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Neal accepting his Golden Kite Award

Neal Shusterman is the New York Times best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning Challenger Deep; Bruiser, which was a Cooperative Children’s Book Center choice, a YALSA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults pick, and on twelve state lists; The Schwa Was Here; and the Unwind dystology, among many other books. He lives in California with his four children. Visit: www.storyman.com



Neal's "Challenger Deep" is the winner of this year's 2016 Golden Kite Award for Fiction.

Neal tells us about where "Challenger Deep" came from. About his son's mental illness and struggle and ultimately rising above it. Not a story about his son, but inspired by thing things his son went through. He took the artwork his son had created while he was in the emotional depths, the mental depths, and built a story from that.

"Challenger Deep frightened me. ...I wanted it to be emotionally honest," and something that his son would be proud of. It took him four years to write. How he was so nervous about his editor's response, and how gratified he was by her response that it was "a masterpiece." And then he gets a great laugh when he says that praise was followed by a ten-page editorial letter!

"Challenger Deep is a call to action. To talk openly about mental illness."

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Bonnie Nadzam's recent essay at Literary Hub, "What Should Fiction Do?", is well worth reading, despite the title. (The only accurate answer to the question in the title [which may not be Nadzam's] is: "Lots of stuff, including what it hasn't done yet...") What resonates for me in the essay is Nadzam's attention to the ways reality effects intersect with questions of identity — indeed, with the ways that fictional texts produce ideas about identity and reality. I especially loved Nadzam's discussion of how she teaches writing with such ideas in mind.

Nadzam starts right off with a bang:

An artistic practice that perpetually reinforces my sense of self is not, in my mind, an artistic practice. I’m not talking about rejecting memoir or characters “based on me.” What I mean is I don’t have the stomach for art that purports to “hold up a mirror to nature,” or for what this implies, philosophically, about selfhood and the world in which we live.

This is a statement that avant-gardes have been making since at least the beginning of the 20th century — it is the anti-mimetic school of art, a school at which I have long been a happy pupil. Ronald Sukenick, whose purposes are somewhat different to Nadzam's, wrote in Narralogues that "fiction is a matter of argument rather than of dramatic representation" and "it is the mutability of consciousness through time rather than representation that is the essential element of fiction." Sukenick proposes that all fiction, whether opaquely innovative or blockbuster entertainment, "raises issues, examines situations, meditates solutions, reflects on outcomes" and so is a sort of reasoning and reflection. "The question," he writes, "is only whether a story reflects thoughtfully, or robotically reflects the status quo with no illuminating angle of vision of its own."

Magritte, "The Human Condition", 1933

Sukenick, too, disparages the "mirror to reality" or "mirror to nature" idea: "Once the 'mirror of reality' argument for fiction crumbles, possibilities long submerged in our tradition open up, and in fact a new rationale for fiction becomes necessary."

Nadzam's essay provides some possibilities for remembering what has been submerged in the tradition of fiction and for creating new rationales for fiction's necessity:

I want fiction to bend, for its structure not to mirror the reality I think I see, but for its form and structure to help me peel back and question the way reality seems. The way I seem. I love working with the English language precisely because it fails. Even the most perfect word or phrase or narrative can at best shadow and haunt the phenomena of the world. Words and stories offer a way of experiencing being that is in their most perfect articulation a beat removed from direct experience. And so have I long mistrusted those works in which representation and words function without a hiccup, creating a story that is meant to be utterly believed.

Again, not at all new, but necessary because these ideas so push against dominant assumptions about fiction (and reality) today.

An example of one strain of dominant assumptions: Some readers struggle to separate characters from writers. On Twitter recently, my friend Andrew Mitchell, a writer and editor, expressed frustration with this tendency, saying: "EVERYTHING a character says/does in a story reflects EXACTLY what the writer believes, right? Based on the comments I just read: YES!" As I said to Andrew in reply, this way of thinking results from certain popular types of literary analysis and pedagogy, ones that seek Message from art, ones that want literature to be a paragon of Self Expression, with the Self either a fragile, wounded bird or an allegorical representative of All Such Selfs. It's "write what you know" taken to its logical conclusion: write only what you know about what and who you are. (Good luck writing a story about a serial killer if you're not one.) Such assumptions are anti-imagination and, ultimately, anti-art.

These dominant assumptions aren't limited to classrooms and naive readers. Consider this, from Achy Obejas's foreword to The Art of Friction (ed. Charles Blackstone & Jill Talbot):

When my first book, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like  This?, was released in 1994, my publishers were ecstatic at the starred review it received in Publishers Weekly.

But though I appreciated the applause, I was a bit dismayed.  The review referred to the seven pieces that comprise the book as “autobiographical essays.” I found this particularly alarming, since six of the seven stories were first-person narrations, mostly Puerto Rican and Mexican voices, while I am Cuban, and one was from the point of view of a white gay man named Tommy who is dying of AIDS.

I’d have thought that the reviewer might have noticed that nationality, race, and gender seemed to shift from story to story—and that is what they were, stories, not essays; fiction, not memoir—but perhaps that reviewer, like many others who followed, felt more comforted in believing that the stories were not products of the imagination but lived experiences.

Imagination is incomprehensible and terrifying. In the classroom, I see this all the time when students read anything even slightly weird — at least one will insist the writer must have been on drugs. When a person reads a work of fiction and their first impulse is to either seek out the autobiographical elements or declare the writer to be a drug addict, then we know that that reader has no experience with or understanding of imagination. For such readers, based on a true story are the five most comforting words to read.

I come back again and again to a brief passage from one of my favorites of Gayatri Spivak's books, Readings:

I am insisting that all teachers, including literary criticism teachers, are activists of the imagination. It is not a question of just producing correct descriptions, which should of course be produced, but which can always be disproved; otherwise nobody can write dissertations. There must be, at the same time, the sense of how to train the imagination, so that it can become something other than Narcissus waiting to see his own powerful image in the eyes of the other. (54)

To return to Bonnie Nadzam's essay: Another dominant force that keeps fiction from becoming too interesting, keeps readers from reading carefully, and prevents the education of literary imagination is mass media (which these days basically means visual/cinematic media). I love mass media and visual media for all sorts of reasons, but if we ignore pernicious effects then we can't adjust for them. Nadzam writes:

...I’ve noticed that with much contemporary fiction, when we read, we’re often not asked to imagine we’re reading a history, biography, diary or anything at all. Often the text doesn’t even ask the reader to be aware of the text as text. With much fiction, we seem to pretend we are watching a movie. And it is supposed to be a good thing if a novel is “cinematic.”

Much fiction today, especially fiction that achieves any level of popularity, seems to me to draw not just structurally but emotionally from television. At its best, it's The Wire (perhaps the great melodrama of our era -- and I mean that as high praise); more commonly, it's a Lifetime movie-of-the-week. TV, like pop songs, knows the emotional moves it needs to pull off to make its audience feel what the audience desires to feel -- make your audience feel something they don't desire to feel, and most of them will turn on you with hate and scorn.

The giveaway, I think, is the narrowness of the prose aesthetic in all fiction that pulls its effects from common wells of emotion, because a complex, unfamiliar prose structure will get in the way of readers drinking up the emotions they desire. Such writing may not itself be inherently rich with emotion; all it needs to do is transmit signs that signal feelings already within the reader's repertoire. Keep the prose structure and style familiar, keep the emotions within the expected range, and the writer only needs to point toward those emotions for the reader to feel them. The reader becomes Pavlov's dog, salivating not over real food, but over the expectation of it. If an identity group exists, then that identity group can train its members toward particular structures of feeling. If the structures are even minimally in place, then members in good standing of an identity group will receive the emotional payoff they desire. Fiction then becomes a confirmation of identity and emotion, not a challenge to it.

(Tangentially: The radical potential of melodrama is to trick audiences into feeling emotions they would not otherwise feel and to complicate expected emotions. This was, for instance, the great achievement of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book that is terribly written in all sorts of ways, but which mobilized -- even weaponized -- sentiment to an extraordinary degree. The same could be said for The Wire, though with significantly less social effect [Linda Williams has some thoughts on this, if I'm remembering her book correctly].)

Anyone who's taught creative writing will tell you that lots of students don't aspire to write for the sake of writing so much as they aspire to write movies on paper. Which is fine, in and of itself, but if students want to write movies, they should take screenwriting and film production courses. And if I want to watch a movie, I'll watch a movie, not read a book.

Movies, TV, and video games are the dominant narrative forms of our time, so it should be no surprise that fiction often resembles those dominant forms. Even the most blockbustery of bestselling novels can't compete for dominance (and almost every bestselling novel these days is a movie-in-a-book, anyway, so they're just contributing to the dominance). Look how excited people get when they find out their favorite book will be turned into a movie. It's like Pinocchio being turned into a real boy!

What gets lost is the literary. Not in some high-falutin' sense of the Great Books, but in the technical sense of what written texts can do that other media either can't or don't do as well. Conversely, other media have things they do that written texts don't do as well, or at all — this is what bugs me when people write about films as if they're novels, for instance, because it loses all sense of what is distinctly cinematic. But that's a topic for another time...

Nadzam discusses how she teaches fiction, and I hope at some point she writes a longer essay about this:

When I do “teach” creative writing, I point out that a work of formal realism (which I neither condemn nor condone) usually adheres to a particular formula: Exposition informs a person’s Psychology, from which arises their Character, out of which certain Motives emerge, based upon which the character takes Action, from which Plot results (EPiC MAP). And what formal realism achieved thereby was answering some of the metaphysical questions raised by Enlightenment thinkers about what the self, or character, might be—a person is a noun. A changing noun, perhaps, but a noun nonetheless—somehow separate from the flux of the world they inhabit. The students I’ve had who want to “be writers” hear about EPiC MAP and diligently set to work. The artists in the class, however—the kindred spirits with the mortal wound—they look at me skeptically. Something about that doesn’t feel right, they say. I don’t want to do it that way, they say. Can we break those rules? And each of their “stories” is a terrible, fascinating mess. Are the stories messes because these writers are breaking with habit, forcing readers to break with expectation, or is the EPiC MAP really an effective mirror? I grant that this is an impossible question to answer, but an essential question to raise. By my lights these students are trying, literally, to re-make the world.

This reminded me of Mac Wellman's longstanding practice of encouraging his playwrighting students to write "bad" plays. The New York Times describes this amusingly:

He asks students to write bad plays, to write plays with their nondominant hands, to write a play that takes five hours to perform and covers a period of seven years. Ms. Satter recalled an exercise in which she had to write a play in a language she barely knew.

“I wrote mine in extremely limited Russian,” she wrote in an email. “Then we translated them back into English and read them aloud. The results were these oddly clarified, quiveringly bizarre mini-gems.”

Mr. Wellman explained: “I’m not trying to teach them how to write a play. I’m trying to teach them to think about what kind of play they want to write.”

Further, from a 1992 interview:

Inevitably, if you start mismatching pronouns, getting your tenses wrong, writing sentences that are too long or too short, you will begin to say things that suggest a subversive political reality.

One of the most effective exercises I do with students (of all levels) is to have them make a list of "writing rules" — the things they have been told or believe to be key to "good writing". I present this to them seriously. I want them to write down what they really believe, which is often what teachers past have taught them. Then, for the next assignment, I tell them to write something in which they break all those rules. Every single one. Some students are thrilled (breaking rules is fun!), some are terrified (we're not supposed to break rules!), but again and again it leads to some fascinating insights for them. It can be liberating, because they discover the freedom of choice in writing, and do things with words that they would never have given themselves permission to do on their own. It's also educative, because they discover that some of the rules, at least for some situations, make sense to them. Then, though, they don't apply those rules ignorantly and unreflectively: when they follow those rules in the future, they do so because the rules make sense to them.

(I make them read Gertrude Stein, too. I make them try to write like Gertrude Stein, especially at her most abstract. [Tender Buttons works well.] It's harder than it looks. They scoff at Stein at first, but once they try to imitate her, they struggle, usually, and discover how wedded their minds are to a particular way of writing and particular assumptions about sense and purpose.)

(I show them Carole Maso's book Break Every Rule. I tell them it's a good motto for a writer.)

To learn new ways to write, to educate our imaginations, we need not only to think about new possibilities but to look at old models, especially the strange and somewhat forgotten ones. Writers who only read what is near at hand are starving themselves, starving their imaginations.

Nadzam returns to 18th century writers, a trove of possibilities:

Fielding thought a crucial and often overlooked aspect of the theatrum mundi metaphor was the emphasis the metaphor puts on the role of the audience, and the audience’s tendency to hastily judge the character of his fellow men. We are not supposed to assume, Fielding’s narrator tells us in Tom Jones, that just because the brilliant 18th-century actor David Garrick plays the fool, Garrick himself is a fool. Nor should we assume that the fool we meet in life is actually—or always—a fool. How then is Fielding’s audience to determine the character of Fielding’s contemporary who plays the part of an actor playing the part of a ghost puppet who represents a real-life individual whose eccentric and condemnable behavior Fielding satirizes? For Fielding, there is no such thing as an un-interpreted experience; an instance of mimetic simulation cannot be considered “truth” (a clear image in a well-polished mirror) because truth itself is the very act of mimetic simulation.

Seeking out writers from before fiction's conventions were conventional helps us see new possibilities. (This is one of the values of Steven Moore's two-volume "alternative history" of the novel, which upends so many received ideas about what novels are and aren't, and when they were what they are or aren't. Also Margaret Anne Doody's The True Story of the Novel. Also so much else.)

Finally, one of the central concerns of Nadzam's essay is the way that assumptions about fiction reproduce and reify assumptions about identity:

...what is now generally accepted as “fiction” emerged out of an essentialism that is oddly consoling in its reduction of each individual to a particular set of characteristics, and the reality they inhabit a background distinct from this self. At worst, behind this form are assumptions about identity and reality that may prevent us from really knowing or loving ourselves or each other, and certainly shield us from mystery.

So much fiction seems to see people as little more than roleplaying game character sheets written in stone. Great mysteries of motivation, great changes in conviction or belief, all these too often get relegated to the realms of the "unrealistic" — and yet the true realism is the one that knows our movement from one day to the next is mostly luck and magic.

Relevant here also is a marvelous essay by Stephen Burt for Los Angeles Review of Books, partly a review of poetry by Andrew Maxwell and Kay Ryan, partly a meditation on how lyric poetry works. More fiction writers ought to learn from poetry. (More fiction reviewers ought to learn from the specificity and attention to language and form in Burt's essay, and in many essays on poetry.) Consider:

A clever resistance to semantic function, an insistence that we just don’t know, that words can turn opaque, pops up every few lines and yet never takes over a reader’s experience: that’s what you get when you try to merge aphorism (general truth) and lyric (personal truth) and Maxwell’s particular line of the North American and European avant-garde (what is truth?). It haunts, it teases, it invites me to return. By the end of the first chapbook, “Quotation or Paternity,” Maxwell has asked whether lyric identification is also escapism: “Trying to identify, it means / Trying to be mistaken / About something else.” Poetic language is, perhaps, the record of a mistake: in somebody else’s terms, we misrecognize ourselves.

And:

We can never be certain how much of our experience resembles other people’s, just as we can’t know if they see our “blue”.... Nor can we know how much of what we believe will fall apart on us next year. ... His poems understand how tough understanding yourself, or understanding anyone else, or predicting their behavior, or putting reflection into words can be, and then forgive us for doing it anyway...

We need more fiction like Stephen Burt's description of Andrew Maxwell's poems: More fiction that understands how tough understanding yourself, or understanding anyone else, or predicting their behavior, or putting reflection into words can be, and then forgives us for doing it anyway.

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Independent ebook publisher Moby Books (Canada) is looking for novels, novellas, and short story collections by emerging and established authors. Authors can submit full length manuscripts or partial queries for consideration. Payment and contract based on a print publishing model. Deadline: ongoing.

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Hypertrophic Literary (AL) is open to submissions for upcoming issues. Looking for pieces that evoke a physical reaction, make readers feel something: joy, nausea, shock, desperation. Open to submissions of poetry, fiction, excerpts, and nonfiction. Hypertrophic accepts work in all genres and “[doesn’t] care who you are, if you’ve been published before, if it’s your first book or seventy-fourth.”

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SlashnBurn is “an anti-art arts journal seeking to publish and bring attention to work outside the conveyor belt work coming out of most workshop-based MFA programs.” Currently accepting submissions in fiction, flash fiction, comics, creative nonfiction, memoir, poetry, reviews, and blended-genre. No hard genre work. High-concept is fine, but grounded in real human conflict and action. Deadline: Rolling.

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The University of Toronto’s speculative fiction journal, The Spectatorial, is currently looking for fiction, poetry, articles, essays, graphic fiction, novel excerpts, book/movie reviews, etc. Particularly interested in topics that touch upon other cultures and marginalized groups, whether it’s discussing literature no one has heard of from another country, or addressing social justice issue in a speculative work. Articles 500-1200 words, or pitched proposals for topics of interest. Deadline: ongoing.

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The Eden Mills Literary Contest is open for entries from new, aspiring and modestly published writers 16+. Categories: short story (2500 words max.), poetry (five poems max.). and creative nonfiction (2500 words max.) First prize in each category: $250. Winners invited to read a short selection from their work at the festival on Sunday, September 18, 2016. Entry fee: $15. Deadline: June 30, 2016.

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The Cossack Review is looking for submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, flash fiction and works in translation for their next print and online issues. Send 3-6 poems, one story, or one essay. Especially interested in thoughtful, diverse work.

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I'm always looking to add some more New Jersey writing groups.

Scroll down for a list of the New Jersey Writing groups I currently have on file, with links to websites where available.

WOMEN WHO WRITE (open to ladies only)
Various groups (see their groups link for full details)

THE NEW JERSEY SOCIETY OF CHRISTIAN WRITERS
Various Groups in Burlington, Camden and Salem Counties (see website for details)
Contact: Dr. MaryAnn Diorio: [email protected]

THE SCIENCE FICTION SOCIETY OF NORTHERN NEW JERSEY
Various meetings (see Meetup page for more details)


BERGEN COUNTY
Bergen County Poets and Fictionaires
Where? See Meetup page
When? See Meetup page
Contact: See Meetup page

Mahwah Writer's Collective
Where? 100 Ridge Road Mahwah, NJ 07430
When? Tuesdays: 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Contact: Mahwah Library (201) 529 2183

Science Fiction Association of Bergen County
Where? Bergen Highlands United Methodist Church,316 West Saddle River Road, Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
When? 2nd Saturday of the month (see www.sfabc.org for more info)
Contact: [email protected]

BURLINGTON COUNTY
Juliette Writer's Group
Where? Barnes & Noble, Eastgate Square, 1311 Nixon Drive, Moorestown, NJ 08057
When? Every third Thursday, 7:30pm
Contact: Run by Dawn Byrne. Call store for details: (856) 608 1622

CAMDEN COUNTY
Writing Group
Where? Barnes & Noble, Towne Place, 911 Haddonfield Rd, Cherry Hill, NJ 08002
When? Every second Tuesday, 7:30pm
Contact: Run by Susan Pitcher. Call store for details: (856) 486 1492

Garden State Writers
Where? South County Regional Branch Library, 35 Cooper Folly Road, Atco, NJ 08004
When? 3rd Tuesday of each month, 7pm-9pm
Contact: See website

ESSEX COUNTY
Montclair Editors and Writers
Where? See Meetup page
When? See Meetup page
Contact: See Meetup page

HUNTERDON COUNTY

MERCER COUNTY
Princeton Writing Group
Where? Various Meet-ups (see the group's webpage for details)
Contact: See website

MIDDLESEX COUNTY
New Jersey Romance Writers
Where? Mercer County Public Library, Hopewell Branch, 245 Pennington-Titusville Road, Pennington, NJ 08534
When? 4th Tuesday of each month, 6 - 8:30pm
Contact: See website

The Garden State Speculative FictionWriters (GSSW)
Where? Old Bridge Public Library,1 Old Bridge Plaza, Municipal Center,Old Bridge, NJ 08857
When? First Saturday of each month - see website for details
Contact: See website

Liberty States Fiction Writers
Where? Edison Library, 340 Plainfield Avenue, Edison, New Jersey 08817
When? 2nd Saturday of the month 10-10:30am (business) 10:45-11:45am (workshop) Noon-1:15 (roundtable sessions)
Contact: See website

The Princeton Writing Group
Where? See Meetup page
When? See Meetup page
Contact: See Meetup page

The Woodbridge Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers
Where? See Meetup page
When? See Meetup page
Contact: See Meetup page


MONMOUTH COUNTY
Writing Group
Where? ASBURY PARK Public Library, Children's Room500 First Ave - Asbury Park, NJ
When? 3rd WEDNESDAY of Each Month (5.30-7.30pm)
Contact: Neville - [email protected]

Writing Group
Where? Barnes & Noble, Lanes Mill Marketplace, 4831 US Hwy 9, Howell, NJ 07731
When? 3rd Thursday of every month
Contact store for more info: (732) 730-2838

BelmarArts Creative Writing Group
Where? The Boatworks, 608 River Road, Belmar, NJ 07719
When? 4th Thursday, 7pm - 9pm
Contact: See website

Monmouth Creative Writing Group
Where? Monmouth County Library (HQ), 125 Symmes Drive, Manalapan, NJ 07726
When? 3rd Thursday of the month (7pm)
Contact: ?

Monmouth Writers
Where? Howell Library, Howell Library, 318 Old Tavern Road, Howell, NJ 07731
When? 2nd Saturday of each month
Contact: Rick Kelsten See website

Writing Group
Where? NEPTUNE Public Library, Meeting Rm #225 Neptune Blvd - Neptune, NJ
When? 2nd Saturday of each month (1pm - 3pm) (NB: Please check library's calendar before turning up.)
Contact: - (732) 775-8241

The Noble Writers
Where? Middletown Library, 55 New Monmouth Road, Middletown, NJ 07748
When? Wednesdays ((10am - 11:30am) (NB: Please check library's calendar before turning up.)
Contact: TBA

Writing Critique group
Where? Middletown Library, 55 New Monmouth Road, Middletown, NJ 07748
When? Wednesdays (7pm) (NB: Please check library's calendar before turning up.)
Contact: TBA

OCEAN COUNTY
Manchester (NJ) Writers' Circle
Where? Manchester Library, 21Colonial Drive, Manchester, NJ 08759
When? 1st & 3rd Tuesday of the month (2pm-4pm)
Contact: See website

Berkeley Adult Writers' group
Where? OCL (Berkeley Branch), 30 Station Road, Bayville, NJ 08721
When? Last Monday of the month - 6:30pm start
Contact: (Library) 732 269 2144

The Jackson Writers' Group
Where? Jackson branch of the Ocean County Library, 2 Jackson Drive Jackson, NJ 08527
When? See website
Contact: See website

SOMERSET COUNTY
New Jersey Writers' Critique Group
Where? Barnes & Noble (Somerset Shopping Center, 319 Route 202/206, Bridgewater, NJ 08807)
When? First Wednesday of the month, 7pm - check B&N website for latest info
Contact: (B&N) 908 526-7425

New Jersey Writers' Society
Where? Franklin Township Library (Historical Room), 485 Dermott Lane, Somerset, NJ 08873
When? Third Thursday of the month, 7pm - 9pm
Contact: (Library) 732 873 8700

UNION COUNTY
New Providence Writers
Where? Waterlilies Restaurant, 33 Union Place, Summit, NJ (parking free on Sundays)
When? 1st and 3rd Sunday of the month, 2pm.
Contact: Join and RSVP for meetings through Meetup group


If you know of any statewide or local writing groups in New Jersey which aren't listed above, please let me have contact details and/or a website link, if possible. Also, if your group is listed, but I've got the information wrong, please let me know.

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SAD Mag, a Vancouver based arts & culture publication, is seeking poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction pieces. Theme: Secrets (personal and political secrets, unconventional ideas and lives — writers are encouraged to interpret creatively and broadly). Length: 1,000 words max. Accepted pieces published online alongside an illustration; some published in the print issue. Particularly interested in works by queer and emerging writers. Deadline: May 15, 2016.

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New quarterly Flytrap Uprising is accepting submissions for their second issue. Looking for noir–noir fiction, noir poetry, and articles about noir topics. Editor’s note: Noir is more than detective stories. Seeking “your dark, your discouraged, your hopeless, but also your light at the end of the tunnel.” Deadline: August 31, 2016.

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I'm looking forward to this weekend's Write Stuff Conference. It'll be my seventh time there (and second as a presenter).
In addition to Friday night's Page Cuts session, I'm giving three talks on Saturday: The 3 Cs of Conflict; Writing for YA/Tweens, and a dialogue presentation, Say it again, Sam (using dialogue to maximum effect).

I'm also attending NJ SCBWI's summer conference.

2016, April 8th - 9th  
The Write Stuff Conference, Best Western, 300 Gateway Drive, Bethlehem, PA 18017

2016, June 4th - 5th
NJ SCBWI Summer Conference (attending)
Crowne Plaza/Holiday Inn Express, 900 Scudders Mill Rd, Plainsboro Township, New Jersey 08536



How about you?

What have you got lined up in the coming weeks and months?

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by Bryan Hill “Thank you, Sarah for your courage through the dark years. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive.” – Kyle Reese The year is 1985, my family just got cable television, and there was a chrome nightmare coming to get me. James Cameron’s THE TERMINATOR is the […]

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ArtAscent seeks submissions on the theme of “green.” Entries may include fiction, poetry, short stories and other written explorations (up to 900 words). Selected entries published in ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal. Open to international writers. Entry fee: $10. Deadline: April 30, 2016.

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River & South Review, a semi-annual, student-run, online literary journal, seeks submissions for their next issue. Accepts fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from writers of any age who have not earned a graduate writing degree. Deadline: April 10, 2016.

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The Royal City Literary Arts Society (BC) is accepting entries for the RCLAS Write on! Contest. Three genres: fiction (1500 words max.), non-fiction (1500 words max.) and poetry. First prize in each genre: $100. Entry fee: $20 ($10 for members). Selected entrants published in RCLAS’ e-zine, Wordplay at Work. Deadline: April 1, 2016.

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Swept is a magazine based in Toronto that promotes and investigates arts and culture with an emphasis on Canadian content. Currently looking for short stories, poetry, photos, and journalistic stories/articles/op-eds. Presently unpaid; goal to start paying contributors by September 2016. Deadline: ongoing.

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The Minola Review welcomes arts and letters from all female-identifying writers. Interested in work that is fearless and unsympathetic and goes where others are uncomfortable or afraid to go. Open to submissions of poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews. Deadline: rolling.

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Why does the world need yet another book on how to write fantasy fiction? Because the public continues to show a nearly insatiable desire for more stories in this genre, and increasing numbers of aspiring authors gravitate toward writing it. As our real lives become more hectic, over-scheduled, insignificant, socially disconnected, and technologically laden, there seems to be a need among readers to reach for a place where the individual matters.

The post On writing fantasy fiction appeared first on OUPblog.

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Lunch Ticket invites submissions from translators and authors of multi-lingual texts for the Gabo Prize for Translation. Prize: $200 plus publication. Poetry, prose, and bi/multi-lingual work accepted. Deadline: February 29, 2016.

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Ballet Cat: Dance! Dance! Underpants!
by Bob Shea; illus. by the author
Primary   Disney-Hyperion   56 pp.
2/16   978-1-4847-1379-2   $9.99

Dance diva Ballet Cat returns for her second early-reader performance (Ballet Cat: The Totally Secret Secret, rev. 7/15), and once again she’s paired with a reluctant partner/friend. Butter Bear likes dancing but draws the line at leaping. Ballet Cat can’t imagine why: “Super-high leaps are the best part of ballet.” Ballet Cat gamely accommodates her pal’s concerns…at first. When Butter Bear resorts to tried-and-true stalling tactics — she’s hungry/thirsty/has to go to the bathroom “in the woods” — normally sunny Ballet Cat cracks. Shea knows how to get maximum expression out of thick black lines. His characters’ pas de deux is choreographed on solid-color backgrounds with a minimum of props, giving new readers a leg up on the energetic and funny speech-bubble text. An audience of “underpants peepers” is what has Butter Bear grounded; Ballet Cat’s perspective — “If you dance with all your heart, the only thing they will see is the beauty of ballet” — 
lifts everyone’s spirits. Underpants are on full display, but “ballet conquers all!” (Shorts under tutus would help, too.)

From the January/February 2016 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Review of Ballet Cat: Dance! Dance! Underpants! appeared first on The Horn Book.

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ArtAscent invites writing by international writers on the theme of “heat.” Entries may include fiction, poetry, short stories and other written explorations (900 words max.). Selected writers will be featured in the ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal, including an artist profile review. Entry fee: starting at $10. Deadline: February 29, 2016.

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Maybe a Fox
by Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee
Intermediate, Middle School   Dlouhy/Atheneum   261 pp.
3/16   978-1-4424-8242-5   $16.99   g
e-book ed. 978-1-4424-8244-9   $10.99

Eleven-year-old Jules, a budding geologist, and her twelve-year-old sister Sylvie, the fastest kid in school, live with their father in rural Vermont. Because the girls’ mother died when Jules was small, her memories, frustratingly, are dim. She does remember the awful sight of their mother collapsing onto the kitchen floor, and then six-year-old Sylvie sprinting as fast as she could to get help, but it was too late. And now Sylvie is the one who has disappeared: one morning before school she takes off running in the woods and never comes back; they think she tripped into the river and was swept away. At the same time, a fox kit, Senna, is born, with the instinctual desire to watch over and protect Jules. Because foxes are considered good luck, Jules’s occasional glimpses of Senna bring her some peace. A catamount, too, is rumored to be in the woods, along with a bear, and at book’s climax, the human, animal, and (most affectingly) spirit worlds collide and converge. This is a remarkably sad story that offers up measures of comfort through nature, family, community, and the interconnectedness among them. The sisters’ best friend, Sam, who is himself grieving for Sylvie and desperately longs to see that catamount, is happy to have his brother Elk home from Afghanistan, but Elk’s own best friend Zeke didn’t return, leaving Elk bereft; he and Jules mourn their losses in the woods. Zeke’s grandmother is the one to whom Sylvie ran when their mother collapsed and who now brings soup for Jules, and for her kind, stoic, heartbroken father. A good cry can be cathartic, and this book about nourishing one’s soul during times of great sadness does the trick.

From the January/February 2016 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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These books take place in fantastical worlds, but the protagonists’ pluck may feel familiar to many intermediate and middle-school readers.

Twelve-year-old Gracie Lockwood, the high-spirited heroine of Jodi Lynn Anderson‘s My Diary from the Edge of the World, lives in a world that’s like ours but with a few key differences (involving dragons and poltergeists, for example). When an ominous Dark Cloud seems to portend her brother’s death, Gracie, her family, and a classmate set off on a cross-country Winnebago trip in search of a guardian angel and a ship that will help them escape. Anderson lets the intricate details of Gracie’s world emerge gradually through her protagonist’s sharp, sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant diary entries. (Simon/Aladdin, 9–12 years)

In the village in Anne Nesbet’s The Wrinkled Crown, girls mustn’t touch the traditional stringed instrument, the lourka, before they’re twelve for fear of death. Linny, full of “music fire,” has secretly built a lourka and expects to die, but instead, it’s her friend Sayra who begins to fade into the unreachable realm called Away. Nesbet’s fable explores the relationship of science, logic, and imagination; a cozy, personable narrative voice punctuates the drama with light humor. (HarperCollins/Harper, 9–12 years)

In Catherine Jinks’s The Last Bogler, bogling is now respectable, and Ned Roach has signed on as Alfred Bunce’s apprentice. Ned must lure child-eating bogles with song so Alfred can dispatch them—and that’s only one of the dangers, for Alfred has drawn the attention of London’s criminal underworld. Fans of How to Catch a Bogle and A Plague of Bogles will appreciate Jinks’s accessible prose, colorful with Victorian slang; her inventive, briskly paced plot; and the gloom and charm of this trilogy-ender’s quasi-Victorian setting. (Houghton, 9–12 years)

Mirka, star of Barry Deutsch‘s humorous, fantastical, Orthodox-Jewish-themed Hereville graphic novel series is back in Hereville: How Mirka Caught a Fish. Her stepmother, Fruma, warns her to stay out of the woods while babysitting her half-sister Layele; so of course, curious Mirka drags Layele right in there with her. The girls encounter a wishing fish who once lost a battle of wits with a young Fruma and who now has a wicked plan to gain power through Layele. Expressive, often amusing comic-style illustrations do much to convey each scene’s tone and highlight important characters and objects. The eventual solution requires verbal gymnastics as much as heroics and compassion from Mirka. (Abrams/Amulet, 9–14 years)

From the February 2016 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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Facing illness, sexuality, family issues, and life-and-death situations, the following teen protagonists maturely and deeply explore the world around them while also looking within themselves.

Until the hospital called, asking her mother to pick up elderly Mary, seventeen-year-old Katie — star of Jenny Downham’s Unbecoming — didn’t even know she had a grandmother. Katie, her brother, and their mum bring home Mary, who is suffering from dementia. As Katie learns more about her grandmother’s and mother’s pasts, she struggles with her own secret: she is pretty certain she is gay. Told from a limited third-person perspective, the book offers implicit commentary on the historical and contemporary constraints on young women’s lives and their freedom to love freely. (Scholastic/Fickling, 14 years and up)

In Kate McGovern’s Rules for 50/50 Chances, Rose’s mom has advanced Huntington’s disease and Caleb’s mom and little sisters have sickle cell disease. The teens meet at the annual Walk for Rare Genes fundraiser, and their immediate attraction soon develops into something more meaningful. Rose spends much of the novel locked in indecision about whether or not to be tested for the Huntington’s gene, and what the results will mean for her future plans: college, a dance career, a relationship with Caleb. Rose’s realistically confused and complex anger and grief about her mother’s decline adds poignancy to the teen’s dilemma. (Farrar, 14 years and up)

In Instructions for the End of the World by Jamie Kain, Nicole’s father is a survivalist who believes wilderness skills are the surest protection from a dangerous world. When Dad decides to leave the grid altogether, moving the family to a ramshackle forest homestead, Mom balks and runs off. Dad goes after her, leaving Nicole and her younger sister, Izzy, behind. Nicole worries about Izzy’s involvement with teens living at a nearby commune; at the same time a brooding resident there named Wolf stirs up her own rebellious yearnings. Most chapters feature multiple narrators (Nicole, Izzy, Wolf, and others), but Nicole’s voice provides a steady through line to follow her genuine and compelling struggle. (St. Martin’s Griffin, 14 years and up)

Sensory details (especially scents) evoke the physical and emotional landscape — 1970s Birch Park, Alaska — in Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock’s The Smell of Other People’s Houses. Four distinct first-person narrative voices breathe life into the adolescent protagonists. Escaping her alcoholic father’s abuse, Dora finds a welcome haven in Dumpling’s family’s fish camp. A few stolen nights with handsome Ray Stevens leaves sixteen-year-old Ruth pregnant and alone. The characters’ engaging individual stories, thematically linked by loss and yearning, are enriched by the tales’ intersections, and are grounded in emotional honesty. (Random/Lamb, 14 years and up)

From the February 2016 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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