At least they didn't give it to Mittens

Here's the SLJ article asking if Orson Scott Card's beliefs about homosexuality should have been taken into account when YALSA awarded him the Margaret Edwards Award. I dunno if this is a real controversy; has anyone heard it brought up elsewhere?

New Podcast: Grace and Alvina

Our latest podcast is up.

In anticipation of the Robert's Snow: for Cancer's Cure snowflake auction, Lolly talks with author-illustrator Grace Lin and her friend, co-blogger, and editor at Little Brown, Alvina Ling.

Three Little Words

Despite the fact I announced I would have no opinions in re Dumbledore's sexual orientation, I, of course, do and have been arguing them ferociously to the J.K. Rowling in my head. The short version is that while I applauded her mischief and relished the subsequent panty-twisting, I thought she had no business making up her readers' minds about what happens (or, in this case, happened) to Harry Potter and his fellows beyond what information she gave us in the books. By telling us that Dumbledore was gay, she implied that she had the story all sewn up, that readers had only to ask--her--to fill in the blanks she had left. But filling in those blanks, melding a story with one's (or One's, to quote from the hilarious Uncommon Reader) own imagination is what reading is all about. A huge part of the reason the Harry Potter books (volumes one through three, anyway) held so little charm for me was Rowling's insistence upon doing all the coloring-in herself, leaving the reader few opportunities to put his or her own imagination to work. That's why I grumbled that they were books for people who generally preferred to watch TV, and that's why I though Rowling's announcement was a little grabby. (The child_lit railings about whether it was a corrective or a confirmation of the Potter series' "heteronormativity" left me untouched; the only flag you need to fly is your own).

But I've since learned that Rowling's remarks were less peremptory than I had thought. While the newspapers were reporting that she said "Dumbledore is gay," the Leaky Cauldron has posted a rough transcript of the Carnegie Hall q-and-a, and according to that she said (in response to the question "did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?") "I always thought of Dumbledore as gay." That I always thought matters enormously. Writers are as free as readers to mentally embroider or annotate a book; I imagine that a writer has to, even, settling into her imagination a rich landscape from which details are drawn for the page. I'm reminded of Margaret Mitchell being asked if she thought Scarlett ever got Rhett back. She didn't think so, she said. That didn't--and needn't--stop optimistic readers everywhere from imagining otherwise.

We make dreams come true.

At least Lisa Yee's. My next editorial is about George Clooney.



(photo by Richard, taken at Joanna and Norwood Long's house)

"The Writing of Fantasy": Susan Cooper and Gregory Maguire

Last Friday Daryl Mark (of the Cambridge P.L.) and I went over to MIT to look over the new location that anticipatory enthusiasm for the evening seemed to demand. So, we're still on for the program with Susan Cooper and Gregory Maguire, we're still talking about the writing and reading of fantasy, and it's still all going to take place on Wednesday, November 14, at 7:00PM. But note the new location: the program will now be taking place in the Frank Gehry glam Stata Center. MIT kahuna Paul Parravano (yes, consort to the inestimable Martha) showed us around, and it's quite an impressive place. Tickets (free but limit of four) for the evening will be available October 15th by sending an SASE to: Susan Cooper Event, Cambridge Public Library, 359 Broadway, Cambridge, MA, 02139. Note: seating is first come, first served; overflow "population" (MIT-speak for audience) will be accommodated via TV monitors. A reception will follow.

The following evening Susan Cooper will deliver a lecture, "Unriddling the World: Fantasy and Children" for the Cambridge Forum. This event is also free, no ticket required, and will be held at 7:30 PM at the First Parish church in Harvard Square, Cambridge.

It's Her Party

Anne Fine offers a personal take on the Tintin in the Congo controversy, citing examples from her own work where she has revised lines to better speak to contemporary sensibilities and her own raised consciousness. P.L. Travers, you will recall, did the same with Mary Poppins, replacing the racial representatives of the "Bad Tuesday" chapter with friendly animals instead.

It's interesting that Fine doesn't do the same with her adult books: "I have six adult novels on the shelves, and wouldn't dream of going at those with a red pen just because times have changed." Her reasoning seems to be that children read both more intensely and in greater ignorance, that they don't have a concept of books becoming "dated." (Thus the pressure on Judy Blume to update Forever to include condoms.) But isn't it the natural way of things that old books give way to new books? Not that people won't continue to read a mix of new and old, but what Fine is advocating is a kind of artificial life support for books that might otherwise fall out of fashion or favor. Let 'em.

Romper Stomper Bomper Boo

Yes, I saw lots of my friends at work and play over the weekend at ALA, although my own presence felt circumscribed: mornings in the booth, afternoons at the Caldecott meetings, dinner with a friend, Newbery-Caldecott-Wilder banquet, over and out.

I met a lot of you at the Horn Book booth, and I thank you for stopping by. The exhibit hall traffic seemed less busy than usual, at least in our neck of the woods, but not so quiet that I could wander the floor for candy and swag. The only juicy thing I heard was that Jailbird Hilton had successfully shopped a children's book proposal to HarperCollins, a rumored denied by one Harper editor who stopped by. Otherwise, all was peace. I did sign up a few more boys, including Leonard Marcus, Bob Lipsyte, and Ken Roberts, to write for our upcoming special issue on Boys and Girls; my job this week is to remind them of their perhaps rash promises.

I'd tell you all about the Caldecott meetings, but then I'd have to kill you.

Seeing the Big Banquet from the other side of the lights was fun. The food is exactly the same, with the only perk being that the waiters are more wont to refresh your coffee, perhaps anticipating the ripple effect of a sleepy speaker. As the Wilder winner was not on the dais, Susan Patron had to graciously divide her attention between me and Newbery Chair Jerri Kladder. It was fun--Susan and I went to the same college, albeit in different years, so we got to reminisce a bit. Susan is a native Los Angeleno, something that became apparent when the dais began unaccountably shaking during her speech, and she said something like, "oh, earthquake" and continued unperturbed with her prepared remarks. Both she and David Wiesner spoke well: he's an old pro at this now, of course, while Susan has the storyteller's gift of being able to make eye contact with two thousand people. Me, not so much--as I was awarding the Wilder Medal to James Marshall, my attempts to look between my speech and the audience were continually being interrupted by a photographer at my feet, who raised his lens every time I looked up until I finally told him to stop. It worked, less because of my commanding presence than because he got the giggles.

The thing I didn't know about being an award committee chair was that at the reception following the banquet you have to stand in a receiving line, shaking hands with everyone who had not had the good sense to run for the cab line. I don't care if I do live in Massachusetts, never, never will I marry if this is part of the deal.

When It's Time to Keep Quiet

In yesterday's Huffington Post, author Leslie Bennetts complains about a New York Times piece, which, using Bennetts' new book The Feminine Mistake as an example, speculated that the sales of hot-button books have been compromised by their authors' endless talk show rounds: readers figure they already have enough of a gist for their purposes. This is a valuable argument, but Bennetts says that the article's real point was to attack her; she also works in a rather impressive amount of self-congratulation and glowing quotes from reviews, which I suspect is her real point.

From my own one skirmish with trade book publication (Hearing Us Out, Little, Brown, 1994) but also from conversation with writer-friends, I'd have to say that Bennetts is exhibiting the classic signs of an author with a new book. It's the best high in the world. But: no amount of attention is enough, no criticism can be taken lightly, the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who have Read My Book and Loved It, and ignorant pigs. Anne Lamott writes funnily about this phenomenon in Bird by Bird: when publication date arrives she expects flowers and candy and congratulations; she practices modestly digging her toe into the dirt in expectation of all the compliments and attention she's about to receive. Nothing happens.

I think it's a completely understandable and forgivable attitude. For so long, your whole world has necessarily been that book and it becomes natural that you believe others will feel the same. It passes, thank God, or we would all be insufferable, but I wish somebody had told Bennetts that no matter how valid her point is (not, in my opinion), now is not the time to complain about being attacked. When the only response you will find truly acceptable is "you are wonderful," you can't win. Don't play.

This time, it was a friend.

Editor Frances Foster called this morning to tell me that writer Janet McDonald died yesterday in Paris, her adopted home. I never met or even spoke with Janet, but my admiration for her books led to my interest in her writing something for the Horn Book, which led to one of the richest--and definitely the most riotous--files in my email archives. There was no joke she would dare not make, but unlike many funny people, she was just as appreciative of other's (mine, I mean) jokes as she was expert at making her own. After we had finished working on her Horn Book article, our correspondence continued, with sometimes a dozen emails in a day when I was allegedly working at home and she was up late in Paris, allegedly doing the same: "I need a new YA book idea and fast, now that I'm done with the one Frances was awaiting. Or how will I pay my rent? It's too hot to set up my Love Tent in the Bois de Boulogne next to the Brazilian trannies (plus, those gorgeous wenches would get much more traffic than me)." We talked gossip, politics, sex, aging, love troubles--books, rarely. In the past year, there were some breaks in our emails due to Janet's illness, which we both thought she'd beat--she told me about doing a victory dance with Kiley Minogue in the chemotherapy ward--but when I didn't hear from her for a good long time I knew it had come back. I'll really miss her.

Her books will remain a signal contribution to YA literature: smart, teen-intriguing tales set in the African American neighborhoods of the Bronx and Brooklyn, told by someone who really knew what she was talking about, and who knew that a situation was never enough; you need a story. And while Janet's books frequently deal in tough issues, plenty of her characters have a gift for backtalk that could have you, as Janet often said, "on tha flo'!" Her novel Off-Color will be published this November by Frances Foster Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Kurt Vonnegut

has died, and Monica Edinger offers a brief tribute to his impact on her "arty and alienated" group of high school chums. I never "got" Vonnegut the way many of my friends did, but I can certainly appreciate the way he pushed at the boundaries of science fiction to make us rethink it and literature in general in more expansive terms.

I wrote an article for SLJ a hundred years ago about "cult novels," books that may or may not have had a wide audience but still seemed to speak to the kind of coteries Monica and I were both part of. They were books that made you and your friends feel like part of a special elect. Atlas Shrugged, Dune and The Lord of the Rings were big in that way; Monica also mentions Richard Brautigan, someone I remember Not Getting at all but I also knew he was Cool and therefore I should keep quiet. Who is speaking that way to teens today? Neil Gaiman is one I can think of, and I'm sure there is a whole canon of graphic novelists I just don't know. I could also see M.T. Anderson getting that kind of readership but wonder if being published as a YA writer hurts more than it helps. Part of the appeal of cult writers is that you discover them without the apparent aid of adults (but bless the librarians who put them in our way), and the fact that a YA novel says, de facto, this is for you, can work both for and against a book's appeal.

"Green" or just l-a-z-y?

I discovered this loathsome new invention in some anti-Canadian snarking on Gawker. Atwood et al are pretty nervy promoting this higher-tech autopen as anything more than an excuse to multitask watching Canadian Idol and promoting your book at the same time.

I'm not an autograph collector, so I'm not sure I understand the appeal, but isn't part of getting a book signed the commemoration of meeting an author you like? That whole Patricia Polacco "hand that touched the hand that touched the hand" connection? I don't care how Long your LongPen(tm) is, Ms. Atwood, I'm not letting it near me.

Maybe they do things differently down under

A childlit reference today to a blog post last year on Michael Thorn's Achockablog revealed a semi-juicy scandal heretofore unknown to me involving the excellent Australian writer Alyssa Brugman, who complained to her publisher that Thorn was selling an ARC of her book Being Bindy on eBay. The publisher, Faber, dutifully if thickheadedly wrote Thorn to tell him to cease and desist, or they would stop sending him advance copies for review. Apparently the blogosphere was thick with reproof, because Brugman wrote a rather stern note about the matter on the home page of her website, saying that ARCs are the property of the publisher, not the reviewer, and therefore Thorn had no right to sell them.

Personally, I think Brugman might better torture herself by contemplating the fact that Thorn had no desire to keep his copy of her book, but the fact remains that the book was his to sell; at least it works that way on this side and end of the pond. Publishers don't lend books to reviewers, they simply hand them over. Thorn very carefully made the point that he does not sell ARCs as new books (which would be fraud) or indeed before their publication dates. The publisher is certainly within its rights not to send Thorn (or anyone) review copies if they don't want to, but this would rather defeat the purpose of review copies. (And, contrary to what one irate publisher told me, no one needs permission from the publisher to review a book.) I imagine that Faber knows this, too, and is banging its corporate head repeatedly on the table for being caught between author and reviewer on this one.

For the record: after the Horn Book has finished with its reviews, and the publishing season has passed, we cherry-pick titles to keep in our collection (everything reviewed in the Magazine and a culling from the Guide), give some away, make "creative art" projects out of others, consign some to a Wall of Shame, and sell the rest as a lot to a used-book wholesaler.

But if anyone knows: is this standard operating procedure among our fellow nations?

Just Don't Go Out So Much

Kelly Herold's blog led me to this piece by Meg Rosoff about why she doesn't like to write negative reviews. I have to say that I don't find writers to be the best reviewers, because they tend to be too sympathetic and too focused on being "encouraging," as if the author were the primary audience for the review rather than the potential reader. There is also a tendency in the allied children's book fields to be "nice," which isn't good for literature and can also unfortunately short-circuit when the strain of being friendly and polite all of the time becomes too much and what might have been simply a quiet demur instead gets ugly. But Rosoff's example of a reviewer feeling bad after meeting the author of the object of her scorn is just plain chicken. Far more than in adult literature, there's a lot of contact between children's book authors and their reading communities, which I think leads to a lot of soft-pedaling--I've had reviewers turn down assignments of mediocre books by authors they will be having dinner with, and I remember a fellow member of a book prize jury deflecting criticism of a particular book because the author, the previous evening, had explained to the member --while they were dancing--why the book was the way it was. The author-reviewer relationship is unavoidably adversarial: one is judging the other. To have it otherwise means we should just all go work in publicity.