The Randomness

Do you ever feel like there's no way to explain your life, not because it's a mess but because strange things just happen to you on occasion? That was me in February, when OF COURSE TSA checked my bag the day I was traveling with three random books and some canned okra. (Side note: I felt vaguely like a criminal for transporting okra across state lines.) But here's the great thing about the randomness: you can absolutely use it in your writing.

We all know the old adage that "truth is stranger than fiction." This is why I encourage you to tuck these little incidents away for future reference, when you may need a bit of comic relief in your novel or even simply a bit of characterization. Why NOT write about the girl who packs okra in her suitcase? Maybe there's a good, solid reason for it. Or maybe that's a wacky thing this character does because she's afraid of eating anything that hasn't been canned. Either way, there's a story in there somewhere.

So embrace the randomness next time it happens, and see where it leads you. 

-Cate-

In Defense of Domestic Vacations

When my brother and I were growing up, our parents were adamant about taking us places both in Michigan and the US as a whole. In this way, I've been able to visit 22 states (although my goal, of course, is 50) and see a great deal of both peninsulas of my home state. It was, truly, an invaluable experience.

Some of you are going to disagree, I'm sure, emphasizing the wonders of traveling abroad. I've been to Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Belgium, and I value those trips for many reasons. However, being an American writing in America about Americans, I find it essential to my fiction that I know America.

I used to write almost exclusively about suburban Detroit, because that was what I knew. Now I also write about rural, small-town North Carolina, having spent almost a decade living there. Boston/Cambridge will no doubt make appearances in the future, as well as other places I've seen and loved. It is unspeakably important that I am able to write clearly and accurately about these places; in choosing them as settings, I have made a commitment to the cities, their people, and potential readers to be as truthful as possible. Rendering a city incorrectly can alienate or even misinform your readers, and that wouldn't be cool.

Repeat excursions are, I think, equally important as the initial trips. For example, back in May, Mom, Dad, and I spent a long weekend in Harbor Springs, Michigan (across the Little Traverse Bay from Petoskey) and made a foray into Mackinaw City. I grew up visiting Mackinaw on a pretty regular basis, but it had been so long since I'd been that I couldn't have fleshed out certain details from memory if I'd been given a pop quiz. Now that I've had a refresher, though, I can consider using the place--and its landmarks that appeal to me most, such as Scalawags--in a story in the near future.

Ultimately, my point is this: I don't consider it to be isolationist when a person chooses to explore the beauty and offerings of our own backyard, which for you might mean your immediate geographic area but for someone else might mean our entire swath of North America. There's so much history to learn and so many really, truly awesome sights to see that it would be a shame not to do so, and an even bigger shame not to include them in your writing so that you might share them with others.

-Cate-

What YA Reading?

So. Word on the street is that adults who read young adult (YA) books should be ashamed of themselves.

I know that this is old news by now, but I wrote the bulk of my summer blog posts months ahead of time to accommodate my ever-evolving situation, which is why I'm just now getting around to addressing the recent furor over this assertion. My friend Rachel Heston-Davis did a bang-up job of responding to Ruth Graham's article, as have many others. But of course I feel the need to add my voice to the dissenting crowd, because that's how I roll.

A stack of (mostly) YA books).

A friend and former professor of mine shared an article about the lack of discussion surrounding male YA readers (and, to an extent, authors). It's a quick yet illuminating read about true YA demographics. My friend, however, noted that she "Couldn't help wishing, though, that the male YA writer quoted in the article hadn't said he might not read YA if he didn't write it" because she was "Not sure that helped sell the concept." Below you'll find my response to her, as well as some comments I made when I first read Graham's screed (note: I've edited this since I spoke with my friend for clarity as well as the sake of redacting personal information).

***

Things I Said When I Had a Strong Gut Reaction to Ruth Graham Slamming My People
1) Tuck Everlasting is not YA. It's a children's novel. Neither is The Westing Game. It's a middle-grade novel. Freaking look into it.
2) As a matter of fact, the quality of YA fiction HAS improved greatly over the last 20 years.
3) Go read Inexcusable and tell me again that there's no such thing as moral ambiguity in YA fiction.
4) How is it not a good thing when adults take teenagers seriously and are able to connect with them through shared reading experiences?

The Luxe, the first book in one of my all-time favorite YA series.

Things I Said When I Read The "Dudes" Article

To an extent, I understand people who say they wouldn't read the genre if they weren't writing in it, since part of the process of writing a certain genre involves knowing it (current trends, past masters, et cetera) and NOT reading it would open them up to read other things/work on other projects, but at the same time, I come from the school of "read everything. Read it now," since I think you can find influences everywhere. Which is to say that I understand your frustration with someone making that declaration.

Even before I switched from fiction to writing for young people (WFYP) in grad school, I would occasionally read something from that group (mostly revisiting YA titles, and occasionally middle grade stuff, that I'd enjoyed when I was in that age range), but I will readily admit that I read more YA/middle grade stuff now than I did before, both because I want to know what's going on in that world and because I had some great professors whose work I'll read whenever I can get my hands on it.

With two of my WFYP homies (Elizabeth and Jamie) after our graduation.

One of the things that bothers me more about these conversations--and honestly not just because I dislike John Green--is the fact that the same big-ticket authors keep coming up as examples of what adult YA readers are (or should be, or should not be) reading, particularly Green, Rainbow Rowell, and Suzanne Collins, much though I may love The Hunger Games. Maybe I'm more sensitive to it because I personally know or am acquainted with some YA authors who deserve to be read, or am familiar with works by authors who are sort of on the margins.

I'm thinking here of Jack Gantos (who has had an interesting life and wrote an incredible novel, Desire Lines, which deals with homophobia and bullying), Sara Farizan (who is helping add some diversity to the genre, being both Persian-American and part of the LGBTQ community), Chris Lynch (he maybe kicked my ass a little--okay, a lot--in grad school, but why more people don't read and take to heart Inexcusable [which I will take any opportunity to plug] is beyond me), and even someone like Cherie Bennett (her Sunset Island series is akin to the Sweet Valley High books, which some people dismiss but I firmly believe have a place in the literary world, since they're fun and have a wide appeal).

Gantos' phenomenal work.

I will say that I appreciate people highlighting the fact that dudes read--and write!--YA and middle-grade books, not just ladies. There was a weird disparity between our faculty and our student body during my time at Lesley; out of eight profs across two years, four were male, but I only knew one guy who was a student (Scott Weems, who, interestingly enough, actually had his PhD in cognitive neuroscience before he came to Lesley for his MFA in WFYP and then went on to publish a non-fiction book about humor and why we laugh, going back to his neuroscience roots), although there have been a few other men whose time didn't overlap with mine. They're underrepresented in YA almost as much as women are in literary fiction, people like Green, Scott Westerfeld, and David Levithan aside.

 Dr. Weems, a seriously nice guy.

It also bugs me that YA authors are simultaneously held to the same and different standards than other authors. You can't sit there and tell me that YA is crap because it's not "literary" enough (which is patently bullshit) and also say that it shouldn't appeal to adults (or else that adults shouldn't find it appealing). That's like saying that a high schooler can't appreciate Steinbeck or Faulkner or that most vaunted of titles, To Kill a Mockingbird. Why SHOULDN'T adults appreciate YA? Not to get all Whitney Houston here, but the children are our future. Let's go ahead and take them--and what they read--at least a little bit seriously. Besides which, does rallying against the adults reading YA also mean that no adult should be writing it? Because every YA author I know, and most of the authors I can think of, is at least in the mid-20s age range, if not older. I'll return to the example of Chris Lynch, who is in his 50s and is a grandfather. Should this disqualify him from penning another YA novel?

 My favorite YA person named Christopher, with the possible exception of Crutcher.

This is all very frustrating to me on a general level. Rachel [mentioned above] in particular has been very vocal, both on Facebook and her blog, and she and I are forever sharing articles back and forth, or else one of us is commenting on whatever the other posts. I actually have an anecdote from my last semester of school that kind of sums up how I feel about all of this: our entire cohort (about 32 of us) had a meeting one morning to discuss student and faculty graduation speakers. Everyone had the opportunity to offer up names, and the other WFYP ladies asked me to recommend Tony Abbott as the faculty representative. Before I got a chance to do so, however, one of the Writing for Stage and Screen students piped up and said, "I want to nominate [one of the WSS profs], because I feel like the WSS people are really disregarded in the program." There were two problems with this declaration. 1) The WSS people were the rock stars of the program. 2) NO ONE (and I mean freaking no one) took WFYP seriously at all except for those of us who were pouring our heart and soul into it.

And that battle rages on today. YA is dismissed by certain critics because it's not "worthy" of adult attention. It's kind of a tunnel vision effect, I guess: you only appreciate what you think belongs on your path. But that's the way you miss out on some pretty awesome stuff.

So now that I've written a manifesto, I'm gong to go take a nap, and maybe read some YA.

-Cate-

Images of The Luxe and Desire Lines via Barnes & Noble.
Image of Dr. Weems via his website.
Image of Chris Lynch via Lesley University.
Images of stacked books and badass ladies via my own Instagram feed.

You're a Poet

Yesterday, it happened again: someone made the assumption that I am a poet.

Look, I get it. I work for a press that focuses on poetry. My undergraduate alma mater is known more for its poetry output than its fiction. Of the reviews I've posted here so far, the majority have been about collections of poetry. Almost all of my publications have been of the verse persuasion.

But the fact is, I have always thought of myself as a fiction writer first. Until partway through my BFA program, I didn't much believe in poetry at all. In grad school, I studied young adult fiction. Do you see where I'm going with this?

Maybe not. Because I didn't see it until about thirty seconds ago. I'm not a prose writer. I'm not a verse writer. I'm just a writer. That's all.

-Cate-