Fond Farewell
Friday, August 8, 2008
There are those in this world who make us better people. Our children, who ask the truest questions and who watch to see who we actually are, what we actually believe in, what we actually do in times of tension or stress. Our friends (and agents, when we're so blessed) who insist on honesty. Our neighbors, with whom we share the news...and the sugar. That guy who teaches the samba and who says, after five weeks of struggle, "You are becoming a samba dancer, Beth. You are finally hearing the music."
For those of us who write, there are editors, and I'd have been nowhere fast without mine. My very first was an editorial board at the literary magazine, Iowa Woman, which gave me three chances to improve an essay I'd titled "Pearl," about a lost heirloom necklace. In books, Alane Mason at Norton helped draw essential, delineating lines in a collaboration that extended over the course of three memoirs and left me with a treasured real-world friendship. At New World Library, Georgia Hughes, a California editor, embraced Ghosts in the Garden, a book about a Pennsylvania garden (and garden walker), and helped elevate it to the universal. At Temple University Press, Micah Kleit took a chance on a whole new category of book, Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, and slyly (so slyly he might have thought I didn't notice) helped me relieve it of its extra weight. At Berrett-Kohler, Johanna Vondeling helped turn an inverted, fantastical fairytale called Zenobia into something a bit more straightforward (and therefore more meaningful).
So that I come now to Laura Geringer of HarperCollins Children's Books, who has had her own fabulously successful imprint there for the past 17 years and who sold an astonishing 50-million books plus during that time. Laura wrote me a letter a few years ago—reached out and made a suggestion that we work together on novels for teens. It took us more than a year to figure out just what we should be working on, and then it happened—a collaboration that for me was both joyous and rewarding and that resulted in Undercover, House of Dance, and the soon-to-come Nothing but Ghosts and The Heart is Not a Size. Laura lived those books from the inside; she helped me imagine them more fully. She said, "It's your book, and we'll publish it as you wish, but perhaps you'll consider...."
I always considered. And the books are so much better for her many provocations and long and always literary emails.
Yesterday I learned that Laura is leaving her imprint to pursue her own writing, to explore digital storytelling, and to work with a favorite charity, First Book. I felt sad, of course—no one wants a partnership to end. But who among us would ever stop a friend from living her dream?
A fond farewell to Laura then. Books on my shelf that I'm proud of, thanks to her.
A thank you to Jill Santopolo, for the conversation, and for all the glorious bridging she does, even as she edits her own authors and writes her own books. (I will go to dinner with you, Jill, but you can forget right here right now about the mojitos and my dancing on any tables.)
And a thank you to Lisa Bishop who has posted a piece I wrote on revising Heart at that fabulous myspace HarperTeen site.
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=72210576&blogID=422296192
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