Many of the books in this issue of Notes implicitly enjoin us to look up from the page and head out into nature (or, as my mother would say, “put down that book and go out and play!”). As I write this, we’re just coming off of Screen-Free Week, an annual effort in which young people and adults alike are encouraged to turn off their TVs, computers, and game consoles in favor of non-virtual recreation. “Read a book instead!” has always been at the top of the list of approved alternatives — but what if your book is on a screen? As digital editions take an increasing piece of the publishing pie, we are all being challenged to rethink what we mean by “book” and “reading.” I can now go outside and take an entire library along with me in my pocket. I wonder what Screen-Free Week — not to mention my mother — would think about that?

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

The post From the editor — May 2013 appeared first on The Horn Book.

It was noticed — my imagination — and praised until I was nine or so, when my mother started rebuking me for having too much of it. Perhaps I’d provoked her, paradoxically, by wandering in my chatter too close to truths that needed to stay secret. Whatever her reason, this was a blow to me — an attack on my best protection, and my joy.

I could have given up right then and withered away, and might have if it hadn’t been for books. Whatever else my family’s faults, they read. My mother took me each week to the library, where I was encouraged to wander freely through the children’s room, choosing whatever pleased me. On one wall were picture books for little kids; on the other walls, the books with chapters — “real” books, to my mind, or what we now call middle grade books. I flew through those middle grade books, six or more a week, finding solace and hope.

Consider one of my favorite series, Mary Norton’s Borrower books, about people so tiny they could live under the floor, surviving on the gleanings of humans. Stacked matchboxes became a chest of drawers, a hatpin a weapon against threatening bugs, a potato enough food for weeks. What vast imaginations the Borrowers needed, to see a cutlery box as a possible boat, or a boot as a home. And even better — I understood this early on — what a vast imagination Mary Norton had needed to create the Borrowers. Or E. Nesbit the Psammead, Noel Streatfeild the Fossil sisters, C. S. Lewis the wardrobe, Norton Juster the tollbooth — the list was long and laden with riches.

My decision was made. Since splendid imaginings were too much for the real world, I threw in my lot with the authors and their creations, and stayed there until I grew up and no longer needed the shelter. By then, however, living without books had become impossible — the act of reading was as natural and essential to me as eating or sleeping. And so I read and read, and eventually I wrote a middle grade book of my own, but that is another story.

Not all children are treated as badly as I was, and for that we can be grateful. But all children have to work out the role of creativity, fantasy, and learning in their lives, often at the same age I was when books saved me — nine to twelve, the years for reading middle grade books. This is when children are moving toward an identity apart from their families but haven’t yet submerged themselves in peer groups. For these brief and wondrous years, they are individuals open to and ripe for the very best we can give them, including those books written just for them, books that invite them into the world outside their families, their schoolrooms, their own lives.

The list of middle grade books available these days is immeasurably longer and richer than when I was a child fifty years ago. Frank Cottrell Boyce, Christopher Paul Curtis, Kate DiCamillo, Polly Horvath, Grace Lin, Hilary McKay, Louis Sachar, Laura Amy Schlitz, Jerry Spinelli, Rebecca Stead, N. D. Wilson, Lisa Yee — these are only some of the authors writing superb books for middle graders. Into the midst of such treasure, however, creeps a troubling trend. The immense success of young adult books, written for teens and known to everyone as YA, has been overshadowing the quieter middle grade category and, in some cases, threatening to subsume it.

For example, a list of “The Greatest Girl Characters of Young Adult Literature,” published online by The Atlantic Wire in 2012, was made up almost entirely of middle grade stalwarts like Meg Murry, Harriet M. Welsch, Claudia Kincaid, and, even worse, those marvelous young girls our seven- and eight-year-olds read about: Ramona Quimby and Pippi Longstocking. I’m happy to say that a great outcry ensued, leading to a mea culpa from The Atlantic Wire, plus an excellent discussion of what exactly YA is (among other things, books written about and for teens, not children). Another example: a 2012 NPR online poll, “Best-Ever Teen Novels? Vote for Your Favorites,” got into a mess when it — correctly — rejected all the votes for middle grade books. Much complaining followed, which led to further explanations, which led to…more complaining. And still the mix-ups come, though not all are so public. Just ask any middle grade writer when was the last time he or she had to run the so-you-write-YA gauntlet. Then hold onto your hat.

Some of this confusion is understandable. Long before YA was dreamt of (most say sometime in the sixties), children’s books were written in which the characters grew from childhood into adolescence and even adulthood. To name a few: Little Women, the Anne of Green Gables series, the Betsy-Tacy series, and the Little House series. So should we now re-categorize them as YA? No. The children’s book world, if not the general public, is certain of that. Those books were written for children, are safe and appropriate for children, and would probably bore the socks off any teenager reading them for reasons other than a nostalgic return to her own childhood. Then there’s the more recent Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling’s behemoth, which brought on further category confusion by starting out in middle grade, then aging into YA as Harry himself aged into adolescence. On top of all that, not only is there the sad fact that middle grade is not as snappy and memorable a term as YA, it is also too often seen as a synonym for middle school, which is another thing altogether.

So is all this confusion really a problem? Does it matter? Not in terms of teens or adults reading children’s books, or even of children reading YA books (the less sexual and violent ones, that is). But in terms of maintaining the boundaries of the middle grade category — so that children know where to go for books that address their particular lives — it matters a great deal. Not just to the children who are, like I was, unprotected and floundering, desperately in need of an imagination-filled haven. No, it matters to all children. As Monica Edinger wrote in response to the NPR brouhaha (“Stop Calling Books for Kids ‘Young Adult,’” November 2012 on the Huffington Post), “Those adults who enjoy reading young adult books today like to reminisce about their favorite teen reads. But when they include children’s books among them and call them YA, they are marginalizing the true readership of these books. My fourth grade students are children. They are not young adults.” Exactly. And, besides, claiming Ramona for YA is like your older sister borrowing your favorite sweater to go out with her boyfriend while you have to stay home with the babysitter. It’s just not right.

Those of us who write middle grade books are a proud bunch, certain that our work is important, that we’re building lifelong readers, maybe even saving lives. And we’re absolutely certain that we’re not a part of YA. Please help us keep the boundaries high and childhood safe for children. They need it, and we owe it to them.

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Middle Grade Saved My Life appeared first on The Horn Book.

Not here. While I’m firmly in favor of the right of people of any age to read up, down, or sideways as they choose, here at the Horn Book we like to think there is a bright line between publishing for adults and publishing for kids, defined as people of an age between birth and high school graduation. In no small part, we like to think this because it makes our work easier. But, like Jeanne Birdsall, I believe the line has value, too.

I came into librarianship more than thirty years ago as a YA librarian. Young adult literature was an almost completely different animal then. The books were shorter, the protagonists younger; sex might be happening, but it was off the page. (Judy Blume’s Forever is the big exception, but Forever was published, nominally, as an adult book.) You might have seen some four-letter words, but you’d never find a fuck on the first pages as you do at the beginning of Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park, a YA novel that gets a starred review this month. Thirty years ago, YA books were labeled “12 and up,” and, as these things usually go, they were mostly being read by ten- to thirteen-year-olds. The first “14 and up” I can remember seeing was Margaret Mahy’s The Catalogue of the Universe, and now that age range is the rule.

Do you ever wonder if 14 and up, sometimes way up, should still be our job? Martha Parravano, the other day, was going through a book cart of new ARCs when she literally threw up her hands in submission to the lineup of fat, glossy YA novels. Their size, their number, their…perfectly respectable selves. I say “perfectly respectable” because the professionalism of these books is not in question, from jacket design on in to the catchy stories, fluid writing, and vivid characters (see Katrina Hedeen and Rachel L. Smith’s “What Makes a Good YA Love Story?” for a consideration of a baker’s dozen of excellent books showing just one slice of YA lit). But the fact that there is so much of it presents a question for everybody in the business of books for young people. Has contemporary YA lit outgrown our caretaking? And forget their staggering numbers: why are novels for people old enough to vote even our business? Bowker’s recent “Understanding the Children’s Book Consumer in the Digital Age” report revealed that it is adults, not teens, who buy most YA books, and those adults are buying them for their own reading pleasure. By and large, however, YA books are published by the children’s divisions of their publishers. Eleanor & Park is published by St. Martin’s Griffin, one of the very few cases I can think of where YA, labeled as such, comes from an adult trade division. I wonder if more of the grownups should be taking on their share.

The post Editorial: Everybody Wants 
to Be a Teenager appeared first on The Horn Book.

For readers in the Southern California region, I’ll be speaking about the Common Core State Standards and nonfiction publishing at the Children’s Literature Council of Southern California’s spring workshop on Saturday, May 11, in South Pasadena. To register for the event go to http://www.childrensliteraturecouncil.org/events.htm, and I hope I see some of you there.

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief
The Horn Book, Inc.

The post NF Notes: From the editor, April 2013 appeared first on The Horn Book.

When I was in nursery school, my favorite bedtime books were two my mother stole from the Unitarian Sunday School library, Martin and Judy, volumes II and III, by Verna Hills Bayley. I loved these books, about two friends who lived next door to each other, because each chapter contained a mildly dramatic story on a subject I could relate to, and each one ended with a lesson. (That’s right, a lesson—the same thing that makes me leery when I see one in a picture book manuscript today. But that’s because I don’t like instruction that tries to pass itself off as something else.) Judy and her brother get distracted while popping corn in the fireplace and forget to replace the screen, causing a fire. A tiny fire that burns a hole in the rug, but it seems scary at first. Judy and her mother sensibly discuss, “How can a fire be naughty? It has to burn the things that are in its way.” Another time, Judy gets her tonsils out in a story that ends with Judy remembering her father’s wise words, “Hospitals may not be much fun, but they are good when you need them.” So satisfying!

When I came across these books again in my twenties, I rolled my eyes at their all-white cast, their overstated prose style, and their obvious didacticism. But now I recognize what they did well. There’s real plot in each story, yet they are short and come to rewarding conclusions. They build a world and characters. Finally, each tale, from the rained-out picnic to the nickel that gets lost under the porch, is one a preschooler can relate to. And don’t many of our very best picture books today explore or celebrate the tiny things that loom so large in a child’s universe?

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Different Drums: How Can a Fire Be Naughty? appeared first on The Horn Book.

A freak tent, a dust witch, a quote from Macbeth, and a villain named Mr. Dark. Such was the stuff of Something Wicked This Way Comes. I’d always been fascinated by carnivals. They seemed to spring out of vacant parking lots overnight. So it made sense that I’d be drawn to Ray Bradbury’s novel as a young girl.

In this tale of good versus evil, the mood is bleak. Danger is foreshadowed by the arrival of a man selling lightning rods covered in strange symbols. The bustle of the small town ends abruptly once the clock strikes nine. Posters announcing Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show appear, hung by a creepy man whistling Christmas carols in October. And when the carnival finally arrives, the descriptions are ominous. The slithering train’s grieving sounds, a wailing calliope, and the skeletal poles of the tent drew me into the weird landscape and held me captive.

The young protagonists, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway, are relentlessly pursued by Mr. Dark after witnessing the devastating consequences faced by townspeople whose deepest desires are fulfilled by carnival attractions: a carousel that makes someone younger or older, a hall of mirrors that reveals an inner truth, and a block of ice containing a beautiful woman. Jim falls victim to temptation but in the end is saved by William and his father, Charles. Evil is conquered by a smile. The carnival is destroyed by a warm embrace and laughter.

The book was odd, and not what my friends were reading, but I was hooked. Every now and then, when the wind is particularly fierce and the forecast predicts an impending storm, I still wonder what it would be like to sit astride a painted carousel horse and turn back the clock for one last glimpse of youth.

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Different Drums: Something Wicked appeared first on The Horn Book.

In a field that celebrates the works of Maurice Sendak, William Steig, and Jon Scieszka, and in which anthropomorphic animals are regularly clothed only from the waist up, “weird” is difficult to define.

In 1994, I had worked at Junior Library Guild for three years, helping to decide whether the K–5 titles I read seemed fresh simply because they were different or if they were in fact good. When our company was sold and longtime editorial director Marjorie Jones retired, suddenly that assessment was up to me.

On a train to Connecticut to meet with my new supervisors, I read proofs of Dinner at Magritte’s by Michael Garland. It is a fictional story about historical figures, something I’d been taught to be skeptical of — and it wasn’t perfect. Both the dialogue and paintings were a little stiff. But I loved how Garland turned the ordinary happenings described in the text — a boy named Pierre and his neighbors René and Georgette Magritte walk, play croquet, and dine together — into homages to the surrealist’s dreamlike works. For example, as Pierre and friends walk through the woods, their arms and legs weave in and out of the background (as in Magritte’s Carte Blanche), and Magritte attends dinner in a bowler hat, with an apple suspended in front of his face (à la The Son of Man). I felt sure kids would enjoy these weird images, but as a whole was the book better than all the ones I hadn’t yet seen or read that season?

After the fact, when books that cause me anxiety during the decision-making process (kids in a televised fight to the death, bears that eat hat-stealing rabbits) have become established on our list, their innovations become familiar, their existence seems inevitable, and it’s hard to remember that once, like Dinner at Magritte’s, they were new and strange.

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Different Drums: New and Strange, Once appeared first on The Horn Book.

This ended up being a challenging assignment, because much literature for youth is pretty weird when coldly explained (kids travel through space and time to duel a giant brain!), and we don’t think twice about it. Saying that I adore Polly Horvath’s wonderful combination of bizarre, perhaps magical, realism and petulant domesticity, which I absolutely do, is just going to elicit yawns: yeah, me and the award committees.

I’m therefore going with a book by an author whose reputation has never really taken off in the U.S. despite her significance in her home country of Australia. Sonya Hartnett’s Sleeping Dogs (1995) is still one of the most horrible, beautiful, shocking books I’ve ever read, pushing not just the envelope but the entire mailbox of young adult literature. The Willows, a hardscrabble, dysfunctional family that runs a trailer park, are so isolated by their abusive patriarch’s cultish control that they have only the vaguest, most unconvincing inklings, from their poorly transmitting TV and from books, that their life isn’t the same as everybody else’s. Commencing with a clearly incestuous dawn cuddle between a brother and sister and moving swiftly into a lovingly detailed scene of sheep slaughter, the book marks its bitter territory right up front. Yet this is no Neanderthal enclave, and there are heartbreaking flares of possibility beyond the family’s strictured life: one son creates delicate nature drawings; another longs to go to college; and the family prizes its monthly reading assignment (currently, portentously enough, Crime and Punishment). Into this mix comes a brash young artist intrigued by the family’s strangeness (and gratified by how superior it makes him feel). The ways in which this does not, to put it mildly, go well would have made Flannery O’Connor blanch and William Faulkner sober up, and it is a savage, traumatic exploration of the way tragedy can lie like kindling in people, just waiting for something to set it alight.

From the March/April 2013 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Different Drums: Horrible and Beautiful appeared first on The Horn Book.

Roger wants us to answer this: “People — some people — say your books are weird. Do you think your books are weird?”

This is what I plan to say.

No, I don’t think my books are weird, and it hurts my feelings when people say they are. I was particularly hurt recently when someone described one of my books as “weird even for her.”

Right after reading that comment, I sat down to watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? It wasn’t really my choice. My daughter was home visiting, and she forced me. I love the Coen brothers, but the first time I tried to watch O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I gave up because it was…too weird. In fact, it irritated me that the great American filmmakers would waste their time making such a weird little film.

I settled in anyhow because I wanted a place to sulk and frame responses to “weird even for her.” I figured I’d just ignore the movie. But to my great surprise, I no longer found the movie weird. I’d seen enough Coen brothers by that point to gain a facility with the language Coen. I was no longer sitting there as I had the first time with my arms crossed, muttering, “Oh, you’re just being too weird.” There’s a wonderful scene in the movie where a flood comes and sweeps up everything and everyone in its mighty waters. And that’s what it felt like. That I had volunteered to leave the comfortable footing of my familiar shores and get swept into a Coen flood that carried me somewhere I would not otherwise have reached.

I once read a book about language acquisition that said that people with the strongest egos have the hardest time learning a new language because they’ve already found something that works for them. They are not anxious to give it up to the unknown and where it might take them. When a person becomes fluent in a second language, they actually develop a whole new personality. They are a different person in English than they are in French. This is why people who have experienced trauma or heartbreak often find themselves with a compulsion to learn Italian. It not only gives them a new way of looking at the world and a different frame of reference — it changes who they are. And that is primarily what I think we mean when we say something is weird. We are saying, This is scary because it might make me see things differently and that would change who I am. That is the scariness of weird and also its strength.

Hi, Jack. Martha and Roger want to know if we resent being pigeon-holed (if we think we are) as quirky, offbeat, zany, etc.?

This assumes that we view our own work as weird. But weird is a judgment by someone on the outside of a work. The writer has the first experience of the story and must necessarily be inside of it. Nothing is truly knowable except from the inside. And anything truly known isn’t weird.

But of course it isn’t always easy for either the writer or the reader to move from the outside to the inside. They have to leave behind, in creation or response, all that is fake. Art is, as Sister Wendy says in an interview with Bill Moyers, “a great tester of the fake because it must be the real you that creates or responds. And the more the real you dares to create or respond, the more the real you is there.” This is the great reward, the great moment of being for either the writer or the reader.

For a long time when I got letters from people saying that one of my books had moved them, I couldn’t connect. It bothered me. It seemed ungrateful to feel I didn’t even really care about these letters, that they had nothing to do with me. Recently, I have understood that what I was feeling (although I didn’t understand it) was that these readers were thanking me for creating a catalyst for something deep within them to show up. They weren’t really delighting in me. They were delighting in themselves. And since I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me, I was right: there was no connection. Not in that sense. But there was the work. And that is what art is. The middleman.

Hi, Mr. Gantos,

The Horn Book asks the following: “Jack has a book about obsessive mother love/taxidermy. Polly has a book about bunny detectives. Have you ever had a novel turned down by a publisher? Have you ever been asked to write something with broader appeal?”

Polly has turned this section of the discussion over to me because once again someone has not read the jacket of Mr. and Mrs. Bunny — Detectives Extraordinaire! and is attributing the book to her. Humans! What are you going to do? Can’t live with them and can’t eat them. (Without the proper condiments.)

Well, to begin, this was Mrs. Bunny’s first book, so she has yet to get the “please write something with broader appeal” kind of rejection slip that has caused so many rabbits to hang themselves by their ears from the nearest light fixture. Secondly, Mr. and Mrs. Bunny has very broad appeal in both the human and bunny market and even among foxes — although there it is being marketed as a horror story. And we all know the many-specied popularity of your books, Mr. Gantos.

But let Mrs. Bunny put her thinking cap on. It seems to her that the Horn Book is setting things up as weird vs. mainstream. Mrs. Bunny would ask herself, having delved into a certain amount of human popular fiction, Are bunny detectives stranger than owls delivering letters or some godforsaken creature called a Dementor? Is obsessive mother love/taxidermy weirder than adolescent girls being infatuated with young men who want to suck their blood (never Mrs. Bunny’s idea of an attractive courting ritual) or television shows where the object is to kill everyone else and be the last one standing? I mean, objectively speaking, are they, Mr. Gantos, are they?

So! Mrs. Bunny thinks perhaps we are not talking about weird vs. mainstream. We are talking about something else here. We are talking about a kind of nervousness some books evoke. A kind of apprehension. Some suspicion that one is going to have to work for one’s dinner.

Sister Wendy calls this not weird vs. mainstream, but pure vs. comfort. “Comforting art,” she says, is art that is easy to react to. “Everyone knows exactly what they think about it…Feeling I know I can judge without having to look, without having to take trouble. That is comforting.” You don’t have to dig deep within to show up for it. Sometimes Mrs. Bunny finds she wants this. Sometimes she wants to read Bridget Jones’s Diary. But sometimes she wants to read American Pastoral. It reminds Mrs. Bunny of the time she put a water feature in the garden. Mr. Bunny was not a fan. “Don’t you find it soothing?” she asked Mr. Bunny, but he replied, “Mrs. Bunny, I do not ALWAYS wish to be soothed. Sometimes I like to be WORKED UP!”

Of course Mrs. Bunny is not sure that you or Polly Horvath could call your books pure as opposed to comforting. That is a judgment that must come from others, and only as time will tell. In other words, you’ll be toes up fertilizing the carrot bed, Mr. Gantos, before anything definitive is decided. Mrs. Bunny is sure only that her own book must be of the pure variety because Mr. Bunny is always declaiming that her writing career has been no comfort to him whatsoever.

So if it’s weird and difficult, it is art?

No. It may not evoke any response in you. Twin Peaks was to Mrs. Bunny’s greatly discerning eyes weird, but Mrs. Bunny thinks it is not art, because when she got inside it, it was no longer weird — but it wasn’t really anything else either. There seemed a definite lack of there, there. There, there is a must.

Well, then, what if everyone says it is art, but yet it doesn’t awaken a flowering within you? No sudden understanding that this is something magical and mysterious that you are now in contact with.

Yes, but it could be that you are not ready for this story. And maybe never will be. Your response alone doesn’t define its artiness.

Well, frankly then I don’t know what you’ve been going on about.

I didn’t say this was going to be simple. Leslie Fiedler used to say that when he came upon something that didn’t awaken a flowering within, he would say to himself, “What is lacking in me that I fail to respond to this?” But try that one on some editor slogging through the slush pile.

Jack, help us out here.

Thank you, Polly, for your thoughts on the subject of not being weird. (And please thank your colleague, Mrs. Bunny, for her thoughts as well.) I fully subscribe to Polly’s point that the more you understand a piece of art, and the more you empathize with the world within a book, and the more you give yourself over to an external experience, the more it radiates within you in a genuinely transformative way. This is not weird. It is as profound as early Homo sapiens painting portraits of themselves on cave walls. They discovered their other selves, and thus self-dialogue was born and blossomed. Which was fantastic! Where would we be as a species without self-reflection?

As for me, I can’t say that anything I’ve published thus far is intentionally weird, as I think weird is a very calculated result of a writer’s intent. I certainly don’t want my readers to be weird as a result of reading my books, but if something I write ignites them to reflect on themselves or others, and causes meaningful change and understanding, then I am gratified. When I publish a book, it is a form of sharing myself, and given the range of my publications (from picture books to a prison memoir), I don’t think any of my books are weird.

Besides, to be truly weird I believe a book has to live in the dark full-time, unexposed to readers’ spying eyes. In other words, a truly weird book is an unpublished book — a rejected manuscript, in fact. So let me take you to Bates Hall in the Boston Public Library — a 218-foot-long, forty-two-foot-wide room with a fifty-foot-high barrel-vaulted ceiling, with 224 numbered seats around twenty-eight oak tables. In this room is where, since 1974, I have written the majority of my forty-five published books. Here I have also written three full-length unpublished and thoroughly rejected and unrehabilitated novels, which remain in manuscript form. It is these three cadaverous novels I wish to write about in response to Roger’s query: “To some people your books are weird. Do you think they are weird?”

In Bates Hall I always name my novels after the seat number in which I sit during the writing of the manuscript, and I always change seats with each new manuscript. Recently, I drifted into Bates Hall. Looking out across that vast room is like looking out at an old New England graveyard, with the tall, rounded backs of the captain’s chairs rising up above the tables like flinty, skull-carved headstones. I love this room, and so one by one I visited seat #37, seat #57, and seat #117. I think of the manuscripts written there not as the dead but as unique books that have been buried alive within me, and in this way I think of them constantly as my greatest private works — books so rare that only I will ever know them.

Many years ago, before electronic burglary detection, I used to hide inside a long hollow coffin of a bench with a hinged seat just outside of Bates Hall in the Pompeii alcove. I would wait until the library closed and for the guards to give a final “all clear” to the darkened rooms, and then I would push upward on the seat, crawl out, and quietly creep into Bates Hall. In those days I only had two failed novels, the ones written at seats #117 and #37, and I would sit for hours in those seats without pen or paper. There was no reason to take notes. As I thought about the novels, I was no longer attempting to rewrite them, but to re-remember them and reset their type in the doing. “Seat #37” was rejected many times. At first I used to take out the red-inked and hand-typed manuscript, which lived in a file cabinet I affectionately called “The Triage.” I know this manuscript better than any of my published books because I dwell on it as a wound that won’t heal, and I am not looking for a cure. I wander the familiar streets of sentences and blocks of paragraphs and towns of chapters. I love the labyrinth of misplaced words, decaying architecture, dead-end story lines, and jaundiced weather. “Seat #37” is an exceptionally rare book for me because it is the most flawed, and thus a traveling museum of woeful double chins, gimpy phrases, forced adjectives, excess rants, and corrosive promises masquerading as true love. But for editors who had read “Seat #37”…well, it is as if I took a mighty oak tree in the fullness of summer and painted a letter on each leaf, and then when they dropped in the fall I gathered them up and taped them onto large sheets of paper (seventy leaves to the line and twenty lines to the page, which equals 1,400 leaves). The serendipitous text, with words more unknown than Esperanto, created nothing but chaos. Though this book was rejected by all, I still love it. I wake up at night from a dream and realize I’ve been walking the alleys of the sentences in my sleep.

Over at seat #117 is a manuscript that, like Chernobyl, is encased forever inside my own dome. It is the story of a situational mute touring the Amazon rainforest in an effort to communicate nonverbally with indigenous people — something along the lines of how termites communicate as described by E. O. Wilson in his great book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and in Karl von Frisch’s book that decodes the language of dancing bees. It would be best to pulp this manuscript and instead affix a book binding onto a small mirror so that the reader could open the cover and stare into a ready-made dictionary of gestural language. Or not. This book is difficult to pin down.

“Seat #57” was written after motion detectors were installed, and so I could never sit at that seat overnight and ponder its endless manifestations. It is a flawed manuscript fitted out with a broken rudder like the wounded German battleship Bismarck in the Atlantic, which could only steer in circles like a carnival marksmanship game while the British Navy pounded it into submission and sent it to Davy Jones’s Locker. This book is about quantum physics and the micro-implanted levers of a charade government scheming within the president’s mind. “Seat #57” was rejected, and because it was the manuscript I submitted to Farrar right before Dead End in Norvelt, the words are still freshly painted on the inside of my skull. It is odd to “abandon ship” on a manuscript and to sit in a lifeboat and stare at the listing hulk as it drifts in and out of sight but never goes away. It never sinks.

I imagine all my rejected books, petting them as I page through and nurture them. They are my abandoned litter of kittens—runts to some but tigers to me, prowling under my skin, their very own Eden where my mind is their lair and my heart is the prey that nurtures them each day. Whenever I sit at seat #57 (where, incidentally, I am writing this), I quietly promise, “I will never submit you again. Inside of me you will always be pure.”

The above ordinary slice of life is what is within the mind of this writer. What is beautiful to me is the fabulous Lovecraft of impossible landscapes where, within each person, the extraordinary resides. The rare-book-room of the mind is a tonic compared to the outside world, which is unrelentingly predictable. Each day I read three newspapers. I can count on the consistency of hate, prejudice, anger, death, cheating, ignorance, crime — all cancers spawned by the foul reign of pulp social behavior. What people think of my books is not my concern. What is beautiful to me is beautiful to me. The undiscovered tombs of Egypt prefer to remain undiscovered. They know that, once opened, their murals will slowly fade to white like skulls bleached out by the sun.

Don’t open the tomb. Close your eyes and imagine it. Nothing could be more beautiful than what you can’t share. Is that weird?

From the March/April 2013 special “Different Drummers” issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Two Writers Look at Weird appeared first on The Horn Book.

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

From the April 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

The post From the editor – April 2013 appeared first on The Horn Book.