Trick or Treat

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The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories

These experimental, unedited short stories showcase the many faces of horror — goth, faerie, ghostly, grotesque, lyrical, vengeful, and nasty-cool. Some clusters of tales are responses to a subject prompt like “King Arthur” or “puddles”; others are one-offs.  Creatures such as vampires, dragons, and zombies are joined by original creations such  as butterflies in temporary human form. The stories all tend toward the traditional  structure of a surprise ending. The pieces were first published online by the three authors  as an exercise in creativity and criticism, and the presentation here is innovative,  incorporating critique comments, hand-written marginalia describing the  writer’s process, doodles, short essays, and diagrams. The stories themselves are strong,  but the apparatus can get in the way; the self-congratulatory tone of the comments wears  thin, and some of the process notes (“I suck at inventing new slang”) add little to the  reader’s understanding or pleasure.

From the September/October 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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What Came from the Stars 

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A Certain October

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I would call it a guilty pleasure if I felt guilty. But my subscription to People magazine actually liberates me. Instead of furtively flipping pages in the checkout line, hoping to find the photos of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s baby before it’s time to unload the hummus, I have Blue Ivy Carter (seven pounds) delivered, so to speak, right to my door. Instead of trying to catch up on the last two months’ worth of celebrity gossip while under the dryer at the hair salon, I get the news fresh, in the comfort of my living room, without the distraction of overheated earlobes.

So it was with zero pangs, qualms, or first-degree burns that, on the evening of February 17, 2012, I sat down to indulge in the latest issue and a glass of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. (I do have some class.) I had barely made it through the table of contents when my cell phone buzzed with an e-mail. Melissa, my editor at Red Line Editorial, was sending out an offer for a new assignment to several of her writers. The first one of us to respond would get the job.

Technically, Red Line is a book packaging company, though, as Red Line’s founder and president Bob Temple explained when I contacted him for this article, he prefers the term “book development house.” Its clients, mainly educational publishers, hire Red Line for a variety of services, from shepherding a manuscript through the writing and editing process to collaborating on the development of new series.

Authors writing for Red Line do so on a work-for-hire basis. They’re paid flat fees, no royalties. Each manuscript must conform to fairly strict series guidelines. The word that comes to mind when I think of the deadlines is insane, but let’s just call them tight. Still, tight deadlines can motivate a writer to produce more than she would if she had all the time in the world. (Feel free to substitute me for a writer and I for she in the previous sentence.) As a friend of mine who has done work for hire for other publishers said, if you’re efficient and “get in a groove,” you can make a living, or something close to it, with work-for-hire projects, though this road to semi-solvency does come with a stigma. As another friend who writes for both the trade and educational markets noted, “Many folks think work for hire is selling out.”

It’s true, when I first stepped into the sunshine with my shiny new MFA degree in writing for children and young adults, I didn’t have much respect for the type of library-market titles Red Line has since hired me to produce. For one thing, I’d spent years reviewing such books for The Horn Book Guide. The Guide, as you probably know, reviews a much greater quantity of titles than The Horn Book Magazine. While the Magazine, in general, publishes recommendations, the Guide reviews it all — the good, the bad, the intermittently coherent. How well I remember those days of regularly receiving hulking boxes of books from the Guide. The initial discovery of a UPS delivery on my porch felt like Christmas! Then I’d slice open the box, and there it would be: the coal. I’m talking about, say, five books in a hypothetical series called Countries Beginning with S, along with a note from the Guide editor instructing me to “please write one review for these five books.” So I’d scowl at Sri Lanka, smirk at Sierra Leone, determining from the outset that what I’d find between the covers warranted a bunch of other S words — slapdash and superficial and subpar. The S word, in short.

But recently I happened upon this quote from poet Czesław Miłosz: “When the Japanese poet Basho advised a poet describing a pine to learn from the pine, he wanted to say that contemplation of a thing — a reverent and pious approach to it — is a pre
requisite of true art.” In other words, said the haiku master, show a little respect. Thinking back on my Guide reviewing days, I realize now that my dismissive attitude wasn’t doing anyone any favors. How could I possibly judge those books fairly through a veil of condescension? Not that I’d necessarily place educational series nonfiction in the lofty-sounding category of “true art.” But joining the ranks of work-for-hire writers has humbled me. I have looked more carefully at the pine and learned a thing or two.

First and foremost, I’ve gained an appreciation for the level of craft and effort it takes to put together one of these books and to do it well. I’ve learned that to produce a substantive, informative, entertaining, thoroughly researched narrative within the often-frustrating constraints of whirlwind deadlines and curriculum criteria — for example, a friend told me she wasn’t allowed to use the word haunting, even in describing a melody, because ghosts don’t fly with school boards in Texas — is really, really hard, but also, if you can accomplish it, enormously satisfying.

So far all of my assignments from Red Line have been in the area of middle-school nonfiction. For the first one, I flung myself into the fetid partisan swamp of the Bush v. Gore case to write a volume in ABDO Publishing’s Landmark Supreme Court Cases series. Every day for two months I rolled my little suitcase full of library books about the 2000 presidential election to a neighborhood coffee shop and got to work. (A sample of the giddy, exhausted e-mails I sent to friends during this period: “Don’t worry, Gore is pulling ahead! I think he’s going to win this time!”)

Next I swooped over to the Twittersphere to write about the company’s cofounder Jack Dorsey for another ABDO series, Technology Pioneers. Working on it (yes, the book is longer than 140 characters) gave me insight into how things in the real world spark advances in the virtual one. It’s safe to say there would be no Twitter if Jack Dorsey hadn’t been a kid who played with maps.

But back to my latest opus. In her e-mail on February 17th, Melissa offered a last-minute project, one that had recently materialized. She needed someone to write a middle-school biography in ABDO’s Lives Cut Short series.

As I read Melissa’s message, the subject of the proposed biography was smiling up at me from my People magazine cover. Was it coincidence or fate? I decided to go with the latter. I wrote back immediately to say that of course I wanted to write about Whitney Houston.

My response beat out another author’s by less than a minute.

However, I soon learned that this was not the easy territory of writing for a Pop Star Princesses series. And I was not the first Whitney biographer to learn such a lesson. In 1996, Kevin Ammons, the ex-boyfriend of Houston’s publicist, came out with the unauthorized Good Girl, Bad Girl: An Insider’s Biography of Whitney Houston. Not long after Houston’s death, Ammons’s coauthor, Nancy Bacon, described the unsettling package she’d received from someone while working on the book. “I opened it up, and it was a snake. It didn’t smell—it had obviously been sent to me alive. [Whitney] told Kevin I was like a snake in the grass because I was writing bad things about her.”

Of course I didn’t have to worry about reptiles special-delivered from the grave. Nonetheless, Houston, we had a problem. When I accepted the assignment, my attitude toward the damaged diva was less than respectful. I viewed her in the way I used to view library market nonfiction — as kind of a joke. Unlike the other two “serious” projects, here was easy money! Take a nostalgia trip back to the 1980s, watch a few episodes of Being Bobby Brown on YouTube, tell the familiar fallen-angel tale—how hard could it be?

Meanwhile, peeking out from behind a pine tree, Basho frowned, and shook his head.

Because friends kept asking if I was nervous about handling the sensitive material — i.e., the story of the singer’s descent into drug abuse and ultimately tragic end — I figured that would be the biggest challenge. And would I address the rumors about Houston’s possible lesbian relationship with her longtime friend Robyn Crawford? (To answer that question, no; Houston asserted in numerous interviews — and I agree — that even if the rumors were true, it was none of anyone’s beeswax.) What didn’t concern me enough, I don’t think, was whether I’d be able to get beyond my own preconceptions, whether I could get close enough to my subject to portray her as a complicated person instead of just a punch line.

Red Line requires its authors to submit an outline, first chapter, and working bibliography for approval before going ahead with projects. Normally I’m not the plan-ahead type, but being forced to do this prep work has proven lifesaving when, in the middle of a manuscript, I would feel overwhelmed by the amount of work left to do. Rather than fearfully watching the sand slip through the hourglass, I’d click on my outline for reassurance. An outline says: see, no need to fret, you’ve thought this thing through already. You said you were going to do this, so all you have to do is do it. Piece of cake.

I seriously don’t know how anyone managed to write these books before the Internet. To all you Stone Age work-for-hire nonfiction authors, pounding rocks together and consulting the oracle of the card catalogue, we pampered Googlers bow down! Back in the old days, for instance, it would have taken me countless microfiche-tangled hours to access all the magazine interviews I cited in my bibliography.

Now a labor-unintensive click takes me to a list of links compiled by fans on www.classicwhitney.com. A few more clicks, and suddenly there Whitney is: the energetic young star-on-the-rise profiled in People Weekly in 1985; the woman “under the microscope” (her metaphor for fame) setting the record straight in Ebony in 1991 about the five-and-a-half-carat rock on her finger from beau Eddie Murphy; the feisty goddess speaking directly to her legion of gay worshippers for the first time in Out magazine in 2000. (The Out interviewer claimed to have “glimpsed the real Houston” — and he liked what he saw — when he told her he believed she was straight and she responded, “It’s not for you to believe me. I don’t give a s— if you believe me or not.”) The internet worked as my portal into Houston’s heart and mind, or at least the portions of them she chose to share with the press.

As I kept reading and ferreting out articles, as I tuned in to the broadcast of her star-studded but surprisingly (to me) intimate and moving funeral at Newark, New Jersey’s, New Hope Baptist Church, as I scanned the sections on “Nippy” (Houston’s childhood nickname) in the autobiography of her mother, gospel singer Cissy Houston, the layers gradually peeled away. Early media images portrayed a squeaky-clean pop princess who wanted nothing more scandalous than to dance with somebody who loved her. Later she became infamous for her “crack is whack” persona (crack being the one drug she famously told Diane Sawyer in 2002 that she would never do because she was too rich for it). However, I found, as I wrote in the book, “a real person, a girl from New Jersey who had strengths as well as weaknesses, just like anybody.”

And it all started on that winter night when I settled onto my couch with my white wine and realized that my guilt-free People magazine pleasure had a new name: research.

From the September/October 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

Art by Devon Johnson

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Pirateria: The Wonderful Plunderful 
Pirate Emporium

Shiver Me Timbers!: Pirate Poems & Paintings
by Douglas Florian; 
illus. by Robert Neubecker
Primary    Beach Lane/Simon    32 pp.
8/12    978-1-4424-1321-4    $16.99
e-book ed.  978-1-4424-5712-6    $12.99
Florian provides young pirate lovers with a profusion of arrrghs and ahoy mateys, enough to keep their piratephilia alive for a long time. Using stereotypical pirate-speak, each poem explores a familiar aspect of pirate lore and takes it to a new level of rhythm and rhyme, usually with a final line calculated to evoke a chuckle. In “Pirates Wear Patches,” rhyming couplets list pirate clothing and accessories, from patches to puffy shirts to tricorne hats. The final stanza reads, “Pirates have parrots / And eat alligator. / Pirates shoot first / And then ask questions later.” Sometimes the poems veer into the deliciously disgusting. “Pirates’ Meal” ends with the crowd-pleasing line, “Methinks that I will puke.” Neubecker’s digitally colored India-ink illustrations play well with the light verse. While some of the images feature close-ups of faces, many of a pirate (or just his bloodshot eyes on a black background) staring directly at the reader, there is nothing to be afraid of here, and the reader knows that these poems are balanced between light gore and outright silliness.

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Emily Post was the guardian of etiquette for decades, and now her descendents Peggy Post (Emily’s great-granddaughter-in-law) and Cindy P. Senning (Peggy’s sister-in-law) cover the genteel beat, making their book Emily’s Everyday Manners a tempting choice for teachers of manners. It is filled with practical advice about everyday situations that children encounter, such as playing on a playground, attending a birthday party, or riding the school bus. The book’s characters demonstrate good manners through sample phrases they might use in specific situations. Unfortunately the whole thing backfires because the words coming out of the kids’ mouths are so very unchildlike. For instance, while washing the dishes little Emily says to little Ethan, “Thanks! My mom so appreciates the help.” At best, these kids come across like Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver; at worst, their adult-sounding comments would probably elicit real-life teasing from other children.

One old favorite to ease grownups and kids alike into the subject of manners is Sesyle Joslin’s classic What Do You Say, Dear?: A Book of Manners for All Occasions. The book, which adults may remember from their own childhoods, features delightfully imaginative and childlike scenarios such as this: “You are walking backwards, because sometimes you like to, and you bump into a crocodile. What do you say, dear?” A page turn reveals the answer: “Excuse me.” The accompanying illustrations by Maurice Sendak are very funny, with many of his characteristic touches (e.g., child characters wearing outsize dress-up clothes, a dog craning to lick a wedding cake). Not surprisingly, however, the book is of its time; the little girl plays at being a princess needing rescue, a bride, and other very traditional gender roles that may set off sexism alarm bells. Likewise, the firearm will probably rule it out for use in school, but the scenario makes its point perfectly: “You are a cowboy riding around the range. Suddenly Bad-Nose Bill comes up behind you with a gun. He says, ‘Would you like me to shoot a hole in your head?’ What do you say, dear? ‘No, thank you.’”

What Do You Say, Dear? works so beautifully as a manners book because it’s genuinely funny to both adults and children. It’s also participatory — the child is expected to fill in the answer before turning the page. The book doesn’t lecture children or put unrealistic-sounding words in their mouths. Rather, it gives kids practice with good-manners words so that they may, if backing into a crocodile (or a grandma) in the grocery store, spontaneously come up with the just right thing to say.

Another book an older generation might remember fondly is Munro Leaf’s Manners Can Be Fun. It begins by making the point that “good manners is really just getting along well with other people.” Updated several times since 1936 when originally published, it relies heavily on name-calling, describing children such as “BRAGGER” (“who tells you all the time how great he is”) and “SHOW-OFF” (“who is miserable if everybody isn’t paying attention to her”). The tone is very much that of an adult instructing a child—you can practically see the finger-wagging. The stick-figure illustrations are comical, but overall the book lacks the grace both in writing and illustration of Leaf’s classic Story of Ferdinand.

An entertaining book that melds old-fashioned sensibility with a modern-day twist is Diane Goode’s Mind Your Manners! The text comes from an 1802 spelling book designed to instruct children on etiquette. Still-useful tips include, “Throw not any thing under the table,” “Drink not, nor speak with any thing in thy mouth,” and “Eat not too fast, or with greedy behavior.” Rich watercolor and ink illustrations show the nineteenth-century Abbott family sitting at a long table — and breaking each of the book’s etiquette rules in turn. Goode skillfully conveys humor with a swoop of a line and a squiggle of black ink; readers who carefully pore over the pictures will be rewarded with lots of funny details. Interplay between the text’s heavy-handedness and the illustrations’ humor provides a great opportunity for discussing, with a light touch, current expectations for good manners.

Some books are fine stories on their own that also happen to cover manners. One is Cari Best’s Are You Going to Be Good?, about a little boy who tries his very hardest to be polite at his great-grandmother’s 100th birthday party. Young Robert rejoices in attending this most special occasion, looking very proud in his suit and tie, with newly polished shoes. He’s also all prepped with his manners: “In the car, they practice ‘Please.’ They practice ‘Thank you,’ and ‘Excuse me,’ too.” G. Brian Karas’s pictures hilariously convey both Robert’s ebullience (which would seem to present a challenge to all those expectations of behavior) and his sudden shyness at being faced with a roomful of tall, dressed-up adults. This isn’t a book about a perfect child but one who is trying hard, and in the end he and Great-Gran Sadie get into some welcome mischief. This book could be a wonderful way to prepare children for an important event, for it models not just child behavior but also compassionate, wise adult behavior (sometimes we need a little reminding, too).

Another picture book that is strong in its own right and happens to have some good pointers about manners is Thank You, Meiling, by Linda Talley. Little duck Meiling is behaving much in the way a spoiled human child would. Her mother reprimands her and sends her to run errands with a little boy: “You shall go with him. If you pay attention, you may learn something about courtesy. Remember, stop and think of others.” The duck takes her mission seriously, noticing each polite phrase or action as she and the boy gather items for the Moon Festival. The story is engaging, the Moon Festival traditions enticing, and the manners are clearly portrayed as being more than mere custom but rather a way of taking care of others.

Author Judy Sierra shows a particular affinity for picture books about manners. Her most recent, Suppose You Meet a Dinosaur: A First Book of Manners, depicts a little girl who goes to the grocery store and encounters a dinosaur. The pair copes with a number of etiquette questions, all posed in rhyme, as when the dinosaur wants to turn down an offer of butter brickle: “She does not want it, even slightly. / How does she let you know politely?” The question-and-answer format recalls What Do You Say, Dear? but with an updated look and tone. Tim Bowers’s illustrations portray the dinosaur with a tiny pink purse and glasses, watched by wary-looking humans as she shops. The book combines humor with instruction, as does Sierra’s Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf, in which a dapper-looking wolf heads off to a party at the library while trying to remember his instructions: “Sip your tea and never slurp, say ‘Excuse Me’ if you burp. / Smile and have a lot of fun, but don’t go biting anyone!” Fairy-tale characters populate J. Otto Seibold’s digital illustrations, and kids will enjoy finding the ones they know while they follow B.B. Wolf’s attempts at staying polite.

Since the reason for having good manners is to get along well with others, and each of Mo Willems’s books gets down to the fundamentals of the way people (and elephants, piggies, pigeons, ducklings, and others) relate to one another, it’s not surprising that he, too, has written some manners books. Time to Say “Please”! offers advice to a little girl who is eyeing a cookie jar so longingly that her eyes turn into cookies. The words of wisdom are presented by cute little mice, industriously using balloons, signs, parachutes, and other things to show the information: “Don’t just grab it! Go ask a big person and PLEASE say ‘PLEASE’!” The mice continue to list other reasons to say please, and some other useful phrases, too, all delivered with humor and practicality: “You may not get what you want. But it’s hard to say ‘no’ to ‘please.’”

Willems’s newest Pigeon book, The Duckling Gets a Cookie!? also features manners and cookies. Pigeon cannot believe that adorable little Duckling has somehow gotten hold of a cookie simply by asking for it. After Pigeon reels off the many things he himself requires, a tear drops from his eye: “But do I get what I ask for?” A double-page-spread Pigeon-tantrum ensues: “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” He is finally shamed into politeness by the duckling’s kind offer of the cookie. An adult looking for the perfect book to teach a rude child manners may prefer a protagonist without so much attitude, but children will get the point through Pigeon’s own bad behavior.

For those still on their way to Willems there are even some board books intended to teach manners to the very youngest. Manners Time, by Elizabeth Verdick, gives kids not just the words to say but the accompanying physical cues. In one example a little girl offers salad to her friend, and the text reads, “Here’s a nice way to say no: ‘No, thank you.’ (A smile helps, too.)” Changes in typeface help identify the message, with the spoken phrase printed in a different color. The illustrations by Marieka Heinlen show a diverse group of kids with a range of expressions that make meaning clear while not stooping to the cartoony or exaggerated. This book could be used with toddlers as well as with older kids who need some help with social cues, and it also includes some thoughtful tips for parents and caregivers.

Hello Genius, a new series of board books, offers bold graphic illustrations and one manners word or phrase at a time. Titles include Mouse Says “Sorry,” Hippo Says “Excuse Me,” and Bear Says “Thank You.” In Penguin Says “Please,” Penguin starts out being bratty, demanding things without saying the magic word. By the end he learns how to ask politely and is rewarded with the things he requests. It’s a simple lesson that’s useful to learn as early as possible.

There are several contemporary examples of books whose attempts to teach manners are heavy-handed and unwelcome (Whoopi’s Big Book of Manners, for instance, or the new Terrible, Awful, Horrible Manners!). The books that succeed in their mission are the ones that help children learn some of the nuances of polite behavior and are still great stories — entertaining, engaging, and authentic-sounding. One of the best manners books in recent years, combining all the elements of successful etiquette-teaching, is Jane Yolen’s hugely popular How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? The volume combines Mark Teague’s very funny illustrations showing human parents and their dinosaur children with Yolen’s impeccable rhymes. Children get enough distance from the moral that they can be caught by surprise when they recognize their own naughty actions; as a little girl in my story time once exclaimed, “Hey! Sometimes I do that!” They get the message; and because it is delivered with sly wit that is funny to both the child and the adult reader, it is a treat for all. And for that, we should all say, “Thank you!”

Good Manners Books

Are You Going to Be Good? (Farrar, 2005) by Cari Best; illus. by G. Brian Karas
Bear Says “Thank You” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Hippo Says “Excuse Me” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Mouse Says “Sorry” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Penguin Says “Please” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Mind Your Manners! (Farrar, 2005) by Diane Goode
What Do You Say, Dear?: A Book of Manners for All Occasions (Addison-Wesley, 1958) by Sesyle Joslin; illus. by Maurice Sendak
Manners Can Be Fun (Lippincott, 1936; Universe, 2004) by Munro Leaf
Emily’s Everyday Manners (Collins/HarperCollins, 2006) by Peggy Post and Cindy Post Senning; illus. by Steve Björkman
Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf (Knopf, 2007) by Judy Sierra; illus. by J. Otto Seibold
Suppose You Meet a Dinosaur: A First Book of Manners (Knopf, 2012) by Judy Sierra; illus. by Tim Bowers
Thank You, Meiling (MarshMedia, 1999) by Linda Talley; illus. by Itoko Maeno
Manners Time (Free Spirit, 2009) by Elizabeth Verdick; illus. by Marieka Heinlen
The Duckling Gets a Cookie!? (Hyperion, 2012) by Mo Willems
Time to Say “Please”! (Hyperion, 2005) by Mo Willems
How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? (Blue Sky/Scholastic, 2000) by Jane Yolen; illus. by Mark Teague

From the September/October 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Jangles: A Big Fish Story

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