Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I have just returned from a three-day Library of Michigan conference with nearly ninety other librarians from all over the state. I now know that I have made the right decision to take on the position of Young Adult Librarian for the Three Rivers Public Library.

Not only was the conference well-organized, informative, and inspiring, I was reinforced in my belief that libraries occupy a critical role in education, public policy, and the ongoing struggle to define democracy as a viable system for equalizing access to resources and opportunities for everyone.

Equal. Access. Resources. Opportunities. These are, to me, the key components of liveable communities. They are the underpinning of a dynamic education system. They are the core concepts of how we define ourselves as Americans.

We live in a society that is divided by partisanship and alienated from values. Some of the inability to find common ground politically and socially is a result of complicated times, assaults of various kinds from many different directions. Simply, people behave badly when they perceive of themselves as being threatened. Yet, the more protective we become of ‘territory� (whether it be physical, emotional, or intellectual,) the more divided society will become, the more intransigent our problems will feel, and the more entrenched we will be in failing systems, antiquated solutions.

We speak to the potential of educating youth for leadership and creative innovation and then do everything possible to undermine that goal. Our view of the future and the opportunities it represents is clouded by defensiveness and ‘more of the same� strategies. Our choices are limited by a product mentality � these inputs, those outcomes � and gravely threatened by a fear of ‘governing� while ignoring the real dictators: corporate domination of our economy and communities.

Libraries represent a nearly ideal manifestation of ‘government.� Right in the name is the word ‘public� which means “of, relating to, or being in the service of the community or nation.� Here we are back to those values of service � equality, access to resources, opportunities. I can’t think of anything to which I could feel any more committed.

It’s that time again � or maybe even a little past time � to offer my list of the best fiction of 2012. I’m sure I’ve missed some great ones but these are the novels I read, enjoyed, and can strongly recommend. Looking forward to a great reading year in 2013!

Carry the One by Carol Anshaw
I'm not sure how I could have missed this author before. Carol Anshaw achieves a perfect narrative rhythm, magnetic images and characters so raw and vulnerable that I can almost feel the wounds on my own skin. While the premise of this book (a car accident that kills a little girl) doesn't seem especially mind-blowing, the literary results are. Excellent.

Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron
Chosen for Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize (for socially relevant fiction,) Naomi Benaron’s Running the Rift makes the political personal as the best of well-written fiction can do. The story is told from the perspective of Rwandan teenager jean Patrick, a young man who wants nothing more than to represent his country as a runner in the Olympics. But what country? Jean Patrick is Tutsi and that ethnic label not only makes his dream particularly difficult to achieve but actually puts his life in danger. Even with losses too great to imagine, Jean Patrick never loses his determination to live, to love, and to capture some hope for the future � for his beautiful broken country and for himself.

The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau
The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau just won’t go away. This is one of those books in which story and prose combine in such subtle and profound ways that it’s almost as if the characters have become a part of the reader’s bloodstream. Jonas is unforgettable � a victim of war who represents nothing other than the intensity of human vulnerability � as are all the good people around Jonas who try but will never understand the ways his experiences have shaped him or be able to help him decide what he has to do about it. Jonas is someone we need to pay attention to if we are ever going to gain a true sense of the unbearable and unacceptable costs of war.

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
It feels almost arrogant to attempt a ‘review� of Junot Diaz’s new collection of short stories This Is How You Lose Her. Diaz writes from a place few of us even know exists within ourselves, manages to deftly capture culture with story while exposing something deeply personal. It is almost as if each shifting account of Yunior and his relationships with family and women is a separate strand of DNA holding essential information that, when put together, forms the most amazing yet intangibly familiar complexity. Yunior’s relationship with identity informs the largest questions of humanity through a focus on those minute strands of cellular being. Yes, this is, at it’s most basic, the simple story of how a boy becomes a man but, by setting this process in the context of a man’s relationship to women, Diaz has succeeding in revealing the giant footprints of social history.

When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man by Nick Dybek
A boy and the sea. A moral dilemma involving fathers and sons. A fishing town in economic peril. If you believe that everything that can be written about these topics has already assumed a place in literature, you haven't read Nick Dybek's When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man.
With 14-yr.-old Cal as the pivot point in a swirling tale of both personal and mythic tention, Dybek plunges the reader into the depths for which only a tiny town set on a peninsula jutting into the Pacific Ocean could possibly provide the literal and metaphorical setting. Writing with Hemingway-like precision, clarity, and beauty, Dybek grabs us by the heart with both character and plot and simply never lets go. Definitely one of the best books I've read this year.

The Round House by Louis Erdrich
With a wonderful thirteen-year-old narrator and the compelling spiritual elements she is so known for, Louise Erdrich fulfills all the expectations of her former books with the newest, The Round House. It is often said that an author must, in some ways, fall in love with her own character(s). Erdrich loves not only the characters she creates � and so do we � but also their history, their environment, the entire world from which they spring. While imparting the social and historical realities of the Native American experience, especially the broken shards of bigoted laws that prevent access to personal and tribal sovereignty, Erdrich also manages to tell a riveting tale of crime, revenge and redemption that resonates across all cultures.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars is an absolute standout in the YA heap if for no other reason than its head-on treatment of mortality and heroism from a real-lit perspective. With engaging characters, a riveting story, and subtle-yet-compelling wisdom, Green manages to pull the reader into his world � no matter how tragic and heart-wrenching � and make us want to stay there.

The Red House by Mark Haddon
The Red House by Mark Haddon is a most unusual and compelling book. While I’m tempted to describe the quickly alternating scenes as ‘snapshots,� that seems wholly inadequate to the depth and vibrancy he is able to achieve in the fewest number of sentences. These people � a family? a collection of individuals, a metaphor for generational breakdown? � are so vivid, so raw, so unique and yet so real as to be nearly painful. It’s the kind of pain you hope for every time you open a book and Haddon has delivered it beautifully.

In One Person by John Irving
Billy Dean/Abbott - or 'William' as he is known by his beloved Miss Frost - joins the distinguished cast of not only John Irving's most memorable characters but of literature as a whole. If you are the slightest bit uncomfortable with blasting away at assumed boundaries of sexual and gender orientation and practices, then this book is absolutely not for you. Or, maybe it's exactly the book for you. And if Billy is one for the classics, so is Irving's Vermont town, Billy's family, his friends, his lovers and the secrets they all carry in hopes of keeping their lives under control while the world as they know it crashes down around them.
Epic in scope, In One Person follows Billy from his both charmed and confusing adolescence in the 1950s through his adulthood in the present, covering the Vietnam era, the AIDS epidemic, right up to the appearance of actual LGBT support groups on high school and college campuses! You won't want to miss a minute.
A fantastic read.

(Okay, sorry. I’ve got to include this. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to give it a try. I find the young adult landscape a bit barren at times for contemporary literature and I know there are lots of readers out there who might not stumble upon this book without a little boost of encouragement. Forgive me for the shameless self-promotion.)

Getting Somewhere by Beth Neff
Sarah, Jenna, Lauren, and Cassie may look like ordinary girls, but they’re not. They’re delinquents whose lives collide when they’re sent to an experimental juvenile detention program on a farm in the middle of nowhere. As the girls face up to the crimes they committed, three of them will heal the wounds of their pasts and discover strengths they never dreamed they had. And one, driven by a deep secret of her own, will seek to destroy everything they’ve all worked so hard for.

Mudwoman by Joyce Carol Oates
There is almost nothing more exciting than finding a new Joyce Carol Oates book on the library shelves. Her newest, Mudwoman, shines with her usual brilliance on every page, captures a kind of personal and social essence that is rarely achieved in literature. I know the word ‘visceral� is so overused but the actual sensation of reading this book can be described no other way. Mudgirl, Mudwoman, M.R. � an abandoned child, an adopted teenager, president of an elite university. Within her, we see the history of a woman, certainly, but we also see the history of women, the experience of being a woman so vividly on the page that, even if we are a woman, we feel as though we haven’t quite captured our own essence until Oates reveals it for us. Other reviewers have referred to this novel as a ‘ghost story.� I find that almost insulting and certainly far from the point. Or, on second thought, such misunderstanding makes Oates� point exactly. Who of us � women � are not ghosts of ourselves, our dreams and behaviors and experiences shadows of who others want and expect us to be? I may say this once or twice a year: this book is a masterpiece.

The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman
Elliot Perlman succeeds in creating a highly contemporary and moving story while capturing some of the intense flavor of the recently passed (and still ever-present) Civil Rights era. The characters are real, complex and magnetic. It's a rare feat to write a novel with multiple perspectives and make each one equally compelling and interesting. Perlman's book does that while also building beautiful and satisfying connections between them. A really great book.

I’ve received some great questions from various interviews over the last ten months since Getting Somewhere came out so thought I’d gather a few of the responses in one place. This is the third installment. (And if YOU have a question you’d like to ask, send me a message here at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ and I may post it with my response!)

For Reading Keeps You Sane

Where did the title of your book come from?

I’m sure it happens all the time: the book is written and all that remains is somehow arriving at the perfect title. The title is the book’s face to the world and finding the perfect fit might require long, diligent effort, even a few initial stabs at it that earn just wrinkled noses and noncommittal smiles.

I have to admit, though, that that’s not the way it happened for me at all. In fact, the title Getting Somewhere jumped into my mind even before the first page was completely written, providing thematic guidance for the actual writing of the novel itself.

That classic concept of a ‘heroine’s journey� permeates the narrative from the very first scene in which the four girls arrive at the farm in the detention-center bus, taking that first step on what will turn out for all of them to be a bit of a harrowing trip. Jenna is prepared to be seriously underwhelmed, expecting the women who run the farm to have nothing to offer her � just like all of the other adults she has encountered so far in her life. Sarah doesn’t think much beyond a warm bed or a full stomach at first, has trained herself to take things pretty much as they come, assuming others will make the tough decisions and let her know about them afterwards. Cassie has rarely been beyond the walls of her grandmother’s trailer, the boundaries of the surrounding yard, can’t even conceive of what she might confront beyond pictures from the books she’s devoured from early childhood. And Lauren? Well, Lauren expects to get whatever she wants, has no intention of doing anything she doesn’t want to do or being anywhere she doesn’t want to be.

Yet, despite the fact that they’ve all converged onto this isolated spot on earth from significantly diverse directions, they’re all on the same road now. What will they make of the trip? How will they use what they know of themselves to discover their strengths and discard their shackles? How will who they’ve been up until now allow (or disallow!) them to absorb these new and difficult � yet potentially life-altering � surroundings, to negotiate the path laid out before them?

I’m fascinated with the process of personal decision-making, with the way that identity is such a stew of our perceptions of ourselves within the framework of our experiences. Sometimes our experiences hinder our ability to move forward. Sometimes what we believe about ourselves � what we’ve been told by others � simply isn’t true. Sometimes, in order to get somewhere, we have to leave an awful lot of stuff behind.

With Getting Somewhere, both the title and the book, I hope to address some of the most basic questions of trust and choice and forgiveness. I am pleased and honored to invite readers along on that metaphoric � but no less real and challenging � journey.

For A Tapestry of Words

Describe your choice to include strong adult characters in the story.

As you may have noticed, there are a lot of dead and missing adults in YA literature. The reasons are fairly obvious. First, YA characters need to be experiencing some kind of challenge, drama, or even trauma. Killing off a parent (or two) is a pretty good way of doing that. Second, YA protagonists are generally learning how to make the transition from childhood to adulthood (the ‘coming of age� trope) and the experience is significantly more interesting and dramatic without a parent looking over their shoulders. And, finally, YA is, well, it’s YA which means it’s about young adults. The sense among the adults who edit, publish and market these books is that teenagers just don’t want to read about adults.

The truth is, though, that adults are both the primary problem-makers AND problem-solvers in the world. Whether it’s fantasy or real-lit, it’s usually neither workable nor advisable to eliminate adult voices entirely. Think of Harry Potter. He has both Voldemort and Dumbledore. Or Katniss Everdeen with both President Snow (and the Capitol) and Haymitch (‘maker� and ‘solver.�) There are certainly exceptions but the point is that the world isn’t � or shouldn’t be � divided up by age groups and adults can serve as both excellent antagonists and critical resources in literary settings. In other words, the identity of the teen character evolves either in relationship with or in juxtaposition to the adults in his or her life.

And, in fact, adults represent a ‘future� that is not possible to develop in any other way. Kids generally don’t get to grow up in YA lit and yet, if we are to explore the psychologically essential (and dramatically interesting) aspects of responsibility and consequences, it is important to represent how those might manifest themselves over time. Adult characters can provide critical tension by acting as models, reflections, or even cautionary tales, sometimes all at the same time. This is the dynamic that fascinated me as I developed the characters and plot elements of Getting Somewhere.

My characters are four teen girls who have committed juvenile crimes and elect to participate in an alternative detention program located on an organic farm. Clearly, something has gone wrong for them. Though we want to know what has happened to them in the past, the setting and the story line pretty much eliminate any significant role for parents right from the start.

And yet, adults do come to play a significant role. Three women run the farm. They are important to the story, (and to the girls) offering that classic conflict between potential resource and flawed decision-making. Though the issues the girls are dealing with start long before they arrive on the farm, the relationships they develop with the adult women � and the relationships between the women � offer a potent context for exploring those exact issues further. Paradoxically, an understanding of the identities and experiences of the adult characters provides an opportunity to delve more deeply into the girls themselves � the impact of experience itself, the nature of emotional resources, how choices are made, how empowerment happens.

And, maybe more importantly, it is essential for our YA characters to grow, to experience some kind of transformation over the course of the story. While the love, nurture and support for that growth can come from some other source � a friend or love interest, for example � having it come at least in part from an adult (or to be visibly absent, forcing the teen to recognize the gap) is rich, powerful, and compellingly realistic.

In addition to that, there is the question of how we perceive of young adult experience, both in real life and on the page. I think younger readers ARE interested in reading about adults. Genuine adults, conflicted adults, flawed adults. Maybe not as primary characters but certainly as interesting, fully-developed, authentically devised secondary ones. Teens are keeping their eyes on us � as well they should! They want to understand motives, access information, evaluate how their decisions are going to play out in the long run. As authors, regardless of genre, it is our job to give that to them.

Here are a couple more of the great interview questions I've received since Getting Somewhere came out. This is the second installment and I'll plan to have one more. (And if YOU have a question you’d like to ask, send me a message here at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ and I may post it with my response!)

From Amaterasu Reads

What does it feel like to have a published book?

They say it’s like having a baby � the initial excitement, the long wait, and eventual flurry of pain, relief, exhilaration, and exhaustion. I suppose this is as good a metaphor as any and yet, even though I’ve had four kids of my own, the best preparation I could have had for the experience of writing a book and having it published has been the nearly thirty years I spent as an organic vegetable farmer.

People I knew were pretty surprised when I told them I planned to quit farming, was resigning as manager of the farmers market and director of the not-for-profit I had founded, and that I hoped to become a writer. They were further surprised to discover that I had no intentions of writing about agriculture (at least, not directly!) or sustainability or community planning or any of the other topics I’d devoted my career to so far. What they really couldn’t have known, though � and I didn’t either � was that the experience of farming had, in many unpredicted ways, prepared me well for some of the things I would need to learn as a new author.

Like patience. Is there anyone who truly considers themselves patient? I certainly tried my best to be patient with my kids. And farming is nothing if not an exercise in patience. You know those gorgeous red-ripe tomatoes you love to buy at the farmers market? Well, we farmers plant those seeds in February, nurture baby plants along until they can tolerate the outdoors, weed around them for months, watch them carefully as they ripen, finally bring them to customers a good six months later. And none of this includes the months before spent perusing seed catalogs, selecting varieties, comparing records, crunching numbers, or the previous years dedicated to creating a fertile garden in the first place.

Writing a book is nearly exactly like that. It’s a whole lot of ‘hurry up and wait.� All of your experiences have collided to create this book in the first place. You’ve spent varying amounts of time getting those perfect words recorded. And you certainly have an idea of what your ultimate goal might be (a published book!) But even once you’ve done the research to determine where to send the manuscript, even after you’ve found an agent and the agent has sold your book to a
publisher, there are so many steps along the way and so many chunks of time when you are simply waiting for the process to unfold.

I guess that’s why they call it ‘practicing� patience.

And still, for all your best efforts in identifying and pursuing all the necessary resources, you really have very little control over the outcome. Some of it certainly comes down to hard work, some of it is timing, and some of it is just simply dumb luck (sort of like the weather.) And though it may be kind of hard to believe, that’s actually a good thing � recognizing that all you can ensure is the integrity of the process, the quality of the relationships built along
the way.

In many ways, that’s been the best part of becoming a writer and the part where my farming experience has turned out to be most relevant. It doesn’t matter how perfect that tomato turns out to be if nobody ever picks it up, admires it, savors the lovely flavor. Especially with organic farming, each vegetable is truly a labor of love. It matters who eats it, who shares with you a recipe they used to prepare it, who comes back to find more just like it. And writing is the same
way.

Authors care what people think. A book is a special kind of relationship, characterized by the nature of the story, the voice chosen to tell it and the total vulnerability we risk to present it.
In the same way that my farmers market customers wanted to be connected to the food they ate and the people who grew it, readers seek stories that will make them feel connected to something larger than themselves, that tell them something about the world of the author, the world as a whole, and, maybe more importantly, something about themselves. I am honored by the opportunity to give that to them. And of course, that’s exactly what authors want too and are
willing to go to a whole lot of trouble to get it.


From One A Day YA

Describe your main characters. If they were real people, would you be friends with them?

Getting Somewhere is the story of four very different girls who have been convicted of juvenile crimes and choose to serve out their sentences in an alternative detention program located on an organic farm. The narrative switches back and forth between the girls, providing each one’s perspective on the very challenging experiences she is confronting in this unfamiliar environment.

We are introduced first to Jenna who is described as someone who would willingly push others out of the way to get where she has to go. And yet she is, of course, much more complex than that, having been shuffled around from foster home to foster home, eventually landing in juvenile detention as a result of taking the fall for much more hardened (and sophisticated) criminals. She’s turned her hurt into a shell and we are given the opportunity to watch while that shell either weakens a bit and falls away or installs itself as a permanent burden on her back. Cassie, on the other hand, has no experience of the world at all. She has spent her childhood living in an isolated trailer with her grandmother, who has gradually deteriorated mentally, leaving Cassie as the primary caretaker. Their only outside connection is with Cassie’s uncle who, while keeping them alive and fed, turns out to be more curse than blessing. Cassie’s crime does not become clear until late in the book but her personal struggle to fit in, to find something she can call ‘self,� is a vibrant theme throughout the story. Then there’s Sarah. She ran away from home at thirteen and, as happens to so many girls on the street, becomes the victim of drugs and prostitution. At first, the farm simply means a warm bed and hot meals but she is hard-pressed to resist the pressures � of all kinds � to participate in the drama that ensues there. The last girl is Lauren. She’s a thief and a manipulator and yet no less a victim of the poor decisions of the adults around her than the others. While I don’t know anyone exactly like Lauren � or any of the others, for that matter � there is a little piece of each one of them in all of us. And as one very wise writer said recently, you have to fall a little bit in love with your characters, no matter how difficult. At times, I just want to give each of them a great big hug!

I’ve been asked by fel­low author, Nancy Agabian, to par­tic­i­pate in a Blog Hop in order to intro­duce authors to new read­ers. This is an oppor­tu­nity for you to get know some­thing about the next novel I have been work­ing on and to check out some writ­ers who might be new to you (links posted at the end of this post.) These are some excellent writers whose work I highly rec­om­mend. Again, spe­cial thanks to Nancy Agabian for ask­ing me to participate � here is her link so you can travel backwards as well as forwards. Happy Hopping!



Q: What is the working title of your new book?
A: The In Between.

Q: Where did the idea come from for the book?
A: The events in this book are VERY roughly based on an actual experience. When a very close friend of mine (who had named me power of attorney and medical advocate when she first got breast cancer) discovered her cancer had metastasized to her brain, her somewhat and intermittently estranged parents showed up in the guise of ‘support.� It gradually became clear that their motives were a lot more complicated than that and not necessarily focused on my friend’s well-being. A group of friends tried to rally around and found themselves pitted against the legal rights, pure venom and crazy shenanigans of my friend’s very abusive family.

Q: What genre does your book fall under?
A: It is young adult fiction with cross-over appeal.

Q: Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
A: I love movies but I’m kind of terrible at celebrity stuff. I can provide some casting guidelines, though.

Chelsea � beautiful, popular, ethnically ambiguous, might remind me a bit of Santana Lopez (Naya Rivera) from Glee, personality-wise. Imagine Santana if she discovered she had bone cancer.

Natalie � narrator for the story, Chelsea’s best friend. She’s a little short, frizzy hair, Jewish, intelligent, musical, excellent athlete, yet thinks of herself as barely average in the shadow of Chelsea’s star-light. (I Googled ‘female teen actors� and thought maybe Selena Gomez could pass for Jewish though I don’t know anything about her acting.)

Elena � Natalie’s soccer teammate and new friend, of Palestinian descent. Google search same as above: Parker McKenna Posey? Though, again, I know nothing about her acting.

Jake � Natalie’s slightly younger brother, autistic (think toward the Asberger’s end of the spectrum.) Okay, I know he’s probably too old but Joseph Gordon Levitt would be great.

Various adults though I think Meryl Streep definitely needs to play Chelsea’s nasty mother.

Q. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A: Told through the sympathetic voice of Chelsea’s best friend Natalie, a young woman who takes on the troubles of others like some people collect stuffed animals, it is really Natalie’s struggle with the concepts of friendship, loyalty, commitment to an ideal, and self-worth that fully illuminates a story where no one is what they seem, teenagers are forced to carry the responsibility of adults, and the ‘in-between� world of imminent mortality can reveal what is really most important in life.

Q: Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
A: I have a wonderful agent and my first book was published by Viking/Penguin. It is unclear at this time whether I will be continuing to work with the same publisher on future projects but my hope is to develop and maintain a long-term (professional) relationship with either my present editor or another one just as good.

Q: How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
A: Probably about three or four months. I write fast and then go back and flesh everything out, toss the junk, address plot problems, etc. in revision. Total time between six and eight months.

Q: What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
A: I was a tiny bit miffed when John Green’s newest book The Fault in Our Stars came out since both main characters in his novel have cancer AND my manuscript had actually been written several years before his book’s release (I wrote it while waiting through the publishing process for my first book Getting Somewhere, probably about 2009, though still revising.) Of course, despite the cancer similarities, the stories are each very unique in their own way. It’s not a YA book but there might be some similarities with Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper as a kind of ‘medical thriller� with lots of family dynamics thrown in (great book, terrible movie.)

Q: Who or What inspired you to write this book?
A: My interest is in relationships � all the ways that they manifest themselves, how they are defined within and influenced by the social framework, their impact on the formation of identity. In particular, I am fascinated with the intersection between an individual and her social environment, and the experience of marginalization, especially for girls and women. While critical issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc. all have a marginalizing influence, things like disease and abuse can offer similar challenges and often stimulate parallel psychological and emotional responses. This story gave me a chance to explore that further as well as the often over-looked but essential connections between mental and physical health.

Q: What else about your book might piqué the reader’s interest?
A: I kind of fall in love with all my characters but none so much as Natalie in The In Between. She is so alive for me that I can forget she’s not a real person, someone I wish I actually knew. Sometimes I almost feel bad for making things so hard on her, for raising the dramatic stakes again and again to the point where she is nearly crushed. Yet, it’s truly the confidence I have in her (and that I want to instill in her) that drives the story. My only hope, really, is that this novel will be as enjoyable (though occasionally heartbreaking) to read as it has been to write.

LINKS:

Miguel Morales �
Barbara Shoup - barbarashoup.blogspot.com

I’ve received some great questions from various interviews over the last nine months since Getting Somewhere came out so thought I’d gather a few of the responses in one place. This is the first installment.

From Eve’s Fan Garden�
What do you like most about writing? What do you like least?
I hope I don’t sound too Pollyanna-ish to admit that I love virtually everything about writing. I love the creative process, the opportunity to incorporate imagination into my daily life. I love watching the characters develop, take on personalities of their own, and I love the ‘problems� that arise in connecting all the threads of the story and working to solve them. I love that my time is my own, that productivity is completely dependent on my own discipline and resolve and that I can write for a bit, work in my garden (thinking about the story, of course!,) come back to it for awhile, do a little cooking or sewing or reading, and then return to the manuscript just as I left it. I also love just working with words, finding the best ways to express an idea or a thought or an emotion. It’s a very rewarding process. Weirdly enough, I also love the editing process, receiving feedback from my wonderful editor, making revisions. In fact, I might like rewriting the book as much as I like writing it in the first place. And, just having gotten started on the publicity aspect, I’m enjoying that too. There would be no point in writing if I didn’t eventually get to talk to people about it? The hardest part? Waiting. Lots and lots of waiting.
From WMUK interview...

Why did you decide to set the alternative detention facility on an organic farm? What did that environment offer that the girls might not have gotten somewhere else?

One of the primary things that the farm offers to the girls is the element of belonging. Places have a huge impact on who we become. Each girl in the story, except one notable exception, contributes her labor to the farm and also seeks out places among the fields and woods and waterways that allow her to feel a kind of connection that was inaccessible to her before. Without even realizing it, the girls finally belong to something that their families and other people in their lives have been unable to provide.

Another important resource offered to each of the girls at the farm is the ability to control her own use of time. They work hard, using some of their time productively with very tangible results but they also have plenty of free time to explore both the inner and outer worlds that are becoming available to them. They begin to see how precious their time really is and what it feels like to make choices for themselves.

Along with time comes the notion of sovereignty. This is a very good word, I’ve always thought, to describe the concept of ‘control� without the negative connotations we have with that word. The farm helps to erase the imbalance of power that has been so much a feature of the girls� early experiences, creates an environment where choices are encouraged, where each person has the opportunity to become accountable for how they behave, how they treat other people, how they view themselves.

And finally, as Ellie states in one of the early scenes in the book, the farm is about food, for sure, but it’s also about passion. The adults who work there are nothing if not passionate about the land, the plants, the food they produce, and the ways in which they attempt to connect with their community through its production. The hope of the program is that, even if the girls do not become passionate about the exact things that the farm represents, they’ll experience what it feels like to be passionate about something and carry that with them when they move on into their own adulthoods.

From The Story Siren guest blog, responding to the question of why I wanted to write a story about juvenile offenders...

From the time I was a little kid, I’ve always been highly responsive to the pain and suffering of others. I think I was in about the fourth grade when I began to read the newspaper and any stories I came across concerning war or famine in other countries, oppression of women or children or minorities, environmental disasters, felt like they concerned me personally. It wasn’t a puppies and kittens thing. It was more of an activist thing. If it was wrong, I wanted to do something about it.

I suppose that’s part of the reason I became an organic farmer. In addition to loving plants and enjoying the labors surrounding their care, even more than the desire to help people eat healthy food, was the satisfaction I derived from restoring a small piece of land to it’s highest level of well-being, the sense that I had an ever-so-tiny impact on making the world a better place.

And I’m sure that’s also part of the reason I wanted to write a story about juvenile delinquents. There’s no question that their experiences are interesting and compelling. But the issue for me was more that juvenile offenders, especially girls, are extremely likely to be victims of circumstance, their crimes the result of powerlessness and oppression. And, in fact, the more I read about juvenile detention facilities, their ‘conditions of confinement,� which resemble prisons far more than they do any therapeutic environment, the more determined I was to create � if only fictionally � a scenario which allowed these girls to recover the choices that might lead them to better lives.

In Getting Somewhere, these four girls � Cassie, Jenna, Sarah, and Lauren � have an opportunity to address the issues that have brought them to this facility in the first place. They apply their labors to the work of the farm, interact with Ellie, Donna, and Grace, the adults there, and learn to know each other, to identify ‘resources� when they appear and to put them to use better understanding themselves. Unfortunately, one of the girls is not only resistent but downright hostile to the opportunity being offered to her. And her hostility threatens everything the others have worked so hard to achieve.

The story seeks to address questions that are relevant to all of us and to society in general: What if your life, a part of your immediate future, at the very least, had been determined by something bad that you did? Would you want people associating you with that thing? Would you want to be known by it?

And even more, can you stop being a victim once that’s happened? Do you have choices? And, if so, how do you make them?

Flash (fiction) On The News

Rhea was eleven when she got tired of wearing layers of undershirts beneath her school blouse and finally told her mother she thought she needed a bra. It wasn’t so much the bulge of the breast tissue itself but the way her enlarging nipples pressed insistently against the fabric of her clothes as if announcing themselves to the world. Rhea knew something about it was her fault but she didn’t know what.

When Rhea was twelve, she heard her brother and his friends in the basement rec room through a cold air return vent in the kitchen. They were talking about knockers and sucking the cantaloupes and having to come up for air between the balloons.They were giggling and guffawing and imitating a high voice that Rhea knew was meant to be hers. The girl-voice was first pleading, then breathing hard and then gasping with either pain or pleasure, Rhea wasn’t sure. Even though she couldn’t be certain exactly what the boys were saying about her, she knew it wasn’t good and she knew it was her fault.

She began to slouch.

When Rhea was fourteen, her parents went to visit her mother’s ailing mother for the weekend and Rhea was left in the care of her brother. Almost as soon as the parents were out the door, Rhea’s brother called his friends to come over. While Rhea remained reading in her room, the house filled with voices and laughter, mostly male but some female, the noise expanding and swelling against the walls of the house as the friends became drunker and drunker. Rhea was a little bit curious but mostly she was just very hungry so she wandered down the hallway and into the living room on the way to the kitchen, keeping her eyes mostly down and her shock at the disarray contained. She would just grab a box of crackers and maybe some cheese, head back to her room.

She felt the hand on her arm without immediately seeing who it belonged to. She suspected it was a mistake so she edged away, continued toward her room but the hand closed around her wrist and she was forced to look up. Into a smile, a voice she couldn’t quite hear above the music, a gesture to follow.

He was Brent, a friend of her brother’s. He had a pleasant face, a very nice smile, a gentle way of just barely touching her skin with the tips of his fingers without feeling at all invasive. He looked carefully at her when she answered his questions as if what she had to say could actually matter to him even though she knew that was impossible and he could barely hear her voice anyway, even after they moved into the far corner of the basement rec room where her mother had shoved an old ratty couch no longer suited for the upstairs.

She drank a little of what he had in his cup. She didn’t think she’d had very much but it had become hard to remember. He claimed to know what he was doing and she believed him.

He claimed that they could really get to know each other better if they went upstairs and she believed him.

He said he would just lie down with her a little bit, they could talk until she felt better, and she believed him.

When his hands were under her clothes and his body pressing her into the mattress, he promised not to hurt her.

She believed him.

He didn’t force her. He didn’t have to. She went along, didn’t know to protest, didn’t actually know what was happening. She couldn’t tell anyone that because they wouldn’t believe her.

How could a fourteen year old girl not understand when...? But she didn’t. That was the truth. The real felt nothing like it had been described. In fact, she didn’t even think to connect what was happening to her body with the health films at school or the gauzy, breathless scenes in movies. It was nothing like either one.

Her body should have known. And it should have known, too, that she was too young to be a mother, that whatever little gears and levers are in there should close tight against the sperm of a man she doesn’t know, doesn’t love, who will go off into the world without even turning back, may never know that his body contributed to making a life that needed a place to live and grow before it could be part of the world and that place was a woman’s � no, a girl’s � body. She should have known. But she didn’t.

And so, clearly, that is her fault too.

I’ve discovered two very important things since my young adult novel Getting Somewhere came out in January. One, the teens I meet are not only interested in reading; they also want to write. And, two, I love helping them do it.

Thus, the birth of the SEE Youth Writing Program.

SEE has a mission. Yes, I want emerging writers to have the tools to achieve their goals. But, in addition to that, I want to help kids learn how to help themselves, how to identify their personal resources, access them, and use them to make the world they live in a better place. From what I’m hearing, that’s what kids want too. They want to be heard. They want to learn tools for telling the stories of the world they live in. And they want to participate in change.

SEE does this in a couple of ways. First, it helps participants become aware of their own feelings and how to communicate about them. Second, it promotes empathy through the development of fictional characters, settings, and narratives � stories about people who are NOT them but may be LIKE them in critical ways. Finally, it encourages young people to develop and use the written word as the creative expression of imagination, specifically the ability to imagine a world that empowers everyone in fair and just ways.

SEE stands for Sustainability through Empathy and Empowerment. This is because sustainability is a framework for creating a livable world and the written word is a powerful tool for achieving social, economic, and environmental justice. The goal of SEE is to place this tool firmly in the hands of our youth, encouraging their voices, stimulating their empathic responses and empowering them toward personal and social awareness.

If you are a young person excited about writing or an adult who works with young people, SEE may be for you.

For more information or to contact me about a SEE workshop, write to: authorbethneff (at) gmail (dot) com. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Teachers, librarians, writing group facilitators, bloggers, and students may also feel free to contact me for traditional author visits and online mentoring, editing, writing tutorials, etc. For more information, follow this link:

I think book clubs and reading groups are awesome. Books are invaluable to our well-being, even more so when they can be shared. There is almost nothing better than getting a chance to talk about the stories that give meaning to our lives.

Here are some ideas to make your own book group a success.

Whether conducted by the local library, school or bookstore or as a more informal gathering of friends and acquaintences, it is important for a book group to operate as a democracy. Participants should have input on book selection, discussion strategies, the logistics of scheduling, etc. Everyone needs to feel involved in decision-making.

That said, there is nothing wrong with assigning someone to take responsibility for these or any tasks, if everyone agrees that’s what they want to do. Especially in book clubs that are oriented toward a particular genre, members may appreciate book selections suggested by someone with expertise or interest in the area. Another arrangement can be rotating responsibility for book selection among members or developing a list of potential book selections and then choosing from the list. The important point is that everyone agrees to the strategy and then refrains from complaining about the book selection or about feeling left out if they have agreed to the way books will be chosen ahead of time.

Establish agree-upon goals for your group. Do you want to read a book a month? Six books a year? Do you want to meet bi-monthly? Do you want to focus on bestsellers? Pulitzer Prize winners? Newbery Award winners? Classics? Do you have a maximum number of participants? Address as many questions as you can in your planning, write everything down, and then be willing to evaluate again if something comes up. If issues do arise, be sure everyone is there for the discussion and that it doesn’t happen over the phone or through e-mail between just a few members (unless you are organized enough to have assigned a board who takes responsibility for certain kinds of decisions.)

Be sure that time is given each meeting to talk about the book. Remember your goals and try to meet them. If socializing is an important aspect of your gathering (and be sure it is for everyone,) set time aside before or after the book discussion. Be mindful of making everyone feel welcome and involved, even (and especially) if some people have relationships outside the group.

Not everyone is going to like every book. Members should agree to read at least 50 pages of each book before giving up (100 would be better!) Yet, even if a reader doesn’t enjoy a book, it is essential for criticism to remain constructive, based on the understanding that reading enjoyment is subjective. All criticism should be reserved for the book itself and not targeted at other members who might disagree. Keep competition out of the group. People vary in the speed they read, the amount of time they have to devote to it, the types of books they enjoy. Above all, be respectful.

Consider creative discussion strategies to keep your group dynamic. If discussion leadership rotates between members, allow each person to conduct his or her meeting in the way that suits them best. A list of discussion questions is always a good idea but there are lots of other possibilities as well. Here are a few:
- Each member brings an object that connects to something or someone in the book.
- Each member reads a short selection from the book.
- Each member describes one thing they liked and one thing they didn’t about the book.
- Each member chooses a favorite (or least favorite) character and describes the reasons for his or her choice.
- Each member describes another book that the selection made them think of.

And finally, authors might be very interested in getting involved in your conversation. Speaking just for myself, I love hearing from people who have selected my book for a reading group and am happy to contribute or participate any way I can. Consider inviting an author to respond to discussion questions you have devised.

I am so excited to attend this retreat and to work with Alex Sanchez and all of these wonderful writers. Take a look at this link - great bios, everybody - and, of course, feel free to donate! How much fun it's going to be to follow these lives and careers over the coming years!

Go here...