Saturday Liveblogging, Part III

If David Attenborough were filming me for a documentary about the children's book editor in her natural habitat, the last two hours would have been rather more entertaining than the first. I put away books. I packaged manuscripts and took them down to the mailroom. (The new carpet is looking very nice.) I wrote a reject letter. I cleared off some projects that had been sitting on my IN chair for some time. I have not been doing anything very important or essential; but it's the little things that make one have a slightly clearer head, so the big things can then be tackled with more energy and hope. On Monday.

I found a Post-It that I used to have stuck to my computer monitor and stuck it back on. It said simply "Waldeinkamseit -- forest solitude" -- a beautiful German word for a lovely feeling.

Other things on top of or attached to my computer monitor:

• A Chinese good-luck cat giving me the "CAT POWER!" sign
• A McDonald's toy of a hippie bus (from the movie "Cars") that Lisa Yee sent me
• A small silver U-shaped vase
• A picture of the Tooth Fairy drawn by Ross Collins

And a series of Post-Its:

• Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. -- Winston Churchill
• My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me.
• DOES YOUR P&L HAVE A ROYALTY? [I always forget to add in the royalty in our P&L program and have to fix it]
• i.e. -- That is, in other words; e.g. -- for example (no etc. @ end)
• lie, lay, have lain; lay, laid, have laid. Lay takes an object.
• (a note on a story to be written about meeting Death)

And another series of Post-Its stuck to the side noting books I want to read:

• Mark Francisco Bozzuti-Jones [an author]
• Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
• Two Eggs, Please by Betsy Levin and Sarah Weeks [Jill recommended this when I was thinking about picture books a few months ago]
• Cross-X: A Turbulent, Triumphant Season with an Inner-City Debate Squad, by Joe Miller
• Thy Kingdom Come by Randall Balmer

Rachel is now sitting in my office, in my reading chair, going over the copyedits for our spring 2008 book with Ross. The workmen have gone home.

And actually, Rachel and I have just decided to leave as well and go get pedicures. Red toenails, here I come.

Happy weekend, all!

Saturday Work Liveblog, Part II

Very little of physical excitement happened in these two hours: I read. I thought. I wrote. I stuck what I read and wrote in either a file box (to be shared with the rest of the imprint at our next staff meeting) or an envelope (to be returned to its creator or publisher).

But I read and thought about a lot of mentally exciting things: A book about Muhammad, who I am ashamed to say I know very little about, and I was fascinated by what I learned of his life. A poetry collection or two, which require careful consideration about the worth of the poetry and the best way to make it work for publication in today's market. Some French children's publishers' catalogues, which featured some really, really beautiful books. (Also a lot of books about philosophy and death, I must say . . . You can often discern a nation's character (or at least the stereotypes of a nation's character) in its children's book catalogues. The Swedish: amazingly open about sex! And death too.) And a foreign picture book about a little boy taking a bath in the sink and the deeply strange-looking adventures on which this leads him (starting with a grown man sitting in the sink with him with a clipboard), which features a lot of nakedness to go along with the weirdness. (Two other things that come up a lot in foreign picture books, which you hardly ever see in American ones: nakedness and peeing.)

It's also interesting, in reading foreign-publishers' catalogs, to see what's common across all children's publishing houses everywhere: A chick-lit line. A sports-book line (almost exclusively soccer in Europe). Horses, occasionally (though much more in the UK or Australia than in Europe central). Princesses, pirates, nonfiction about dinosaurs. And the incursion of multiculturalism in each country's unique form: The French have lots of books about Algeria and Islam; Germany has books about Turkey and Turks; we saw a lot of books from the UK and Australia about asylum seekers a couple years ago (though this seems to have fallen off a bit). (There's also deep stereotyping, I must say, in the form of wildly inaccurate-looking books about Native Americans or Africans that would give U.S. cultural arbiters fodder for years.) It's fascinating.

And going back to the nakedness/peeing/sex: Thinking about how other countries are so comfortable and accepting of these things and telling their children about them, I start to wonder why we're not. What's the matter with having really honest, frank discussions about body parts or losing your virginity or the fact that we're all naked under our clothes? While they don't need to be a topic of daily discussion (or picture books, necessarily), maybe we could all calm down a bit about these matters if we discussed them matter-of-factly rather than with our usual frenzied Puritanism. The scrotum debate is unimaginable elsewhere. . . .

I hope there's a European or Asian children's books editor out there somewhere who's writing the foreign equivalent of this post: "Those crazy Americans! So uptight about penises!"

Saturday Work Liveblog

I am here at work on an overcast Saturday, trying to clean off my desk, and to keep things interesting, I'm going to liveblog every couple of hours (trying very hard not to have the blogging eat up my work time). Rachel's here too, and she just brought in cupcakes from Dean & Deluca as a reward to both of us for our virtue.

Some men are installing carpet down the hall and listening to -- Eminem, I think. There's an R&B song on the Top 40 charts with the chorus, "You've got an icebox where your heart used to be, an icebox where your heart used to be," and then a man with a bass voice growls, "So cold, so cold, so cold. . . . So cold, so cold, so cold." It never fails to crack me up. I especially love the use of the old-fashioned word "icebox" -- "refrigerator" just had too many syllables, I guess.

Also on a musical note: On the way home from work last night, I saw a man in the subway station singing a song called "Suicide Is Painless" on a ukelele.

I have been thinking about children's literature this week, even if I haven't posted here. . . . I said this on child_lit in relation to a discussion about whether Tamora Pierce was great or good:

"I draw the distinction between great and good based on a work's depth -- the emotional and thematic/philosophical levels it strives for and succeeds in reaching. Tamora Pierce and Eoin Colfer are entertaining and good; Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling are not only entertaining but thought-provoking (on the subjects of God vs. man and love/death respectively, I would say, being VASTLY reductive) -- and therefore great.

"Or to cite another genre: I am on a mad Georgette Heyer romance binge at the moment, and loving every minute of it, but while Heyer has Jane Austen's gift for character and humor, she doesn't have Austen's control of plot or clarity and fineness of morality/theme. And that morality lifts Austen to a great writer, while Heyer is simply a very good one.

"For more thoughts inspired by an earlier round of this discussion, see /chavelaque/2005/12/manifesto.html."

End of self-quoting. Would you all agree? I finished two Heyer novels in bed this morning, btw, Frederica and These Old Shades (both begun earlier this week or last), and they were just marvelous. I'm on to Arabella next, and thinking I'm going to order Regency Buck and Faro's Daughter to feed the addiction.

Luck Be A Lady

There's an article in the Times today called "The Greatest Mystery: Making a Best Seller." If you're in publishing, it will tell you what you already know -- that is, nobody knows anything -- but if you're not in publishing, it's a concise little introduction to the gamble.

Saying "Nobody knows anything" is disingenuous, though; or at least, it should be more specific: "Nobody knows anything about what makes a bestseller." (This article is in the Business section, not the Arts.) Editors know what makes a good book, or we hope we do; like all readers, we get that tingle up our spine, that feeling of falling in love, that urge to tell everyone about this wonderful new experience -- compounded, in our case, by the desire to help the book be even better. But a book's quality is no guarantee of its sales, and conversely, things of what I would judge questionable quality sometimes sell very, very well. And of course, standards of quality vary hugely . . . from grown-ups to children, editor to editor, reader to reader.

I've always thought we don't need more market research, we just need better ways to connect readers to books that already exist: You love Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane; you're in the mood for an intelligent literary mystery with wit and romance; you input all this into a computer, and beep-boop-beep-beep-bop-boo, you're told to read Laurie King's Holmes-Russell books. Something like that. And, of course, we need to expand the market, to figure out some way to show all those people staring into space on the subway or watching infomercials for vegetable choppers at 2 a.m. that hey, you could be reading something that would interest and engage and surprise you instead, and wouldn't that be more exciting? (And then connect those people with the right books, of course.) (Though that might require market research, to reach them.)

So maybe a better way to say it is "Everybody knows what they feel, and loves a good book, however they define it." But after that: "Nobody knows anything."

Book Illness Alert!

I have recently contracted a severe case of Pfefferitis and thought I should warn you all against what could very well become a raging epidemic of the disease . . . if you haven't contracted it already.

PFEFFERITIS
An intense 337-page inflammation of the mind and heart, caused by reading Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer.

Indications
Reading Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer; inability to stop talking about reading Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer; constant low-level concern about one's own survival in case of lunar disturbance.

Progress of Disease
Stage 1: Crack open book. Start reading about the pleasantly normal life of 16-year-old Miranda, who lives in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Stage 2: In the book, the moon is knocked off kilter by an asteroid, and giant tsunamis (drawn by the moon's gravitational pull) swallow both coasts. Realize you live on the coast, and thus, in the book, you would now be dead. Gulp. However, Miranda is still alive, and so you keep reading to see how she and her family survive.

Stage 3: Miranda and all her family join a mass ransacking of a grocery store. Picture this same scene in a New York City grocery store. Gulp again. Plan to start stocking up on canned goods now, and also procuring water-purification tablets and kung fu lessons. This resolution increases in inverse proportion to the family's food supply over the months that follow.

Stage 4: Holy freaking wombats! Volcanoes have sprung up near Montreal, literally pulled out of the earth by the moon! Could that actually happen? That couldn't actually happen. But the ash from the many new volcanoes brings on a new mini ice age, and the family must burn their stockpile of wood to stay warm. Note to self: Ask landlord to install wood-burning stove in apartment, or failing that, research likelihood of volcanoes in Brooklyn.

Stage 5: Give up regular life; let dishes rot; finish book.

Stage 6: Feel renewed appreciation of life, electricity, family, sunshine, and chocolate.

Treatment
Only known cure: Finish reading book, then purchase a gallon of water and three tins of canned tuna. Store all five items in a safe place. Also -- because this should be a part of every prescription -- eat chocolate.

Notes
Highly contagious, whether by person-to-person or book-to-person contact. In fact, you may have been infected just reading this. If so, do not panic! Clear your schedule, proceed calmly to your nearest bookstore/library . . . and watch out for sprouting volcanoes.

Q&A: Lisa Yee, author of SO TOTALLY EMILY EBERS

Last month, Arthur A. Levine Books published Lisa Yee's latest novel, So Totally Emily Ebers, which was edited by Arthur and me. I invited Lisa to come over to my blog for a Q&A.

Q. What is your favorite part of writing?

A. Aside from seeing someone reading one of my books, my favorite part is when I write a great sentence. When the nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs and stars align just so. It is the best feeling, ever.

What's your writing routine? When is your best time to write? Do you work in longhand first, or do you do everything on the computer? Do you tend to complete drafts ahead of time, or work right up until the last minute? Does anyone read your work before you send it to me and Arthur?

OMG, is this one question?

I'm a night person and do my best writing after midnight. That's when the house is quiet, and it's just me and my words rattling around.

I would love to write in longhand first. But sadly, I have very bad handwriting and can't even read it. It was the only C I ever got in school. Penmanship. Sigh. Luckily there are computers! If we still had to use typewriters, I don't think I could an author--I make soooo many changes as I go.

I tend to (try to) complete drafts ahead of time. Then I overwork them to death.

I once asked my husband to read a manuscript, and he fell asleep in the middle of it. Neither of us has recovered from that. So now, no one reads anything before I send it to you and Arthur. Although, I do read passages to my family, especially to my teenager who enjoys pointing out my mistakes.

When did you start your LJ? What inspired you to do it?

I was inspired to start blogging because of a intense spiritual need I had to tell the world about my deep thoughts. (Snort!)

What really happened was that I belong to a YA Novelist listserv. A couple years ago, a bunch of people kept talking about this thing called blogging. It sounded weird/intriguing, so I thought I'd try it out. Now I'm hooked.

What writing communities/listservs/writing groups are you a part of? What is your participation with them like (e.g., do you share drafts, brainstorm, offer one another general support)?

I'm on LiveJournal and MySpace where I blog about writing and reading and Peeps and bad dogs and whatever crosses my mind at the moment. I also blog for AS IF!, Authors Supporting Intellectual Freedom.

As far as listservs, as I mentioned I belong to a YA Novelist one. It's been WONDERFUL. It's the on-line version of a water cooler. Writing is so solitary. But with the listserv we ask questions, share information, procrastinate, and motivate one another. We cheer great reviews and hiss at bad ones. It's quite a lovely support system.

What about the LAYAs? How did you get involved with them?

The LAYAs stand for Los Angeles Young Adult Authors. (Technically, it should be LAYAAs.) We formed when author Cecil Castellucci realized there was a group of New York authors who got together for Drink Nights, and thought we should have our own west coast version of the group. We don't limit ourselves to Drink Nights, however. We've sort of gone bowling (once we all arrived, we decided not to bowl), we've had a dinner/wine night that was sponsored by a wine company, we've been judges (and worn crowns) for a parade, etc.

You weren't initially interested in the idea of doing an Emily book. What made you change your mind, and what did you find to connect with in her?

I heard from so many fans asking for a book about Emily. Plus, my daughter wanted one. When I starting thinking about it, I realized she really did have a story to tell.

What really pushed me toward it though was one night I was having dinner with someone--an adult, actually. And he said, "I can't imagine an Emily book because we already know everything about her from Millicent and Stanford's novels."

And I thought, "No, no, no, nooooooo. You don't know her. She puts on a good front, but there is so much more to her!"

With Emily I tried to tap into her bubbly exterior, all the while being aware of the pain she carried inside. I think a lot of kids (and adults) do this. And it's the seeming happy ones who can have the deepest hurt.

I can think of only one other author who's juggled the same plot over three books starring the three same characters (Joyce Cary, an adult novelist, who wrote a trilogy beginning with THE HORSE'S MOUTH). What were the challenges and rewards of such an approach?

Oh! I didn't know about Joyce Cary. I think I did mention William Faulkner's SOUND AND THE FURY in my proposal, though. However, that was a single book with multiple POVs.

At first I thought, "Oh, it'll be easy to write these because I already know what happens." Ah hem. Wrong-O!

The actual overlapping scenes are only a small portion of each novel. The challenge was channeling the voices of each of the three characters since they were all written in first person. For example, even though Stanford and Emily appear in Millicent's book, Millie only recounts what she hears them say, not what they are thinking. So I had to develop backstories and really get to know each character--what makes them laugh, cry, worry, be scared.

In doing all this, I fell in love with Stanford and Emily. I really hurt for them and I laughed along with them. It was wonderful. What was not quite as fun was doing timelines and calendars and charts to make sure the correct scenes and lines of dialog overlapped. Eeeew. Luckily, I had YOU! Man, you are a whiz at detail. A couple times on the phone you'd say, "Blah, blah and then this happens on this day . . ." and I'd go, "Uh huh, yep." (But then I'd have to go look it up because I didn't remember the scene you were talking about!)

Do you have a favorite scene common to all three books? If so, which one and why?

I think I like the drugstore scene the best. It's where Millicent, Emily and Stanford are together for the first time--sort of like a collision. To get each person's take on the event is such a hoot. When I go to school visits, it's what I like to read to demonstrate POV.

Emily's father was a rock star with the one-hit wonders the Talky Boys. Who were your favorite bands in the 1980s? Any memorable shows?

Ooooh, you would ask me that! Let's see. I liked The Culture Club (Boy George has a great voice). And I loved the song, "Careless Whisper" by George Michael, who had been with Wham! I was a huge Madonna fan and I liked Spandau Ballet. Later, I found out that Princess Diana loved Spandau Ballet, and I thought, "We are so totally alike!" I used to go to a lot of concerts and I remember seeing Hall and Oates, and Earth, Wind and Fire, and George Benson, and Melissa Manchester, and Christopher Cross, and Michael Franks, and . . . hmmmm, I should probably stop now or we'll run out of space!

Maddie, Millicent's grandmother, plays a prominent role in all three books, and her humor and vibrancy makes her one of my favorite characters in the trilogy. Is she based on a real person?

Maddie is a work of fiction. So often adults are bad guys in books. I wanted one who was fun and irreverent and loving and kind, even if she did break the law now and then. It's surprised me how much Maddie has resonated with my readers. A lot of kids ask about her and want to know more about her.

A lot of the brand names in SO TOTALLY EMILY EBERS are code references to real people. Could you identify some of them for us?

Oooooh, there are SO MANY references to real people. Hmmmm, here are a few . . .

• Mr. Kinnoin, who jumps on a desk and starts screaming/crying after he wins the lottery, is named after my friend Dave Kinnoin, who's a singer/songwriter.
• AJ Shiffman, one of Emily's best friends from New Jersey, is named after a girl whose mom won the "Your Name in My Next Book" auction for a fundraiser for my kids' school district.
• The Castellucci Collection sundress is named for my friend, author/playwright/musician/everything Cecil Castellucci.
• The Mercedes Metz lawn gnomes are named after our middle school principal.
• Dr. Seto is named after my doctor and JodiJodi clothes are in honor of my agent, Jodi Reamer.

Your current project, CHARM-SCHOOL DROPOUT, is a YA novel. At what point did you realize it was going in that direction? Did your thinking or process change at all writing YA vs. writing middle-grade?

It was actually quite liberating writing a YA. The book didn't start out as one, but the more I delved into the main character's life, things started happening that took me by surprise. I realized that the content was so much more mature than what I had done in the past, and hence it became a YA. It's quite dark in some places, but still very funny.

Finally, can you provide some of the lyrics to Emily's father's #1 rock smash, "Heartless Empty-Hearted Heartbreaker"?

Uh. Hmmmm, I never thought of this before. I used to write jingles, but they were mostly about food products. So let me give it a try. Off the top of my head . . .

You, you ripped my soul apart

You, you are without a heart

You, you're the one who brought me to my knees

For you, I'd be back in a heartbeat, if you'd just say pleeeeease . . .

Heartless empty-hearted heartbreaker -- whoooo, whooooo, whooooooo

Hahaha . . . I can't stop laughing. This is soooooo bad. On purpose, mind you!

For more on the Emily Ebers editorial process, see this talk and Lisa's LJ. And to buy So Totally Emily Ebers (hint, hint), visit this link or your local independent bookseller!

Intimations and Promulgations

• I will be speaking at the Missouri SCBWI conference in St. Charles (outside St. Louis) on November 10. I've now done a big novel-craft talk and a big picture-book-craft talk -- is it time for a submissions speech again? I'd love to talk about characters and characterizations in some way, I think, or voice, but I'm not sure how much of those can be taught. . . . Hrmm. Suggestions?
• The Park Slope United Methodist Church Book Sale will be Saturday, June 2. If you love books, this is an amazing event -- we're taking over a whole gym this time for sales of hundreds of wonderful used titles. You can also donate your old books if you'd like to clear off your shelves; click here for more info, and mark your calendar.
• Kate's Paperie in Soho is having a moving sale and it's fantastic -- 20-80% off a bunch of stuff, including their entire stock of paper.
• Harry and the Potters are performing on June 1 at the Knitting Factory and -- this is awesome -- July 19, two days before DH-Day, at the Bohemian Beer Garden in Astoria.
• Cool thing el boyfriendo has done this week: He recorded the voice of a character in Grand Theft Auto IV.
• "Gilmore Girls" is going off the air. Having seen only maybe half of this season's episodes, and not being very impressed, I am not as sad about it as I would have been otherwise. Logan = feh, but at least Luke and Lorelai are moving back toward one another . . .
• I can't talk about Luke and Lorelai without thinking of this fantastic Jennifer Crusie essay, "The Five Things I've Learned about Writing Romance from TV," to wit: "It's not that they're opposites and hate each other, it's that they're different enough to challenge each other's world views, and because of that, their attraction to each other becomes a demonstration of their characters. Or to put it another way: Interesting characters like people who challenge them and make them grow, not people who reinforce them as they are and help them stagnate." If you have any sort of relationship in your novel, this essay is worth reading, but if you have a romance, it's a must.
• Rock. No, Paper. No, Scissors.
• Ah, it's nice to be blathering here again.
• And six more things that make me happy: Two new pillows, three new-to-me Georgette Heyer novels, and one last McVitie.

A Poem by Wislawa Szymborska

Some Like Poetry

Some--
not all, that is.
Not even the majority of all, but the minority.
Not counting school, where one must,
or the poets themselves,
there'd be maybe two such people in a thousand.

Like--
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments or the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry--
but what short of thing is poetry?
Many a shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and hold on to it,
as to a saving bannister.

-- translated by Joanna Trzeciak, in the collection Miracle Fair


Some People Like Poetry

Some people--
that means not everyone.
Not even most of them, only a few.
Not counting school, where you have to,
and poets themselves,
you might end up with something like two per thousand.

Like--
but then, you can like chicken noodle soup,
or compliments, or the color blue,
your old scarf,
your own way,
petting the dog.

Poetry--
but what is poetry anyway?
More than one rickety answer
has tumbled since that question first was raised.
But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that
like a redemptive handrail.

-- translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh and printed in The New Republic, October 28, 1996


To conclude National Poetry Month: One poem, two translations from the Polish. Which do you prefer?

This is why working on translations is so hard and so interesting, and why you have to find the right English "voice" for every foreign-language author and book (your cousin who speaks fluent Spanish won't do): Translation requires interpretation of the meaning of the text, and an adjustment of the translator's voice to serve the author's point. I like the second translation better, because its personality is warmer (all that use of the second person), less formal, more personal, as poetry should be: something you live with, that helps you get through the day, like dark chocolate or true friends. And I like the word "redemptive" in the last line. But I also like the "do not know and do not know" in the first translation, the active demonstration of and insistence upon that not-knowing; and the elegance of the word "bannister," as opposed to the plain dull "handrail." In translations even more than in other writing, I'm aware of an author actively making choices, and every word counts.

Thanks for sticking with me all this month! We'll be back to the usual approximation of "normal" here in May. And more Szymborska, all translated by Trzeciak: here, here, and here.

Two Sonnets I Associate with Carleton College

The seniors in their black robes, with their troubled
Destinies in their smiles, in a thousand chapels
Now manfully march from childhood into banks,
Shops and offices, with their ranks
Unbroken still, and their eyes front still,
As if in all their classrooms they had learned
Only the virtue of marching, the vice of standing still.

Or so it seems -- or so it seems to those
Who watch them with the knowledge of many such marches
And see in them only the mass, forgetting their own
Halting separateness years ago,
When they found themselves, in those robes, suddenly grown,
And suddenly, flanked by classmates, marching alone.

-- Reed Whittemore

(Longtime chairman of the English department; this poem was published in the June 1963 Voice, where I discovered it while working for the Archives one summer)


I. Nomen, Numen

"Tuncks is a good name. Gerard Manley Tuncks."
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, from his Journals

I am haplessly hopelessly Hopkins.
What is a Hopkins? A series of little
Hops. Leaplets. Nothing sustained. Nothing whole.
Hobbled-kind. Hare-minded. What begins
Well ends one length away. Half-happens.
A plan, hope-full, for poem, or more, hurries to a fall.
A man breathes in, puffed, breathes out, flat. That's all.
My name (help!) spells me out: what whole? My sins.

Ah, but Tuncks. Tuncks. I would give such thanks
To be so named. Sound sound manly single.
Blow well-aimed at a mark; thought an arrow thinks.
Thunk. Thud. Straight for God. Good. Nothing will
Do but dead center, the heart of the Triangle
's Word, Holy Name no silence (sh!) outflanks.

-- Philip Dacey

(who read at Carleton my senior year; this poem was published in the English department newsletter, and I saved it. The same newsletter also contains the following Quote of the Week, designed to test English majors' recall of the books they studied:

"It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States. To any other type of tourist accommodation I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motel -- clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love."

Ten points to the first reader who is not Katy or Nadia -- or Eric or Ted or Avery or Andy -- or okay, not associated with Carleton, period -- who can identify the author and novel from which the quote was taken. )

"What Lips My Lips Have Kissed," by Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet know its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," by John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"The breath goes now," and some say, "No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.


More of my favorite Donne:
"The Good-Morrow"
"Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God"
"To His Mistress Going to Bed"
"Go, and Catch A Falling Star"

Daemons, Links, and Kid Lit Drinks

My friend Ben sent me a link today to The Golden Compass movie website's Find Your Daemon feature. After a twenty-question personality test, I have learned I am "modest, spontaneous, shy, competitive, and sociable," and therefore my daemon is an ocelot named Sereno. This would mean more to me if the three other people I know who have taken the test were not also judged "modest, spontaneous, shy, competitive, and sociable," and also therefore future companions to ocelots. (The website itself also seems oddly educational and explanatory. . . . Part of the great genius and pleasure of The Golden Compass is how it just throws you into this world of daemons and alternate-Oxfords and leaves you to puzzle out its wonders for yourself, and the site tells you straightaway [assume kindly didactic vaguely English-inflected voice] "a person's soul lives on the outside of their body in the form of a daemon" [/voice]. Hrmph.)

Anyway, I think I am going to stick with my daemon from a few years ago, when Katy and Ted and I decided to try out what Philip Pullman said was the best test of one's daemon -- that is, having two friends confer and choose for you. Katy was an otter (cheerful and resourceful); Ted was a lemur (I think; tree-loving and vegetarian); and I was a swan (long-necked and fierce) --much snappier.

Apropos of nothing, four blogs worth checking out:

• Isabel Archer, written by my Carleton classmate Avery Palmer, with good writing and beautiful photos of his travels in Mexico and beyond;
• Living the Romantic Comedy, by screenwriter and novelist Billy Mernit, with reflections on one of my favorite genres (often done, rarely done well);
• Trainwise, by my friend Jonathan Valuckas, with many great reviews and crazy adventures; speaking of which:
• Mishaps and Adventures, by Chad Beckerman, an art director for Abrams Books for Young Readers (and formerly of Scholastic and Greenwillow), about children's and young adult book design.

Random piece of advice for the day: Do not write to an editor and tell her you want her to publish your book, but you are not open to any further editing on it. She will turn you down. On second thought, if you aren't open to any further editing, do tell her -- it will save you both the hassle.

And as you have probably seen on Fusenumber8: Next kid-lit drinks night, May 8 at Sweet & Vicious. Hooray!

"You Must Accept," by Kate Light

You must accept that's who he really is.
You must accept you cannot be his
unless he is yours. No compromise.
He is a canvas on which paint never dries;
a clay that never sets, steel that bends
in a breeze, a melody that when it ends
no one can whistle. He is not who
you thought. He's not. He is a shoe
that walks away: "I will not go where you
want to go." "Why, then, are you a shoe?"
"I'm not. I have the sole of a lover
but don't know what love is." "Discover
it, then." "Will I have to go where you go?"
"Sometimes." "Be patient with you?" "Yes." "Then, no."
You have to hear what he is telling you
and see what he is; how it is killing you.

"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," by John Keats

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then I felt like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez* when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

___________________________
* I always loved the footnote in my Norton Anthology of English Literature on this line -- that it was Balboa, not Cortez, who first saw the Pacific "matters to history but not to poetry."

More Keats:
To Autumn
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
The Eve of St. Agnes

"In the Middle," by Barbara Crooker

of a life that's as complicated as everyone else's,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather's
has stopped at 9:20; we haven't had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don't ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning's quick coffee
and evening's slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

The Quote File: Poetry

[Poetry is] the successful synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. – Carl Sandburg

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. – Robert Frost

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. – Marianne Moore

Poetry is a separate language. It's a language in which you never really come to the point. You're always at an angle. – Karl Shapiro

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful ... like a bouillon cube: You carry it around and then it nourishes you when you need it. – Rita Dove

Poetry is the deification of reality. — Edith Sitwell

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades. — Boris Pasternak

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private. – Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings. – W.H. Auden, poet

Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat. – Osbert Sitwell

Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in their best order. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance. — John Keats

Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something--perhaps not much, just something--of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment, of time, and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being--not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses--but a human being, we call it poetry. – Ted Hughes

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed – Umberto Eco

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. – Steven Wright

When I feel inclined to read poetry, I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as the poetry of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment. – Hart Crane

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. – Wallace Stevens

The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so. – Babette Deutsch

Almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of maneuvering. You may feel the doorknob more strongly than some big personal event, and the doorknob will open into something you can use as your own. – Robert Lowell

I have no fancy idea about poetry. It's not like embroidery or painting or silk. It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at. – Louise Bogan

Fiction is ... like sitting in a clearing and waiting to see if the deer will come. Poetry to me is lightning of the moment. – Tess Gallagher

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation. – James Fenton

I think a poem (also) is a dream, a dream which you are willing to share with the community. It happens a writer often doesn't understand a poem until some months after he's written it--just as a dreamer doesn't understand a dream. Being a poet in the United States has meant for me years of confusion, blundering, and self-doubt. The confusion lies in not knowing whether I am writing in the American language or the English or, more exactly, how much of the musical power of Chaucer, Marvell, and Keats can be kept in free verse. Not knowing how to live, or even how to make a living, results in blunders. And the self-doubt comes from living in small towns. – Robert Bly

I write poems to wake myself up, or to preserve a suddenly lit, awakened state. Of dreams, as of taste, too many sweets spoil the sense. It's not nice dreams I'm yearning for; it's true dreams. – Heather MacHugh

A poet is somebody who feels
and who expresses those feelings through words.
This may sound easy -
it isn't.

A lot of people think
or believe or know they feel
but that's thinking or believing or knowing, not feeling
And poetry is feeling, not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know
but not a single human being can be taught to feel –
Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know,
you're a lot of other people,
But the moment you feel, you're nobody but yourself . . .

-- e.e. cummings (?)

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople—it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. . . . You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs. – e.e. cummings

It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem. – Wallace Stevens

Jokes concentrate on the most sensitive areas of human concern: sex, death, religion, and the most powerful institutions of society; and poems do the same. – Howard Nemerov

To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers – or both. –Elizabeth Charles

I think that all poets are sending religious messages, because poetry is, in such great part, the comparison of one thing to another... and to insist, as all poets do, that all things are related to each other, comparable to each other, is to go toward making an assertion of the unity of all things. – Richard Wilbur

The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him. – Dylan Thomas

But how can you care if anyone really gets poetry, or gets what it means, or if it improves them.
Improves them for what? for death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too. – Frank O’Hara

I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time. – W. S. Merwin

Good poems are meant to complicate our experience. – J.D. McClatchy

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. — G. K. Chesterton

"To Be in Love," by Gwendolyn Brooks

To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.

In yourself you stretch, you are well.

You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too.
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or a light spring weather.

His hand to take your hand is overmuch.
Too much to bear.

You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.

When he
Shuts a door--
Is not there--
Your arms are water.

And you are free
With a ghastly freedom.

You are the beautiful half
Of a golden hurt.

You remember and covet his mouth
To touch, to whisper on.

Oh when to declare
Is certain Death!

Oh when to apprize
Is to mesmerize,

To see fall down, the Column of Gold,
Into the commonest ash.

From "The Lady's Not for Burning," by Christopher Fry

JENNET. . . . But even so
I no more run to your arms than I wish to run
To death. I ask myself why. Surely I'm not
Mesmerized by some snake of chastity?

HUMPHREY. This isn't the time--

JENNET. Don't speak, contemptible boy,
I'll tell you: I am not. We have
To look elsewhere--for instance, into my heart,
Where recently I heard begin
A bell of longing which calls no one to church.
But need that, ringing anyway in vain,
Drown the milkmaid singing in my blood
And freeze into the tolling of my knell?
That would be pretty, indeed, but unproductive.
No, it's not that.

HUMPHREY. Jennet, before they come
And interrupt us--

JENNET. I am interested
In my feelings. I seem to wish to have some importance
In the play of time. If not,
Then sad was my mother's pain, my breath, my bones,
My web of nerves, my wondering brain,
To be shaped and quickened with such anticipation
Only to feed the swamp of space.
What is deep, as love is deep, I'll have
Deeply. What is good, as love is good,
I'll have well. Then if time and space
Have any purpose, I shall belong to it.
If not, if all is a pretty fiction
To distract the cherubim and seraphim
Who so continually do cry, the least
I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world
With human deep-sea sound, and hold it to
The ear of God, until he has appetite
To taste our salt sorrow on his lips.
And so you see it might be better to die.
Though, on the other hand, I admit
It might be immensely foolish. -- Listen! What
Can all that thundering from the cellars be?

(Etc.)


(N.B. I discovered The Lady's Not for Burning through the fantasy novel Tam Lin by Pamela Dean. It is one of my very favorite plays, lovely and funny and romantic and wise, and written almost entirely in gorgeous blank verse. One of the Amazon.com reviews calls it "The best Shakespeare play not written by Shakespeare," and Dean compares it to Austen for the perfect balance between the comedy of its actors and the near-tragedy of their actions. I've seen only one staging, on film, with Kenneth Branagh and Cherie Lunghi; if you ever hear of another production, please let me know.)

A Ramble: Thoughts Written on the Plane Home from California

(some of which I had had before going to California and finally had the time to write properly on the plane; and yes, this consciously morphed into a blog post partway through, and has been edited and added to since)

fantastic fact, the (n.) that one thing that, in entering a fictional world, alters it and the people who inhabit it so profoundly that the story becomes a fantasy. A dragon, a daemon; the ability to control the winds through singing, or the existence of an entire hidden magical world; gods who act on earth and demand to be worshipped, or ghosts; and the entire logic of the world warps around that and is changed by it. But everything else must remain the same: most especially characters, and their wants and needs and relationships; and scientific laws. No one has yet written a story, that I know of, about what would happen if the earth lost its gravity, how we should survive and what that would change.

The way good writers make your brain spark, alive with both the wonder of their creations and the wonder of the real world: your brain sharpened by the truth they present.

Some themes that emerged from the conference:

• Empowerment. I talked a little about my fascination with power as a theme in children's literature -- that it comes up so much (implicitly or explicitly) because it's what children don't have (cf. Where the Wild Things Are). Also the power of the writer to master his or her past through writing.
• Writing your own truth. I used the phrase "your way of being in the world" in my talk and didn't cite it properly; it was from the first part of that lovely Zadie Smith article I linked to a few months back. (Alas, my link to the article itself no longer seems to work.)
• Outlines. Gotta love 'em.
• The three-act plot structure, in both my talk and Anastasia Suen's. I identified the core story picture-book structure as "Problem-Process-Solution," where the process makes up the slowly crescendoing middle of the book. Anastasia then took that a step further and put emphasis on the joins between the acts, which she identified as turning points, where the character decides to make a change and takes action to effect it. If you saw the cheerfully terrible picture book I showed at the conference, both the spreads I chose to make full-page pictures -- me pulling my hair and shouting "AUGGH! I NEED COOKIES!" and me mashing the banana -- were turning points, though I hadn't explicitly identified them as such; and thus they deserved the emphasis of the full-page spreads.

Anastasia and Cheryl Zach and I all talked about the importance of plotting and pacing and structure, making your story work in harmony; and then Joan Bauer stood up at the end of the day and blew us all away, God bless her, by talking about the thing that matters most, the thing an editor can't fix or a writer fake: making your characters real. Let's make a character, she said. Boy or girl? Girl, we answered. How old is she? 15. What's her family like? Big -- seven brothers and sisters. What's her pain? She's abused. Where does she live? New York City. Who abuses her? Her uncle. What kind of abuse? Sexual. What's her talent, what keeps her alive? She's an actress. Is she good? Yes, very good. Why is the abuse unexpected? They're rich. Where are the parents? Making money. Who can she talk to? A counselor. And as Joan ran through the litany of questions, the girl sprang to life -- different for each of us, I'm sure, because of our individual tastes and histories, but there in the room, scared and defiant, waiting for all of us to take her and make her story ours. Every editor knows you can fix pacing, you can fix plotting, but you can't fix bad writing and lack of characterization -- or at least, it rarely proves worth the time, if you're trying to make something of literary and not just commercial worth. That ability to create real kids and teenagers and make us care about their problems is the talent Joan and Lisa Yee have in such abundance, and why J. K. Rowling is such a success, really -- OK, incredible plots there too, but they work because we care.

Speaking of which, Lisa and her cute (Son) and beautiful (Teen) and funny (Hubby) family tried very hard to wrest the secrets of Book 7 from me -- but I only smiled sphinxishly. (I've withstood that kind of pressure before.)

Another theme of the weekend was the necessity of writing your own truth, going deep, not shying away from it, not being scared. Cheryl Zach noted that once someone pointed out that all her heroines lacked mothers, and this forced her to look at her own history with new eyes, and enriched all her books afterward. Joan spoke about the deep connection between the struggle to grow a giant pumpkin -- the subject of her first novel, Squashed -- and her struggle to write the novel itself while recovering from a painful accident. Lisa talked about her deep fear of calling herself an author and the bravery required to do so. And when someone thanked me for my willingness to show what were undoubtedly some of the most unflattering (but also funniest) photos of myself ever taken, to write a story casting myself in an unpleasant light (as my bad picture book eventually evolved into), I said why I did it: If I'm going to ask for honesty and truth and pain and humility from my writers, then by goodness, I have to try to show those same virtues myself in what I write. (That thought also was behind "Morals, Muddles," when I gave that talk last year.) And lord, some of those pictures were humbling.

During Joan's talk she spoke about the trouble she had with her second novel, Thwonk -- in particular that she created a whole backstory for the Cupid character but used none of it. At that, the woman sitting next to me wrote "BACKSTORY" in her notebook, then drew a circle around it and a slash through it. "No!" I wanted to say to her. "You have to have backstory! The trick is to make your characters show it in who they are and what they say and do, and when to display the facts of it so it matters in present action. Explanations of backstory are odious, but not backstory itself." Lisa's first draft of Millicent (that I read) was 75 pages of backstory followed by 150 of action in the present, and much of our work on it involved chopping up that backstory and slotting it into the right places -- if we didn't cut it out altogether. (Also J. K. Rowling's genius: perfectly timed deployment of backstory.) But the work was all worth it because the characters were so strong.

I hung out with Marilyn, Greg of Gottabook, and the Disco Mermaids, who are already planning something fabulous for this year's SCBWI ball (hint to everyone else: stock up on your aluminum foil). I like LAX, and Georgette Heyer novels (I'm on a binge -- finished Sylvester on the plane, reading Venetia now, desperate to get ahold of These Old Shades), and See's candies, and walking on Santa Monica Beach. Also 70 degree weather, thank God, and my first-ever sight of an orange tree. I am obsessed with the "Spring Awakening" soundtrack -- all contemporary-YA writers should see this musical to remember the pure clear desperation of teenage sexuality and the weight of adult oppressiveness (though the oppressiveness is less of a problem now than when the show is set, the desperation rings true). And it's a pretty amazing show, period. I want to go see it again and sit onstage. And I have never particularly cared to have Showtime until they came up with a "This American Life" TV show and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers started brooding out of all these subway ads as Henry VIII. Normally I do not find Jonathan Rhys-Meyers that attractive, but in these ads . . . Zounds, as an Elizabethan would say. Forsooth.

End of ramble.

"The Last Hours," by Stephen Dunn

There's some innocence left,
and these are the last hours of an empty afternoon
at the office, and there's the clock
on the wall, and my friend Frank
in the adjacent cubicle selling himself
on the phone.
I'm twenty-five, on the shaky
ladder up, my father's son, corporate,
clean-shaven, and I know only what I don't want,
which is almost everything I have.
A meeting ends.
Men in serious suits, intelligent men
who've been thinking hard about marketing snacks,
move back now to their window offices, worried
or proud. The big boss, Horace,
had called them in to approve this, reject that --
the big boss, a first-name, how's-your-family
kind of assassin, who likes me.
It's 1964.
The sixties haven't begun yet. Cuba is a larger name
than Vietnam. The Soviets are behind
everything that could be wrong. Where I sit
it's exactly nineteen minutes to five. My phone rings.
Horace would like me to stop in
before I leave. Stop in. Code words,
leisurely words, that mean now.
Would I be willing
to take on this? Would X's office, who by the way
is no longer with us, be satisfactory?
About money, will this be enough?
I smile, I say yes and yes and yes,
but -- I don't know from what calm place
this comes -- I'm translating
his beneficence into a lifetime, a life
of selling snacks, talking snack strategy,
thinking snack thoughts.
On the elevator down
it's a small knot, I'd like to say, of joy.
That's how I tell it now, here in the future,
the fear long gone.
By the time I reach the subway it's grown,
it's outsized, an attitude finally come round,
and I say it quietly to myself, I quit,
and keep saying it, knowing I will say it, sure
of nothing else but.