Walter Dean Myers and the World We've Lost

Walter Dean Myers died today. With this sudden loss, his much-read New York Times opinion piece from this past March takes on the character of a final charge to the kidlit community. One I hope we will fulfill.

What I thought when I first read the piece (from a perspective, of course, that began some 30 years after that of Mr. Myers) was this:

It wasn't always like this.

Here's a book from my shelves. If memory serves (it occasionally does) my brother bought it for the cover price of 1.50 at The Book Worm, a shop around 15 miles from our home. We bought books there sometimes, when we were in funds-- books by Walter Dean Myers, and S.E. Hinton, and John D. Fitzgerald, and Mildred Taylor. The books were all, like this one, modest in size and presentation. The Potterquake was still far in the future, and the children's book market wasn't anywhere near as competitive as it is now.

Hold onto that last thought. It's important.

In this long ago world, computers were vast objects that filled an entire room, and nothing went "beep" except automobile horns. Local volunteer firemen used to take all us village kids on long, long night rides atop the fire trucks and we were allowed to put out the streetlamps with the searchlights. Kids roamed freely in the fields and forests; no one expected anyone so patently annoying as us to be kidnapped.

The kids in Walter Dean Myers's books explored just like us, only in Harlem. That interested us. We climbed about in barns; Myers's characters roamed abandoned buildings. We rode our bikes down the steepest hills we could find; Myers's characters did wheelies. Harlem was a different world-- but these characters were fully relatable.

It had clearly never occurred to anybody at The Book Worm that the kids in a nearly all-white community wouldn't want to read books about kids in Harlem. As you can tell from the cover, it also hadn't occurred to anyone at Avon Books that since the majority of American children were white, black children ought to be kept off book covers. There can certainly have been no idea that the books were somehow Special Interest, rather than mainstream. The Book Worm was about the size of the average motel room, with no shelf space for Special Interest.

In his New York Times piece this past March, Myers wrote:

"...This was exactly what I wanted to do when I wrote about poor inner-city children — to make them human in the eyes of readers and, especially, in their own eyes. I need to make them feel as if they are part of America’s dream, that all the rhetoric is meant for them, and that they are wanted in this country."

I can only speak to the first part of Myers's wish. Mission accomplished. We ate these books with a spoon. Any suggestion that we shouldn't, or wouldn't, or couldn't have done so would have had to come to us from adults. No adults obliged.

We grew up. The Myers books got tucked onto a shelf with many others. The Potterquake came along and shook the children's book world to its core. And the annual output of children's books tripled.

The number of children, however, did not.

Suddenly the children's book world got more competitive. It became necessary to find an edge wherever one could. Covers became a matter of intense study and scrutiny-- what would attract readers? What would repel them?

At some point, someone somewhere seems to have decided, based on who knows what data or theory or madness, that a protagonist of color on the cover would not attract readers. (Begging the question: Which readers?)

There followed a period of several years during which African-American characters-- and, to a lesser extent, other characters of color-- vanished from the covers of children's books. Books that had a protagonist of color would show something non-human on the cover-- a symbol, a building, a monster, anything! Or the protagonist would appear in silhouette. Or, in what quickly came to be known as whitewashing, the protagonist would be shown on the cover but would have mysteriously lost melanin.

I see signs that this is dying out. I still think we have a long way to go before we progress to the point we were at in 1977. But I think that we've passed our nadir, and we're on an upward climb. Characters of color are reappearing on book covers, and some of them are even African-American.

We can do better, though. We can do so much better.

Let's do it for Walter Dean Myers.

Recipe: Spiedies

Friends, I am about to do what no upstate New Yorker does lightly. I am about to share my spiedies recipe.

Understand, this isn't my actual spiedies recipe. This is an approximation of how I make 'em, jotted down for the first time ever during a recent spiedies-making episode.

The main principles which my method follows are... wait, what?

What are spiedies?

Oh. Spiedies (pronounced "speedies") are a regional dish found within roughly 60 miles of Binghamton, New York. They are chunks of spiced, marinated meat, eaten in a sandwich. When I was a kid I thought they were called "spiedies" because they cook very quickly. Now that I am grown up and have Google, I'm able to find out that nobody knows why they're called spiedies. When I was a kid they were almost always made with beef. Nowadays I think they are more often made with chicken.

Anyway, spiedies are not good for you, but I like to think my version is less-not-good-for-you than others.

Warning: Spiedies are addictive.

Ingredients:

2 large garlic cloves

1 lb (450 grams) organic free-range boneless, skinless chicken breast

1/2 cup olive oil (Metric conversion table for recipes)

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

1/4 tsp lime juice

1/4 tsp turmeric

pinch fresh ground black pepper

1/8 tsp Jane's Crazy Mixed-Up Salt (optional)

1 T¹ fresh basil (about 8 leaves)

1 T fresh sage

1 tsp fresh oregano

4 spearmint leaves and 2 peppermint leaves (or 1 tsp combined fresh mint)

Chop the garlic and set it aside to rest.

Combine the olive oil, vinegar and lime juice in a large measuring cup. Add the turmeric, pepper, and salt. Set aside.

Chop the herbs; set aside.

Remove all fat from the chicken and cut it into chunks or strips no more than 1" in size. Put the chicken in a bowl or plastic bag.

Beat the oil, vinegar and lime juice briskly with a fork for 1 minute. It will separate immediately, but at least you tried. Add the garlic; stir. Add the herbs and stir thoroughly.

Pour this marinade over the chicken and stir well. Marinate in the refrigerator for 24 hours or more, stirring occasionally in a vain effort to get the oil and vinegar back together.

The olive oil may solidify in the fridge. For this reason, I prefer to use a plastic bag. Frequent vigorous (but not too vigorous) squishing of the plastic bag can reliquefy the oil.

Once the spiedies are marinated, remove them from the liquid. Fry them. (The oil will tend to splatter, so you might want to cover the pan. Alternatively, they can be skewered and cooked outdoors on a grill.) Drain on paper towels or paper bags, and serve in your preferred sandwich wrapper. I like to use toasted Italian bread. Traditionally nothing joins the spiedies inside the sandwich. It's just spiedies and bread. 
 

Alternative for those avoiding starches: Cut each chicken breast into three or four thin cutlets, instead of chunks or strips. Marinate. Then, instead of frying, spread the marinated spiedies on a cookie sheet and bake in a 350 degree oven for 20-25 minutes, or until cooked through. (Slice and make sure there's no pink inside.)

The fresh herbs, by the way, are why I prefer to make spiedies in the summer. But don't go out and buy all that stuff if you haven't got it growing. And if you have thyme, which grows wild in much of upstate New York, use that too. Just use whatever you have, in whatever combination you want. Spiedies are essentially a state of mind.

1 If using dried herbs, use 1/3 as much. 1 T fresh= 1 tsp dried. 1 tsp fresh= 1/3 tsp dried.

My Writing Process Blog Tour

I would like to thank the delightful and wise Megan Frazer Blakemore, author of The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill, for inviting me to participate in the Writing Process Blog Tour. I have the honor to know Megan through Twitter and lists; lots of lists! Her 2013 middle grade fantasy The Water Castle tends to appear on the same lists as my book Jinx. Most recently, they both appeared on the 2014-15 New Mexico Land of Enchantment list.


And now, here are my answers to the Writing Process Blog Tour questions:

1) What are you working on?

I'm sitting here waiting for the page proofs of the third and (for the nonce) final Jinx book, Jinx's Fire. They should be here very soon. And I've started drafting another middle grade fantasy. This one is set in a different world from Jinx's, and at the moment the protagonist is a girl. I'm about 12,000 words in.

2) How does your work differ from others of its genre?

I suppose anybody's work is different from anyone else's. You could take any story idea (for example: Due to a series of errors, a fieldmouse is elected President of the United States) and hand it to 100 different writers, and you'd get 100 different stories.

One characteristic of all my work is that I'm fascinated by setting. I love to explore places. Setting is nearly always a character in my stories. In the Jinx books, the setting even has a speaking part.


3) Why do you write what you do?

The desire to explore, again. Not just places, but relationships between people, and the reasons why things happen, and the unwritten rules and assumptions that we live by.

I feel lucky to be writing children's fantasy, because fantasy stays with you. When people talk about the books they remember from childhood, more often than not they talk about fantasy. There's much more children's fantasy being published now than when I was a kid, and I'm so glad to be allowed to be part of that.

4) How does your writing process work?

I spend a long time-- months, sometimes years-- letting the story come to me. While that's happening, I walk, I draw pictures, I write down bits of dialogue and ideas, and I do bubble maps. I use colored sharpies for the latter; a different color for each character or event. (I have a lot of colors.) I also use the colored sharpies on index cards, which I'll rearrange on a table or on the wall until I get the main events into a temporary order.

Then I start drafting, as fast as possible. I shoot for 10,000 words a week and usually make it.

I set the draft aside for as long as I can afford to (usually two weeks to two months). Then I come back to it with fresh eyes and begin the revision process. I usually go back and make more bubble charts at this point to resolve issues that have come up during the drafting. It'll be sometime after the third draft that I actually show the work to friends, family, or critique partners.

After that there will be several more revisions before I'm ready to send the work off, and then finally of course there are yet more revisions with the guidance of my agent or an editor.

Oops, here's the UPS guy with those page proofs for Jinx's Fire! So I'm going to finish now and hand you over to another participant in the Writing Process Blog Tour, fantasy author Sarah Prineas, who needs no introduction but is going to get one anyway.

Sarah Prineas's award-winning Magic Thief series follows the adventures of the irascible wizard Nevery and his gutterboy apprentice, Connwaer. Sarah holds a PhD in English literature and recently taught honors seminars on fantasy and science fiction literature at the University of Iowa. Her latest book is Moonkind, the conclusion to the Winterling series. Visit her website here, and watch for her Writing Process Blog Tour post on June 12^th.

Kids' Author Carnival NYC

Be sure to join us if you can for the Kids' Author Carnival at Jefferson Market Library in New York City on May 31st, 2014!

Free admission to all ages, doors open at 5:30, events 6:00-8:30 pm.

38 genuine middle grade authors will be in attendance! Activities, fun, book signings. See you there!

Authors participating:

Kwame Alexander
Shelby Bach
Kelly Barnhill
Jeff Baron
Rebecca Behrens
Josh Berk
Sage Blackwood
Isaiah Campbell
Caroline Carlson
Soman Chainani
Matthew Cody
Edith Cohn
Bruce Coville
Jen Swann Downey
Paul Durham
Tim Federle
Laura Marx Fitzgerald
Tommy Greenwald
Christopher Healy
Kody Keplinger
Claire Legrand
Dana Alison Levy
Elizabeth Levy
Alexander London
Lauren Magaziner
Jen Malone
Kate Milford
Michael Northrop
Dan Poblocki
Marie Rutkoski
Heidi Schulz
Michelle Schusterman
Polly Shulman
Laurel Snyder
Aaron Starmer
Lauren Tarshis
Mary G. Thompson
Danette Vigilante

On Writing A Fantasy Protagonist of Color

There's a difference between 1. writing a protagonist who is a person of color and 2. writing the experience of being a person of color.

#2 is difficult for an author who doesn't share the same cultural background as the character. Take the marvelous scene in Christopher Paul Curtis's The Watsons Go To Birmingham 1963 where the narrator, Kenny, recounts the family's reaction to the older brother, Byron, straightening his hair. Few white writers would have had the knowledge necessary to write that scene-- the undertones of the act, and the parents' outrage, come as a surprise to most non-African-American readers. This is the kind of deep cultural knowledge that isn't available to the outside observer.

#1, on the other hand, is what readers have in mind when they ask why more protagonists can't just be people of color, without it being a big deal.

In fantasy, they can. And easily. Especially in second-world fantasy.

In second-world fantasy, there is usually no stigma attached to varieties of pigmentation. (Hey, that's why it's called fantasy). As for cultural knowledge-- well, the writer is inventing the culture as part of the world-building. Hence any writer can dye a protagonist any color.

The weird thing is... well, I did it. And sometimes people try to convince me I didn't.

Here's the cover of Jinx. It shows a dark-skinned boy in an obviously-enchanted forest near an obviously-enchanted castle.

What's weird is that often people look at the cover and see a white boy.

 Do you? I don't. I've probably spent more time staring at this cover than anyone. Jinx doesn't look exactly as I picture him, but I don't draw well enough to show him exactly as I picture him, so that's a moot point. His picture certainly matches his description in the book. When people try to convince me Jinx is white, I direct them to the description, and they read it and agree that yeah, it does sound like he's not white.

Well. Ultimately a character exists somewhere in the space between the words a writer types and the image that forms in the reader's mind. I hope that for some readers, at least, my characters will look the way I see them. Sometimes Jinx shows up on lists of books with protagonists of color, and that makes me happy. Sometimes he's left off the lists, because Jinx's color isn't the point of the story.

 The same seems to be true of a handful of other middle grade novels that have come out in the last year or two. It would be nice to think that we're getting to a place where a non-white protagonist will be too ordinary to notice. Unfortunately, recent events suggest we're not getting to that place. Not yet.

What Is Middle Grade?

Every middle grade author seems to get this question:

"Should my kid read your book?"

Of course the correct response to this is "Yes, yes, absolutely! Buy it at once. In fact, just to be on the safe side, buy a copy for every room in the house."

But really, we just don't know. We're not sure what you're asking.

Recently someone phrased the question in a way that made the issue clearer to me. "Would my kid like your books? You said you write middle grade. She's in 3rd grade. Is that middle grade? She reads at a 9th grade level, though."

Now I understand the question.

The "middle grade" label hasn't been around that long, and it's not clear to most people what it means. It's not clear to me, come to that. The books tend to have grade levels or age levels stamped on the jacket flap, leaving both children and adults with the impression that "middle grade" is a measure of reading difficulty.

I think that it is not.

Most middle grade novels are not easier to read than most adult novels. In fact, they may be harder. However, they are not too hard for most upper elementary children. Neither are most adult novels too hard for them, come to that. The Hobbit has a higher lexile level (whatever that is) than Cry, the Beloved Country.

Vaguely, the age levels on the book jacket might suggest interest level. But the suggestion is not exclusive. I hear from a lot of adults who read my books.

So I thought maybe what the parent was really asking was just what "middle grade" means. And here's the definition of middle grade fiction I came up with.

In a middle grade novel:

• There may be some swearing, but it's usually limited and/or not spelled out on the page.
• Romance may happen, but it's not the focus. There will be no sex scenes.
• Bad things may happen, but despair is never permanent. Ultimately it turns out that life is worth living.

That's not a full and exact definition, of course. Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny is middle grade under that definition. (A book I loved at age ten, by the way.) But it's the best I can come up with right now.

Every time I try to add something to it, I either think of exceptions or realize that I'm trying to impose my own preferences.

After writing this definition, I started googling to see what other people think "middle grade" means. And I'm afraid I disagree with a lot of them. Here's what I think middle grade is not:

• It's not a reading level.
• It's not written with simplified sentence structure, easier vocabulary, or lower expectations for plot and character development.
• The plot is not external-rather-than-internal. It can be either; it can be both.
• It does not necessarily feature a protagonist who is between 8 and 13 years of age.

Anyway. My definition may be so much blather. But it's what I've got for the moment.

Were the Oz Books Girls' Books?

Before there was Harry Potter, there was Oz. There was a lot of Oz. There were 14 Oz books by L. Frank Baum published between 1900 and 1920, and there were dozens more written by other authors after his death.

Baum received thousands of fan letters. People lined up to buy the books. There was merchandising. There was probably fanfic too, but, you know, not online. 

Oz was big.

Oz wasn't the "just a dream" world of the movie. It was a real magical world that was visited by real children-- a girl named Betsy, and a girl named Trot, and a girl named Dorothy, and... maybe some other girls. I don't remember.

My grandfather read all the Baum Oz books as a child, while women battled for the right to vote and men battled for German trenches. There was nothing remotely similar being published at the time. Children's fiction was dominated by the Depressingly Moral (let's just say Little Eva has a lot to answer for) and the shoot 'em up action adventure. No one could die in Oz. This was a flaw as far as narrative tension, but a real innovation otherwise.

Given a choice between reading about brave little heroines wasting away from consumption and reading about the caverns of the Nome King, kids chose the latter. Early twen-cen kids loved the Oz books.

Many decades later, my brother and I read them. First we read all the L. Frank Baum ones, and then all the Ruth Plumley Thompson ones and the John R. Neill ones. Even as late as the 1970s, they were a large part of the extant body of children's fantasy literature.

Although the main character, Dorothy, was a girl, and the other main child characters (Betsy and Trot and Princess Ozma) were girls, and the only boy we saw much of in the Baum books (Button Bright) was kind of a low-watt bulb, nobody ever suggested to us that these were girls' books.

One of the Baum books does have a boy protagonist, Tip,  who ***spoiler alert*** near the end of the book becomes a girl. Permanently. If this traumatized my grandfather or my brother for life, they never mentioned it.

 

(Chances a middle grade author could get away with that nowadays: Zero.)

(Possibly slightly less than that.)

I've talked to my brother about this a bit over the years, as he's raised children and I've raised books. According to him, he never, as a child, experienced any failure to connect to a female protagonist because of her un-maleness. According to him, the only books he felt were off-limits to him were those that were clearly identified as being "for girls"...

...and that is what we're doing far too much of today.

I'm picturing how the Oz books might be published today... in a world where they weren't already classics, that is. Pink and lavender covers. Glitter, perhaps. Lots of emphasis on the Princess aspect.

After all, no one would expect boys to read a book about girls.