Guest Author: Sue Farrell Holder

Today we're chatting with Sue Farrell Holler, author of Lacey and the African Grandmothers, which has just been shortlisted for the 2011 children's choice Rocky Mountain Book Awards.

LEC: Lacey and the African Grandmothers is based on the true story of Lisa Jo Sun Walk.  How did you hear about Lisa Jo, and what compelled you to tell her story?

SFH: I’m inspired by real places, real people and real situations, and I had goose bumps the first time I heard this story from Lisa Jo’s teacher, Denise Peterson. I was immediately filled with a resonance of words and a wealth of imagery.

The story punctuated something I’ve always believed -- that one person can make a huge difference. When I first spoke with Lisa Jo on the phone, I was captivated by her quiet humility. “I just wanted to help them,” she said.  Nearly two years later, when I met her in person, I felt an incredible warmth radiate from her and envelope me. I felt as if we were long-lost sisters and I was delighted beyond reason when she gave me permission to tell her story.

Lisa Jo’s story inspired me, as I hope it will inspire others.

LEC: Many authors would have written a straightforward biography.  However, Lacey and the African Grandmothers is fiction - but fiction containing photos of the real life "characters." What factors led you to decide on a fictionalized approach?

SFH: The biggest factor in writing this story as fiction is that Second Story Press was interested in having me write it for the Kids' Power Series, which are ficitionalized accounts of real events in which children take action to make their lives and their world better. The other main factor was that Lisa Jo was 18 when she began working with the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign.  Kids' Power is aimed at a younger audience (ages 9 - 13) and I wanted a character to whom the young readers could relate.

I consider Lacey and the African Grandmothers as a "blended" story that mixes fact and fiction. The setting, the work she does and the visit of the African grandmothers are real, for instance, but most of the conversations and the scenes that make up the narrative part of the story are fictional.

LEC: Your descriptions of the story's setting and life on the Siksika Reserve feel unvarnished and very real. What kind of research was required to create this authenticity?

SFH: Being connected to nature is important to me. I'm interested in native plants and animals, and I pay attention to things like the sky, sunrises and sunsets, and how the wind blows. I lived in central Alberta for four years and I learned to love the prairie as much as "Lacey" does.

Probably the most valuable piece of research was that I was permitted to spend several days at Sequoia "hanging out", talking to students, touring Siksika, and spending time at the Blackfoot Crossing Historical Centre. I observed and absorbed. I listened particularly to how people talked, the sound of their voices. I also had the opportunity to meet Lisa Jo, to talk with her, and to meet her children. We connected so well that when I was leaving, her little girl asked, "Is she one of my aunties?"

I'll be forever grateful to Denise Peterson, who is the Principal of Sequoia, for allowing me to visit her school, for facilitating my every request and for allowing me to tap into her vast knowledge.

LEC: Children's writers are often told to write without an agenda - that the theme or message of the story should never overwhelm the story itself. In contrast, the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman Lacey learns from Kahasi is a teaching tale, designed to convey wisdom from one generation to the next. How do you strike a balance between entertainment and "lessons" in your own writing?

SFH: I think every story we share -- whether orally or in writing -- is to some extent a "teaching tale." There is always something to be learned -- whether it's how a character reacts to a situation, how others see the character, or how problems are resolved, for instance -- but I can't imagine writing a story in which I focussed on teaching a particular lesson.

I consider myself an entertainer. I write stories that I hope children will want to read for the simple joy of reading and getting caught up in a story. I see learning as a bonus to the entertainment value of stories.


LEC:  What can you tell us about your current projects?

SFH: I'd love to tell you about my current project, but I can't! It's partly superstition that I'll jinx myself, and partly that when I talk about a work-in-progress my incentive to complete it melts faster than a popsicle on a hot day. I was really tested when I was writing Lacey as I had signed the contract with Second Story before the manuscript was completed. I was really excited about it, but didn't tell anyone except my immediate family, Denise Peterson (who was sworn to secrecy) and eventually, Lisa Jo. I kept my lips zipped until I had my author copies of Lacey in my hands.

LEC: In that case, thanks for joining us today, and good luck with whatever your next book may be!

Guest Author: Maryrose Wood

Today's guest is Maryrose Wood, author of Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love, What I Wore to Save the World, and the delightful middle grade novel The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place.

LEC: The Incorrigible Children seems like a huge departure from your previous books, which are a mixture of teen fantasy and "chick lit." What prompted the switch?  And how did you manage to capture that delightful "classic British" voice?

MW: The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place is my first middle-grade series. After writing a half-dozen YA books I was ready to shake things up a bit for myself. And my youngest child is now twelve, so I've been living through the middle grade years and was starting to feel like I had something to say to that age group.

I also really love to write comedy, and although there's plenty of humor in YA, middle grade is like comedy heaven. The idea of a comedy/mystery about three kids raised by wolves with a teenage governess, set in Victorian England, is such a middle-grade concept. Once that premise came to me, there was no turning back!

As for the voice of the book - I was working on the proposal for the series and started talking with Donna Bray at Balzer + Bray (an imprint of HarperCollins Children's Books), with whom I had never worked before. Like me, she was a big fan of Charlotte Bronté's Jane Eyre, and she totally got what I was trying to do, but the original sample chapters I had were actually written in the first person (narrated by Miss Penelope Lumley, the governess!). Donna nudged me to take off the gloves, comedy-wise. I immediately went back and rewrote the opening chapters from the third person POV of this slightly offbeat narrator who is both modern and yet channeling that classic British children's book voice, and I knew I'd found the right way to tell this story.

So it was more a question of not holding back than finding.  There's something about that voice that's very me, actually: the playfulness with words, the tendency to give advice, the occasional bouts of rueful, Anglophilic nostalgia...I'm not sure what all this says about me, but there you have it!

LEC: One of the things I loved about this book is that it doesn't talk down to its readers. On the contrary, it seems almost designed to stretch both their vocabularies and their ability to read between the lines.  In comparison to classic kid lit, many contemporary novels seem straightforward, or even simplistic.  Do you feel that today's writers may be underestimating, rather than challenging their readers?

MW: When my son was in third grade he came home from school upset because his teacher found him halfway through a Roald Dahl book. She took it away, telling him it was too hard for his "level." "But mom! I want to know how it ends!" he complained. I made sure we had a copy of that book at home, pronto.

Writers, editors, publishers, teachers - everybody has their own ideas about what kids will like and are "ready" for. I figure that kids will decide what they like! It's good to give them a lot of choices.

I have no consciously didactic plan about using a big vocabulary in my writing for kids; I just don't see any reason not to. From what I've read (and observed), the brains of kids under the age of thirteen or so are in a language-acquisition mode that is sponge-like to the point of being miraculous. If we don't offer them delicious words like incorrigible and hyperbole and velocipede, they'll just use all that brainpower to memorize the names and powers of every Pokemon under the sun. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I love Pokemon! But kids are smart and hungry to understand things. Acquiring a big, rich vocabulary gives a person the tools to have big, rich ideas and make sense of complexity. And the world needs more people who can make sense of complexity!

I will say that the kids I have talked to are very engaged by the "smartness" of the book. Like Miss Penelope Lumley, I tend to be an optimist, and I suspect that the more swamped kids get with visual, action-driven forms of storytelling (movies/tv/youtube videos/xbox games/etc.), the more uniquely rewarding the experience of reading novels becomes. The ability to stop and reflect on what's going on within the story, to wonder what might happen next, to pause and savor a word like 'velocipede' and marvel at how times have changed - these are the special pleasures of fiction. To know more than the characters know and figure things out by, as you say, "reading between the lines," is a kind of literary fun than I hope today's kids will find as addictive as generations of readers before them have. First, though, they have to be given the chance to discover it.

LEC: According to your author blurb, you were a governess yourself once. Who was your Agatha Swanburne?

MW: I homeschooled my kids for a few years, when they were young. I wish I'd had an Agatha Swanburne! I was kind of winging it. Luckily it all worked out fine. In fact, I think it's one of the reasons I have a lot of trust in kids' natural curiosity. Perhaps it's also why Miss Lumley has such faith in the Incorrigibles' ability to learn, too. They may have been raised by wolves, but she never gives up on them or lowers her expectations.

LEC: Aspects of The Mysterious Howling are quite dark, almost gothic. Others (and here I'm thinking of squirrels) are pure comedy.  What role does humor play in this, and your other books?

MW: I love comedy. Finding the funny is one of life's great joys. After all, who doesn't like a good laugh? Comedy also a useful narrative tool, because it makes the pace of a book accelerate. To use a baseball analogy: if you have a 'funny' pitch in your bag of tricks, you don't have to keep throwing fastballs and nothing but fastballs. You can mix it up and avail yourself of lots of different elements - gothic scenarios, moments of peril, melancholy ruminations, and then pick up the pace again on a dime when you need to.

Ironically, comedy can help a book be more "serious" in terms of the subjects it touches upon. To paraphrase Mary Poppins, it's a "teaspoon of sugar" that helps the social commentary go down. It lets you put thought-provoking content in a book while keeping things entertaining and age-appropriate and not preachy. I do love comedy, can you tell?

LEC: What's next for Penelope and the Incorrigible Children? When will the next book be available?  Not that I'm eager or anything...

MW: Book two of the series is called The Hidden Gallery, and it will be out in March, 2011. In it, Penelope and the children must temporarily decamp to London. There they see many sights of historical significance, learn the difference between optimism and optoomuchism, and discover a dessert so indescribably delicious that it literally cannot be described. And, of course, they encounter more mysteries than you can shake a stick at, along with several shocking revelations!

I'm happy to say that there will be more illustrations by the wonderful Jon Klassen. The cover is so unbelievably cute, I can't wait until everyone gets to see it. Soon!

LEC: You're also launching a teen book next week, called The Poison Diaries.  What can you tell us about the story?  And perhaps more importantly, what can you tell us about scoring introductions with Duchesses?  Not to mention tours of Hogwarts!

MW: First, allow me to say that The Poison Diaries is not one bit funny. After all that! It's historical YA gothic romance that's also a supernatural thriller. But that was part of what made the project so appealing to me; so often authors are encouraged to repeat variations on what they've already done, and here was an invitation to exercise a whole different set of writing chops.

The book centers on a character who goes by the name of Weed, a mysterious youth who can communicate with plants. He falls in love with a girl named Jessamine, the daughter of a brilliant apothecary who keeps a locked garden of his most dangerous plants. Together, Weed and Jessamine become embroiled in the complex and dangerous moral world of the Poisons. These are plants whose powers can go either way - they can cure, or they can kill.

The concept was the brainchild of the Duchess of Northumberland, who's well known for creating spectacular gardens, including an actual Poison Garden at Alnwick Castle. Before I began writing the book I made a trip to Alnwick for a whirlwind tour of the castle, the Poison Garden, the grounds, and some other locations that had relevance to the project - like Soutra Aisle, in Scotland. It was the site of a medieval monastery and hospital where the monks had a great deal of knowledge about the medical properties of plants.

And yes, Alnwick Castle was used as Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films. It is truly an astonishing place. If you want a peek at it, visit www.poisondiaries.com. There's a great video in which the Duchess gives a tour of the poison garden and talks about the various plants within and how they inspired her concept for the book. It's wonderfully spooky!

LEC: Sounds fantastic!  I'll look forward to reading that one.  Thanks so much for taking time to chat!

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For more information on Maryrose Wood and her books, visit her website.  For a limited time,  HarperCollins is also offering a free online preview of The Poison Diaries, which you can check out here.

Guest Author: Joëlle Anthony

Today's guest is Joëlle Anthony, actress, writer, and author of the not-quite dystopian teen novel, Restoring Harmony.

LEC: Tell us how you arrived at your unusually positive envisioning of a future after fossil fuels.

JA: In a way, I think it’s a result of my personality. I’m generally really positive and happy, so even in imagining something as drastic and world-altering as the end of fossil fuels, I can see the positive impacts. Things like stronger community and family ties due to people having to work together, no cars on the roads so there’s plenty of room for bikes, and less pollution. On one hand I find the whole idea of this kind of change frightening, but on the other hand, I also find it kind of exciting and refreshing.

LEC: Many dystopian novels involve teens attempting to break free of or overthrow the system.  Your story, however, is quite ordinary (in the best possible way).  What attracted you to the personal, rather than the epic?

JA: A story’s intensity comes from the people and environment that makes up a character’s world (while it’s true in Molly’s story that she leaves and goes on a road trip, she essentially finds herself in the same sort of small community again). If you tell a story about the character’s immediate world, it feels familiar to people and makes them care. A bigger story can be more exciting and get your heart racing with fear or anticipation, but what appeals to me in a story is how it makes your heart hurt, expand, love, care, worry, and race as you’re reading it. I think the more a reader feels like what happens to the characters can happen to them, the more connected they are to the story. That’s why I chose a high concept setting, but a small, personal, family story to tell.

LEC: When Molly begins her quest, she brings her fiddle because she can't stand to be without her music.  What she finds is that her passion repeatedly opens doors and gains people's sympathies.  Did you originally intend music to play such a central role in the plot, or did it start out as a simple character quirk?

JA: I’m married to a musician, so music is woven into my daily life, and I knew it would be a thread throughout the book. While I didn’t know exactly how it would play out in the story until I started writing it, I did know it would be something important to Molly that would link her to home. As far as opening doors, using it that way came from something I talk about with my husband quite a bit – the value of live music. In the past, before distribution of recorded music, musicians were revered and depending on social status and location, instruments were often rare. I wanted to show that side of being a musician because we don’t think about it much anymore. It’s somewhat surprising to Molly how much people are excited by her playing because she comes from a family of musicians. In general, when we have a talent and are surrounded by other people who have it too, we tend to forget how special it is.

LEC: One of the things I love about this book is the depth of the characters.  Even your bad guys, - Randall, for example - are more than simple villains.  Tell us how you go about developing your characters.  What do you think complex secondary characters add to a story?

JA: In the past, I used to create really well-developed main characters and totally forget about the secondary characters so they ended up quite flat. Then I got my hands on Donald Maass’ book Writing the Breakout Novel. I’m not out to write the next mass produced blockbuster, despite the title of his book, but I did find that the exercises he gives for creating layered characters are invaluable.

Also, as an actress, I am used to developing characters, and I applied some of that. There are a few things you can know about your characters and show, but not tell directly. One is that each character needs a secret – something he knows that no one else knows about them. Another thing to remember is to play the love and/or intention in each scene. Even when characters do seemingly bad things, they’re not necessarily doing them just because they’re evil. They’re doing them because they think they’re right. So if the author knows why they believe they’re right, then you can add depth to the story.

Now when I’m writing a book, I let my secondary characters be sort of one dimensional in the first draft and then I go back through and breathe life into each one. I’ve gotten a lot of nice comments about the supporting characters in Restoring Harmony, and it means more to me than almost any other nice comment!

LEC: What can you tell us about your next book, The Right & the Real?

JA: In a way, The Right & the Real is totally different, and in a way, it’s the same. It’s set in the present, in Portland, Oregon (my hometown), and it’s about a girl whose father gets mixed up in a cult and when she won’t join with him, he throws her out onto the street. She is very close to graduating from high school and because she has no one else to turn to, she just tries to make a go of it, keeping her homelessness a secret from her friends and teachers.

It’s similar to Restoring Harmony in that it’s a personal story about family, friends, and surviving tough circumstances. I’m about to start the editing process and I’m very excited! I think it will be out sometime in 2012.

LEC: I look forward to reading it!  Thanks so much for taking the time to share with us today.

JA: Thank you so much for having me!

For more information on Joëlle and her books, visit her website, where a teacher's discussion guide for Restoring Harmony is also available.