well as critical thinking. I tend not to talk curriculum details on school visits, but I can tell when I’m in a room with kids who are encouraged to talk candidly. One of the best things I think a teacher can do is sit with students in discomfort and complexity without trying to have all the answers. So I guess it’s not a curriculum I’m looking for so much as a class ethos that can be applied to just about any subject matter.

Jilly learns a lot about the different challenges people face—and that her responses to such things can make a difference, for better or worse. What age were you when you very first realized this in your own life?
I don’t think of it as a switch—I can’t name the first time I realized that my actions are rooted in my experience and that their consequences lay out differently based on our marginalizations. That’s something I’m still learning. And to try to name the first time feels like I’m trying to tout myself as someone who always knew. For so long, I didn’t know. But one early realization was in middle school when I realized that my “A” class was about two-thirds white, while the “B” classes were pretty mixed and the “C” classes were mostly black. And yes, they were called A, B and C tracks. I knew something was skewed, but no one talked about it, other than to lay the responsibility of where they had landed directly on them because “education is fair.” But it’s not fair when racism and class dominate the way they do in the United States.

I like the world-building of B. A. Delacourt’s Magically Mysterious Vidalia trilogy, Jilly’s favorite books. How much work did you put into detailing that world for yourself? Are you tempted to write a fantasy trilogy now?
Not even a little bit. Plot is really hard for me, and fantasy books are filled is adventure and plot twists. This way, I got to do some of the world building and character creation without having to worry about what actually happens in the books or creating a strong story arc.

Are you working on any new books?
Always. The project I’m focused most on right now is a companion novel to George. It takes place two years later, and focuses on the bully’s best friend. It’s time for Rick to get out from under his “friend”’s thumb, and junior high is a great opportunity to discover who you are and how you want to be in the world. There’s also a queer student alliance, and, of course, Melissa is in the background, happy as can be, with not a bit of the kind of adversity that a plot requires.

If there were ever a fire in author Corey Ann Haydu’s home, she knows exactly what object she would grab: her collection of 20 years’ worth of journals. “I have a huge trunk filled with everything that happened in my childhood,” she says, speaking from her Brooklyn residence. “I love being able to sneak back in there and see who I was at age 10 and 11 and 12. There’s something really comforting about feeling like your life is stored somewhere, and for me, there’s a real panic at the idea of not being able to go back and touch base with the things that happened.”

But what if she couldn’t access all of those memories? That’s the central premise of Haydu’s cleverly deep new middle grade novel, Eventown, in which a family trying to escape the aftermath of a tragedy choose to have their negative memories erased. 

The Lively family is ready for a fresh start, so they pack up and head to Eventown, an enchanting utopia without modern amenities like cars, TV or the internet. At first, 11-year-old Elodee Lively and her twin sister, Naomi, delight in their move to the town filled with identical homes, rosebushes, waterfalls, perfectly ripe blueberries and a heavenly ice cream shop. “I wrote a lot of Eventown when I was pregnant,” Haydu says with a laugh, “which is why I think there’s a lot of cake and ice cream.” She adds, “It’s fun to create your own utopia because it’s just borrowing from all your favorite things in the world.”

Of course, there’s a price to be paid for perfection and, in ways reminiscent of Lois Lowry’s classic Newbery Medal winner The Giver, the twins slowly discover that this utopia is not what it seems. Haydu’s readers have two mysteries to untangle: What are the strange secrets of Eventown, and what was the tragedy that turned the Lively family’s lives upside down? 

“In some ways, it’s a book about the fog of grief,” Haydu explains. “I didn’t necessarily want the grief to be dealt with directly for most of the book. I think having the characters and the reader face tragedy together made the most sense.” All of Haydu’s books echo her personal philosophy: “While it’s tempting to shield kids from the most difficult parts of life for as long as possible, maybe in reality the biggest lesson about hope and wonder and love comes from really facing a tough part head on. I strive to write books that encourage facing what’s really hard while also exploring what remains really beautiful in the world in spite of everything difficult,” she says.

As for her own childhood challenges, Haydu’s trunk of journals reveals both the joys and sorrows she experienced while growing up in a small New England town with an alcoholic parent—a fact that was not discussed during her childhood, as her family was concerned with keeping up appearances. “It’s hard if, at age 12, you don’t feel like everything’s fine, but everyone’s saying it is,” she says. “That’s a confusing space to occupy.”

It’s a space that Elodee refuses to occupy. Unlike her twin, she’s determined to plunge ahead and try to understand Eventown’s secrets, including its disappointing library full of blank books. After Elodee’s mother assures her that novels aren’t needed, she disagrees, saying, “It’s weird. It’s terrible. It’s . . . wrong.” Enlisting the help of a new friend, Elodee eventually breaks into the town’s strange Welcoming Center, an act that turns most of Eventown’s citizens against her in a dramatic, nail-biting showdown.

Ironically, Haydu was so focused on portraying her characters’ heartache and emotions that she had no idea that she’d written “a bit of a page-turner and a mystery” until an editor commented on the compelling result. “My book feels so personal to me,” she says. “Maybe the specifics are different, but all of the feelings in my books are mine. And that’s the important part.”

Haydu’s first book for young adults, OCD Love Story (2013), addressed her own struggles with anxiety; Rules for Stealing Stars  (2015) chronicled an 11-year-old girl with an alcoholic mother; and The Someday Suitcase (2017) followed a fifth-grader who yearns to cure her friend’s illness but can’t. And then there’s Eventown, which deals with families trying to ignore their most painful memories, an ultimately impossible feat.

“I always think I’m writing a different type of book,” Haydu confesses, “but it always turns out that the themes relate back to central stuff for me, such as pressures placed on girls, the idea of perfection, secrets and loving people so desperately and wanting to protect them, even when you might not be able to.”

Just like her heroine Elodee, Haydu acknowledges the continuing game of tug of war she plays with her memories. “There are moments when I want to dig into that box and read some of the tough parts, and there are moments that I want to lock that box away and never look at it again,” she says. Hopefully, for Haydu’s growing legion of young readers, she will peek back in and allow those glimpses to continue to fuel her fiction.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Karyn Parsons talks about her debut middle grade novel, How High the Moon, her time as an actor on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” empowering children, keeping hope while fighting against injustice and more.

You’ve had such a gloriously varied career. How did you hone your writing chops?

I’ve always loved writing. Never thought of myself as a writer, though. I declared my love for acting at an early age. I studied. I got an agent and was fortunate to have success in that field early in my life. But with that success came being identified as “an actor” by everyone, including myself.

After “Fresh Prince” ended, a friend encouraged me to study writing with author and teacher, Jim Krusoe. The experience changed everything for me. I didn’t stop loving acting, but I realized there was something that I loved more. I dedicated hours every day to writing. To reading. To reading about writing. Being able to call myself a writer, however, was still difficult. Showing that part of myself to others was terrifying. I had identified myself as an actor for so long. It was hard to make that transition for me.

Honestly, though, acting and writing are similar in many respects. It’s storytelling. It’s slipping into another person’s skin. My lifetime as an actor has definitely helped me with my writing.

You founded Sweet Blackberry to make short animated films that bring little-known stories of African-American achievement to children everywhere. In the opening paragraphs of How High the Moon, Ella runs through the blackberry bushes in her hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina. Tell us about the importance of those blackberries, how you decided to write this book, and how these storytelling projects relate to each other.

(You caught the blackberries!)

I think that sharing inspiring stories of African American achievement with children can change the way they look at race as they enter the world. By seeing someone that looks like themselves overcoming incredible obstacles, they’ll recognize their value and what they’re capable of. Children that aren’t African American will also be inspired. And I think they’ll go into the world looking at their neighbors as more than what our society often presents.

Over the years, researching for Sweet Blackberry, I often came across the story of George Stinney, Jr. I’d share it with people, but no one seemed to have heard of him. It was terrible to think that when he died the memory of that horrible tragedy was buried with him. I wanted people to know his story. It wasn’t a Sweet Blackberry story—nothing about it was empowering—but it was important.

Your mother was raised in the South. Did you incorporate any of her childhood experiences into your novel? What research did you do to bring the worlds of both Jim Crow South Carolina and 1940s Boston so vividly to life?
Oh, so much of it is my mom’s. The backdrop, anyway. Not the actual story. She told me stories of her growing up on a farm in the south and about her grandparents. She always referred to that time as so joyful. There was little to nothing about the racial discrimination, let alone the horrors. I made her dig a little deeper for me and share more when I decided to do the book. She and my aunt both shared with me. And, of course, there was plenty of research. I dug into newspaper archives and took advantage of the internet. It was a lot of fun, actually. Writing a historical novel was daunting sometimes, but then I’d wind down some unexpected path and discover all sorts of treasures from the past. People, events, details of society and culture that we don’t see today, and they’d find their way into the story.

I didn’t know that George would be in there when I first started the story, but my mother didn’t grow up that far from Alcolu where George lived. The chronology of their childhoods was close, too. When he did first appear, he wasn’t one of the principal characters in the book. His story was a memory. I was encouraged to bring him to the forefront. I think I was scared to at first. It’s a hard story to get close to.

Your novel tackles some of the horrors of human behavior, yet manages to be hopeful. Was this a difficult balance to achieve?
Well, my mother is such an optimist and such a hopeful person, so the fact her memories were paving so much of the way and the fact that I was seeing this world through a child’s eyes, I believe, kept things hopeful. And Ella wasn’t someone to be defeated by tragedy. I think she would take injustice and use it as fuel for fight.

Like Ella, you grew up in a biracial family. How did Ella’s character evolve? Is she named for Ella Fitzgerald, who sang “How High the Moon?” How did you settle on the title?
She is named for Ella Fitzgerald, yes.

Ella is at the age where she’s becoming aware of how the world sees her. How she perceives they see her anyway. She’s just left behind that beautiful space in childhood where you’re free floating. When you’re not thinking of how you look or about those superficial differences that we later become aware of and cling to and attach to identity. Ella doesn’t want to be different. But the deep, unconditional love of her family helps her to begin to accept all of who she is. And that love helps her understand what family really is.

The title, well . . .  it’s about wanting and reaching. Reaching for something that seems forever out of reach.

Each of the three cousin narrators in your book―Ella, Henry and Myrna―have unique family situations. The closing scene of your book is a beautiful tribute to families in all their wonderful varieties. Was it a challenge to incorporate so many stories and voices?
It wasn’t. They were my family as I wrote this (they still are), and even though things aren’t always smooth, they love each other and accept each other. They are all different, but they are one. And they all had something to say, so they all had to be heard.

What books were important to you as a child? What books have been meaningful to your own kids? How is children’s literature changing?
I had to read everything that Judy Blume wrote. There were others, of course, but, like so many of us, I ate those books up. I used to get an almost visceral thrill when I entered a new book. And, even recently, I was reading Jesmyn Ward in the anthology, Well-Read Black Girl, talking about a book she read as a kid, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. I hadn’t heard or thought of that book since I was a kid, but chills ran through my body when I read the title again. I think it must’ve really affected me so long ago. My mom was a librarian and I was an only child, so I spent a lot of time in libraries by myself. I think I experienced that thrill quite a bit.

These days, it seems there’s SO much out there for young people. It’s so varied. Such an exciting time! I do hope though, that with all of the contemporary writing we have the older books don’t get pushed to the back and forgotten completely.

Do you and your family ever watch “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air?” Can you do the Carlton dance?
Ha! No, we don’t watch, but the kids have seen it. They each went through a very brief phase. They liked the show. Laughed a lot and that made me feel pretty good.

The Carlton? I’ve never been able to do it! My son can, though. He’s pretty good at it.

What’s next? More books?
Yup. Working on one now.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of How High the Moon.

Margaret Peterson Haddix has written more than 40 books for children and young adults which have been translated into more than 20 different languages and have received numerous honors, including New York Times bestseller status, the International Reading Association’s Children’s Book Award and they have won spots on the American Library Association’s lists of best books.

In the first installment in her new middle grade series, Greystrone Secrets: The Strangers, three young siblings must solve a mystery that involves a series of kidnappings and a parallel dimension. We caught up with Haddix to talk about how A Wrinkle in Time influenced this new novel, how her fiction has inspired young readers and more.

What were some of your inspirations for the story in The Strangers? While reading it, I found your book reminiscent of both Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Were these texts influential for this novel?
I would say there’s always some Wrinkle in Time embedded in anything I write because I read that book so many times as a kid; it’s hard to separate out who I would be as a writer—or a person—without it. And like Wrinkle in Time, The Strangers has siblings searching for a beloved missing parent against great odds, family members demonstrating (and benefitting from) intense love and loyalty, and kids struggling against weird and/or scary alternate worlds they don’t quite understand. I didn’t consciously intend all those connections while I was writing The Strangers, but apparently, my subconscious wanted to pay homage.

The Strangers was also probably influenced by another book I read and loved as a kid: Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key. That also has siblings in danger and with a mysterious past they don’t know about until odd events begin happening. Secret codes don’t play as big a role in Witch Mountain as they do in The Strangers, but I do remember one that was very important.

I didn’t read A Series of Unfortunate Events until I was an adult, so it’s not as deeply ingrained. But you are not the first to point out that connection. Both have three siblings dealing with, well, you know, unfortunate events. It’s just that the events the Greystone kids grapple with are rather different than the circumstances Lemony Snicket puts the poor Baudelaire children through.

How much research into parallel universes did you do to take this high-level concept and make it both relatable and understandable to a young audience?
I had previously done research about parallel universes while I was writing my time-travel series, The Missing. I’d wanted to make that series as scientifically plausible as possible—which is a little laughable, of course. I came across scientific articles theorizing that time travel could never happen, but parallel universes are very likely. Regardless, I think it’s hard to write time travel without veering into parallel-universe territory. The Missing series, like a lot of other time-travel fiction, became an exploration of how different decisions in the past could create a new present and future. I also dealt with the concept of an alternate world in one of my standalones, Game Changer, so I was definitely primed for the topic. Would it sound lazy to admit that I didn’t do any extra research when I started on The Strangers? If anything, my problem working on early drafts of the book was that I was already too cozy with the topic. I appreciated my editor, Katherine Tegen, asking questions during the revision process that made me realize I needed to give more explanation because some of my younger readers might be encountering the concept for the first time. So as the Greystone kids were struggling to understand parallel universes, I had Emma think of kid-friendly examples, like the worlds diverging dramatically just because someone chose a different ice cream flavor.

Still, based on my conversations with readers, I believe kids can catch on quickly. I think it’s human nature to wonder, “What would the world be like if things were a little different? What would my life be like if only I’d done or said this or that, instead of what I really did or what actually came out of my mouth?”

Do you hope to inspire your young readers to take up an interest in the sciences after reading your novel?
Yes! Or math. Or political science. Or sociology. Or cryptology. Or writing. Or any subject where they think deeply and investigate and try to make the world a better place. One of the great things about writing for kids is that I get to share my love of many different topics with readers. And because I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’ve now met young adults who encountered my explorations of certain topics years ago, realized they had a greater interest and dove into studying topics as far from my own areas of expertise as genetics and engineering. And now they know a lot more about those topics than I do—and hold actual degrees in those subjects—and all that is wonderful.

How have your past experiences as a newspaper editor and a reporter influenced both your writing style and your narrative choices?
Working at newspapers forced me to become a more efficient and clearer writer. Clarity and brevity are particularly valuable traits in writing for kids.

And I doubt that this was exactly what you meant by “narrative choices,” but stories I covered as a newspaper reporter literally gave me the ideas for my first three books. Since then, the seeds of the ideas for three of my other books—including The Strangers—came from reading newspapers. My background in journalism probably keeps me a little more moored in reality. Even though I’m writing fiction now, and even though it’s sometimes fairly fantastical, I still want my characters to react realistically, and I still want a certain logic to my plot choices. I always try to see my characters and their story arcs in a larger context.

Many of your novels are installments in larger series. Do you prefer to write those as opposed to standalone novels? What does a series enable you to do narratively that a standalone doesn’t, and vice versa?
I like being able to switch back and forth between series and standalones because there are pros and cons with each. (In addition to the Greystone Secrets series starting this year, I also have a standalone, Remarkables, coming out in September.)

What I love about series is the way it gives me the chance to explore more facets and tangents of a story. I’ve been able to jump to different perspectives, explore how a single event can affect different characters differently, and in general, just show a bigger, more complete picture of the fictional time and place and characters I’ve imagined. I love how readers can be so eager to see the rest of the story with a series. I love being able to give them more than the one tale that can be told between the covers of a single book.

But sometimes series can begin to feel a little like that picture book about the fish you aren’t supposed to overfeed—sometimes series grow out of control. Right now I am in the early stages of working on the third book in the Greystone Secrets series, and I see so many directions I could go, so many paths I could take. And soon I will need to aim for and then arrive at The End. So sometimes I’m just really grateful for the completeness of a standalone, the way it’s a beginning, a middle and an end, and then it’s really and truly finished.

Do you have any interest in writing books for adult readers at some point in your career?
I have thought about it and I have had ideas for adult books. There have been times when I’ve seen potential forks ahead of me in my writing career and wondered about making that leap. So far there have always been better reasons not to, but who knows what could happen later on? If I do that, it would have to be because I have an idea I’m dying to explore that has to be for adults. I think sometimes writers feel they have to write for adults to be “real” writers—or to be perceived that way by the literary community. I don’t feel that motivation at all.

What do you love most about writing stories for young readers?
I have so many mosts! I love getting to keep the childlike wonder-and-awe part of my brain alive and active. I love that perspective. I also love getting to meet so many kids, who are such interesting people. I love the way young readers can be so passionate about the books they care about. And, even though it feels like an overwhelming responsibility sometimes, I love the sense that I have an incredibly meaningful job because I am writing for kids, and they are so new to the world that a single book can make a bigger difference to them than to any adult.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Greystone Secrets: The Strangers.

The Size of the Truth is Andrew Smith’s first foray into middle grade fiction. The Michael L. Printz honoree’s latest madcap tale follows Sam Abernathy, a claustrophobic eighth grader who bridles against the stifling expectations of his parents, the identity his small-town has foisted on him, and his reemerging memories of the three days spent at the bottom of an abandoned well taking counsel from a wise and acerbic talking armadillo. Eccentric and entertaining, The Size of the Truth is for anyone who’s ever felt boxed in. We caught up with Smith to talk about forging your own path, the power of humor and more.

Sam, the protagonist in The Size of the Truth, is trapped. As a young child he was physically trapped, having fallen down an abandoned well, and now he finds himself trapped in a more existential sense—trapped by his parents’ and town’s expectations of what he is or should be. Did anything make you feel trapped when you were young?
One of the issues I tend to obsessively examine in my books is the idea of boxing (not the fighting kind) and labeling—and how external constraints and expectations on young people produce so much anxiety and unhappiness. The good news—and this may be purely anecdotal, coming from someone who’s spent the majority of his life working with kids on a daily basis—is that things are loosening up and getting better for kids, but the labelers and box-makers among us still have a lot of progress to make. I came from a very strict, regimented family, and my parents definitely started grooming me at a very young age for the future they had in mind for me. I bought into it, I suppose, until I was about 14, but after that, I was determined to go my own way. They were against my idea of becoming a writer, but that was all I really wanted to do from about that age on, so I just did it.

And how did you break free from others’ expectations of you and blaze your own path?
Or was he pushed? I don’t think I broke free so much as grew up on the outside of everything. Like Sam, I was much younger than my classmates, having been put ahead in school (which I thought was a terrific idea for about one school week). So I never fit in, and I think my peers’ expectation was that I would always be an outcast. There were no other paths but the one I had for myself, and I had no sense of what succeeding at what I desired to do would look or feel like.

I really loved Bartleby, the talking armadillo who provides Sam with words of wisdom. Did you have someone like Bartleby in your life growing up? If so, what did you learn from him or her?
First of all, I would love to have a talking armadillo, but I’d want him to be nicer than Bartleby. And I suppose the closest thing I had to him would have been a few of my favorite teachers: Miss Haines (she taught history in middle school); Mrs. Veith, who taught geometry in high school; and my favorite, Mrs. Beaubien, my high school English teacher. Mrs. Beaubien was one of those teachers who every kid was terrified of. She was brutally demanding and an impossibly hard grader, but she gave me a love for literature and writing.

Both Sam and James want to pursue careers that, to a degree, challenge stereotypes of masculinity. What made you want to focus on issues of masculinity and gender in this book?
I’ll be totally honest here—I never thought about gender roles and gender conformity when I was writing the book. I mean, James does mention the pressure society often imposes on boys who dance, but what I mostly wanted to examine and have readers question is the idea of success and the prescriptive future that so many parents construct around their children. Sam’s parents and James’s father have already mapped out for their sons what being successful and fulfilled in their futures will look like, without ever really considering what those things mean to Sam and James. As a high school teacher for going on 30 years, this is one of my biggest frustrations today. In narrowing down the fates of our children, I also see a constriction of opportunities to build a happier future for society and the world as a whole. As I often tell my kids, you only get so many trips around the sun—do you really want to spend them doing something that makes you unhappy?

Your books are, in my view, zany, off-the-wall and consistently hilarious. What draws you toward the humorous and the absurd?
Humor is the best way to challenge accepted notions of certain status-quo practices and ideas without instantly drawing dividing lines and creating enemies. And I think nearly everything has tipped toward the absurd, especially in the past few years, so we may as well just ride that wave and see where we end up, right?

Why do non-traditional characters and themes play such a large role in your writing?
Whenever I begin a new project, I like to challenge myself to come up with something that won’t be like anything else that’s out there, so I try to explore story elements and sometimes technical components of storytelling that defy the conventional. And since I like to have fun doing what I do, humor is always going to be there—even in some of my most serious work.

What’s up next for you? Do you have more middle grade books lined up, or are you back to YA?
I’m currently finishing (I swear I’m almost finished) another middle grade novel about Sam Abernathy. Then I have the young adult novel Exile From Eden, the sequel to Grasshopper Jungle, coming out in September. And I’ve also been working on a graphic novel with my illustrator friend Matt Faulkner called Once There Were Birds, which we’ve been collaborating on for more than a few trips around the sun now. I don’t envy the amount of work for Matt—illustrating is really hard! I drew the illustrations for Exile From Eden and doing it gave me panic attacks. After that? Who knows? I’m going to write some poetry for National Poetry Month in April, and one of these days I’m sure I’ll finish this adult novel that I’ve been kicking around, too.

Autho photograph © Kaija Bosket

Kate Messner’s latest middle grade novel, Chirp, is an engrossing summer adventure novel that takes place in Vermont. It’s the story of Mia Barnes, who is convinced someone is trying to sabotage her grandmother’s cricket farm. It’s also a book informed by the #metoo movement: Mia’s former gymnastics coach touched her inappropriately, leaving Mia feeling confused and robbed of her confidence. We asked Messner about the wild world of cricket farming, as well as the work that went into researching and writing a novel that addresses difficult emotional truths.

How did you settle on crickets as a central subject of Chirp? What intrigued you most during your research into this industry?
My interest in entomophagy (eating insects as food) began in 2013, when I read this United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report on edible insects. A few years later, my husband, who’s part of a group that offers help to start-up businesses in Vermont, came home with a folder of information about a new business he thought I’d want to read about: a cricket farm. When I visited the new farm (and heard the chirping of half a million crickets in a warehouse!) I was absolutely fascinated and decided it would be an amazing setting for a kids’ book—a mystery that also explored ideas about entrepreneurship and sustainability.

Do you have any favorite cricket tasting experiences or recipes to recommend?
When I was doing research for Chirp, I sampled crickets in every iteration imaginable. I tried cookies, bread and fruit leather made with cricket flour, snacked on flavored, roasted crickets, ate Thai cricket pizza and topped it off with chocolate-covered cricket ice cream. My favorite cricket foods are the Texas barbecue crickets from Aketta, a cricket farm in Austin, and chocolate “chirp” cookies (chocolate chip . . . but with cricket flour added!). The recipe for those is in the book club and discussion guide for the book!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Chirp.

How does your background in TV news reporting help you as a novelist? Did the #MeToo movement prompt you to write Chirp, or was this a subject you had been considering writing about for longer?
This was definitely one of the things that fueled my writing. I was especially haunted by the courageous testimony of the gymnasts who were assaulted by their doctor, Larry Nassar. I read through pages and pages of their victim impact statements from the sentencing. It was horrific and gave me nightmares. But it also made me even more determined to craft a story that portrays a realistic look at how some adults gain the trust of kids in order to harm them. In Chirp, it’s an assistant coach at Mia’s gym whose too-long hugs, texted photos and unwelcome backrubs made her uncomfortable. He also gives her gifts and says things that are typical of grooming behavior. I want kids to recognize this and be able to talk about it with a trusted adult if it ever happens to them.

You’ve written that your characters’ experiences with sexual harassment and molestation “were inspired by stories in the news and my own experiences growing up, as well as those of many women I’m lucky enough to call friends.” How did personal experience inform your writing of this novel? Was it ever difficult to write?
This isn’t a subject I ever thought I’d write about. But like many women, the combination of the 2016 election and all of the #metoo related news stories stirred up tough memories as well as productive anger. For me, that took the form of a resolve to speak up about these issues so our daughters don’t have to struggle with the same toxic culture. I spent a lot of time talking with friends about their experiences as well as taking time to write about my own childhood memories in detail—from inappropriate touching from a family friend to a stranger who exposed himself to me on a beach while I was looking for shells on a family vacation. And of course that was difficult, but it was also important—to spend time processing those memories through the lens of an adult and a writer. If I hadn’t returned to revisit those tough places, I don’t think Chirp would have the same emotional truth.

What an exceptional passage this is: “Mia still felt icky when she got home. She wasn't even sure she could say exactly what happened, but something had, and it felt gross and wrong and probably she should have said something to her mom, but how could you say something when you couldn't even explain what happened yourself?” It’s so impossibly hard for kids to talk about incidents like these. Do you anticipate getting letters from readers about their own situations? Do you have thoughts about what you'll say to them?
That passage is very much rooted in my own experiences as a child. If no one’s talked explicitly with you about issues of sexual assault and consent, you don’t really understand or recognize what’s happening when it happens. And months before Chirp’s release, I started hearing from early readers who also saw themselves in Mia’s experiences. They wished they’d had a story like this when they were younger.

I’m sure there will be pushback to this book. There are always adults who think it’s their job to protect kids from uncomfortable ideas. But keeping stories like this from children is the opposite of protecting them. Information is what helps kids identify when someone isn’t acting in their best interest and empowers them to speak up. I do anticipate that I’ll hear from more readers when the book is released, and I have a file of resources ready to share, but the very first thing will be encouraging them to talk with a trusted adult, and reassuring them that what happened was wrong, and wasn’t their fault.

“[M]onths before Chirp’s release, I started hearing from early readers who also saw themselves in Mia’s experiences. They wished they’d had a story like this when they were younger.”

You’re quite the researcher, having visited the Vermont Ninja Warrior Training Center, the inspiration for the Warrior Camp that Mia attends. What led you there? Did you try some of the challenges?
I always try to make sure my characters’ hobbies are portrayed in a way that’s vivid and realistic, so that the book will feel real to kids who love that hobby, too. When I was working on Chirp, that meant talking with gymnasts, reading about how kids’ entrepreneur camps work and how they’re encouraged to draft business plans like Mia’s, and also figuring out what happens at a “Warrior Camp.”

I’d read about the Vermont Ninja Warrior Training Center, and with a quick phone call, arranged a visit during one of their camps for kids. I try not to become part of the story when I’m doing research—that’s left over from my years as a journalist—so I didn’t try any of the challenges that day. Instead, I sat off to the side while the kids had their normal camp day, stretching with their coaches and then breaking into groups to work on the different challenges. I observed and listened in, collecting details in my notebook—a bit of dialogue from a coach trying to teach the rings, kids shouting encouragement to one another on the quad steps, the squeak of sneakers on the spider wall. And then I talked with both campers and coaches about their experiences. I also spent a lot of time hanging from our pull-up bar at home—something Mia does as she’s trying to regain arm strength after her gymnastics accident—so that I could describe that burning feeling authentically!

Syd, “a fat sausage of an English bulldog puppy,” plays an important role in Chirp. You've also written a chapter book series about Ranger, a time-traveling golden retriever. Tell us about the dogs in your own life.
Ah, the truth is, everyone in my family is allergic to dogs, so we can’t have one in real life. I love other people’s dogs, though, and I think that’s why I keep putting them in my books. Ranger and Syd are sort of my imaginary dogs. Gram’s dog Syd in Chirp was inspired by the bulldog that used to hang out at the rink where my daughter figure skated before she graduated. The real Syd was also super-drooly and equally as affectionate.

You’re a mountain climber trying to summit all 46 Adirondack High Peaks between book deadlines. What number are you on? Any exciting experiences to share?
I’m not an Adirondack 46er quite yet (that’s the name given to people who have summited all of the 46 Adirondack High Peaks over 4,000 feet). At the moment, I’m only a “32er,” but I hope to finish in the next few years. I love hiking, even though many of the trails are muddy, root-tangled messes littered with giant boulders. It’s meditative for me, and I get some great thinking done while I’m out there.

Also? Hiking in the Adirondacks is a lot like writing a novel. It always feels impossible at first, and no matter how long you work, you start to doubt that you’ll make it. But ultimately, you have to take it one small stretch at a time. Just one more mile. One more chapter. And there are so many wonderful discoveries to make along the way.

Two-time Newbery Medalist Lois Lowry is one of the most distinguished writers of all time. In On the Horizon, she reflects on her extraordinary childhood and the historical moment in which it occurred. As a young child, Lowry and her family lived in Hawaii, scant years before the attack on Pearl Harbor; after the war, they moved to Tokyo.

In the poems that compose On the Horizon, Lowry intertwines personal memories with the experiences of historical figures and ordinary people at Pearl Harbor and Japan who lived through same history as Lowry herself. BookPage spoke to Lowry about writing in verse, choosing which stories to tell and revisiting the past.

Tell us about the decision to tell this story of connections in verse. What did you find challenging about it? Rewarding?
Nine years ago, two other authors—Richard Peck and Cynthia Voigt—and I, all at the same time, without talking to one another about it, wrote novels in which all of the characters were mice. How on earth did that happen? Was there something in the atmosphere? It’s a mystery.

And now, this year, the book I was working on seemed to want to be written in verse. There is no other way for me to describe that. And so I wrote it that way—and later discovered that a lot of authors were writing novels in verse. Another odd coincidence.

I like the demands of poetry. It distills things, pares them back to their essence. Maybe that is what I needed to do with this narrative. It was a subject that had been haunting me for a long time. Was it a story? A memoir? I wasn’t certain. But it floated there in my consciousness for some years, images drifting and surfacing now and then. And that’s what poetry does, I think. When the images began to appear on the page in that form, it seemed right.

The servicemen portrayed in the Pearl Harbor poems are based on real people. How did you choose to tell these particular stories?
The selection of particular individual stories was the same for both the Pearl Harbor and the Hiroshima sections. Research provided me with many true stories, each gripping in its own way.

In the reading and rereading, though, I found that now and then one small, sometimes not terribly important detail would capture my attention. The 17-year-old Marine, Leo Amundson, on the USS Arizona, for example. He was no one special, really, until I discovered that he was from the same small town in Wisconsin where my grandmother lived and where my father had grown up. Had they known each other? Possibly. No way to know. But it made Leo special to me.

Or the sailor named James Myers. Nothing really unique about him, until I followed paths through the archives and found that his family had already lost their two other sons in tragedies unrelated to the USS Arizona. An old newspaper quoted his mother, an Iowa farmer’s wife, as saying, “I had bad luck with all my boys.” I couldn’t get the terse enormity of that woman’s statement out of my mind. Sometimes it was a visual image. Shinichi Tetsutani, about to have his fourth birthday, riding on his red tricycle the morning that he died in Hiroshima. And his parents, burying the tricycle beside him. I couldn’t erase that image from my consciousness.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of On the Horizon.

You moved to Japan not long after the end of World War II. At the time, how much did you understand about what had happened there?
I was 8 years old when the war ended, so my childhood had been permeated with war-related details: the thin blue stationery on which infrequent letters from my father in the Pacific arrived; the ration stamps that my mother used at the grocery store; the news coming from my grandfather’s radio every evening.

All of us as children knew about the war. We even played games in which the bad guys were the Japanese or the Germans—but we had no understanding of the uncertainty, the fear, the huge tragedy that was taking place. I think it was not until 1991, when my own son was a fighter pilot during the first Gulf War, that I understood what my mother must have gone through while my father was overseas.

In the poem “Now,” you mention the Hiroshima memorial. When did you visit it? How were your experiences of visiting Japan at that time different compared to your memories of your life there after the war?
I left Japan in 1950 when the Korean War began and my father, fearing for our safety, sent us back to the United States. (He was on the staff of the Tokyo Hospital and had to stay because of the casualties arriving from Korea.) As a child, I had spent summer vacations on an island in the Inland Sea, near Hiroshima. But I never visited that city then, nor did I during subsequent trips to Japan as an adult. Then in 2014, I had an opportunity to take a trip around Japan by boat, and during that trip we entered the Inland Sea, stopped at Hiroshima and visited the Peace Museum there. 

Japan, and especially Tokyo, is so different now. My house near Meiji Shrine is gone. Skyscrapers and high fashion have taken the place of the rubble and poverty that I remember. But some things, like the quiet courtesy, seem unchanged. I was walking in a park in Kyoto when it began to rain, and without a word a woman approached, smiled and held her umbrella higher so that I could join her under it. When we parted a little later, without thinking, I bowed slightly to her as a thank you. It came quite naturally and felt familiar to do so. Japan still feels, in a way, like home to me.

“It is always small stories . . . that remind us how connected we are to one another.”

Your author’s note contains a fascinating anecdote about a childhood encounter with a boy who grew up to become the illustrator Allen Say—who, as an adult, also remembered the encounter. Why do you think that moment was memorable to both of you? Has he read On the Horizon?
Allen, with whom I have remained close friends, read the book in manuscript form. I talked with him on the phone recently to confirm the accuracy of my pronunciations of Japanese words before I recorded the book as an audiobook. I had to ask him, too, for his original Japanese name (he is portrayed in the book with his childhood name, Koichi Seii) because I have only known him as Allen Say.

The moment described in the book, when we were both 11 years old and looking with both curiosity and suspicion at each other, would never have been a memorable one had we not met each other by chance almost 50 years later.

Many young readers are fascinated by World War II; your book, Number the Stars, has gained a wide readership over the years since its publication. I imagine you’ve received many letters from young readers about that book as well. Do any common themes emerge from those letters about their experience of the novel?
Although Number the Stars is set during WWII in Europe and deals with the Holocaust, its focus is really on the courage and humanity shown by Denmark during that time. I still—32 years after its publication—receive letters and emails from young readers all over the world. The thing that interests them, and that they write passionately about, is just that: the generosity and compassion shown to the Jewish people of Denmark in 1943. So often they write and ask me to tell them what happened to the young girls in the book, and I have to explain that the girls are fictional, but that the real people they represent did in fact survive and grow up and, like all of us, hope for a world free of prejudice.

“Reading, thinking and writing about events during World War II has reminded me again and again that our humanity unites us.”

Three decades and many books separate the publication of Number the Stars and On the Horizon. One is fiction, one is not; one is prose, one is in verse. Both address the same moment in world history. How has your own perspective on or understanding of that historical moment changed (or has it)?
This is a hard question to answer because right now we are feeling so many chilling undercurrents of discontent and divisiveness. Reading, thinking and writing about events during World War II has reminded me again and again that our humanity unites us. 

My son, when he was stationed with the Air Force in Germany, met and married a German woman. Her mother described to me being 9 years old, hiding in a basement, terrified, when the Americans—the enemy—entered her village. She said the soldier who entered the basement where she huddled, crying, was the first black man she had ever seen. He reached into his pocket and gave her a piece of candy.

It is always small stories like hers that remind us how connected we are to one another. These days we need reminding. I guess that’s why I keep telling them in whatever ways I can.

What other books about the war have been meaningful for you—either for young readers or for adults? 
Without question: Hiroshima by John Hersey, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

What is something you love about being a writer of books for young people?
The response, always. The heartfelt misspelled emails. I feel so connected to those readers.

Author photo by Matt McKee

Bestselling author Gordon Korman’s latest middle grade novel, War Stories, tackles a serious subject, juxtaposing a boy’s admiration and belief in his great-grandfather’s heroism and valor with the gritty and morally complex reality of war. BookPage spoke to Korman about his turn to historical fiction, the ambitious structure of War Stories and how he keeps young readers turning the pages in book after book.

You’ve written so many books on so many different subjects over the course of your career. What drew you to writing about a story about World War II?
Even though I’m probably best known for writing humor, I might be even more proud of my work in the adventure genre, stretching back through my books in The 39 Clues series all the way to my Island trilogy from the early 2000s. Later on, the Titanic trilogy showed me how much fun it could be to merge adventure and historical fiction. That’s when I knew that one day I would write a World War II novel.



I’d love for you to talk about the way you’ve structured War Stories, the way it unfolds from multiple perspectives, in multiple moments in history. Did it have this structure from the very beginning of your writing process? Why did you decide to tell the story this way?
It actually took a long time to get this exactly right. My original vision was straight historical fiction—perhaps kids during the London blitz or fighting with the Resistance. It was my editor, the amazing David Levithan, who first suggested a multigenerational story. I realized I could craft parallel arcs for a contemporary seventh grader and his 93-year-old great-grandfather.



Jacob, Trevor’s great-grandfather, is a fascinating character. His willingness to share exciting and heroic stories of the war with Trevor sets him apart from many veterans, but he’s also unwilling to revisit and confront memories that are more troubling. How did you go about crafting and balancing this tension in him as you told his story?
It’s true that many veterans of World War II don’t like to talk about their experiences, which is too bad, because we are losing the generation who represent our last direct connection to that time. Jacob was at least partly inspired by my own grandfather, who was a great storyteller. He was older during World War II, so he served in North America, freeing up men closer to Jacob’s age to do the actual fighting. Perhaps that’s why he was so willing to share—he never saw the awful cost of war firsthand. In that way, it makes sense that Jacob, who loves to talk, clams up when forced to confront certain memories. 


The young reader I imagine is always just a little bit bored and on the verge of losing interest. So I write to keep that kid hooked, and the choice of genre—every choice, really—is based on making the best call to create an engaging story.

What kind of work and research did you do to be able to represent Jacob’s experiences on the page? Did you learn anything that surprised you?

It sounds cliched to say my research taught me how awful war is—that’s something we all know. But until I rolled up my sleeves and did the digging, I don’t think I fully understood the extent of it. Did you know that the Allies accidentally killed more French citizens in the process of liberating them than the Nazis killed British citizens in the entire war? You become desensitized to statistics about entire towns reduced to rubble. Most of France was rural, so the smell of hundreds of thousands of farm animals slaughtered by shelling was a constant. I relied largely on reporting from journalists embedded with Allied units, such as Ernie Pyle and A.J. Liebling.



Trevor glorifies what he believes to be true about World War II because of the stories he’s heard from Jacob and because of the video games he plays. How can we tell more honest stories of heroism and war, particularly for young readers? Why is telling these stories important?
One of the reasons I called the book War Stories is that stories can reveal deeper and more complicated truths because they’re populated by real human beings. Video games do a great job of creating exciting and challenging gameplay scenarios based on the appearance of reality, but they aren’t very good at exploring truth. No game, no matter how realistic, will ever be able to portray the tragedy of a single loss of life.

I don’t mean that video games are terrible. My own kids are gamers. Trevor will always enjoy video games. But in France he learns that games are exactly that—games, not truth. And it’s important for us to keep telling these truths so that future generations of leaders can make the momentous decisions of war and peace with their eyes open.



One of the first books I can remember reading and connecting with as a young person was your 1988 book, The Zucchini Warriors. I’d love if you would talk a little bit about writing in so many different genres—humor, sports, action, suspense, historical, mystery—over the course of your career. Is there a genre you haven’t tried that you’d still like to tackle? Do you read as widely across genres as you write?
Thank you for that! I’m a great admirer of Avi; his ability to skip effortlessly among genres astounds me. But the truth is, I don’t think about genre all that much when I’m in the middle of a book. The young reader I imagine is always just a little bit bored and on the verge of losing interest. So I write to keep that kid hooked, and the choice of genre—every choice, really—is based on making the best call to create an engaging story. Reading widely is vital. You can’t internalize how to make a genre yours until you’ve seen how the greats have made it theirs.

PS: I’m less known for my novels in the paranormal genre, but my series, The Hypnotists, is still one of my all-time favorite writing experiences.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read why BookPage reviewer Kevin Delecki says War Stories “strikes a perfect balance between compassion and honesty.”



You’ve written series as well as stand-alone stories, like War Stories. How is the process of writing a stand-alone novel and a book in a series similar? What do you think young readers enjoy about each type of storytelling?
It wasn’t too long ago that I was immersed in a total series world. I was in the middle of Masterminds and The Hypnotists; Jingle (the last installment in the Swindle series) had just come out; and I was touring for Flashpoint, my final contribution to The 39 Clues. Now I’m several books into a run of all stand-alones (with a couple of sequels in the mix).

I love the challenge of creating a whole new world for every novel, but I’d be lying if I said there isn’t a kind of security-blanket comfort to being in that series zone, where you finish a book and instantly know what comes next.



You’re well-known as an author who enjoys visiting schools and meeting readers (in fact, your website says you’ve visited 49 states, 9 Canadian provinces and 11 countries in Europe and Asia—what’s the missing 50th state?). How does spending so much time with your readers influence you as a writer?
I did my first school visit when I was 14 years old, and meeting my readers has always been a big part of my writing career. To me, it’s pure win-win. It’s excellent promotion and at the same time, it’s the kind of research you can’t get any other way. You hear what gets the big laugh, the introspective chuckle, the “You think that’s funny? That makes one of us.”

That missing state? Hawaii.



Your first book, This Can’t Be Happening at MacDonald Hall, was published when you were in the ninth grade. What writing advice would you give ninth-grade Gordon if you had access to a time machine and could find a way to give it to him without interfering with the space-time continuum? What advice do you think ninth-grade Gordon would give you in return?
Obviously, I was thrilled about the publication of my first novel, but when I think back to that time, I mostly remember being incredibly impatient. The book was written for a seventh-grade assignment, yet by the time it hit the shelves, more than a year and a half had gone by. That’s not terrible by publishing industry standards, but to a middle-schooler’s sense of time, it’s forever. So my main advice to my much younger self would be to chill out.

In return, ninth-grade Gordon might remind me not to lose my joy in a really cool twist, a great scene or a hilarious one-liner. I can’t ever forget that the writer I was then is much closer to the age of my readers than the writer I am now.    

Author photo by Owen Kassimir.

The publication of a book as extraordinary as Daniel Nayeri's Everything Sad Is Untrue would be a momentous occasion all on its own. Based on Nayeri's childhood experience of fleeing religious persecution in Iran to eventually settle in Oklahoma, BookPage reviewer Luis G. Rendon says Nayeri's "patchwork story forms a stunning quilt, each piece lovingly stitched together to create a saga that deserves to be savored."

Everything Sad Is Untrue is also the first book to be published by a brand-new independent children's publisher, Levine Querido. Founded by Arthur A. Levine, who helmed an eponymous imprint at Scholastic and also held the role of editor in chief at Knopf Books for Young Readers, Levine Querido launches its inaugural list in the fall of 2020.

Nayeri and Levine give BookPage readers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at what it takes to write and edit a middle grade novel, bring us up to speed on the story of Levine Querido thus far and share their hopes for their work.

An editor’s work is often invisible to a reader, but most writers are quick to acknowledge what a good editor can bring to a book. (To borrow a turn of phrase from Khosrou, the narrator of Daniel's book, perhaps a good editor is like a god who speaks and a god who listens.) Because you’ve both worked as editors within the children’s book industry and both have written children’s books yourselves, I’d love to hear about the work you did together to shape Everything Sad Is Untrue. What questions did you ask each other and yourselves as you worked on the book?

Levine: I would strongly resist the characterization of the editor as a kind of G-d! At least in the traditional sense of an all-knowing, all-seeing, omnipotent being who shapes, controls and forms the book, with the author as clay. If you could meet Daniel, you'd laugh hard at the notion of me (or anyone) assuming that role with him!

And that's not how I think of the job anyway; I think of myself as the smart best friend who loves you and reads your manuscript because he already thinks you're amazing and just wants to give you a few helpful reactions and impressions. If anything, for me G-d is that ineffable burst of wonder that happens when creative people come together with pure trust. I don't know—Daniel, was G-d part of it for you at any part of the process of this book?

Nayeri: I like this. We’re going straight into religious conversation on question one. Leave it to you, Arthur, to get to the heart of the matter immediately. I have often heard from my fellow editors that the last taboo of children’s literature is religion. But this is a book about religion entirely. It is the reason the younger narrator is a refugee. Religion is the dividing line between his mother and father. And underneath his obsession with counting the memories of his grandfather is the anxiety that when they both die, they will go to different places. For me, G-d was in every word, or at least I hope so.  

But to return to your description of the author/editor relationship, I agree. I think the best version of that relationship is one where each person thinks the other is a master at their work. When I read an editorial note, I am naturally resistant. It hurts in the way that physical therapy hurts. An immediate reaction would be to argue, dismiss or distract from the points being made. But somewhere deep down, I know my editor is brilliant. He isn’t saying this to be obtuse. And my child mind has to relent to guidance. But then, maybe I was a recalcitrant child. Were there any instances you felt I never quite managed to hear you out? 

Levine: Ha! We're both author-editors so I know exactly what you mean. I could sometimes feel you struggling to consider my reactions; we had some excellent back and forth about the bull-killing scene, remember? But it's a good example of the process working on both sides. I shared my visceral reaction to some details and placement decisions, but I also felt total confidence that your vision for the book in its entirety REQUIRED many of those details as part of an accumulation of imagery and metaphor—meaning, ultimately, I might tell you that I recoiled at something, but if you said, "Good! I wanted the reader to recoil!" then I was happy. 

I have a great deal of faith in the capacity of young people to experience a huge range of emotion and experience through literature; I think that from time immemorial that has been the magic power of storytelling.

I don't want "obedience" in an author. I want someone who is so thoughtful and aware of his own work that he can be the ultimate arbiter of decisions (meta and micro) about the writing. As long as he thinks my reactions are sympathetic and intelligent then I hope he can give them the room to be helpful. And I'm very confident that you did that, Daniel. Was there ever a time you thought I strayed from that and was a bossy boss?

Nayeri: That’s a great point. One aspect of your editorial approach was to inhabit the reader and offer the most transparent play-by-play reactions to the sentences. Of course, I would wince whenever you’d write that a description of digging out a septic tank almost made you vomit. But then, as you said, I would consider that a victory. That’s how digging out the septic tank should feel, after all.

I think the only time you insisted on something was around the opening line. The book began “My first memory is blood, slopping from the throat of a terrified bull, and my grandfather …” and you were adamant that many readers would recoil if I started there, before introducing the narrator himself. I whined. I squirmed. I fought. I pouted. But finally, you got me to “just try” a different opening. I did so begrudgingly, and now I admit, you were right. The new opening is far stronger. I love that Khosrou’s sense of humor is offered up first. And I snuck in his reaction to your note, which is an apology for the blood, and an insistence that it’s important. You were the reader he is addressing in that section, Arthur. And you were right. I’ll say it again. The first opening was for me. The second opening was for the reader.

So much of what makes a masterful editor is invisible to authors. Their job is to be wind on a river. They nudge the flow of events so gently, with such patience, that the river itself doesn’t realize it is being directed.

Another moment that Khosrou speaks to you, Arthur, is when he says, “You might be thinking, what kind of twelve-year-old talks like that?” Do you remember? That was your note. And Khosrou answered you back, “The kind of twelve-year-old that speaks three languages.” We talked a lot about sophistication of language versus sophistication of thought and how readers would take to both. Where do you land on that? When telling a story to a younger audience that includes painful experiences, how do you edit to give them insight without burden?

Levine: I guess the first part of that answer is that I have a great deal of faith in the capacity of young people to experience a huge range of emotion and experience through literature; I think that from time immemorial that has been the magic power of storytelling. And this turns out to be both an explicit and implicit theme of your book, Daniel. I’m more afraid of depriving young people of the means to see aspects of their own experience reflected, or the opportunity to develop empathy, than I am of burdening them.

In the context of the book itself, I felt that as long as you stayed rigorously true to Khosrou’s actual emotion-within-the-story (and you most certainly did!) that you would never go beyond the emotional capacity of the reader. I also think it’s (always) important to ask oneself who the “reader” is we’re talking about? (As in, “for what age reader is this book for?”) Which reader? Are we talking about 11-year-old Arthur, whose mother and aunt taught him to read before kindergarten, or a reader like my son who only became confident with reading now, in his mid-teens.

The concept of the generic reader is a dangerous one—it leads to unexamined racism, for instance, and unnecessary “dumbing down.” For those readers with confidence and the connection of close experience, the narrative is its own path. For those for whom the experience is further from theirs, I think they only need periodic bridges to help them stay on that path—and small moments such as those you cite above (Khosrou talking to the reader disguised as me) are examples of those bridges.

I also think that while you never shied away from the painful experiences, as you put it, you also were generous with a laugh, quick to offer the reader a mouth-watering cream puff (literally) and unembarrassed by love and joy.

Are you satisfied with the balance? Did you wind up leaving anything out because you felt it would be too “tough” for the reader? It’s hard to imagine. For all that I’ve said here, you know I’m not very “tough” myself, so I would have flagged any sensitive reaction I had, but I don’t think I would, in retrospect, have asked you to consider removing anything that remains.

Nayeri: I think we agree. To me, any work that doesn’t prioritize revealing the truth—even narrowly confined to a particular moment or theme—is a project I would avoid. But as you pointed out, the middle grade category has what I would consider to be the widest range in audience. In some countries, Everything Sad Is Untrue will be published for adults. In this one, it may be read by precocious 10-year-olds. I think this is because middle grade novels are often coming-of-age novels. They are the threshold into adulthood. And we all come to that threshold at different times. I suppose what I mean is simply that the novel must express the truth of that transition into the realm of the adult. And that transition is usually a bloody one.

I am an inveterate lover of overlong titles, so for a while I wanted If You Don’t Stop You’re Unstoppable. I liked the hopefulness of that last one, the idea that this isn’t just a tale of immigrant woe. But it also sounds like those ’90s-era sports equipment ads that ended, “No Fear!”

But is there material I would share with an adult that I would withhold from a 10-year-old? Of course. I’ve known sensitive 10-year-olds with their own traumas to endure, who needed a few more years of gentleness and psychological assurance. And I’ve known plenty of 12-year-olds who need to be smacked out of their constant self-regard. It takes a parent, librarian or teacher to make that distinction, to put the right book in their hands and to speak with them afterward about what just happened. That’s the highest purpose of a “gatekeeper,” in my opinion.

That was also one of the main uses of addressing the reader in the book. Khosrou is choosing to share his pain and suffering with young readers, but also talking them through it manageably. I think that’s what the title refers to as well.

Arthur, introduce us to Levine Querido. What will make Levine Querido’s books unique?

Levine: Our motto is “Beloved books, beautifully made,” so I hope readers will find that the contents of the books are as extraordinary and surprising as the way they look and feel. We hope to be passionate advocates for authors and illustrators who come from previously underrepresented groups, in English and in translation, and to shine a spotlight on their talents.

We are choosing books to publish because we truly think they are incredible, choosing artists because we think their art is gorgeous.

Daniel, as you mention in your book’s acknowledgements, Arthur is a mythical figure in children’s publishing. Can you talk a bit about the myth of the man? What did he and the team at Levine Querido bring to this book?

Nayeri: So much of what makes a masterful editor is invisible to authors. Their job is to be wind on a river. They nudge the flow of events so gently, with such patience, that the river itself doesn’t realize it is being directed. They find like-minded librarians and booksellers and throw themselves into the actual work of community-building. They literally spend all day in the grind house of managing outsized egos, constant misunderstandings or internecine corporate warfare, and they spend nights gently coaxing a manuscript into the world. And at end, they’re judged on their list.

All that, and I haven’t even addressed what LQ has managed to do as a new publishing company. To put the likes of Antonio Cerna and Caroline Sun in decision-making seats—these are two people I’ve admired for more than a decade. Nick Thomas is so clearly a virtuosic editor. There’s Alexandra Hernandez, the team at Chronicle . . . I could go on. I’m tempted to just start listing names, as if I’ve won something. The reality is that I feel I’ve finally won the attention and effort of these sorts of people. I couldn’t begin to explain what that means to someone like me.

Arthur, how did Everything Sad Is Untrue first come to you? What made it stand out to you? How far into reading did you get before you knew you wanted to publish it?

Levine: I had met the intimidatingly smart and charming Mr. Nayeri at an American Library Association conference one year and we struck up a friendship and mutual admiration society. Jo Volpe, his incredible agent, sent me the manuscript, which left me gobsmacked. The fluidity with which Daniel went from the funny earthy realities of middle school life to the exquisite poetry of stories with a thousand-year history . . . only a very, very gifted author can do that.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Everything Sad Is Untrue.

Daniel, your acknowledgements and author’s note provide a glimpse into the genesis of this book. It took you 13 years to write, and you mention that it was your friend Stacey Barney, the executive editor at Putnam, who suggested you try writing it from the perspective of your younger self. What did adapting that new perspective change for you?

Nayeri: As an adult, I’ve had the opportunity to process a lot of the raw, chaotic elements of my childhood. And that was how a lot of the early drafts read. They were distant from the pain, almost anthropological. By going back and telling the story as I would have as a kid, the reader can see he’s still in the midst of it. He is practically shaking as he describes a moment when he has had his thumb pulled out of its socket by an older kid. He doesn’t want you to think he was afraid. He insists that he didn’t cry, though we know he did. The unreliable and yet emotionally transparent narrator was the best part of shifting the story to my younger self.

Tell us about your mom, to whom you’ve dedicated the book. Introduce her to readers who haven’t read your book yet and don’t know why I’m asking this question. Did writing the book change your relationship with her? Has she read the book?

Nayeri: My mother is the central figure of the story. In the book she is described as not much taller than a potted plant and yet the strongest person I’ve ever met. When I was young, she converted to Christianity, which is a capital crime in our home country of Iran, so we had to escape. My father chose to stay. My mother, sister and I became refugees and finally found asylum in Edmond, Oklahoma. Those are the basic facts. The reality is that we watched this incredibly complicated idea, that someone’s religious convictions would lead her from a fairly well-to-do family across the planet into a life of precarity. As kids, there was a constant attempt to understand the “why” of it all.

There are a lot of people who speak for refugees, but not a lot of people who listen to them. I would love nothing more than to have young readers hear that term and think of Khosrou, someone they met in the course of reading the book, someone they may have come to like.

I don’t think the book changed our relationship much. I suppose I gained even more respect for what she endured. She has always known I wanted to write the book—ever since I was 10 years old—so it was mostly a feeling of relief after it was done. When she read the book, she disagreed with my read on several characters. For instance, she has a much kinder view of her father than I do. Admittedly, she knew him far better than I did. We talked about it. I even mentioned it in the author’s note. But at end, the book was from my perspective as a preteen.

Did Everything Sad Is Untrue ever have other titles that you’d be willing to share? When and how did its current title emerge?

Nayeri: Well, I thought about calling it Refugee, but that was taken. The adult version was titled The Persian Flaw, but that makes it sound like some sort of polemic about modern politics. And I am an inveterate lover of overlong titles, so for a while I wanted If You Don’t Stop You’re Unstoppable. I liked the hopefulness of that last one, the idea that this isn’t just a tale of immigrant woe. But it also sounds like those ’90s-era sports equipment ads that ended, “No Fear!”

What I really wanted was a title that didn’t deny fear or pain, but rather looked past it. That was how I got to the passage in the Lord of the Rings when Samwise Gamgee sees Gandalf return from the dead, and asks, “Will everything sad become untrue?” I adore Sam’s childlike faith there. If Gandalf had said so, Sam would believe that everything was about to become as it ought to be. I loved that, so the title was Everything Sad Will Become Untrue for nearly the entire time I wrote the last draft.

As I wrote, I began to consider that future-tense verb, Will Become. I wanted to add a bit of our narrator, Khosrou, to the sentiment. He, too, is as desirous as Samwise for a world that ought to be, but he’s also a bit more confident—or at least he presents himself that way. He would be the kind of kid who asserts the future as the present. Everything sad IS untrue. He’s jumping the gun. He wants his current pain to be redeemed by a better future. It’s technically a lie. Everything sad is NOT untrue. Not yet. And so that became the final title.

Arthur, I’m not sure whether the letter you wrote to accompany advance review copies of the book will end up in the finished book that readers will buy and borrow from their libraries, so I want to give you the opportunity now to get up on a proverbial soapbox and tell anyone reading this: What do you love about Everything Sad Is Untrue?

Levine: I think I could answer that question from a different angle every hour of the day. It could be the mouthwatering descriptions of food. It could be the descriptions of place so vivid you can feel the wind of an Oklahoma hurricane or smell the jasmine in a garden in Isfahan. It could be the comfort of reading a story told by someone else who knows how hard it is to make a friend in a new place. It could be the shock of a sudden moment of violence in your own living room, or the even greater shock of who comes to your defense. It’s the sharp suspense of a flight for your life. It’s the wonder of a lyrical history that lives in one man’s memories. Ask me again in an hour!

As you’re answering these questions, the launch of your first season of books is right around the corner. How are you feeling? What’s been different for you about the process of working on these books? What have you discovered about running an independent publishing company versus working as an editor or running an imprint inside of a larger publishing corporation?

Levine: Well, in many ways the launch has been building for a year. I hired my incredible editors Nick Thomas and Megan Maria McCullough; we integrated with Chronicle, the best distributor anyone could ask for; and we’ve been working with Antonio Cerna and Alexandra Hernandez to create wonderful marketing and publicity plans, then scrapping them and doing them over again in the digital world. Now it’s like we’re putting on our party hats and waiting to throw the doors open!

Everything about it has felt like a much more pure process, driven not only by mission but by genuine artistic response. We are choosing books to publish because we truly think they are incredible, choosing artists because we think their art is gorgeous. No one in this business can know what’s going to strike a chord; no one can prove which detail in the production values of a book is what’s going to make a difference to a book lover. It’s gut instinct and belief. And now, perhaps for the first time in my career, I can declare that that’s enough.

Daniel, a year from now, what kinds of thoughts and conversations among readers do you hope Everything Sad Is Untrue generates? What do you hope to hear from readers about the book?

Nayeri: There are a lot of people who speak for refugees, but not a lot of people who listen to them. I would love nothing more than to have young readers hear that term and think of Khosrou, someone they met in the course of reading the book, someone they may have come to like. To have a name that goes along with the word “refugee.” That would be powerful to me.

Throughout the story, Khosrou makes this appeal to the reader. He says, we are here, in the parlor of your mind, and I am your guest. He is begging for the reader to see him as a guest and not an intruder. He wants the reader to hear him, and he struggles with the desire to listen to the readers, to hear their response.

If young readers could take in that idea, I think they might consider themselves as having a refugee friend. They might think better of them the next time someone uses the term in some fear-mongering political context, or even in a dismissive one. They will have sat with a refugee for hours, and they will have seen him bleed, and they might even want to welcome more of them into their lives.

Photo of Daniel Nayeri by Daniel Nayeri. Photo of Arthur A. Levine by Tess Thomas.

Acclaimed author Helen Frost is well known for her historical novels in verse, including Salt and Crossing Stones. She returns to verse in All He Knew, which explores the little-known experiences of children in state-run psychiatric institutions in mid-20th-century America through the story of a fictional boy named Henry. We spoke to Frost about her personal connection to the story, researching history and the power of poetry.

In the author’s note at the end of All He Knew, you share that the book’s story was inspired by your husband’s uncle, whose experiences have much in common with Henry’s. When did you begin to think about writing a book inspired by these experiences?
Beginning in the mid-1980s, I listened to Maxine Thompson, my mother-in-law, as she talked about her brother Shirley; she said she had always wanted to write about him “to give him the life he never had.” Over the course of several years, she composed seven poems that told his story, and we worked together to put them into a small chapbook called The Unteachable One.

After that, when I was teaching writing to children in institutions of various kinds (though much different from Riverview), I often put out books of poetry and asked the children to find a poem that meant something to them and share it with the group. Someone always selected The Unteachable One. I don’t know whether it was the title or the small size of the book that attracted children, but I was always touched to hear those poems read in the voices of young readers, and they often inspired children to write brave and honest poems of their own. Perhaps it was during those years that I began to think about how I might explore this story more fully.

Riverview, the institution where Henry is sent, is fictional but based on real places. What kinds of research did you do to represent Riverview in your book? Where does research fit in to your creative process?
That part of my research was very difficult—not hard to find books, photographs, film, documentaries, letters, etc., or to find people who wanted to share their own stories, but so hard to really take in what had happened in those institutions, not only in the ’30s and ’40s, but well into the ’50s, ’60s and even the ’70s. I remember a friend whose mother had a baby in 1968 telling me, “We had to put it in an institution.” That word—“it”—still haunts me, as well as another word she used to describe the baby, which we thankfully no longer use.

We have so many stories about wars, and much respect is given to those who agree to fight in them. I hope readers will pause to consider that making a conscious choice about whether or not to participate in any war is difficult and highly personal, and that different choices can be equally worthy of respect.

I wanted to walk around the grounds of the institution where Maxine’s brother lived, but it has since been turned into a prison (which says something in itself), and I was only able to view it from a distance. I did go with a friend, Leslie Bracebridge, to walk around the grounds of an abandoned institution near where I lived as a teenager, and we talked together about what life had once been like there. As such institutions closed, Leslie has helped to create small group homes for adult women who are released, and she shared with me many stories based on what the women have told her.

I do a lot of research before I begin writing, but as I write, more questions come up and further research is required. I renew my library books multiple times and have a lot of internet bookmarks in a computer file for each book I write. And as people learn what I am working on, I hear many firsthand accounts from friends and family about different aspects of the book.

The character of Victor, a conscientious objector who brings much-needed compassion to Henry’s life at Riverview, was inspired by memoirs written by those who served in institutions like Riverview during World War II. How early on in the process of creating All He Knew did Victor emerge as a character? What do you hope readers take away from his role in the story?
I’ve long considered writing a children’s biography of William Stafford, a poet and World War II conscientious objector who I admire deeply and met on numerous occasions. I’d spoken to his son, the writer Kim Stafford, who encouraged me to do this, but I hadn’t been able to find a way to approach such a biography. At some point, it occurred to me that the two stories—one based on Maxine and her brother, the other springing from William Stafford’s memoir, Down in My Heart—could come together as one book.

I hope the reader experiences the delight in language that I enjoy as I write. I hope my love of poetry is contagious.

I had written many poems about Victor as I was beginning Henry’s story, but I’d set them aside, as I tried to focus more sharply on Henry and to some extent on Molly, Henry’s sister. After reading an early version, my editor Janine O’Malley said that she’d like to know more about Victor. I sent her the crown of sonnets and she loved it; from then on, Victor became a more central character.

Later in the process, my understanding of Victor’s character deepened when I learned that Al Rath, a relative I knew as a child, had worked in a psychiatric institution as a WWII conscientious objector and was influential in the profound changes that occurred during and after the war.

We have so many stories about wars, and much respect is given to those who agree to fight in them. I hope readers will pause to consider that making a conscious choice about whether or not to participate in any war is difficult and highly personal, and that different choices can be equally worthy of respect.

The relationship between Henry and his sister, Molly, and Molly’s letters to Victor are particularly touching. Can you talk about how Molly’s character emerged? What choices did you make in creating her character?
Molly’s character is strongly connected to Maxine, who wrote the poems in The Unteachable One, so that voice was with me from the start. Soon, though, Molly became very much her own character. It was important to have an outside observer with a close connection to Riverview who could express outrage about the institution—not only for her beloved brother Henry, but for all the children who lived and died there.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of All He Knew.

You’ve chosen to write Henry’s poems in free verse, while Victor’s poems take the form of sonnets. How did you arrive at this structure? What are some of your favorite sonnets, for readers who’d like to read more of them?
I love the sonnet form, and particularly the challenge of composing a crown of sonnets. I have included such a crown in books for children (Room 214) and young adults (Keesha’s House) as well as for adult readers. It’s a great form for exploring something complex or difficult. Two of my favorite sonnets are John Donne’s “La Corona” and Marilyn Nelson’s A Wreath for Emmett Till.

Did you know from the beginning that you would write All He Knew entirely in verse? How was your creative process different as you created this verse novel versus novels you’ve written partially in prose—and how was it the same? What do you hope the verse forms add to the reader’s experience of the book?
At the beginning, no, I didn’t know very much about the eventual structure I would find for the book.

I sometimes begin a first draft in prose or free verse, knowing that it is likely to find a different form later on. Once I have a sense of the characters’ voices and the direction of the story (typically after writing about 60 pages), I often start over and write in a way that is closer to the final form.

Writing in poetry, like reading good poetry, makes me pay close attention to the sound and nuance of each word and to how the lines and stanzas appear on the page. I also love the way writing in poetry creates surprises—not just helping me say what I already know or intend to say, but leading to discoveries that may deepen or change the direction of the story in an organic and interesting way.

Whether the final version is in prose, free verse or formally structured poetry, I hope the reader experiences the delight in language that I enjoy as I write. I hope my love of poetry is contagious and that the work I put into the writing is unobtrusive, at least upon a first reading. I know that some young readers don’t care about this, and that’s fine; they’ll still hear and feel the poetry, but a few do pay close attention. I think about a sixth grader stumbling over her words as she tried to tell me what she loved about The Braid, finally settling on, “It’s just . . . you know . . . how it’s . . . MADE!”

Can you say a little about the connection between Victor’s parents and the characters in your book, Crossing Stones?
Yes, although saying “a little” may be challenging, as this is bigger than these two books. I recently found an early draft of The Braid which I had titled Diamond Willow, which would later become the title of a different book. I’d been intending to create a multigenerational story in one book, each representing the point of a diamond. That intention has been obscured by now, but it is still possible to follow a thread of genealogy from the sisters Sarah and Jeannie in The Braid as they are separated in Scotland in 1852, all the way through to Willow in Diamond Willow in the early years of this century. Ollie and Muriel in Crossing Stones speak of “Grandma Jean’s best dinner rolls” and “Great Aunt Sarah,” referencing Jeannie and Sarah. By the time Jean shows up as a spruce hen in Diamond Willow, she represents Willow’s great-great-great grandmother. In All He Knew, Victor is Emma and Ollie’s son, and (you’re hearing it here first!) he may also be related to Willow. Thank you for asking!

Heartdrum, a new imprint from HarperCollins Children's Books, is the first imprint at a major American publishing company dedicated to the work of Native American creators. Children’s author Cynthia Leitich Smith and veteran editor Rosemary Brosnan, Heartdrum's co-founders, share its origin story and explain why its existence is breaking important new ground.

Let’s start with the basics. What will readers be able to expect from a book with the Heartdrum logo on the spine?

Cynthia Leitich Smith: Amazing books! Gorgeous books, heartfelt books, funny books, books with page-turning adventures and books with illustrations so gorgeous, you’ll want to linger over them. All lovingly created by Native authors and illustrators.

What else? We’ll publish mostly contemporary fiction—realistic and fantastical—that centers young Native heroes. Why? Because we are still here, and that’s where the biggest need is in the body of literature. To a lesser extent, we’ll also offer 20th-century historical fiction and narrative nonfiction.

More specifically, that will translate to both concept and narrative books. We’re going to publish poetry and short stories, prose and graphic format books, picture books, chapter books, middle grade and young adult titles, and series and standalone titles. The characters and content will be Native, but that’s just the beginning. Those books will also be Indigenous in sensibility and literary styles, so that they offer young readers a more holistically authentic experience.

Where did the idea for Heartdrum come from?


Leitich Smith: Over a bountiful, laughter-filled breakfast at a Houston conference hotel, Ellen Oh—who is a powerhouse, a radiant literary voice in her own right and a game-changing leader in the movement for more inclusive and equitable books—cheerfully suggested that I might consider founding an imprint featuring books by Native creatives. I smiled, flattered, and slowly shook my head wistfully. I replied that I wasn’t famous or fancy enough to pull off something like that.

It sounded like a sky-high dream, and it was. I mulled over the idea for some months until I found myself teaching Native writers at the LoonSong Turtle Island workshop. The energy was incredible. My fellow Indigenous writers inspired me. I decided to try.

We’re publishing books that will help to correct centuries of misrepresentation, books I longed to read as a child, books worthy of this generation and those to come.

I approached Rosemary Brosnan at HarperCollins. Rosemary is my original children’s book editor and one of the legendary editors in the field. She has also been a devoted and accomplished diversity advocate since I first entered the field. Her response was oh-so enthusiastic—the dream came true, and we got to work!

Rosemary Brosnan: Cynthia wrote me an email in the fall of 2018, asking if I would be interested in working with her on a Native-focused imprint at HarperCollins. I jumped at the chance—and I’m happy to say that our President and Publisher, Suzanne Murphy, was on board immediately. I’m delighted that Cynthia thought of me for this wonderful venture.

You two have worked together for a long time. How did you first connect with each other?

Leitich Smith: I was taking that first piece of advice we often give to beginners, which is to write what you know. I was writing contemporary Native stories, and nobody seemed to know what to do with them. By simply reflecting the truth, I found myself largely blocked by the myth of erasure and by stuck-in-time stereotypes.

One day on a Listserv, I came across a mention of an editor seeking modern Native stories. It was Rosemary, of course! 


Brosnan: I believe that Cynthia submitted her first manuscript to me, for the picture book Jingle Dancer, around 1996. It was just what I was looking for: a beautifully written story about a contemporary Native girl. At the time, the few books about Native kids were often historical and/or not written by Native authors or illustrated by Native illustrators. The book came out under the HarperCollins imprint in 2000.

What does it mean to have an imprint like Heartdrum within a major publishing company like HarperCollins?


Leititch Smith: It’s been quite a journey. My early Native books were published between 2000 and 2002. Then the so-called “multicultural boom” went bust.

I have a clear memory from around 2005 of being told by a respected publishing professional that if Kevin Costner decided to make a sequel to Dances With Wolves, then maybe someone at a big publisher would be interested in acquiring another of my titles. I also recall being told, over and over, that kidlit already had Joseph Bruchac (and then Sherman Alexie), so there was no need for another Native author. One voice, always male, tended to be the default.

Joe himself published hard against that. He supported other Native authors. He even founded a small publishing house to publish Indigenous books.

Part of me wishes that I could travel back in time to that young writer I used to be, the one who at times struggled with discouragement and kept pivoting in search of a way forward in a rocky landscape.

I am a writer, so I kept writing. My Native-focused fiction was largely relegated to the occasional short story in an anthology, and along the way, I published two popular YA speculative fiction series, which was spooky fun. They also provided an opportunity for me to write diverse casts, including Native secondary characters, and to address social justice themes through metaphor.

Finally, a miracle! The steadfast efforts of long-term diversity advocates got a welcome turbocharge from a new generation who insisted on positive, proactive change immediately.

Part of me wishes that I could travel back in time to that young writer I used to be, the one who at times struggled with discouragement and kept pivoting in search of a way forward in a rocky landscape. I wish I could assure her that someday she would spin with joy thinking about the growth and strength of the Native kidlit community and find herself in a key position to help connect young readers with Indigenous narratives.

Brosnan: It’s a huge step. As an editor, I struggled for years to acquire books by diverse authors and to publish the books well. I heard numerous times from teachers and librarians at conferences, “I don’t have those kids in my class/school/community,” meaning, “I don’t need these books.”

We needed to see dramatic changes not only in the industry but also in society to be where we are now. I credit We Need Diverse Books and the Cooperative Children’s Book Center in Madison, Wisconsin, for helping me as an editor and for giving me talking points about demographics and about lack of representation, points that I could take into acquisitions meetings.

It feels like a dream come true to have Heartdrum, to work with Cynthia and to nurture new talent. I always think of the kids we are serving with the books, and that makes me so happy.

How would you each describe what you do at Heartdrum to someone who doesn’t know much about publishing?


Leititch Smith: Author-curator is a new role in book publishing. I’d say I’m the devoted auntie of the Heartdrum titles. I provide all kinds of support to their creators, help feather their nests, offer various gifts and celebrate both day-to-day life and the big milestones. That said, Rosemary is the in-house editor for the imprint, and she’s the one doing the heavy lifting.

Brosnan: As author-curator, Cynthia works with Native authors who are interested in writing books for children and teens and mentors these authors. Cynthia does a lot of work with the author before I even see a manuscript.

When a manuscript is ready for submission, it comes to me via Cynthia or the author’s agent, if the author has an agent. After that, it goes through the usual process. I edit each manuscript on the Heartdrum list—no other Harper editors are involved.

There are so many rewards with this work—the wonderful authors I get to work with, the debut authors we are launching, the kids who will see themselves portrayed in Heartdrum books, getting to work with Cynthia . . . the fun of it all!

But at Heartdrum, I have the I have the benefit of a partner who sends me valuable comments. Cynthia has years of experience teaching writing in the master’s program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in addition to her own experience as an author. It’s extremely nice to have someone to work with like this, and Cynthia always has very helpful feedback. She will also give me specific Native feedback about things I may not be knowledgeable about. We are working very seamlessly together, and I love having her as my partner!

Leititch Smith: I tend to think of Heartdrum as the 2.0 version of our relationship. For me, it’s been a tremendous education and learning what really happens behind the scenes.

Rosemary, you’ve worked as an editor at HarperCollins for 20 years. What’s new and different about your work with Heartdrum, compared to your past work?

Brosnan: I follow the same processes with Heartdrum titles as with my other books, with the very important addition of Cynthia’s contributions that I mentioned above. What’s challenging to me is my ignorance of Native issues, which I have been trying to remedy. There are so many rewards with this work—the wonderful authors I get to work with, the debut authors we are launching, the kids who will see themselves portrayed in Heartdrum books, getting to work with Cynthia . . . the fun of it all! We hosted a Native Writers’ Intensive Workshop over four days in August, led by Cynthia, and that was one of the highlights of my year. There is so much talent out there, and the community has been so incredibly welcoming to me.

Cynthia, in addition to your work as an author, you run an influential children’s literature blog and you’re on the faculty of an MFA program. What has it been like for you to step into this new role at Heartdrum?

Leititch Smith: It's like everything I’ve done before has prepared me for what I’m doing now. When I first decided to leave law and journalism in favor of writing books for kids, my vision was always about more than my own writing—although being a writer is the most “me” thing I do.

My goal was to somehow belong in this magical world of those whose work lights the way through the most challenging thing any of us attempt: growing up.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover Cynthia Leitich Smith's books for children and young adults.

The main challenge is not being able to say “yes” to every project submitted, but we had envisioned publishing four to six books a year, and in our first year, we’ve got 23 books under contract. We’re still looking hard for projects, but we’re also happily bursting at the seams.

The rewards of this work are limitless. We’re bringing forth new voices, propelling rising stars and embracing well-established names, too. We’re showcasing books that will really speak to Native and non-Native kids, books that are intrinsically marvelous reads. We’re publishing books that will help to correct centuries of misrepresentation, books I longed to read as a child, books worthy of this generation and those to come.

What’s on your Heartdrum “bucket list”—elements or characteristics of books you’d love to publish but haven’t yet?

Leititch Smith: We want the Native creators to focus on writing and illustrating the books of their hearts, however they’re best rendered. So they’re in the driver’s seat. That said, I’d love for us to sign up a graphic novel, a novel in verse and a collaborative novel by Native creators writing very different, alternating points of view. The possibilities are endless, but those are a few that spring to mind.

Brosnan: We are looking for fresh voices and for writers who are committed to children’s and YA literature. I like to see what Cynthia brings in. She has impeccable taste!

How will you find fresh voices to work with and publish?

Leititch Smith: It’s a combination of putting out the word and being actively involved in the intertribal book community. Many Native creatives have reached out to me after learning about Heartdrum from, say, social media, Native radio programs or newspapers.

However, the majority are existing contacts or come through word-of-mouth referral. I’ve been a mentor and teacher in Native kidlit for a long time, so it’s not like I’m starting from scratch.

Beyond that, Heartdrum donates annually to the We Need Diverse Books Native Children’s and YA Writing Intensive, which I coordinate and teach along with fellow Native creative and industry faculty. This event is a wonderful skill and community builder.

When you’re reading a manuscript or looking at an illustrator’s portfolio, how do you know when you’ve found something you want to publish?

Brosnan: I’m looking for the same qualities I look for in any manuscript: a distinctive voice; appealing characters; a story that moves along; an author who is committed to their craft; a book that is different from what is already out there. With illustrators, we are more than willing to work with Native illustrators who are new to working on children’s books and to walk them through the process.

Leititch Smith: For manuscripts, I’m seeking high quality literary and visual art that centers young Native heroes and advances the conversation of Native literature. In nonfiction manuscripts, the second part of that equation is especially important.

To zero in on the visual aspect, the right match is so dependent on the project. It’s kind of like falling in love—transformative and elusive and yet somehow it happens every day.

As for the Native creators themselves, I’m most interested in community-oriented folks who are committed to serving the young audience and to building a body of work in children’s and YA books.

What are some Heartdrum titles you’re especially excited to share with readers in 2021?

Leititch Smith: Coming up this winter, we’ve got Christine Day’s tender sophomore novel, The Sea in Winter. It’s a touching, beautifully rendered exploration of a young girl’s journey to reclaim joy. Christine is already a significant voice in the field. Her debut novel, I Can Make This Promise, earned an American Indian Library Association Honor Award.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Heartdrum's first book of 2021, Christine Day's The Sea in Winter.

We’re also publishing an innovative middle grade anthology, Ancestor Approved: Intertribal Stories for Kids, which I edited. It features well-established authors like David A. Robertson and Joseph Bruchac, up-and-comers like Traci Sorell and Eric Gansworth, and new voices like Andrea L. Rogers and Brian Young. While primarily comprised of short stories, lovely poems by new voice Kim Rogers and acclaimed author Carole Lindstorm bookend and help to contextualize the project.

The contributors, including the cover illustrator Nicole Niedhardt, collaborated on world building to offer a collection of narratives intersecting at a two-day intertribal powwow. It was a fascinating process involving an online message board, emails, texts, phone calls and in-person meetings. The result is a fully immersive vicarious experience wherein each entry can stand alone but reading them together adds layers of resonance.

We’re also looking forward to summer releases—debut author Brian Young’s timely and timeless middle grade novel Healer of the Water Monster, Dawn Quigley’s hilarious Jo Jo Makoons: The Used to Be Best Friend (the first in a chapter book series!), and my own Sisters of the Neversea, a modern Indigenous update to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

Beyond that, we’ve lined up a bounty of picture books, including nonfiction and more novels, too! Publishing geeks should brace for several deal announcements to come.

Through her acclaimed books, Laura Amy Schlitz has transported young readers to a medieval English village, Victorian London, a big American city at the turn of the 20th century and more. In Amber & Clay, she sets her sights on ancient Greece to tell the story of an enslaved boy named Rhaskos, who longs to become an artist, and a privileged girl named Melisto, who chafes against familial and social expectations. Told in a mix of prose, verse and artifacts illustrated by Julia Iredale, Amber & Clay is historical fiction at its most inventive. 

How familiar were you with ancient Athens before you embarked on this project? What did you learn about it that surprised you? 
I didn’t know much when I started work on this book. I had to dig in. After a year or two, I had to buy a new bookcase to accommodate all the Greek books I bought. I drew maps, made lists, filled notebooks and tried to make clay pots. I went to museums and stared at things for long periods of time. I went to Greece. I tried to learn the language.

When I began my research, I was often angry. I was angry with the Greeks for being a slave society. I was angry with them for being misogynist. I was taken aback by how hard their lives were, how omnipresent the threats of war and enslavement were. Those fifth-century Greeks experienced little in the way of creature comforts, nothing of abundance or security. At the same time, I was astonished by their creativity, their appetite for beauty, their staggering ingenuity, their leaps of intellect and imagination. They adored excellence and aspired to justice.

And yet.

And yet.  

I told a wise friend how confounded I was by these contradictory Greeks, and she said, “When you are simultaneously repelled and attracted by something, sometimes it’s because you’re standing on holy ground.”   

I didn’t understand that, but I believed her. I kept researching. After a while, the Greeks began to come into focus for me. I started to see how their struggles and hardships and aspirations  came together to form a culture. I was able to see them in a way that felt clearheaded and not sanctimonious. 

As I was writing the story, I wanted to be able to drag children to a museum and say, “See?  That’s what I’m talking about!”

What was it like to travel to modern-day Athens as part of your research?
It was one of two major turning points for me. I took an archaeological tour of Athens, and two fantastic guides tirelessly answered my questions.

Greece is astonishingly, hauntingly beautiful. I was moved to tears. When you see those dense forests and the mountains against the sky, when you see the water and the rocks and that fierce light, you understand how the ancients peopled their world with nymphs and gods and monsters.  

The second turning point for me was trying to learn the language. I didn’t succeed; I had no teacher, and the language is hard. But trying to fit those jawbreaker words in my mouth—struggling to muscle out those consonants—I fell in love. Trying to learn Greek brought the story closer to me.

As you wrote, how did you decide which characters would speak in verse and which in prose?
For the first hundred pages of the first draft, everything was written in prose. But one day I was tempted to write a passage from Hermes’ point of view, and he spoke in verse. That encouraged me to see if the Rhaskos chapters would work better in verse. To my surprise and relief, they did.  

I became very interested in different forms of Greek verse. Perhaps I was guided by Hermes, god of thieves: What else could I steal? I liked the strophe-antistrophe structural technique, which was commonly used by the chorus in a Greek drama, so I tried to copy that. When I encountered hendecasyllables (11-syllable lines), I thought they would be suitable for a ghost. Ghosts and prime numbers seem to fit together.  

As I went on writing, it seemed to me that the gods and the sphinx should speak in verse that was tailored to the character. Hephaistos, god of the forge, for example, is a bass; his lines are slower and heavier than the fluent pattern of Hermes.  

Honestly, I was just messing around. Some of my efforts entertained me, so I kept messing. Sometimes when I was stuck, I’d throw back my head and yell in Greek, “Sing to me, Muse!” It seemed to help. My terrible Greek probably snagged the attention of the muse.  

Was it fun to incorporate the philosopher Socrates (whom you call Sokrates in the book) and Socratic dialogue into the story? 
Choosing which ideas would make sense to children and working them in was fun. But Rhaskos generally ran the train off the tracks, because he wasn’t answering Sokrates’ questions the way I thought he would. 

In the Platonic dialogues, Sokrates asks questions and he’s answered by a well-educated adult, but Rhaskos is a child, so he sees the world differently. He’s intelligent, but he’s had no education. Because of his life experiences, he’s developed a nose for hypocrisy, injustice and malice. He can also be very literal, because children are.  

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Amber & Clay.

I sometimes posed Sokrates’ questions to my students. I asked fifth graders whether there was anything in the world that didn’t change or couldn’t change. One of them answered that the only thing that didn’t and couldn’t change was the past. I put his words in Rhaskos’ mouth.  

Amber & Clay includes moments in which supernatural events (gods, ghosts, magic) exist alongside the human events of the story. Was that always the case? 
The earliest drafts didn’t have the gods, though I was planning on a ghost. The first god to poke his nose in was Hermes. Later I came to understand that leaving the gods out would be negligent. It would have been un-Greek. Nowadays, we draw a line between what is natural and what is supernatural, but the ancient Greeks didn’t. They divined the gods in the land, in their dreams and in their passions. If I’d omitted the gods, I’d have ignored a huge chunk of their experience.   

How did you get the idea to include the novel’s visual elements, illustrated images of historical artifacts and museum placards, as part of the narrative?
As I was writing the story, I wanted to be able to drag children to a museum and say, “See?  That’s what I’m talking about!” I wanted the reader to feel a little bit like an archaeologist, to have to search for the story behind each artifact. 

There are many emotional moments in Amber & Clay and some desperately sad ones—but there’s humor, too. Was it challenging to include funny moments when you were exploring some pretty dark themes? 
No. What I’ve discovered is that if you try to write something funny, that’s challenging. But if you try to write truthfully, even about sad things—maybe even especially about sad things—humor trickles in uninvited, like rain through a leaky roof. Over the years, I’ve come to trust that.

Author photo of Laura Amy Schlitz courtesy of Joe Rubino.