Genie Haddock Kunkle, heroine of Elisabeth Dahl’s Genie Wishes, becomes class blogger in fifth grade, and she has a lot to write about. Her best friend, Sarah, has become friends with the new girl, Blair, a classic mean girl. But Genie spends less time mourning the downgrading of her friendship with Sarah and her social standing than I would expect most tween girls to do (based on my own experiences of tweenhood, which was just called “preteen” back then). Genie blogs about class parties, special projects, and events, though most of the book is standard narrative, not blog entries. There are a lot of different family configurations and races represented; Genie lives with her father, brother, and grandmother since her mother died in a car accident when she was four, a subplot in the book and her life that’s mentioned but doesn’t dominate. It’s nice that it’s set in Baltimore, where the author was born and raised and now lives, and Genie’s school is based on her and her son’s school, the same place. Elisabeth Dahl address issues of puberty, a word she points out that kids hate, with a deft hand: Genie starts shaving her legs, using deodorant, and wearing a bra over the course of the book, but Dahl doesn’t linger on those events, as a kid would hope an adult wouldn’t. Overall, it’s a nice book for tweens; my own liked it, as evidenced by her review:

Genie Haddock Kunkle has been friends with Sarah White her whole life. Now in fifth grade everything changes. Genie was elected class blogger, Blair, the new girl, went to camp with Sarah and is pulling the friendship of Sarah and Genie farther and farther apart.  I like that the book is about fifth grade and that I know a lot about the setting.  Genie gets new friends but she’s still nervous about Blair until Genie asks her about “QT yo!” the blog that Hassan’s been doing because he lost the election to be class blogger. Hassan quit so now Blair’s taken over. Blair is really mean and snobby on her blog and in real life, but she doesn’t want Sarah to know that she’s mean so she asks Genie not to tell Sarah. My favorite characters were Genie and Sophie because they were really nice.  My least favorite character was Blair because she was really snobby.

There’s a whole economic subplot I think would go over kids’ heads but which I found very interesting. Genie’s family can afford her fancy private school because her grandmother works there. Her family belongs to a plain local swim club, while “Sarah and a lot of other classmates belonged to fancier clubs, the kind built around old mansions.” For Spring Break, Genie says, “some people would fly off with their families to beaches, ski resorts, or European cities. Often, they came back tanned. My family usually took a couple of day trips—to Washington, DC, or colonial Williamsburg—but I was more likely to come back with a souvenir visor than a tan.” Blair also has wealthy parents. Along with a dawning awareness of self and body and social standing, comes a slow awareness of economic standing and differences. While I’d love to think it all wouldn’t matter to the kids, it shows itself in things they have, such as smart phones, and Dahl captures this undertalked about part of coming of age in the same subtle but clear way she mentions bras and deodorant that shows it does matter just like those more discussed and obvious parts of growing up do. Are Baltimore authors somehow better at writing well-balanced books about middle school than authors? With a data set of two, Elissa Brent Weissman, interview here, and now Elisabeth Dahl, it’s hard to tell, but both authors present level-headed main characters dealing with the ups and downs of the worst years of school with humor and a calm attitude.

Olu Butterfly, sharp, creative, and witty poet and performer, will be leading Ladies Verse 13: Reciprocity at the Creative Alliance Saturday night. Butterfly has a great unique performance style, visible here in “The Meanest Poem Ever,” written in response to a man at a bar who insulted her starts with a dry “You ugly” and ends with “The universe is only expanding to get away from you.” It’s followed by a love poem, a standard meet, love, and leave plot, with outstanding and creative lines including: “Am I really an Atari trying to compete with a Playstation?” In another video, she responds to viewing the sculpture “The Ego and the Id” by Franz West: “I am in a co-dependent relationship with myself.” A picture of the artwork is included in an inset while Butterfly confidently proclaims: “I live in the projects and like Grey Poupon./My attitude sets off metal detectors and fire alarms.” She leads the Citywide Youth Poetry Team, which I didn’t know existed, here reading at the opening of the Contemporary Wing at the BMA.

CityLit Project‘s line up this year at the festival features George Saunders, Stanley Plumly, Jamal Joseph, workshops on writing for young people and on how to become a bestselling digital and print self-published author, plus 510 Readings and the New Mercury reading series, all at the Enoch Pratt Central Branch. I aim to be there all day and at the Creative Alliance all night.

Jen Michalski‘s first new book of 2013, Could You Be With Her Now (Dzanc Books) (as Adam Robinson points out at HTML Giant, not many writers can pull off the three books in one year hat trick) is composed of two haunting novellas, one centering around a mentally challenged boy and one around a stern and difficult old woman who’s falling in love again after years alone.

“I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” is reminiscent of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, but in a far darker vein. I’ve written here before about road trips and what they mean, especially for those who can’t direct their own journey. But what does a road trip mean for someone who doesn’t even know he’s going to take a journey? In this case, Jimmy, the mentally challenged boy at the story’s center, also learns and grows, a motif in literary road trips, but in a negative, downward way, as his horizons are contracting, and he isn’t even aware of it. There’s sexual growth, as in other road trips, but not of the beautiful kind. Jimmy has limited capacity for learning, and the new things he’s exposed to on the road and during a long walk he takes as a preamble to his wider travels shrink his life. At the end, we’re left with the question of what will or should become of him. For his own safety and that of others, he can’t live in the wider world of cars and stores and people, but his happy-go-lucky outlook would be destroyed in a prison. What should be done for him? What should be done for us?

Sandra Holiday, the main character of “May-September,” an accomplished, cultured woman, a talented pianist, “comfortably rich” wife and mother, has lived a good life, though without much love given or received. She didn’t love her husband, and she never had time for her daughter, Andrea, and withheld affection as her mother, as her mother did to her: “She hugged me at my wedding, and when I had Andrea. That was it.” Then Sandra meets Alice, whom the older woman hires to help create a blog about her life for her grandchildren. Alice, a twentysomething lesbian, is out to the world both in sexual orientation and in the sense of being open to new experiences. Alice and Sandra’s attraction to each other makes for an unusual and beautiful love story. Jen Michalski doesn’t shy away from the physical aspect, handling the sex scenes with clarity and honesty. She’s as descriptive about what an old woman’s body looks like and the beauty that can be found there as other writers are about those of young people. Alice, a writer, finds material in Sandra’s life and old photos, and Sandra finds Alice inspiring enough to go out in the world she had long since shrunk away from. Stewart O’Nan has written understandingly and movingly about the life of an older woman in Emily, Alone: A Novel. “May-September” adds to the admittedly limited oeuvre with the inspiring story of a woman who can still come alive through love.

Epublishing sensation Hugh Howey, the author of Wool and most of its many sequels and prequels (he also encourages fan fiction), says, “I love Baltimore!” He picked up a small sailboat in the Inner Harbor in 1996 and sailed it down to Charleston, then headed farther south: “I hopped around the islands for a while, went through two hurricanes, and spent the last of my cruising funds re-stepping my mast. It was time to head back to the States, where I began a career as a yacht captain.” He continued to hop from job to job, including one as a bookseller, during which he wrote the short story “Wool,” about a dystopian future, in which human beings live in a gigantic silo underground, the world above having been destroyed. Every so often one of them is sent out to clean the lenses that allow the silo-dwellers to look out on the ruined world above. It’s a deadly punishment, but life in the silo is highly controlled and the desire to leave can be overwhelming. I don’t read much science fiction, but this 99 cent ebook hooked me. It hooked a lot of other people, too, and Howey went on to write many more stories centered on the people of the silo. As of two days ago, the first part of the series is available in an omnibus paperback edition. The story of the print edition’s coming into being is almost as compelling as the novel itself; Howey tells it all at The Huffington Post. His knack with publicity, building his fan base person by person, and interacting with his readers, is also a big part of the story discussed by Tammy Oler in Slate.  He’s the 23rd most popular author at Amazon right now, just after Stephenie Meyer. The Washington Post has a review by Keith Donohue. Baltimore provided Hugh Howey with a journey 17 years ago; now he’s offering us one back.

I just bought a brace of Hometown Mugs from HonTown in Hampden at 36th and Roland Avenue. This lovely mug by Mary Pat Andrea features a line drawing of eight row houses, including those having belonged to F. Scott Fitzgerald, H. L. Mencken, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lizette Woodworth Reese. There’s also a tote bag featuring two of the houses. I saw this sometime last spring and didn’t buy it then, then waited months for it to be back in stock.

She also designed Hometown Mugs for Dubuque, Iowa, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, currently for sale on ebay.

Ed and Ann Berlin, the new owners of The Ivy Bookshop, have created a new mug to go with their new website and other general improvements on what was already a great store.

Finally, there’s the hard-to-get CityLit Project mug, which might be for sale this year at the 10th CityLit Festival, April 13 at the Central Library.

For the second year in a row, I’ll be hosting a book discussion at The American Craft Council Show when it comes to Baltimore, February 22-24, at the Convention Center at One West Pratt Street. We’ll be talking about Christopher Benfey’s Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival, a memoir of his family and pottery. His mother grew up in the North Carolina mountains, where natural clay deposits make a perfect home for communities of potters and craftspeople. One such community was the arts school Black Mountain College, where John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, the sculptor Ruth Asawa, and the potter Karen Karnes studied and taught. During its heyday, Black Mountain College was run by the author’s aunt and uncle, Josef and Anni Albers, from Germany, who later brought over his father’s family, refugees from the Nazis. We’ll be talking about the importance of craft and community, how craft can create community, such as Baltimore Clayworks and The Potters Guild. We’ll also be talking about the role of adversity in the creative process. Is it necessary? Are we better off without it? I’ve posted these questions and more at the American Craft Council site. There are also some favorite passages here and here. The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune loved the book. 

Spoon River Anthology

The young adult book Looking for Me by Betsy Rosenthal (Houghton Mifflin, April 2012) is a series of interlinked poems about Edith Paul, one of the only Jewish kids in her neighborhood, growing up with her eleven brothers and sisters in a row house in Baltimore. Sometimes it’s a fun life with all twelve of them throwing gobs of peanut butter at the new wallpaper and buying penny candy from the grocer’s across the street that they then share while playing games and singing songs. Their cousins who “must be rich because Theodora wears Mary Jane shoes and party dresses all the time” “always want to stay with us. It’s a mystery to me.” But often she wonders who she is in her big family, as she, number four, changes diapers, wipes noses, follows the orders of her older sisters, and shares a bed with two of them, “head-to-foot.” Her grandmother Bubby Etta provides extra love “since it’s hard to get hugs in my house” and attention:

I’d talk for a while
because good listeners
are hard to find in my house.

Blanca loved the book, and it provides a wonderful introduction to poetry’s ability to tell stories:

This book is about Edith in a really big family with 5 sisters and 6 brothers, where one day she writes a poem but she leaves out herself. She doesn’t know who she is among all those people. Then one day Melvin, her favorite little, brother dies.  That’s when she sees who she is in the family, “the good little mother’’.  She helps with all the little children. Her teacher noticed that she was really smart. Miss Connelly encouraged Edith to go to college. I really like it because it’s a story made out of poems, I’m sad because the little brother Melvin died.

Like the teacher in Love That Dog, by Sharon Creech, another collection of linked poems, Miss Connelly uses verse to help her students learn about themselves.

Edith’s poems also cover her family’s history, a common Jewish immigrant story. Her Bubby Etta had to leave her baby, who later became Edith’s mother, in Russia when she came to America because she didn’t have money for a ticket, and she didn’t manage to raise the money for thirteen years. A new acquaintance searches for the horns in Edith’s curly hair, and a classmate accuses her of killing Jesus. She’s glad her uncle changed the family name to Paul from Polansky “because nothing/rhymes with Polansky.” Each poem highlights a small part of who Edith is, and taken all together, they offer a heartwarming portrait of a young girl growing up. Looking for Me is set during the Depression, but the search for self is a timeless quest. 

Few writers expect to become bestselling authors. Most just want to be read. Elissa Brent Weissman has had the kind of success many dream of: she’s a steadily working writer publishing books that sell with major houses and deals to keep doing so for the next few years. So far she’s written The Trouble With Mark Hopper, Standing for Socks, and Nerd Camp, three books for middle grade readers about quirky, intelligent kids interested in traditionally nerdy pursuits but very clearly also socially adept enough to have friends. Weissman graduated from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 2005 and still lives and writes in Baltimore. We talked about her career and goals and all a publishing house can still do for an author even in these days of the increasing popularity of self-publishing. Some parents talk a lot about balancing career and children and how to do it, and they write and talk about very little else. Weissman just does it.

What has your career path been so far?
I’ve known that I wanted to be a writer, and specifically a writer for children, since I was in third grade, and I’ve been extremely fortunate to have been able to follow that path directly.  I graduated from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 2005, then went and got a Masters in the study of Children’s Literature at a university in London.  Shortly after I returned from the UK, I sold my first novel (which I’d written my senior year in a class at Hopkins).  From there, I’ve just tried to keep the writing momentum going.  It’s been a blast.

You’ve published one novel with one publisher (Dutton) and two with another (Atheneum). How has it been working in the traditional publishing framework these days? Do you have any thoughts of self-publishing in the future?
I actually published my first book with Atheneum (at Simon & Schuster), my second with Dutton (Penguin), and then went back to Atheneum for my third!  I have two more coming out with Atheneum in 2013 and 2014, and I hope to be able to stay with them beyond that.
There are lots of interesting and in some ways exciting changes going on in publishing these days, and who knows how it’ll all pan out. While I’ve absolutely had my frustrations working within the traditional publishing model, I don’t foresee myself self-publishing anytime soon. What many people don’t realize is that publishing companies do so much more than print (or digitize) books. Going through the revision process with my editors has helped my craft immensely; some books have needed major rethinking, others just refining, but they’ve all benefitted from an editor’s expert insight.  Then there’s design (cover and interior), publicity, marketing, sales, and distribution to take into account. Even if I need to do a lot of the publicity and marketing myself, self-published authors need to do it all themselves, and without (currently, at least) being able to have their books on shelves in bookstores around the country. For children’s books, a big portion of sales are to schools and libraries, markets that would be virtually impossible to reach as a self-published author, not to mention venues like Scholastic book club, which are difficult enough to crack as a traditionally published author. If the rise of self-publishing is inspiring more people to write, I think that’s wonderful. As an author, I think it would be an extremely challenging path. And as a reader—and someone who’s spent a few summers as an intern reading through slush pile submissions—I believe the traditional “gatekeepers” serve a crucial purpose in the literary landscape.

What are your goals as a writer?
I guess my main goals are to keep writing (not always easy, especially now that I have a kid!) and to keep getting better.  I’d hope that every book I write is better than the last, and I want to keep challenging myself to experiment with what and how I write.  Having a child has done that in some ways; I wrote and published a personal essay about being a mom [at The New York Times Motherlode blog], which was new ground for me, and I’ve tried my hand at writing a picture book.

It’d also be really great if my books inspire kids to read or write themselves.  It was the authors I read as a kid who got me fired up about literature, and whenever I visit a school or get an email from a fan, it reminds me that I’ve really got one of the best jobs in the world.

So far you’ve written three stand-alone novels. Many successful YA franchises are built on series. Do you have any plans along those lines?  How about interlocking characters? It would be interesting to read a novel from Zack’s, the cool kid and new stepbrother in Nerd Camp, perspective.
It’s funny that you mention series and Nerd Camp, because I’m actually working now on a Nerd Camp sequel.  I didn’t intend it to be a series, and I don’t know if it’ll go beyond book two, but it’s been fun revisiting the same characters in a new situation.  I’m glad you’d like to hear more from Zack, too.  He plays a bigger role in this book, and much of the story is from his perspective.  Look for it summer 2014! : )

Your novels aren’t typical YA fare in that you tend to write about quirky, intelligent, but largely socially well-adjusted junior high kids. So many other books divide them into popular or unpopular categories, with very little in-between. What do you think of other young adult writers and their works? Are there authors you particularly admire or would compare yourself to?
Thank you!  When writing for kids, I’m tapping into my own experience of childhood, and you could probably say I was a “quirky, intelligent, but largely socially well-adjusted” kid.  It’s true that lots of books lump kids into groups, and other media does as well (perhaps to a more extreme extent in TV and film), but I don’t know that that necessarily reflects reality.  While some kids are effortlessly popular and others are hopelessly bullied, most are somewhere in the middle.  That’s a great place to be.

Young adult books (which are technically for ages 12 and up, though younger kids do read them) are, by nature, more driven by adolescent anxieties than books for middle grade readers (8- to 12-year olds), which is what I write.  I love children’s and young adult books and read lots of them, but I’m particularly admiring of writers like Louis Sachar and Lois Lowry, who do what I hope I do: write stories with fun, fairly wholesome content for smart, curious readers.

Did you go to nerd camp? Would you say it had a big influence on your life?
I didn’t go to nerd camp, but I wish I had!  Having taught at Johns Hopkins CTY, I know now that I would have loved going.  I enjoyed [day camp] and remember it fondly, but my experience was nothing compared to that of friends who went to sleepaway camps. Every one of those people still talks about camp as if it were magical, and many maintain friendships with camp friends, visit camp every summer, or even find ways to work there as adults.  I can definitely see how spending summers without any parents would be life-changing.  That’s what makes it the perfect setup for a children’s book.

Do you track your sales rankings on Amazon?
I am totally guilty of stalking my books online. I’m not so hooked on Amazon sales rank, but that’s mostly because Simon & Schuster allows me to see my trade sales figures weekly, and that I do track. Only royalties statements reflect a true sales picture, though, especially since so many children’s book sales go to schools and libraries. And royalties statements, unfortunately, come very infrequently.

Do you have a day job? When do you write?
I teach classes at a number of colleges in Baltimore, plus adult ed classes and classes for kids.  I also co-founded and co-run a really great program called Write Brain Kids, which keeps me busy too.  But my main day job is being a mom; I have a toddler daughter and am expecting another baby in December.  I’ve got a nanny a few afternoons a week so that I can write.  It’s a lot to balance sometimes, but I feel very lucky to be balancing all things I love.

Road trips in literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, largely stand for self-discovery and wider horizons. But what does a road trip mean for a participant who can’t drive himself? Or one who’s too young to make adult decisions? Is a road trip still an odyssey if the explorers have to trap unwitting caregivers into taking them out into the wider world? The Borrower, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking), and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, by Jonathan Evison (Algonquin), center around journeys with travelers who can’t propel themselves.

“Life’s a fucking class A bitch” says a character in Evison’s The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. Having lost everything of value—his wife, his house, his children—Benjamin Benjamin has become a professional caregiver. He has no one else left to care for but paying clients. His charge, Trevor, has a type of muscular dystrophy, leaving him without control of his limbs but with a strong, wide-ranging mind. Ben helps Trevor with the daily needs of self-care: bathroom, cleaning, turning over, getting in and out of his wheelchair. There isn’t much Trev can do. They have regular meals at a diner and watch the Weather Channel a lot. One of their activities to pass the time is researching obscure and strange tourist attractions around North America—double decker outhouses, Muffler Men, dead celebrity parts (“Einstein’s brain, Napoleon’s johnson”)—and marking them on a giant map. They harbor vague hopes of seeing some of these oddities but know the chances of Trev leaving his mother’s house for that long aren’t likely. But when she needs to travel for her work with horses, Benjamin manages to talk Trev’s mom into letting him take her son on a week-long road trip from Seattle to see Trev’s estranged father in Salt Lake City. All details, all stops, all medical needs are carefully planned for. From the first roadside rest stop, nothing goes as planned. There’s romance, adventure, and new life, and the literal high point is a view of Yellowstone’s Old Faithful geyser. It’s a classic road trip with wonderfully original participants.

In Rebecca Makkai’s The Borrower, Lucy Hull is a children’s librarian in a small town in Missouri, where she helps kids find the books they want and leads the chapter book storytime on Friday afternoons. Ian Drake, one of her young patrons, is a voracious reader, but his fundamentalist Christian parents, particularly his mother, want to be sure he doesn’t read “Roald Dahl, Lois Lowry, Harry Potter, and similar authors” or books including witchcraft and wizardry, the Theory of Evolution, Weaponry, or Halloween. Ten-year-old Ian also has typically gay mannerisms, noted by teachers, and worse, his parents, who have started taking him to Pastor Bob’s classes “dedicated to the rehabilitation of sexually confused brothers and sisters in Christ.” Their youth group program works with children “whose parents suspected they were ‘headed down the wrong path.’” Hull is horrified, but there’s nothing she can do. In spite of her Russian revolutionary roots, she’s made herself into a stereotypical librarian, quiet and invisible. But when Ian runs away to the library, he hoodwinks Lucy into taking him on an journey to see revolutionaries around the northeastern United States, first to her parents in Chicago, then to see fellow Russians in Pittsburgh, and finally to Vermont to the graveyards of young soldiers from the American Revolution.  She doesn’t mean to kidnap him, but given the opportunity, she wants to prepare him for the personal upheaval she knows is ahead of him: coming out as a gay adult and living a happy life with whoever he wants to love.

Ben and Lucy, the caregivers, needs their own healing journeys, too. Benjamin is fleeing terrible grief, and Lucy needs to establish her own life. The backroads of America provide a unique canvas. There’s a whole world out there. The road trips launch Lucy and Ben out of the sad ruts they’ve settled in and into the next chapters in their lives. It’s crucial to shake things up every once in a while, even for the most settled among us, and especially for those who can’t shake it up by themselves.

Rebecca Makkai started The Borrower, her first novel, on a couch in Baltimore, where she was visiting her boyfriend, now husband of ten plus years. They were married at the Peabody, and when I wrote to ask her about her Baltimore connection after reading about it at bookslut.com, she waxed lyrical about The Helmand. Now she lives in Chicago, where she’s raising two daughters and writing her next book. 

Jonathan Evison lives on an island off the coast of Washington State, but he’ll be here for a visit for The Baltimore Book Festival at the end of September, when I’ll be talking to him at about The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and his sweeping historical novel West of Here, Saturday, September 29, at 1pm at the Bank of America Literary Salon.