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I have spent this day in two ways only: At an early hour I Skyped with Ms. Tina Hudak and the young men of St. Albans Lower School of Washington about freedom, walls, inspiration, and building scenes and fictional time during a phenomenal conversation inspired by my Berlin Wall novel, Going Over. I was deeply impressed with those young men. With their recognition, among other things, that whether a wall is metaphorical or physical, it counts. It separates. It divides.

The rest of the day I have been writing my column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, finding it particularly challenging, this time around, to say just what I wanted to say. I fought with words until the words gave in and, at last, relinquished story.

Just as I was completing that work, news came in via Twitter of a GuysLitWire review of This Is the Story of You. The review, written by author and critic Colleen Mondor, is an absolute masterpiece of writing about writing, and I am so deeply taken by the artistry of it.

Taken by it.

Grateful for it.

On a day when words came slow to me, Colleen's words arrived as a salve. This is a deepest kindness.

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Yesterday, Lara Starr of Chronicle Books wrote to share the news that GOING OVER was included in the BCCB Holiday Gift Guide, news I read while giving a very old friend a tour of the Penn campus. The entire list is worth reading, for those of you who are still in shopping mode.

(Buy books from real bookstores! Please!)

This morning, Twitter delivers this incredibly gorgeous and smart review of the book that defined, for me, much of my writing and teaching year. These are words only Colleen Mondor—author, publisher, critic, woman deeply invested in history—could write. I share a final paragraph, but every single word she writes, the perspective she yields about this period, and the photo she used to headline her review matter to me. They put a tear on my face this morning.

Going Over is a teen novel of far bigger ideas than most I have come across. The setting is brilliant and the split narrative, between Ada and Stefan, provides readers with a close look at just how different Berlin became after the split. (Which also makes the reunification that much more impressive.) There are so many novels set during WWII, while the Cold War remains stubbornly overlooked. I'm thus delighted with what Kephart has done here and find these characters, in their decidedly European setting, to be different in the best way. It's a thought provoking title with exceedingly likeable characters and a great ending; all of which make Going Over a winner.

So many thanks, Colleen, and BCCB, and all those who believed in Berlin, and in me, this year. You allow me to keep dreaming forward in ways I'll never adequately explain. To keep writing these small books that take these big risks and hope to find readers who will willingly enter these worlds.

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A few weeks ago, a note arrived from Laura Stanfill, the publisher of a brand-new press called Forest Avenue. Laura knew of my interest in the Schuylkill River. She'd been talking with a mutual friend (the fabulous Colleen Mondor, a fabulous author AND indie publisher). She wondered, she wrote, if I'd be interested in taking a look at a new novel by an award-winning poet named Kate Gray, a book, she said, that "is an unblinking look at boarding school bullying based on Kate's first year as a teacher, with a strong rowing emphasis, including a major plot point that happens on the Schuylkill." The book, Laura continued, "celebrates the river's strength and beauty—and its rowers." It has already been celebrated by writers like Hannah Tinti (about whom I once wrote here), Ron Carlson (whose work I love and mentioned here), and Christopher Buckley.

Laura went on to describe Forest Avenue Press, which has recently signed with a division of the distributor PGW/Perseus and which (pay attention to this) is opening nationally for submissions in January.

A new, award-winning press with promise, I thought.

An editor who deeply loves her authors and is committed to finding a broad audience for her work.

A poet novelist.

The river.

I'm in.

Yesterday and early this morning I've been reading Carry the Sky, this newly launched novel. Gray is a poet all right—a fierce one, a smart one, a writer who knows her rowing, her rivers, the claustrophobia of boarding school bullying, the ache of loss, Physics, and origami. She tells her story through the alternating voices of a Delaware boarding school's new rowing coach and the Physics teacher—both of whom are operating within a haunted psychic space. She tells her story with urgency and with details—physical and emotional—that are wholly unexpected. No cliches here, not in this urgent novel.

For example: Here is Taylor, the rowing coach, in a field with a boy who is different, a boy talking about death, a boy around whom the plot will soon turn:

The flocks of geese in these fields made the ground come alive. Their way of feeding and calling made a hum, something steady. "Why are you talking about death?" His face jerked left like a machine, then jerked right. Without looking at his face, I put the dinosaur on his blanket.

"Why do you like rowing?" he asked. The question was drum roll, cymbal crash, horn.

It was something to do with not wanting to feel pain but wanting to know pain. Like wanting to know fire. You light it in front of you, the colors all over the place, the heat all over your skin, but you don't want to burn or anything. I don't know, but I understand him a little more in the middle of that field, with geese all over everywhere, geese getting along with the swans, and all of us finding a place to land.

In a Q and A at the end of Carry the Sky, Kate Gray speaks of the road she took toward publishing. It wasn't an easy one. It required fortitude—eight years to write the book, two years to revise it, a series of rejections, and then the balm of a writing group:

After I had written and rewritten a complete draft, received rejections when I sent the manuscript out, my indefatigable partner gathered a group of twelve friends to our house for potlucks once a month, and we read the entire draft out loud. Their questions and insights were invaluable. Reading the whole thing out loud let me hear the gaps, the promise.

And so, to a riveting debut novelist, to a brand-new press, to the partner who cared, to the friends who listened, to the rivers that haunt and sustain us — many congratulations on a work of art.

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Colleen Mondor has written an extraordinarily thoughtful post today on the quandary she faced when reviewing You Are My Only.  I won't try to summarize that here.  I will simply suggest that you follow this trail to see what Colleen had to say, what she faced, what she decided to do.

And how graciously she tells us about her process.

For my part, I wish to say this:  Aunt Cloris and Aunt Helen, the two YAMO characters that stand at the heart of Colleen's quandary, lived in my imagination for ten full years.  They represent goodness of an extra-exceptional kind.  They love purely and they love deeply, not just each other, but the boy they have raised as their own and the young teen, Sophie, who moves in next door.  They are not brazen intellectuals.  They are not reformists.  They are not people who live their lives as an overt instruction to others.  They just look out and see what must get done, and with every resource they have (and as two elderly ladies in a poorer part of town, they don't have much) they get that needed thing done.

I did not create Cloris and Helen to make a point about lifestyle preferences, I am saying; that would have never occurred to me and it would have never worked.  Nor would it ever occur to me that potential readers might shy away from a story that has a Cloris and a Helen tucked within it.  Didn't even cross my mind.  Never kept me up at night.  Cloris and Helen are human beings organically summoned from my own life.  They are modeled on people for whom I've felt great affection and admiration.  They are heroines to me.  They needed their story told.

I don't look at people and see difference.  I don't judge another's choices, politics, religion, fashion, upbringing, IQ.  Kindness is what matters to me.  Kindness is the distinguishing factor, the thing that must be sought.  It is that rare thing, that genius thing; it trumps all else.  I know what kindness is because I have been the frequent beneficiary of it.  I know why it matters because I wouldn't still be here without it.

I find prejudice of any kind terrifying.  I want to live in a world in which we all agree on that.

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There are an extraordinary number of BBAW posts going up around the blogosphere today; you'll find many conversations sparking around the idea of community.  You all know how I feel about that, and how grateful I am for my rooting in among you. Today I'd like to formally thank one more special person and blogger (and author!) who is both wise and kind—Colleen Mondor of Chasing Ray—who took the time to read You Are My Only last week and had this to say.

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I'm not quite sure what it was that made me decide (spur of the moment, really) to buy We the Animals, the slender debut novel by the widely acclaimed writer Justin Torres.  I'd heard some humming about the book.  I'd seen the ad.  I'd read what Marilynne Robinson had to say: "Brilliant, poised and pure." I'd read the words of Paul Harding:  "It is an indelible and essential work of art."  It was an impulse purchase, a little easy finger work, and there it was, on my iPad, waiting to be read.

From start to finish, without once leaving the couch, I just read.

We the Animals is the third book that I've encountered in the space of a little more than a week that builds through plurals. There was the rhythmic they, they, they of Colleen Mondor's remarkable debut memoir, The Map of My Dead Pilots.  There was the haunting, concentrating we of Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic.

And now here comes Torres with his story about brothers growing up within the chaotic fist of a poor, troubled family.  "We wanted more," this book begins.  "We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry.  We wanted more volume, more riots.  We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men."

Truly, I am tempted to just keep on quoting.  Because look at that.  Listen to it.  Justin Torres is carving out the sound of a song.

These boys are wild.  Their mom was a teen when all three were born.  Their father is a big, muscular, knotted man—a charmer and a rogue, a man who can purple up his wife with his fists and, just as powerfully, bathe a son. The kids are bound to each other and they're plastering each other—with hands, with words, with wants.  Each scene is a distillation, a moment.  Time moves warily forward.  The boys are in for hurt, and they do some hurting themselves, and sometimes it all grows so unbearably tense that I had to close my eyes and summon my psychic strength to keep on reading.

Readers can never change the fate of the characters they meet.  They can only hope for them.  They can only fear for them.  In reading We the Animals, I did both.  I succumbed to Torres's tale.  I honor his literary powers.   

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I was in Atlantic City a few years back when a friend sent a short note my way.  There was a blogger, she said, whom I had to read—a smart one, a respected one, who was out there talking about something I'd written.  When I followed the link, Chasing Ray, the brainchild of blogger Colleen Mondor, came into mini focus on my Blackberry screen. 

I already knew of Chasing Ray, of course I did; most anyone out here in the land of book blogging does.  Colleen has always called it as she's seen it.  She has waded in toward the important stuff, taken a stand, defended it.  She has fought on behalf of books for boys, on behalf of nonfiction, on behalf of libraries, on behalf of greater transparency in cover art, on behalf of books she has believed in, on behalf of memory. 

I have followed Colleen's blog for a long time now, and so I thought I knew her.  But this morning I finished reading an advanced copy of Colleen's first book, The Map of My Dead Pilots:  The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska (Lyons Press), and I find myself exhilarated by all that I didn't know, had not imagined. This is the story of the four years Colleen spent running Operations for a bush commuter in Fairbanks, Alaska.  It's about the planes that rose and fell, the pilots that went missing, the cargo no one would believe.  It's about defying the odds, the weather, the smash wall of mountains until those things rise up and speak and refuse to be defied.  It's about vanishing, about vanishing's speed.  It's about a daughter who loses her father too soon and who, in the end, writes stories down in search of some salvation.

It's a memoir, but it's a chorus.  It's a we and a them on the rhythmic order of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a book that brings us into itself (and keeps us there, utterly absorbed) with opening passages like this:

The things they had to know were endless.  From their first day flying for the Company, they filled their heads with facts and figures of length and distance, knowledge of rivers and mountains, the locations of a hundred landmarks, or a thousand.  They learned when it was safe to drop down through the clouds, when they might continue forward, when they must turn right or left, when they absolutely had to turn back.  They made sure sled dogs were tied on short leases because one of them would jump on another and cause a fight at the worst possible time.  They understood why they needed to strap down dead bodies extra tight after Frank Hamilton had one slip free on takeoff....

No one liked flying with bodies.

I said this was a memoir, and it is, but it's that other kind of memoir—the kind in which the author is not the heroine, but the webber, the weaver, the voice for those who are no longer here to tell their own stories.  That is not to suggest that there's any distance here, a single line that feels academic (though it has all been magnificently researched) or at emotive remove.  Colleen's passion for those days and those people, her intimate knowing, is galvanizing.  She's tough, and she's been toughened; she rarely puts her own self center stage. But when she appears, when she tells us something personal, the stories stick and matter.

So that this book has great affecting power and it also, I kept thinking, has all the stuff that would make for one heck of a great television series.  Why hasn't anyone thought of this before—to set a series down in a place like Alaska, to cast a bunch of cra

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and that means I'll actually get to meet—live and in person—this writer with whom I've had such a wonderful, honest, intelligent virtual conversation since I first read Illyria last August.  My thanks to Colleen Mondor, who raved about Liz's immaculate sentences to begin with and opened Liz's world to mine.

Liz travels far and wide, both physically and in her own imagination, and she's coming to Philadelphia as a keynoter.  I'm thinking I'll take this colorful lady to Chanticleer, pictured above, if she'll let me.

How colorful is Liz Hand, you wonder? Well, consider this.  She's giving her talk for the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. Her topic? Norwegian Black Metal music. With brilliant friends like this, I defy anyone to call me boring or, say, stuffy.

(smiles)

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I spent much of the weekend preparing for my long morning at The Baldwin School, where I will today be talking about, reading from, and building exercises on the shoulders of Wordsworth and Mary Oliver, Sei Shonagon, Rilke, Neruda, Sandra Cisneros, Marilyn Nelson, and Gerald Stern, among others.  I never conduct the same workshop twice, don't give the same talk over again, and while my husband will be the first to remind me of how terribly inefficient all that is, I know no other way.  No two students or group of students are the same.  It matters, I think, that we actively lean in their direction.

The students pictured above were girls I met during my spring trip to Wisconsin for the unforgettable Fox Cities Book Festival.  I was thinking about them earlier this morning, as I explored Figment.com, a new site designed to enable the young to "share your writing, connect with other readers, and discover new stories and authors."  How cool, might I ask you, is this?  I know dozens of young big-dreaming, risk-taking blogger/writers whose work should grace this site and whose insights could power it forward.  You know who you all are.... and you know that I love you.  Take a spin through Figment and let me know what you think.

And while you're at it, spend some time at Chasing Ray today, because Colleen Mondor has assembled a bang-up interview with one of my very favorite writers/people, Elizabeth Hand.  I wouldn't know Liz if it weren't for Colleen.  I wouldn't know a lot of things, were it not for Colleen.  But listen to Liz talk, for example, about the beautiful big rawness of teens, the "thrilling and often perilous" process of self-discovery for young artists.  I was cooing just this weekend about how happy the Johnny Depp-Patti Smith interview in Vanity Fair made me.  Substance! I declared, I danced.  Substance! I shout again today. 

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A week or so ago, Colleen Mondor, Chasing Ray blogger and Bookslut reviewer (among other things), wrote to say that she would soon be able to share big news.  And so I waited, knowing, as I did, that Colleen had been at work for several years on a book she'd called THE MAP OF DEAD PILOTS.  It was a book inspired, in part by her work as co-owner of an aircraft leasing company, her knowledge of Alaska, her love for boundary-stretching literature, and her passion for melding fact and the imagination.  And it was a book agented by one Michele Rubin of Writers House, whose belief in this project Colleen has described in posts spanning several years.

This was an author and agent who would not give up.  Not in the face of so many almosts.  Not in the face of a rapidly changing industry.  Not in the face of so much that can feel so bleak when you are on the waiting side of a coin.

And so, this week, I waited for Colleen's news.

It came yesterday—news that this book, described in Publishers Marketplace as being "about Alaskan pilots navigating a world that demands close communion with extreme physical danger and emotional toughness" has been sold to Holly Rubino at Lyons Press.  It will go on the fall 2011 list.

I could not be happier for Colleen, who has cheered so many of the rest of us on, has gotten us talking about important book issues (diversity in storytelling, honesty in jacket design, the value of nonfiction for the young), and has never bowed to envy or bitterness.  Colleen Mondor has sold her first book, and she'll tell you more about it here. 

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In Colleen Mondor's wonderfully informed Bookslut November round up, she's taking a look at mysteries—books like Double Trouble, Fixing Delilah, Zora and Me, The Painted Secret, and Tell Me a Secret.  I was happily surprised to discover that Dangerous Neighbors was included in the mix, and I am honored.  Colleen clearly puts her heart and soul into every review she writes, every opinion she offers. 

A few words from her November column here:

First and foremost, this is a love story to the Philadelphia of long ago. Kephart has steeped herself in the city’s history and it shows, especially in the detailed way she writes about the Centennial events and displays. But it is also the story of a secret love and how keeping that secret can be especially appealing to a teenage girl -- how it can lead her to forget about everyone else and how watching that secret grow larger and larger can torment those who keep the secret with her. Dangerous Neighbors is about sisters and a city and a whole lot of love and tragedy. While not a thrilling mystery it is a confection of singular depth nonetheless and just as irresistible.

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In April 2005, following a tremendous bout of insomnia, I began, again to write poems, a medium I had sidestepped for years.  Soon I was working visually with those sounds and songs of the lines and, with my husband's help, converting my photographs into washes of color that could frame and hold each poem.

It would have been nice to publish a book like that, but when it became clear that that wasn't to be, I began a blog—became a self-published poet/photographer, if you will, until the blog took on a life of its own.

Today I wish to thank Sam Strike, for her Radnor High Hall of Fame story in Mainline Media News.  I wish to thank Colleen Mondor, too, for including me in her most recent, and provocative, edition of What a Girl Wants. 

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Colleen Mondor of Chasing Ray has an article, On The Other Side of the Mountains, in the Anchorage Press.

At Chasing Ray, Mondor says: "This particular chapter of the book, "The Other Side of the Mountains", (slightly altered for length and so it could standalone), is about a real historic event when two of AK's most famous bush pilots were feared lost while en route to Barrow in 1928. I wrote about similarities between that flight and modern times and how insignificant maps can be when you don't know where you are."

I got chills reading it; it's from her manuscript, The Map of My Dead Pilots. An awesome title, and as this excerpt shows, the writing matches the title for awesomeness.


Amazon Affiliate. If you click from here to Amazon and buy something, I receive a percentage of the purchase price.

© Elizabeth Burns of A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy

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I don't, as many of you know, look for reviews of my own books, but every now and then one will filter in, and sometimes I'll be reading a favorite blog and come up short against my own name.

That's what happened a few minutes ago, when I was checking in with Chasing Ray, where I've had the privilege of appearing from time to time in a truly wonderful series of Colleen Mondor orchestrated think-a-thons.

I was reading along, about wish lists for Navajo and Apache teens and other typically important topics, when I happened upon this:

After finishing Beth Kephart's latest, The Heart is Not a Size, I have decided she is becoming almost her own little sub genre - a writer who creates stories around, and perhaps also for, a particular sort of teenage girl. The one who seems to have it so together but has numerous little worries, and concerns. Not the drama of violence or addiction ala Ellen Hopkins but of quietly going a wee bit unhinged while trying to hold it all together. Not that Georgia goes crazy in the slightest in Heart, but she worries. And in Nothing But Ghosts there was quiet worrying as well. This all strikes me as something that is perhaps more common than anything else among teenagers - the worrying about holding it all together, doing the right thing, not being a disappointment.

I am taken aback by the perceptiveness of this. It's true. This is what I've been up to. I just didn't know anyone had noticed.

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Feminist Is Not A Dirty Word is the latest in the What A Girl Wants series by Colleen Mondor at Chasing Ray.

What A Girl Wants began in June 2009, and is a series of interviews with authors about the "current status of books for teen girls and what it says about both what they want to read and what publishers think they want to read." Topics since then have covered everything from mysteries to favorite books to recommendations to the most recent entry, about feminism.

I cannot believe I haven't linked to this series before! If you've been reading it, you know how great and in depth it is, with an amazing array of authors. If you haven't been reading it, start now! You'll feel as if Colleen invited all these women to her house, and you're invited, also, and now you're sitting around drinking wine, eating good cheese, and talking about bookish things.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click from here to Amazon and buy something, I receive a percentage of the purchase price.

© Elizabeth Burns of A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy

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For the 11th question of her What a Girl Wants series, Colleen Mondor asked a number of us one of her typically challenging questions: What does it mean to be a 21st century feminist, and on the literary front, what books/authors would you recommend to today's teens who want to take girl power to the next level?

Lorie Ann Grover, Laurel Snyder, Loree Griffin Burns, Margo Raab, and Zetta Elliott all came through with reliably interesting responses. I was caught up in a series of corporate projects and could not respond in time.

Today, however, I'd like to put my two cents in by recommending Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx to readers of any age, gender, or race who wish to understand and celebrate just how hard women have had to work to put their voices on the page—and how women's voices have and will continue to shape us.

Anne Bradstreet, one of this nation's first women writers, entered print, in Showalter's words, "shielded by the authorization, legitimization, and testimony of men." In other words, Showalter continues, "John Woodbridge, her brother-in-law, stood guarantee that Bradstreet herself had written the poems, that she had not initiated their publication, and that she had neglected no housekeeping chore in their making."

No vanity allowed, in other words, and no leaving those dishes in the sink.

Showalter's book—which yields insight into the stories of Phillis Wheatley, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston, Pearl Buck, Shirley Jackson, Harper Lee, Sylvia Plath, S.E. Hinton, Grace Paley, Joan Didion, Lorrie Moore, Jayne Anne Phillips, Sandra Cixneros, Amy Tan, Louis Erdrich, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gish Jen, and so many others—is itself a piece of history, for it is, unbelievably, the first literary history of American women writers.

Showalter suggests that the development of women's writing might be classified into four phases: feminine, feminist, female, and free. Anyone who wants to know just how we got to free (and to ponder, with the evidence, whether or not we're really there) should be reading this book.

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You know you're too busy when you have to say "no" to things you really, really want to do.

Colleen at Chasing Ray has put up the schedule for the 2009 Winter Blog Blast Tour; and this time around, I'm not participating.

What is a blog blast tour, you may ask? Quite simple; over one short week, there are a ton of different author interviews at different blogs.

Who sets it up? The blogs; the bloggers decide who they want to interview and cross fingers that the people they ask want to participate. It's all voluntary and independent; but the people involved strive to have a good mix of authors, of various genres, etc. It's not about a publisher or author promoting a specific title; though goodness knows, new titles will be discussed.

Colleen is the main organizer and cat-herder, in terms of scheduling times, posting schedules, and posting round-ups. As the week goes on, each day she not only posts that day's schedule, but she also pulls a great quote from each interview. Half the fun is seeing which quote Colleen will choose.

Colleen has been organizing this since 2007; in Why I Organized the Summer Blog Blast Tour: Third in a Series on Reviewing, posted June 2007, Colleen explains the origin of the Tours.

As I reread Colleen's original manifesto, I think, Wow, was it only just two years ago we were being called maggots and cat people? That we were defending our experience and right to write reviews? Can you believe that in 2009 we are still defending ourselves?

In 2007, Colleen wrote about the "significant contribution that the kidlitosphere makes to the national literary conversation." It's still something we find ourselves defending, sometimes from interesting and unexpected accusations and sources. And it's why these blog tours will continue, because what Colleen said in 2007 is still true today: with the blog blast tours "we can show just one way that the blogosphere can accomplish a great and worthy task with relative ease, and get the word out on a lot of excellent writers in the process." It's about the books; it's about what bloggers can accomplish.

And I'd forgotten the earlier conversation in April 2007, when Colleen responded to the charges that bloggers could be bought with a cupcake, in You Can't Buy Me Love. Where Colleen notes what is the most important thing to her, and, dare I say, to most people: the readers and the books.

Interested in reading more about these blog blast tours? Colleen has tagged most of them either SBBT (Summer Blog Blast Tour) or WBBT (Winter Blog Blast Tour), so its under those two tags, SBBT/WBBT, at Chasing Ray.

Here is the week's schedule:

Monday

Jim Ottaviani at Chasing Ray
Courtney Sheinmel at Bildungsroman
Derek Landy at Finding Wonderland
Mary E. Pearson at Miss Erin
Megan Whalen Turner at Hip Writer Mama
Frances Hardinge at Fuse Number 8

Tuesday

Ann Marie Fleming at Chasing Ray
Laurie Faria Stolarz at Bildungsroman
Patrick Carman at Miss Erin
Jacqueline Kelly at Hip Writer Mama
Dan Santat at Fuse Number 8
Nova Ren Suma at Shelf Elf

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