Jen Doll Responds to the Read YA Controversy with Thoughts About Nuance—

and this is one of the many things I love about Jen.

Jen's whole piece, on Hairpin, is here.

Her final words are a sweet, right challenge:

So read, read Y.A., read adult literature, read blog posts, read magazines, read your box of Cheerios in the morning. Read all you can and want to read, acknowledging the easy and unchallenging and the difficult and complicated, and form your own opinions, trying to add a little room for nuance and understanding and openness in all that you do. That’s the best you can do as a reader, a writer, and a human.

And how honored am I to have Going Over included among works by Markus Zusak, Nina LaCour, Andrew Smith, Cammie McGovern, Laurie Halse Anderson, Sherman Alexie, Aaron Hartzler, E. Lockhart, and Matthew Quick on Jen's "10 Contemporary Y.A. Books That Made Me Think (and That I Loved)."

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Jan and Lana Dance Jive at 30th Street Station

I've written about Jan and Lana so often on this blog that I don't need to introduce them (do I?).  They are the dancing stars, the soon-to-be movie stars, the team that keeps me honest in a Norah Jones waltz, the instruction that burns but lasts.

Here they are, dancing at Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street Station.

Because that's how good they are.

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in which Matthew Quick's novel brings my ballroom dance friends to the silver screen

A few years ago, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto introduced me to Matthew Quick, a novelist whose The Silver Linings Playbook had recently been optioned for film.  Many books get optioned; far fewer films get made.  Far, far fewer films have director David Russell at the helm and Bradley Cooper, Julia Stiles, and Robert De Niro cast as leads.

The story is quirky, funny, and moving.  It also features a crazy dance contest, and since the movie was being filmed locally, local dancers were invited to audition as extras.

My friend and dance teacher, Jan Paulovich (DanceSport Academy), and his partner, Lana Roosiparg, were among those who showed up for opportunity.  They had, they say, no expectations, were simply hoping to have some fun.  One month later, they were on the set with De Niro and others—not just dancing, but acting.  They had been told two days of filming would be required.  In the end, their dancing—and their charisma—changed David Russell's plans for the dance scene...and required five on-set days for Jan and Lana.

A few weeks ago, Jan asked me to write this story for a local ballroom dance publication.  It gave me the excuse to get back in touch with Matthew Quick and to ask him how it has felt to watch his novel make its way to the silver screen (it will debut this November).  Here's an extract from the story:

Raised in a blue-collar neighborhood by stern—and conservative—Protestant parents, dance was never part of (Matthew's) world; indeed, he said in a recent interview, “the thought of any man or boy dancing—especially someone I knew personally—was absurd.”

Thus, when Matthew first conjured the dance scene in his novel about a man just released from a mental hospital and desperate to reconcile with his ex-wife, he was, in his words “going for laughs.”

“Pat (Peoples) dancing was my fish out of water,” says Matthew. “Lots of jokes were instantly born. The outfits Pat and Tiffany wear during the dance competition and Tiffany's choreography are equally bizarre and over-the-top. Hilarious, in a sad, quirky, and hopefully endearing way. But as I wrote the scenes I began to see that dancing was not only healthy for Pat but therapeutic. In many ways, the ridiculous way Pat felt while dancing—expressing his emotions through movement—was akin to the way I felt when I started writing seriously and telling people that I was a fiction writer. Mostly I imagined Pat and Tiffany as emotionally vulnerable--maybe for the first time--while dancing. Art saves!”

Dance, too, I keep learning, saves. And life is full of crazy, lovely collisions.

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Things don't always fall apart

As anyone who might have read my second memoir, Into the Tangle of Friendship, knows, I don't have the best relationship with my mouth.  Just about anything that could be wrong with it is (I'm talking about structure and soft tissue now, and not verbal emanations; there's much wrong with that as well).  And so, through the years, I've had small surgeries and big ones, I've had jaw bones bolted to jaw bones, I've had the mouth wired shut for weeks on end, I've had a root canal gone desperately wrong (a shattered tooth, a pain killer to which I had a nightmarish reaction), I've had gum grafts that have made me feel and look like a flying UFO. 

It's just my mouth.  It is not life-threatening.  People face far far worse things every single day—many people.  But still.  I woke up this morning and didn't feel like going to the periodontist who is perfectly nice and tres talented (his nephew is also high up on Obama's team, so he tells good stories).  I didn't feel like it.

Here's what happened to make the day sweet anyway.  My son woke up and said the kindest thing.  My husband offered to make me a late-night brown cow (something to savor while watching So You Think You Can Dance).  Matthew Quick sent along these generous words about The Heart is not a Size.  I heard from friends (I love my friends).  And.... the yellow finch that banged on my office window for months following the passing of my mother, the finch that launched Nothing but Ghosts (or its near cousin), started banging again the very instant I arrived following this morning of surgery and stitches.  It had not banged for months and months and months.  But here it was again—another message, I suspect, from my mother.

Life is good.

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Simply from Scratch/Alicia Bessette: Reflections

It was raining the day I took this photograph—raining, and yet the sun was dialed in full blast behind the tears.  That's exactly the way I felt while reading Alicia Bessette's debut novel Simply from Scratch, due out in August from Dutton.  For this is a story about losses, but it is also (very much) a story about gains.  Zell has lost her husband to a terrible accident.  Into the house next has moved a little girl, Ingrid, who never has known her mother.  A quest to win the Desserts that Warm the Soul baking contest—$20,000 and an appearance on the Polly Pinch show to the winning entry—brings these two lovable characters together, and, in the process, awakens a new generation of hope for Zell, Ingrid, and the many others who complicate, in the best possible way, this story of renewal and possibility.

Bessette, who is married to the novelist Matthew Quick, shares with him a love for dogs, a faith in community, and a passion for intergenerational tales, not to mention a terrific ear for dialogue and an enviable knack for moving a story of many pieces seamlessly forward.  Momentum builds, and it builds rightly, leaving plenty of room for the tenderness that binds these knowable souls together. 

Simply from Scratch will, I'm certain, win over many readerly hearts when it launches (so why not pre-order?).  We believe in the characters that Bessette has fashioned.  We root for them, old-friends-style.

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Sorta Like a Rock Star/Matthew Quick: Reflections

On page 328 of Sorta Like a Rock Star, Matthew Quick's joyful-noise-making novel, Joan of Old, a woman just then dying, quotes some Nietzsche to our heroine, Amber Appleton.  It goes like this:

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Damn, I thought, when I got to that page.  I just knew Matthew Quick had dancing in him.  For Quick's Amber Appleton might, when we meet her, be residing in Hello Yellow (code name for the school bus that Amber's down-on-her-luck mother drives) but Amber's determined not to let her domicile get her down.  She's got too much spunking hope in all things living, for starters, and she's got too much faith in her own rocking self.  That is true, at least, until the worst possible thing actually happens, and Amber has to find her way back to believing in goodness, and in getting good things done.

Fast paced and light on its feet, SLARS (as Quick and his fans refer to the book) introduces readers to a town in which nobody and nothing is perfect, except for the quality of caring.  He jazzes the page with quick strokes and bright humor, slipstreaming haikus, a cast of quirks, and a well-spring of only temporarily daunted heart.  No wonder Quick and his wife, writer Alicia Bessette, are on a quest for kindness.  Because, judging from the powerful Sorta Like a Rock Star, kindness fuels Quick's world.

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Quest for Kindness

Matthew Quick (Sort a Like a Rock Star) and Alicia Bessette (Simply from Scratch) are writers—married to each other, successful with their respective arts, and committed to finding kindness in our world.  Not long ago, they invited me to write an essay for their continuing kindness series, and I was happy to sit down and remember just how this blog has introduced me to so many of you and opened the door to one particular San Francisco moment.  The story—and the delightful Matthew and Alicia—can be found here.

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