Lessons in Publishing Longevity: Undercover Sells to the Dutch House, Callenbach

Yesterday, it became official: Callenbach, the glorious Dutch publishing house that released a gorgeous, translated Small Damages two years ago, has purchased Dutch translation rights to Undercover, the first young adult novel I ever wrote and published.

Like Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, Undercover first appeared in 2007 and taught me several things about risks worth taking. Like The Heart Is Not a Size, Undercover is vaguely autobiographical—a Cyrano story of a teen who cannot see her own beauty and who relies on words to bridge her to the world. My Elisa writes poems. She has an English teacher who cares. She skates secretly on a frozen pond. She meets a boy named Theo. Her words, she soon discovers, have power. But so, perhaps, does she.

It is moving to think of vestiges of my own Radnor High and adolescence being transported to the Netherlands, under the auspices of a publishing house established in 1854. It is also telling, and hopeful—a sign of optimism for all of us—that books written years ago still live on, somehow. This idea about longevity is perhaps the lesson for me of this year, as Flow, seven years later, emerges as an affordable paperback, and as Undercover begins the process of finding a new audience in the Netherlands, as it has also found in China.

My thanks to Alpha Wong of HarperTeen for negotiating the agreement, and to Amy Rennert, my agent, for letting me know.

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Be Happy

Anna Lefler and I were having one of our freewheeling phone conversations when living emerged as the topic at hand. Lazy summers. Long meals. Deck sitting. Novel mapping. She wondered (out loud) if I'd ever read Barbara Holland's Endangered Pleasures. I confessed (a mumble) that I hadn't. Three days later (count 'em) Holland's book arrived at my door. I heard the box hit the stoop. I thought to myself, Oh no she didn't.

But she had.

Anna had also, this being an entirely separate matter and package altogether, sent along her Summer '09 hit parade CD (Anna knows music; Anna knows mood; I'm not giving away her medley secrets). So that there I was, trying to choose between sitting and reading, and standing and dancing, two things that cannot be done at once. I went for the dancing first (yes, I know you guessed that) and was joined for a spell by my son, who donned his shades and his best Hollister T for the invited-guests-only party.

(If I have not mentioned this before, our tiny house is surrounded by curtaining trees. What happens in this house stays in this house.)

In any case, I also made room for this lovely Endangered Pleasures, an older book with a timeless message. I leave you with this:

Indeed, pleasure may be almost as good for our health as broccoli; chemists tell us that happy people produce endorphins and enkephalins, brain chemicals that improve T-cell production and then enhance immunity to cancer, heart disease, and infections.

Let us then strive to be merry. Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending. Pleasure itself is endangered.

This late addition to the blog: I've posted over at HarperTeen on writing process. Pen or machine? I've lately gone retro.

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Undercover Poetry Contest Results, An Interview, and Some Guest Blogging

In Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, my memoir about the years I spent learning from a group of young writers, I made it clear that I do not believe in writing as a competitive sport.

I felt, therefore, as if I'd stepped onto hypocritical grounds these past two days as I tried to sort through the many glorious submissions to the Undercover poetry contest. The bloggers who visit here and the bloggers whom I visit are putting art out into the world. Thoughtful, provocative, introspective, original poems and prose that make me stop, over and again. How could I ever choose a slate of bests?

In the end, I narrowed the list of submissions into two semi-finalist slates—one for authors 21 and under, and one for all the others. Jill Santopolo, senior editor at HarperTeen, then spent part of her Monday morning narrowing the field even more. "This will be hard," she said, after seeing the work, but within a few hours she'd made her choices, saying: "What fun to spend the morning reading poetry! In all that I chose, I felt the universality of the experiences written about—I instantly connected with the poem and the narrator and the emotions evoked."

The winners of the 21 and under series are Cuileann, "My Letter to My Astronaut Sister" and The Curly Q, "Self-Contradiction." Runners up in this series are Erin ("Standing") and Maya ("Napwrimo-25"). Cuileann and Q will both receive signed Undercover paperbacks. Erin and Maya will receive (in two months, when they are available) galleys of my fourth YA novel, The Heart is Not a Size, due out next March. Please leave your email addresses in the comments box of this blog so that we can correspond and I can get your snail mail.

The winner of the second category is Susan for her poem that begins, "Searching for the boy." Susan, I'd love to have your email address as well.

Thanks to all of you who took the time to share with me your best work. There wasn't a poem in the bunch that did not move me. I have promised to write a poem with some of your best lines. Look for that in a coming post.

Finally, the writer Sherrie Petersen kindly interviewed me on her always interesting blog. She asked great questions, and I encourage you to take a look. Also today, on the HarperTeen site, I am guest blogging about beginnings. Finally, on David Tabler's lovely Appalachian History blog, I am writing about Horace Kephart's personal legacy, sharing photographs that I have not previously posted.

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Forging a Truce with Beauty

I've posted this video log on the HarperTeen MySpace page today and (because these take me an embarrassingly long time to produce), I post it here as well. The headlines have been difficult lately. Losses are mounting. In this posting I'm talking about why books that matter matter especially so in times like these and how (despite the fact I've yet to write a book that meets my own high expectations) I keep going about the quiet business of forging a truce with beauty.

PJ, the finch have come to the feeder outside my window!

(there's glory in that)

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Nothing but Ghosts/Forthcoming/HarperTeen

Today is Laura Geringer's last day at Harper, and so I'm posting this, the first paragraph of our final book together, in honor of a memorable collaboration.

Nothing but Ghosts will be released next June.

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Mystery Making

Yesterday Laura Geringer, my wise HarperCollins editor, sent along her editing notes for Nothing But Ghosts, the book that will come off the presses a year or so from now. Nothing But Ghosts is a mystery and a romance—a story in which an unresolved riddle concerning a reclusive heiress enables a high school senior to come to terms with the loss of her mother, and the lonesomeness of her father. It's my first mystery, the riddle I gave myself to solve, for I have come to think, after all these years, that the only way to make your next book your best book is to endlessly move yourself out of your comfort zone—to make every story feel as if it is the first story you've tried to tell.

There's an element of the mystery that isn't working quite yet—I suspected as much when I sent the book in, and now Laura has confirmed it. I've placed the wrong things inside one of seven boxes. I have exactly 30 days to get this right.

If you sense a tremble in my corner of the world, you'll know why for. If you see some just slightly bedraggled writer standing still and staring into a complex sky, then you'll know that's me.

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Editorial Good Luck

I've been lucky, when it comes to editors. Alane Mason of WW Norton dug my first manuscript out of a slush pile and called on my birthday to say that she thought she could gain her colleagues' support for the book; she did, she edited wisely, she became, over the course of two additional memoirs, a reliably intelligent provocateur and friend. I respect Alane—the books she's chosen to take on, the book she herself translated (CONVERSATIONS IN SICILY, published by New Directions), and her tremendous work as the founding editor of Words Without Borders, for which she has edited anthologies of writing from around the globe. From Alane I learned about structure. I learned how to look over my own shoulder, to opt for substance over flourish, to not allow my obsession with the sound of language to overwhelm the stories I tell.

Lately, I've been working with this Vegas Fab (as my friend Lori used to say) team at HarperTeen—Laura Geringer (reflective, encouraging, compassionate, and herself an award-winning writer), Jill Santopolo (not just an incredibly responsive and thorough editor, but a kind and patient one), and Lindsey Alexander, who is as dear as her name suggests. From these three women I've learned when to delve deeper, and when to cut a line short; I've learned weave. I've also felt like I've been given a very real, second home in a tremulous world, and, really, who doesn't want that? And let me just say that I love the covers they've been putting on my books—love the fact that they have cared so much about getting every last detail right.

Jill has her own YA book due out next summer (ALEC FLINT, SUPER SLEUTH: THE NINA, THE PINTA, AND THE VANISHING TREASURE) and I'm basically standing here first in line to read it. Her web site is now up, in the meantime, complete with Rebus Riots to solve. I hope you'll check it out. http://www.jillsantopolo.com/

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