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Four industry stars with four different points of view talked to us about groundbreaking nonfiction.

• Steve Malk is a literary agent at Writers House, representing some of the biggest names in the business.
• Susan Campbell Bartoletti writes poetry, short stories, picture books, and novels and nonfiction for young readers. 
• Linda Sue Park is a Newbery Award winner (for A SINGLE SHARD), and the author of a NYT bestseller called A LONG WALK TO WATER as well as WING & CLAW and YAKS YAK.
• Elizabeth Partridge has written more than a dozen books, including MARCHING FOR FREEDOM and biographies of Woody Guthrie and Dorothea Lange.

Susan Campbell Bartlett's career opened up when she started to do nonfiction. She learned everything she needed to know about nonfiction in a great 11th-grade English class: taking notes, research, writing. She's written about growing up in coal country, Hitler youth, the Irish potato famine, and the Ku Klux Klan, and Typhoid Mary.

Some of the best advice she's ever received, from Patti Lee Gauch, is to reach inside of yourself and find a personal story.

Linda Sue Park loves writing historical fiction, and she loves grounding it and basing it in fact. She writes stories like she cooks: there is no recipe. Her tinkering, especially with real life events she works into her books, makes the narratives better. She ended up writing fiction because she loves to change things.

A LONG WALK TO WATER is one of her mashups. It's historical fiction based on the true story of a friend of hers who was one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. She interviewed her friend for hours and read his own writing. But the part of his life that she was writing about happened more than 20 years ago, so to make it a dramatic narrative, she wrote in scenes and added dialogue. Even though she interviewed him and got quotes from him, she considers the reproduction fiction. It's recreated from old conversations, and she doesn't think it's truly nonfiction to work this way.

Linda Sue also makes composite characters out of multiple people. Their stories are true, but the combination makes it fiction. Readers have been moved by the book nonetheless, and have raised more than $1.5 million for a water charity in Sudan. The realness of the book is what resonates with readers.

She's working on a mashup with several authors, including Jennifer Donnelly, M.T. Anderson, Candace Fleming and others about Henry VIII. It's called FATAL THRONE and will be out sometime after next fall.

Elizabeth Partridge loves to write biographies. She likes characters who are difficult. This gives grit and multiple layers to work. MARCHING FOR FREEDOM was a challenging book to write because her main characters were all earnest, hardworking, amazing kids and young adults. It's about the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, and she wanted to choose a new POV from Martin Luther King Jr's. She found photographs of kids who'd participated in marches and tried to find names of people to interview.

A New Yorker article led her to some kids who'd taken part, and before long, she'd found six or seven kids, whom she interviewed in Selma. "If I wanted this to remain nonfiction, I would have to quote them exactly."

Steven Malk has always loved nonfiction. He was a history major in college, and when he gets to read away from work, he reads all nonfiction. Nonfiction has morphed and taken on a broader definition. There's room for more voices. "It's an interesting time." He talked about Deborah Wiles documentary novels REVOLUTION and COUNTDOWN. "She's doing something very unique."
Other writers/artists to watch are Deborah Hopkinson, Kadir Nelson, Eugene Yelchin and Matt dela Pena, Stephanie Hemphill (and more—he's an encyclopedia of books and creators).

He likes it when books open up conversations about what's fiction and nonfiction. He's a bit looser about it. As long as people are reading, that's a good thing. He grew up in his parents' bookstore, and wasn't snobby about what people were reading.

What's the line between fiction and nonfiction? 

Susan Bartoletti - a book like TERRIBLE TYPHOID MARY is nonfiction. When Mary is thinking, Susan couches it in "might have thought." -

Linda Sue Park - "Facts don't interest me very much. I'm interested in truth." Facts are one tool to getting at the truth. At a Library of Congress event she met a man who wanted to read only fiction, because all nonfiction becomes untrue with future discoveries. This fascinated her, even as she depends on nonfiction writers' work to do their own.

Elizabeth Partridge - She has a hard line between fiction and nonfiction. "I will not make up anything. I will twist myself in knots to not make up something." The weather can be particularly difficult. But she's loving the mashups that are getting more and more out there. She loves how in LOVING VS VIRGINIA the author went inside the characters' heads and told the story in poetry.

"We think of nonfiction of being dry and dates and names and places. But if you can find the emotional spine of your book, it will be powerful."

Steve Malk - You need to own what you're doing. You can't say it's nonfiction if you're making up dialogue. If you say you're writing nonfiction but you don't have sources and you're making things up, it makes you look unprofessional. You need to be very clear to an agent or publisher what you're trying to do. Authors notes and backwater can be helpful, but you have to be able to articulate it for yourself when you are submitting. Don't leave that up to the publisher.

We're also starting to see nonfiction back matter in fiction books, Susan said. That's an interesting mashup.

You have to be honest with yourself about your research and what you're writing. You can't rely on your publisher to vet your work.

"If you're passionate for your topic, you want to get it right. You would be unsatisfied fudging it," Linda Sue said.

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When Susan Campbell Bartoletti embarks on a full-length nonfiction project, she knows it will take years and that she’ll have to summon all her strength. “I know it's going to be frustrating and physically and emotionally exhausting,” says the Newbery Award winning author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction and fiction for young readers, as well as picture books, “but I also know there is

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Back in August 2011 I posted here under the title "How great is Susan Campbell Bartoletti?" I reported on how this award-winning writer for young adults had saved me in Orlando, FL, just ahead of an ALAN panel (we shared the dais; she mastered the technology; she made people laugh; I spoke, sorrowfully, of a massive fire). Later I wrote of Susan's kindness in driving many miles to appear in the Young Writers Take the Park event I'd orchestrated with The Spiral Book Case in Manayunk. And then one day I made a video for Susan and her Penn State students, about the crafting of dialogue in two of my novels.

But my very favorite Susan BC moment remains that August day in 2011 when we sat in a top-floor room of the Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus talking about our mutual love for 1871. Yes. Truly. How many people will I ever meet who will love that year as much as I do? Susan was deep into writing her Diary of Pringle Rose for the fabulous and famous Scholastic Dear America series (if you want to know how fabulous, here is Taylor Swift talking about the impact the series had on her). I was finishing my prequel to my Centennial Philadelphia novel, Dangerous Neighbors—a boy's adventure, an 1871 Philly story, due out in early May called Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent. In the cool shadows of Kelly Writers House Susan and I spoke of fires and trains and schools and prejudices, about classified ads and research. We will forever be bound by friendship and a year, by an afternoon at Penn.

Early this morning I had the great pleasure of reading Pringle Rose's story, which is secondarily titled Down the Rabbit Hole and was officially launched a few days ago. It's a pure pleasure of a read; it's vintage Susan. It's a story that takes its fourteen-year-old heroine out of the coal mining country of Pennsylvania (where Susan herself lives) and toward Chicago during a hot, dangerous summer. Pringle has lost two parents to an accident she doesn't quite understand. She has a brother, Gideon, who is different and lovable and deserving of her care. She boards a train with her brother in tow and believes herself destined for a new and elevated life. But the past catches up with these brave journey-ers. And then there's the heat of that summer, that devastating heat, that will crescendo to the Great Fire of Chicago.

Scholastic knew what it was doing when it invited Susan to write this Diary, and I am confident that it will now reach countless thousands—reach, entertain, and enlighten. Susan and I are nursing a fantasy that we'll have an 1871 Celebration Day together. Between now and then, I'm celebrating her.

(The photo above, by the way, is the street where my own 1871 character William lived. I'm still trying to figure out a way to get William and Pringle together.)

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Through a stroke of fate—in the way that we find books waiting on the shelf for us, sometimes for years, without us being aware of their existence—I came across Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, a novel for adults based on the true story of a couple who dared raise their voices against the Nazi propaganda machine and attempted to tell the truth to other Germans. The novel was published in 1947

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A few weeks ago, my friend Susan Campbell Bartoletti (click here to read about how much I love Susan) asked if I might reflect on subtext in dialogue in video format for her Penn State students.  Today, I'm posting my response here—thoughts on what makes dialogue tick.  Susan asked that I read from own work, and so I did—choosing a passage from YOU ARE MY ONLY as well as one from SMALL DAMAGES.  This constitutes my first reading of SMALL DAMAGES, which will be released in July, and which just received a starred PW review.

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title: They called themselves the K.K.K.: The birth of an American terrorist group

author: Susan Campbell Bartoletti

date: Houghton Mifflin, 2010

non-fiction

I’d been hearing about They called themselves the K.K.K. for quite some time now and from what I’d heard, I expected it to deliver a good read. And that it did!

In the bibliography at the rear of the text, Bartoletti  states that her purpose in writing this book is to give testament to the victims of atrocities committed by the K.K.K.. She does this by describing how the Klan came into existence and how it set out to rob Black citizens of their power as American citizens after the Civil War.  Bartoletti uses a variety of images that relate the attitudes of hatred and bigotry that existed at that time while also showing Blacks as educators, intellectuals, farmers, parents, workers, leaders and as victims. These images reach us on an emotional level that the text avoids.

The book takes us from the little meeting in Pulaski, TN where the boys got themselves a club that grew in so much political and societal strength that it was able to perpetuate the grasp of racism on this country and deny opportunities for Blacks for decades to come. We get the details of clothing choices, involvement of women and copies of their rules and regulations.

And, we get their actions. The brutality suffered by several named individuals is related in ways that don’t focus on the grotesque, but that does get the point across. Layered with the story of these individuals is the story of the political play of numerous groups, including the republican and democratic parties. At the same time, Bartoletti lets us know that not all injustices against Blacks were limited to southern states, and that much of the reason the Klan was able to thrive was that Whites lived in fear, too.

I think this books should be in every high school and public library to help young adults understand how racism is perpetuated in this country as well as to understand how power is attained.

Susan Campbell Bartoletti is an award winning, full-time writer.

Filed under: Book Reviews Tagged: non-fiction, Susan Campbell Bartoletti 2 Comments on book review: They called themselves the KKK, last added: 4/3/2012