Beth Kephart Books

Dance Politics

2008-07-24T03:17:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Tara Parker-Pope wrote a jazzing story in the New York Times that she called "Dance Even if Nobody is Watching." It was a short piece with that most-delicious, invigorating, tears-for-happiness Matt Harding youtube at its heart (you haven't seen it? you have to see it. click on the link below). Parker-Pope's story was short and it was definitive: Dance for joy. Dance for your health. (Thank you, Denise Cowie, for sending the story on.)

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/dance-even-if-nobody-is-watching/?ex=1216526400&en=7286a589f5b04fb3&ei=5070&emc=eta1

This morning, I got all caught up in another superior story about dance, and I share it with you here; I encourage you to read in full the essay by Philadelphia dance choreographer Rebecca Davis, who went to Rwanda to teach orphan boys to dance and who emerged from her month in that land famous for a genocide of sickeningly mass proportions with a question I hope she won't mind my repeating: If an exchange of dance moves can transcend barriers of language, race and age, couldn’t dance also play an important role in rebuilding an individual, a family or perhaps even a nation? The boys Davis met could dance, oh, they could dance. They were orphans. They had been stolen from—the very worst kind of stealing. And yet, inside the frame of their dancing, there was joy, there was heart, there was healing.

http://www.broadstreetreview.com/article.php?idc=5&ida=985

Dance as politics, Davis suggests. Dance as medicinal, a salve.

I'll vote for that. I will cast my ballot for the politician who casts a gaze out upon the gathering crowds, who sees people there, yearning people, not just voters, and who sets aside his or her rhetoric for a song turned up loud. For the politician who bows to the exultant, bonding, set-aside-your-differences gift of dance.

My Father's Shoes

2008-07-21T14:40:00.000-07:00

They had been thrown into a bag, then thrown into a closet, then rescued from a flood by a cousin, and even though they were never mine to begin with and I had no right to claim them, here they are, with me: my father's shoes.

Thinned, in places, by first steps. The laces undone.

I have had the urging of a new story within me—the inarticulate and cresting rise of want, the half-crazy urgency to put some broken part of me upon a page. There is a story here, but no shape or plot. There is mood, madness, fear, and not a thing that approximates a strategy.

My father's shoes are like a story at its start—strange, suggestive, still.

OK with YA

2008-07-20T05:10:00.000-07:00

Earlier this blogging week I was musing out loud about the questions, What makes a book a YA book? and What determines suitability? Not original questions, certainly, but important ones that surface nearly daily in my work as both a writer and a critic.

Yesterday, while sprawled on the couch battling the mid-day heat in my un-AC'ed house, I was indulging in one of my favorite weekly rituals—reading the New York Times Book Review, cover to cover—when I came to the last-page essay by Margo Rabb.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/books/review/Rabb-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

Perhaps the essay title says it all: "I'm Y.A., and I'm O.K." But maybe not. For Ms. Rabb, author of Cures for Heartbreak, waits to her very final paragraphs to be okay with being Y.A. Along the way, she interviews personages such as Sherman Alexie and Mark Haddon who comment along the following lines: "I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian—that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing Y.A." (that's Sherman Alexie, the mega-selling National Book Award winner speaking); and "... a number of people look(ed) down their noses at me when I explained what I did for a living, as if I painted watercolors of cats or performed as a clown at parties." (that's Haddon, who authored the impeccable, mega-watt The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.")

Well, it was hot already in my little house in my sweltering neighborhood at 3 in the afternoon, but I was sweating by the time I finished the piece, which concludes (I won't leave you hanging), with Ms. Rabb receiving a note from a young fan who speaks of how wonderful Ms. Rabb's own meant-it-for-adults-but-was published-for-YA-thanks-t0-marketing-department-pressures book is. That fan letter helps assuage Ms. Rabb's shame. It helps her be O.K. with Y.A.

Having written and published in most every genre—memoir, history, poetry, fable, YA, and I'm now at work on a novel for adults—I had to think hard, as I lay here sweating, about Ms. Rabb's essay. I turned my thoughts back to the time when I was nearing publication of UNDERCOVER, my first YA novel, and began to tell my friends what I had been up to. Maybe I live in an ultra Saran-wrapped world, but I don't believe I was ever given cause to feel deep shame. Darcy Jacobs of Family Circle magazine simply reached out and said, "Wait until you meet some of these YA readers; there is really nothing like them." The teachers at my son's high school promised the sort of psychic rewards I'd not be able to find elsewhere. The HarperCollins team, certainly, treated me like a grown-up, not as something secondhand. And as the book moved out into the world something happened—I was introduced to a generation of vivacious, hungry readers who trumpet favorite books to the world, who race to read, who then challenge themselves to read even more. Y.A. books, I also discovered, don't live in some ghetto somewhere. Indeed, a healthy percent of the readers of my Y.A. novels seem to be women in their thirties who don't abide by labels—who have, indeed, minds of their own.

My dear friend Little Willow, a most voracious and discerning reader, sent me a note the other day, when I was feeling blue. She said, in essence, that if we touch one reader with our work—one reader, it doesn't matter who—then we have done our jobs as writers. Readers don't live inside categories. They live within their own hearts and think with their own minds. They find us if we're somehow meant for them, no matter the label (or the brand).

Angel Goodness

2008-07-19T03:49:00.000-07:00

We sense the true in others—friendship that begins not as an exchange of services that might potentially be rendered, but in curiosity, optimism, and mutual respect. Friendship that promises and presages.

True is the reason why Miss Em and her Bookshelf are so widely loved—why so many readers of YA books consult eagerly with her site and have been inspired by her example to fashion book blogs of their own. Miss Em is in books for all the right reasons. She brings intelligence and heart to the conversation, an irreversible goodness.

Yesterday Miss Em sent me a mysterious email: I have left a gift for you on my blog. Bemused, I traveled her way only to be taken aback—not just by her words but by her photograph of a garden fairy. She'd taken the photo with her new cell phone, and I stared in disbelief. For the very same fairy that she'd discovered there in her vacation path sits here in my garden, looking up to the now-empty stalks of tiger lilies. My fairy is a little weather-beaten, a mite crushed-in about the feet. Still, she sits in the shade reading the one page of her book, patient as a muse.

http://emsbookshelf.blogspot.com/2008/07/vacation-thoughts-and-photo-shout-out.html

As if Miss Em were right here, among my favorite blooms.

Suitability, Stuart Little, and Teen Readers

2008-07-18T03:52:00.000-07:00

Jill Lepore, who chairs the History and Literature Program at Harvard and has a novel due out in December, has written a most extraordinary piece in this week's New Yorker. "The Lion and the Mouse" takes a definitive look at E.B. White's journey with Stuart Little and at the librarian and social forces that sought to thwart the perpetually tidy mouse's very existence. Banned from many libraries, despised by the self-righteous, barred from the Newbery Medal list, Stuart Little nonetheless went on to sell more than four million copies. Fortitude is an essential character in the story here. So is the power of American readers to override the gate-keeping critics.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lepore

In her exquisite essay, Lepore also explores a question that haunted me throughout my chairing of the National Book Awards Young People's Literature jury in 2001: What makes a children's book a children's book, especially for stories aimed at the pre-teen and teen set? What, in other words, determines suitability? Young readers have before them an entire world of books—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dickens, Tolstoy, anything anywhere that sits on any shelf or (now) resides on some virtual post. Why the need for a YA label? Why not just write and sell good books and trust the teens to find them?

In my own work on what will be four novels for young adults and one long short story for an upcoming anthology, I've taken the stance that teens are as smart as and often smarter than adults (at least, as compared with moi, they demonstrate an acutely superior intelligence). Teens are smart, they are discerning, and—trafficking as they do in blog contests and book reviews and often electrifying e-book talk—they are some of the most important readers around. What gets written for and read by teens is being talked about today and will reverberate tomorrow, and so, in my own small way, I have chosen to write about big issues—identity, dying, loss, poverty, and, in the short story, suicide—in language that does not sacrifice itself to some false premise about teen vocabularies.

Today, on the myspace Harperteen blog, I'll be continuing my discussion of an issue I wrestled with earlier this week: brand name novels for girls. In the meantime, I send this calla lily from my garden to bookluver, who embraced HOUSE OF DANCE earlier this week.

http://www.myspace.com/harperteen

http://bookluver-carol.blogspot.com/2008/07/house-of-dance.html

Not Enough Time Never Enough Time

2008-07-17T03:10:00.000-07:00

I can't help it: Every day gone is one day less, and this summer the weight of that math is heavier than it has ever been, and far more burdensome. A month from now my son will be off to a college that is tailor-made for him—best program in his field, best chance to learn and dream. He'll be off and I'll be here, not hearing the door slam open and shut, not waiting for him at dinner time, not seeing him slide into my office, not hearing his, "Mom? Got a question." I hardly ever had answers, but he'd ask me anyway; he'd make me feel as if there was some greater difference I could make, something I knew that actually mattered. My son is there in every book I write, in every poem. I see the world the way I do because he is who he is—a profoundly deep thinker, a sly wit, an artist in the making. Because he leaves his mark. Because words change shape when he is talking.

Everything will echo when he's gone. I will sit down to write and wonder what my true purpose is.

A Poem

2008-07-16T05:40:00.000-07:00

At the End of the Seven-Year War

It happened the same day
The hormonal birds went to war —
The incautious finch beaking the raven,
The four wings in a pinwheel flare.

Only just morning, and the day,
Because it had been fought for,
Lived.

Later the false onions were driving
Pickets up through the sedum
On my side of the flowering viburnum
That is the wall between us,
And I gave this my attention,
Unaware of you on your side,
Attending, too.

It went like this — sun between leaves,
Earth between fingers — until you said,
The robin has finished her nest.
The first words you have spoken to me
In seven years.

I opened the branches of my viburnum.
You opened yours.
The air came through.

The Price of Beauty

2008-07-15T03:52:00.000-07:00

On the one hand, this photo says it all. On the other, it doesn't even come close to capturing the way I feel when confronted by a mirror. Affronted. The word is affronted. Walking down the streets most days, I half-expect people to turn on their heels and flee—to run for their lives from my untame-able hair, my ever-pursed lips, that indent in my brow that screams, I'm thinking. On my best days I'm wearing two-inch heels, no higher. I'm toting a no-name bag, wearing some little bought-it-on-sale number. Bought it on sale, then put it away, then pulled it out of the closet three years past its fad date. Please please please don't get me wrong: I know how to dress when I have to. But most of the time, I'm just me, and me is the girl-now-a-woman who stands on most every conversation's margin, hoping to be noticed not for what dangles from my ears, but for what I have to say.

Being a writer, like I'm sometimes a writer, my whole lack of beauty thing shouldn't, in theory, matter. But the fact is, it does. Young female readers, according to a Sunday NY Times story, want their characters endowed with fashion sense and beauty knowledge. They want nouns accessorized with brands; they want the lips through which their characters speak drawn on with the most mod-possible lipwear. Once one of my friends was reading one of my books and called just slightly disgruntled. I need to know what kind of pants this girl is wearing, my friend said. Because, I swear to you, Beth, she can't be wearing trousers. I can't read this if this girl is wearing trousers.

Well. That's it, then. That's it for me. I thought I'd chosen a career that let me get away with being me—that girl with her head in the sky and her nose in a flower, that woman with her brow pressed against the window glass, wearing some torn-up old T-shirt and wishing for a conversation with the moon. Beauty counts. Everywhere it does. And I can't even keep the smoky-eye thing straight.

Dance Heart

2008-07-13T09:42:00.001-07:00

She sat on a chair, immaculate—her hands open to a song. She sat with her back straight and her chin high and her hair pulled back from her face, a child of no more than three and already careful about herself in the world, aware of being watched, or its possibility. I fashioned a future for her while I stole this photograph. I made up a story about something missing found, something asked for given.

Someone reaches for her hand and the music plays and she sylphs.

(I can make sylph a verb if I want to.)

Introducing Keris Stainton/Trashionista

2008-07-11T04:04:00.001-07:00

It's been nine months or so since I (quietly) joined this blogging community, and every single day some sort of richness is returned. Some priceless appeasement. Some new platinum link in a fabulously idiosyncratic chain. Keris Stainton—the Brit behind the wildly influential book site Trashionista, that call-it-how-she-sees it critique maestro—is one of those I could now not live without. We bonded over books, yes. We talked about titles and covers and author faves. But we've also got a Big Thing for ballroom dance going on between us, as she dishes on Strictly Come Dancing and I dish on Dancing with the Stars, and as together we sigh with something more like awe than envy over those who make us believe in grace and beauty. Keris kindly answered some questions this week. It is a great honor to share them.

http://www.trashionista.com

Keris, I have discovered in you not just a writer and a mother but also a tremendous advocate for books and those who read them, not to mention a woman who seems to love ballroom dance as much as I do. We'll get to each in its turn, but to begin: How do you define yourself?

Wow. Okay, well the definition I've got on my blog is "voracious reader and compulsive writer". Despite my son being 4 and the fact that I'm expecting another baby, I still can't think of myself as a "mother". I know I *am* one, it just seems too grown-up for me.

Pink is a predominate color on a site that you've called Trashionista. There's a fabulous near-contradiction in that. Tell us about who you have hoped to reach with this blog, who you have in fact reached, and how you became a multi-continent sensation.

Well, I didn't actually create or design the site. I think it had been going for about a year before I got involved. I saw it on a friend's blog and, since I love chick lit, had to check it out. I started writing some unpaid reviews and then, when the editor left, she asked myself and Diane Shipley (who'd also been writing unpaid reviews) to take over as joint editors. We ran the site together for about a year and then Diane left and I've been sole editor since August 07.

The "trash" in Trashionista refers to the fact that we're not afraid to "trash" the books, rather than that we think the books themselves are trash, which couldn't be further from the truth (most of the time, at least). I'm embarrassed to admit that it took me a ridiculously long time to get that. Whenever an author said they loved the name of the blog, I'd wonder why because I thought it was borderline insulting!

I wanted to reach readers who love chick lit as much as I do. Who don't think chick lit's a dirty word, anti-feminist or "hurting America" (all things it's been accused of). I'm with Marian Keyes in that the voracious criticism of chick lit is more about misogyny than it is about the range or quality of the writing. Yes, there's some bad chick lit, but there are bad examples in every genre and they don't come under anywhere near as much criticism as chick lit.

The people I've reached who I never expected to reach are authors and other publishing industry professionals. We seem to be very well respected in the industry and I'm sure that's because people recognise that we love the genre. I've been surprised and thrilled at how many authors have contacted me personally and they're (almost) always very generous with their time and expertise. I'm still a book dork at heart, so getting a personal email from an author is always a big thrill.

As for being "a multi-continent sensation" - that made me laugh out loud. I'm not even a sensation in my own house!

Do you have a room in your house dedicated to the boxes and pouches of books that arrive each week? How many volumes pass through your house in a given year? Have you thought about starting a lending library in your spare time?

As I'm writing this surrounded by at least eight piles of books, I can't really say there's a system ... but there's an attempt at a system. I've started to put review books into publication date order. If I manage to read ahead I can then allow myself to read something from my TBR shelves, which currently stretch to about 100 books. Sigh.

Books that I've read, I either sell online, pass to friends or give to the charity shop. Those books currently live in the "holding pen" that is soon to become my son's new bedroom, so I'm going to have to start shipping them out a bit quicker than I do now. I do have a separate enormous pile of books to exchange with my former co-editor, Diane. She lives about two hours away and we meet up periodically to swap books. I actually got us both wheeled shopping trolleys to make the exchange easier. We draw some stares, I can tell you. :)

As for how many pass through... I dread to think. I read at least three a week, so that's over 150 and that's only books that I finish. I give up on an awful lot of books. I used to make myself finish, but not anymore. I read a great quote from the author, Nick Hornby, recently. He said that every time you force yourself to keep reading a book you're not enjoying, you're reinforcing the idea that reading is an obligation rather than a pleasure. Even though it's my job, I need it to be a pleasure so if I'm not enjoying a book, I just stop.

What do you love in a book? What makes you stop reading?

What I love in a book is a tricky one. I try not to analyse it too much, since between my English degree and now reviewing so many books, I don't want to lose the magic. I was called a "naive reader" at university, because I didn't want to analyse, I just wanted to enjoy. One thing I do know is that I'm more interested in character than plot - if you've got fascinating characters, you can get away with very little happening. Then again, *something* has to happen although there's no point in reading.

The number one thing that makes me stop reading is exposition in dialogue. It's incredibly lazy and it drives me insane. Factual errors bug me too (Tony Parsons referring to the Britney Spears song "Do It To Me One More Time" for instance).

If you could change one thing about publishing, what would it be?

Oh dear, just one? Well, I'm only just starting out in publishing really, but something someone said to one of my author friends always sticks in my mind and infuriates me. They were talking about how young adult fiction is so enormously popular in the US and not as popular in the UK and the publishing professional said that it never will be as popular. Um, not with that attitude it won't! It's part of the reason my friend and fellow YA author - of the completely brilliant Split By A Kiss - Luisa Plaja and I started our British YA blog, Chicklish http://www.chicklish.co.uk - to promote YA fiction in the UK.

Well, this is self-indulgent, forgive me, but ballroom: Once I read on your blog about you dancing about the house with your child (an image I loved and to which I deeply relate). And of course you and I have shared gossip and awe over shows like Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing with the Stars (and by the way, have you started watching So You Can Think You Can Dance yet, which in my opinion trumps them all?). Why ballroom? Why dance? Why do you love it? Are we (be honest now) lovers of dance just a tad on the crazy side?

You're forgiven! No, I haven't seen So You Can Think You Can Dance yet, but I will, I promise! I've always loved to watch people dance. I think it probably comes from my grandmother, with whom I used to watch old Hollywood musicals. I was just thinking today that my childhood crushes were Howard Keel, Gene Kelly, Russ Tamblyn... From there I moved on to pop stars, but I always loved acts who danced rather than just stood there. Say what you like about New Kids on the Block, but they could move!

Why ballroom? Well, I had absolutely no interest in ballroom until Strictly Come Dancing started and I just fell in love with it. It's just pure joy to watch. And no, we're certainly not the crazy ones! Anyone who could watch Gene Kelly's famous Singing in the Rain routine or the barn-raising scene from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and not want to go and dance in the street is the crazy one.

Has being a blogger fundamentally changed your life?

Oh, absolutely. When I discovered blogging (via the author Jennifer Weiner's blog), I was working as an administrator in the Corporate Recovery and Personal Insolvency department of an accountants (which was just as soul-destroying as it sounds) and desperately wanting to be a writer, without, you know, actually doing much in the way of writing. I started a blog and used it really as a way to make myself write every day. Through the blog I met numerous wonderful people, including writers and journalists, who've been incredibly generous with their time and support.

I believe my blog also helped me get both an agent and a publisher for my fiction, since they could go to my blog and not only read extracts from my writing, but see that I am dedicated to writing and that I have a readership (albeit a relatively small one, but still!).

I actually had the chance to interview Jennifer Weiner by email recently. I told her she changed my life, but she didn't respond. :)

You are a writer, a wonderful writer, of YA stories. Please tell us a little about what you are working on, what you are hoping to achieve.

Thank you. Well I recently got a two book deal, but they want to publish the finished book second and so I need to write another by the end of the year. It's about three girls who go through big life changes over the course of one summer.

What I'm hoping to achieve in my YA fiction in general is to make teenagers feel less alone. I always felt like an outcast as a teenager. I never felt like I quite "got" what was going on and always felt outside of things, whether it would be not liking the right music, wearing the right clothes, or one of those horrible occasions when your group of friends stop talking to you but decide not to tell you why (that didn't just happen to me, did it?).

Space

2008-07-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

When I read yesterday about the embrace of minimalist living on the part of an increasing number of Americans—small the new beautiful, home the great comfort, lavishness of love but not of spending—I had the tremor of epiphany: For the first time in my life I risk being in quasi fashion. Me of the (albeit darling) two-bedroom house, of the mix-and-match vintage clothes closet, of the predilection for applying my imagination, Anne of Green Gables like, to my standard wood deck and its curtain of trees, which (I pretend) is a studly raft floating out upon the bay of paradise.

The economy has people cutting back, valuing the once (in some quarters) despised small life and suddenly I'm more mainstream than I have ever been. I cherish an America that can and will adapt to pressures on resources. I love living among those who find pleasure in the reused and the re-energized and who can make, of seeming constraints, stunning possibilities.

A Poem

2008-07-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

Lower Bunk

After the wail of the night’s only sleep
I lie awake in a room of girls —
a dog, a band of thieves beyond the door,
and the Mexican sky were I to want sky,
want men perched on adjacent roofs
like broken glass on the lip of a dividing wall.
Too soon for the rooster.
Too soon for the slim white goose
to beg for yet another day
through wooded lips.
Insomnia is not the country you are in.
It is the secret of yourself, again, again.

Crash

2008-07-08T06:05:00.000-07:00

All season long the birds have seemed exuberantly confused. The first smack of sun barely tears away at night, and they're out there racketeering, calling to each other from the limbs of the dogwood and maple, the gutter underneath the eave. The conversation is immeasurable and therefore private, but it's the early-morning flight that's got me worried for their sake—the way the birds crash into my windows, fall to the ground and stagger about like drunks until they regain their wits.

Sometimes it's the newly hatched chicks. Sometimes it's an old blackbird with a slight bald spot; the beast should know better, should have some shame. And then there's the male cardinal, that flash of arrogant, impossible red, discernible even in the low dawn light.

I have friends who sleep like I do, which is hardly at all. They write of standing at their windows, too—worrying bird flight and song.

Introducing Jennifer Laughran/Not Your Mother's Bookclub

2008-07-06T10:34:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Laughran is not a little boy in a blaze-colored wig, but she is a wickedly funny and deeply wise provocateur who studies books, studies teens, and sees; that's the point of this photo: Jennifer sees. You'll find her in San Francisco at the ever-proud-to-be-independent bookstore, Books Inc., conducting some of the most successful YA events this country has ever seen. You'll find her on her always-interesting online book community, Not Your Mother's Book Club. You'll find her making new YA authors (like me) comfortable and (quite quickly) cheered by telling the sort of stories one strives not to forget.

She doesn't need much of an introduction, frankly. Her words speak for themselves.

Thank you, Jenn, for taking the time to talk.

http://community.livejournal.com/notyourmothers

Take me back to 2005. You and your absolutely charming cohort Miss Shannon are sitting about after a long day of, well, what?, exactly, at your fabulous independent bookstore when, well, who?, exactly, conceives of the idea that launched Not Your Mother's Bookclub. Ten minutes later were you a) giddy with optimism, b) filled with a sense of overwhelming responsibility, ...or c) something else altogether?

Well, er, that isn't quite how it happened. In 2005, I read the galley of a book called BOY PROOF by Cecil Castellucci. I loved it, and I wanted to host an event for her at my store. The conventional wisdom was that "teens don't come to book events", so the idea for this event was a bit of a hard sell, but I promised that I would, somehow, get teenagers to attend. So I did (mostly by trickery and bribes, and by promising more fantastic YA authors to come). And the event was a modest success.

I realized that we could build on that by making a thing. Like, a club. Something that would happen every month. Miss Shannon got on board and we cooked up some ideas for a launch party, or something, but we weren't sure what. Then Miss Cecil told me that her agent (the fabulous Barry Goldblatt) was having a client retreat near San Francisco. So, I asked him if I could borrow a bunch of his clients, like Cecil, Holly Black, Libba Bray, etc etc, to do a BIG event.

And he said yes. And we did the event. And it was awesome, and a ton of people came. YAY!

Now, the tricky thing is, you can't have a launch party and then have nothing come after it. So, we've just... kept going. And it's been pretty great. And sometimes exhausting.

Take me to a few months later. You're busy building the club, a presence, a following. What is the very first smart thing you did? The very first dumb thing? How do you know the club—and the site—are working?

Hmm. Well, the good thing is, we realized our own limitations. We simply cannot have events in every single one of our ten stores. We cannot have events once a week, even though I am sure that we'd have authors enough to fill that. That would just weaken the whole enterprise - the events have to be special.

We do "curate" this series -- every author that does something with us is AWESOME. That way, though people may not know who the author is, they'll come because they know we have superb taste.

Pretty early on we built some local school alliances, that has been very helpful too.

Dumb things? I don't know. We've had a couple events that maybe were smaller than we would have liked, but that happens. And it is a learning experience. OH! WAIT! I remember something! One time we got trapped with Rachel Cohn in a garage for like, two hours. Long story.

I guess we know that the club is working because we sell a lot more YA books than we used to, and because people come from other counties, other states (and in a couple cases, other countries!) to attend events. That is pretty hot.

Take a wild guess: How many YA authors have you met? How many have you interviewed for your site? And, I hate to be a pain, but: Do you have any guesstimate of how many YA books you've actually read?

I was trying to count, but it got too complicated, so this is really a wild guess - um, 200? 30? 1,000?

Those numbers could be totally wrong.

Tell me this, at least: How many titles do you typically read each week? How many books do you start that you don't finish, on average, and can you ratio that against the number you finish? When the heck do you read, given that most of your day you are—well, tell my readers what you are really doing most of the day.

I read a book or two all the way through every week. I probably read ten or so part of the way through. I look at and discard a lot more than that though.

The thing is, I also have a double-life, as a literary agent, so I have to read my clients work, too. And I read, yanno, some adult books and such as well on occasion. I used to be precious, like "oh, I started it and I have to finish it" -- bah, life is too short. My job(s) have given me a very low tolerance for books I don't enjoy.

What makes a YA book sing for you?

A really strong voice that makes me feel like I KNOW this character. I also like books that make me think, and laugh, and cry. If they do all three, that is a bonus!

Why do you love YA readers?

Like me, most teenagers have a very low tolerance for being bored or for bulls*it. Also, they are voracious and passionate in a way that most adults aren't. Teenagers who are readers wolf books down and are ready to be challenged and amazed, they WANT to get lost in the world of the book, whereas most adults just read to put themselves to sleep at night.

Do you think books should even be classified as YA books? Why not simply say, good books? For don't you find that, in this post HARRY POTTER age, adults are increasingly embracing YA titles?

If I had a dream bookstore, I would shelve things by authors name only and not put any categories at all. I would also expect customers to be irritated and confused and unable to find anything. That is why this remains a dream.

I would like you now to sing a few praises (bias is allowed) for independent bookstores.

This is a topic that I feel really strongly about and it is not something that I can easily encapsulate into a short, cute comment. Basically, shopping at independents is better for the economy, for the environment, and for your soul. If you like freedom of choice, if you are a writer, if you are a reader... you'd better support those indies!

Here's a link to a sort of essay I wrote that explains the importance of shopping at your local independent bookstore in much more detail:

http://www.verlakay.com/boards/index.php?topic=25029.0

Okay, go ahead. Sing some praise for San Francisco.

Well, obviously, San Francisco is the most beautiful city in country. We are awesome. (Overpriced, yes. But you can't have everything).

Finally, if you weren't living books everyday, what would you be doing?

I would probably be a lawyer. And rich! Sigh.

Love

2008-07-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

Because HOUSE OF DANCE is ultimately a story about learning to take care, and to love richly, I dedicated it to my father, who was my mother's guardian angel through her final days, and who still, eighteen months after her passing, passionately tends her resting place. Every day he is there, beside that spot near the woods. Every day the deer watch as my father kneels to root in the flowers he has found that remind him of her. The long, feathered graces of astilbe. The bright pots of color known as pink lady. The steadfast cure of japonica. He leads a line of water to the edged-in flowers. He clips the grass with a pair of shears.

So that when I'm there, when I go to talk to my mother, when I stand in the shadows that have been rearranged and lightened, I tell her how her husband is always near.

On High

2008-07-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

It became another obsession (as if I didn't already have enough obsessions): Watching these baby birds in the nest outside my office grow. They were a mother's angst, a father's patience, eggs. They were hatchlings and beaks. They were miniature lochness monsters with tufted rubber heads, and then they were winged. What has it been? A few nights' worth of dreams, a few days of work, and while all of that was happening (and it seemed like nothing was), three new birds emerged, ready.

Two took flight yesterday.

This morning the third stood at the edge of its nest, waiting for something like a sign. I took one last imperfect photograph (the nest being wrapped into a dark, focus-defeating cove), came inside, put my camera down, then heard what I thought was a knocking at my door. It was wings instead—the last chicks' wings, beating and beating, seeking flight. The bird hopped, it skittered, it banged up against a post, then it wobbled off the edge of my porch, and into my garden, beneath the fringed leaves of my miniature Japanese maple. It's out there somewhere now. Home is still here, if it needs it.

Celebrating Violet

2008-06-30T04:55:00.000-07:00

Melissa Walker: I've raved about her here before. Mentioned how we were first paired in the pages of Family Circle magazine, then crossed paths again in a New York Public Library publication, and, always, spontaneously intersect on many (for me) delightful occasions. She's someone I'm perpetually rooting for, as are we all out here. She's combined talent with savvy, and she's been embraced—by myspacers and facebookers and bloggers, by The New York Times and NPR, by runway models and by people who just love a good, involving book to read.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of reading Violet by Design (for, having read Violet on the Runway, I just had to know how things were turning out for our home-loving, good-hearted, slender beauty with a viciously usurious agent), and I'm turning today's blog over to a Melissa Celebration. You really can't put these Violet books down. With flair, with panache, with a moral center, they take you places—Brazil, Madrid, Barcelona. And then they bring you home.

A million bouquets for Melissa.

New Life

2008-06-28T03:14:00.000-07:00

It's happened again: The nest outside my door has been feathered into and entrusted, and babies have been born—the sharp triangles of their silent beaks tilted earthworm-ward, indulgent and needy. The mother hollers at me not to touch, and of course I'd never touch. But I feel somehow knighted and new again, proximate to wings and to accumulating dreams of flight.

The very terrific Keris Stainton has posted a review of HOUSE today on her popular and fashionably pinked Trashionista blog. I hadn't been sleeping, came downstairs, clicked on her blog, just because I love reading her blog, and there, amazingly, this was.

http://www.trashionista.com/2008/06/book-review-hou.html

Thank you so much, Keris.

The Art of Happiness

2008-06-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

I made the mistake, the other day, of watching myself dance on tape, and there, inside those 90 seconds, were all the demons that have forever chased me. I still don't quite yet believe in me on a stage. Don't believe that I belong beneath the lights, or that my turn has come.

But yesterday, while taking a lesson with the ever-brilliant Jean Paulovich (who will tomorrow be dancing with his very beautiful and equally talented wife, Iryna, on the Music Pier of Ocean City), I did my best to listen to what he had to say. And the thing is: He was not talking only about the spine and the chin and the arrangement of the head, not just imploring me (again) to wait. He was saying the simplest thing—that happiness counts, that joy has its place, that when you really love dance, the way I believe I love dance, passion alone should settle one's frame into the escalation and hush of music. It should be the story your face tells.

It's something I should have known myself, of course. Something, certainly, that the kids of Dancing Classrooms have taught me. My photo today is of Philadelphia's most recent winners, a glorious team taught by my friend and fellow dancer, Linda Camardo.

I'm writing about vulnerability and storytelling on the HarperTeen blog, a fabulous myspace site, today. The link is here, below. For giving me room there, and for being tremendously responsive, I thank Lisa Bishop.

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=72210576&blogID=409718323

Bereavement

2008-06-25T03:29:00.000-07:00

This poem, Jamie, is in memory of. This poem is not enough.

What Time Does

To leave you there,
brine in your hair from the sea,
wind on your skin from the car you drove fast,
the radio on,
until we each had named
our incompatible woundedness,
was one thing.
To walk by the room where we’d almost loved
years afterward,
holding my son’s hand, holding my husband’s,
was, is
what time does.

But to hear your name
in a story someone tells
about a man trapped within
the hostile circumstance of his own skin,
is to hear you not dance,
is to see you not say,
is to understand the word
irrevocable,
and the coming feint of autumn.

The trees have been splitting from themselves
where I live.
Whole crowned limbs going down.

K.

2008-06-23T09:33:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be honest: I was warned. Against taking on a high-school internship student, a writer, they said. Against getting involved, again. Didn't I know that I'd run out of hours? Didn't I see the stuff (meaningless, yet demanding stuff) piling up around my house? Didn't I know what happened to me when I let myself care, and I cannot manage not to care. Not ever. I'm all blood and bones with caring.

I knew. I saw. I said yes to K. anyway. It was only a month-long internship. One month, I said to me. One month, because when I asked him what he was reading at the time, his answer was all the persuasion that I needed.

Thing is, this K., this once-high school student, now graduate, this enormously greedy, never fatuous reader, this writer, and let me tell you, what a writer—this K. was no one-month internship deal. He was, how do I say this? A person with a massive heart and a way with words that broke my heart, even as I sat there, all Mentor-like, and attempted to suggest improvements. Will you read this little book about poems, I asked him, and he did. Will you read OUT STEALING HORSES, and he declared it brilliant, because it is brilliant, and that's K., the real K. He knows from brilliant.

And just now, when I was supposed to be interviewing a client, supposed to be pricing a project, supposed to be doing a bunch of ordinary, grown-up, work-a-day things, he sent an email, containing this quote, which was the thing, just then, that I needed to read. So I give it to you. Because hoarding just won't do.

"All right. He would write a book when he got through with this.
But only about the things he knew, truly, and about what he knew.
But I will have to be a much better writer than I am now to handle
them, he thought. The things he had come to know in this war
were not so simply."
-Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls

K., maybe you'll read THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO next. Because sometimes the hardest, most complicated, most wrenching of stories have to be contained inside the smoothest of shells. Because your patience with this book will be rewarded. Because it's about war, and not simply.

Introducing Tasha

2008-06-21T05:02:00.001-07:00

Goodness abounds out here in the land of the blog (goodness, thy name is Miss Em, Melissa Walker, Little Willow, Jenn, Toby Bloomberg, Grete, Keris Stainton, Ink Mage, Miss Erin, and, oh, you know who you are), and I remain astonished (grateful) that we who love books find one another, and, also, that those who love books so often love them out loud.

Take Tasha, for example, the thoroughly talented force behind andanotherbookread.blogspot.com. You might think that her blog—rich with author interviews, reviews, and contests—would consume her full time, but the thing is: She's still in high school. You might think, well, then, okay: She's a steeped-in-literature English buff, but math is actually her thing, and, oh yes, she doesn't just play piano, she teaches it. She's in about a million clubs (just for something to do, I suppose), and she may well race at Indy and swim the English channel on alternate Sundays, but she didn't have the time to fill me in. Tasha's been generous beyond measure with me. I wanted to learn a bit more about her.

This photo, by the way, is not of Tasha, but of a beautiful doppelganger I snapped at the Devon Horse Show. You can, however, find Tasha this weekend in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and that's because the equally dear writer Karen Serfass took the time to interview her for a story about young adult novels and HOUSE OF DANCE. Innumerable thanks to both of you, for caring.

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20447184.html

Tasha, you began book blogging in December 2007. But: You're a student. But: You have a million homework assignments to take care of. But: Blogging as frequently as you blog is an enormous responsibility. What made you decide to start your own blog? Did you want to fill a perceived gap? Leave a mark? Open the door to conversation?

For me part of the joy of reading is being able to share what you read and let others enjoy it. Where I live there is none of that. Not many of my friends enjoy reading and find it a task when it is assigned in English class, but me I love every minute of it. Starting a blog enabled me to tell the world what the books I was reading were about and then what I thought about them. In a way this was like opening the door to many book related conversations. Through commenting and email I've been able to pass along recommendations and discuss books with other readers and even a couple authors, which I think is just the coolest thing! Now that I've created a blog, I love how it has given me that push to actually contact some of my favorite authors and opened my eyes to new books that I never would have tried would it not have been for a reviewer friend suggesting it or me or receiving it in the mail. Creating my blog has definitely opened so many doors and I love each and everyone of them.

Tell us a little about you as a student—what subjects you love, what activities you are involved with.

Well I am a total math and science geek. Math makes complete sense to me in every way. I love that everything falls into place and everything just works together. I mean this past year I took three math classes...I know I'm totally weird!! I also love science. It fascinates me how everything works and I'm always one to wonder why. Needless to say it too fits me perfectly. Since I'm a total bookworm you may think that I love English, but actually it's my least favorite subject at this point in time. Honestly my biggest miff about English is that it's so subjective. I am definitely the type who likes right and wrong answers, not answers in the middle, which is why English just doesn't work out for me. As for activities there is never a dull moment in my life. I participate in a bunch of clubs and swim for my school. In between all of that I teach piano, take piano lessons, and of course read!!

How long have you loved the feeling of a book in your hand? What is the first book you remember loving?

I have loved that bookish feeling for as long as I can remember. My mom tells me that she's read to me from the day I was born and I have always loved it. I even remember (with the aid of my parents' stories!) being two and having the chicken pox, but still adamently protesting that I wanted to go to the library!! See I was 2 and sick and was still determined to read as many books as possible! The first book that I really remember loving is Good Night Moon. I think my mom had to have read that book to me at least twice a night if not more. I was enthralled with the story. I also remember loving the Erneste and Celestine books as well as Richard Scary. Now I have so many favorite books (House of Dance is totally in one of the top spots!!) that it's hard to even list them all. At one point I had a designted shelf on my bookcase just for favorite books, but now it seems I have too many favorites and they are now just scattered amongst my other books!

Can reading really change a life? Has it changed yours?

Reading can definitely change a life. It can take you on an adventure to another world or teach you a new way of life. It can open your eyes to new things and help you relive others. It is truly amazing and I cannot even begin to imagine what my life would be like without reading and books. Reading has definitely changed my life. Through reading I have learned about faraway places and places close to home. I have learned what it would be like to be rich and famous and what it would be like to live with nothing. I've even found within the last couple of months that even TV can't catch my attention like reading can. There is just so much more you can imagine when you read, unlike TV where it's imagined for you.

What makes a book outstanding in your eyes? Are there books you begin but cannot finish, or does every book intrigue you at some level?

For a book to be outstanding it has to capture me and whisk me away to a new place. The characters have to feel real and they have to show me their story. I also love it when the author is able to pull emotions out of me so that I'm not just reading the book with a straight face. Many books make me laugh, but there are few that make me cry. Those that make me cry I will always remember because if they made me cry (which takes a lot) means that the book was truly amazing. I also love a book that will make me think. I recently read The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson and I loved how it really made you contemplate what life could hold for us in the future. I always try to finish a book even if it's major sucking!! I think it is only fair to the author who has put their time and effort into creating the book, to finish the book. Hey I have come across some great books that I was so unhappy with at the beginning which turned out to be a really good.

What sort of post-high school career do you imagine for yourself?

I have the rest of my life pretty much planned out!! That's just the kind of person I am. Since I was five years I have always wanted to be some kind of doctor. At one point I wanted to be a vet, but then I realized I wanted to help people more. Now I know that I definitely want to be either a pediatric surgeon or a neonatologist (like Addison on Grey's Anatomy). I have always loved little kids and think it would be the neatest thing to be able to give them a second shot at life or just keep them strong. As for where I actually want to go to college I have no idea what so ever!! I think I have a list with about nine or ten schools on it including UNC Chapel Hill, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Duke, and so many others!! I honestly don't know where I'll end up as next year I'm going to the North Carolina School of Science and Math which will open up so many doors for me that who really knows what will happen in two years time! All I know is there will be school, lots and lots of school:)

If you were to write any kind of book, what would that book be?

Hmm.... There would definitely have to magic in the book. Don't get me wrong I love realistic fiction, but I have always loved, loved, loved anything that has to do with magic. I also love historical fiction so the book would definitely have to combine the two. I think combing the two would create a spectacular book -- granted I'd have to have the talent to actually write it! One question Beth.....if I ever write a book will you help me?!?!

Jack Gilbert (again)

2008-06-20T10:03:00.001-07:00

"If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world."

"A Brief for the Defense"
Jack Gilbert
REFUSING HEAVEN

? Yes.

2008-06-18T15:23:00.000-07:00

"The question that obsesses me at this moment of mortal peril is perverse in the extreme, and one that goes against all the strictures and nostrums of our time. I feel silly even thinking such a question, for it is evidently only the product of a greatly distressed mind, but I must put it into words.

"Is there life after youth?"

Richard Flanagan
Death of a River Guide

A Man Can Dream

2008-06-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

It's the foot I'm wondering about, the upright, steel-toed, silver one. Medicinal or nautical? Awkward or somehow comforting?

Because I understand how a man can lie by the inlet sea and dream. I understand how, behind his shades, he cannot imagine me, looking down imagining him, and the places that he takes that foot, when he dreams.

But, the foot?