Happy Hunger Games! Guest Post with Laura Ruby

Hey Inkpotters,

Have you all seen The Hunger Games yet? Laura Ruby was kind enough to Skype with us from Chicago about why this dystopian novel has resonated so much with young adults. She also talks about why she writes for that age group and gives a little advice to aspiring writers. You can watch the video below and weigh in with your take on The Hunger Games and writing for young adults.

Worth a Thousand Words

A couple weeks ago, the New York Times published an article saying the picture book was fading. Sales are down, orders are down--and while the article cites the down economy, it suggests that some of the lag is due to parents rushing their kids into chapter books early to get them ahead. As the parent of a three-year-old, I was dismayed to learn that I was stunting my child's intellectual growth through Grumpy Bird, but have promptly cast it aside in favor of Anna Karenina. I've found it helps to pretend all the main characters are bunnies.

But now the author of the Early Word Kids column suggests I might want to reconsider trashing the Scieszka for Solzhenitsyn. Picture books, it turns out, are actually useful to children's development. She cites a number of reasons, including the relative sophistication of the verbal and visual content of picture books as opposed to early chapter books.

It's never fun to open up the newspaper and discover the thing you've devoted your life to is languishing. (I mean, this is how newspaper reporters feel every day.) But trends come and go in publishing. Get in your time machine and go look at the YA section of the bookstore six years ago. Go ahead, I'll wait. And, really, the economy can probably explain a lot--including, as the blog Mother Reader points out, an early entrance into chapter books. ("I can understand," she writes, "the mindset of an economizing parent who, when purchasing a book, wants to find one that will last a little bit longer. Hey, we do it with shoes and it works.")

The picture book will come back and it will be the dystopian novelists who are reading articles about the fading market and think the world is ending. So, get back to work.

And now, a word from our sponsors at Hamline's MFA in Writing for Children. The deadline for applications for the January term is Nov. 1. If you're curious about the program, you can try a mini-immersion--one residency and one semester. For more details, and for pictures of the handsome student body, please see the website. Please note that handsomeness is not a requirement for admission, and may in fact be an effect of the program.

Being Awesome

One of our students, Dave Revere, gave his lecture on the willing hero. He called it "Being Awesome." That phrase seems to have defined the last couple of days of residency, where all we can do is bask in the awesomeness of our experience and our colleagues. We're way past exhaustion now, but what comes in this place is something oddly close to clarity.

I love it here. I love coming back every six months to this spiritual home. Our theme this residency was setting, and now I'm thinking about this great place, and how it is created by the people in it and the energy around it. Bad food and bad weather just add to the place-y-ness of it--for they just add the depth that make it whole. Besides, without some foibles, this place wouldn't be real, and then where would we be?

It turns out that some of our faculty have talents beyond writing, and while I think this is desperately unfair, it sure makes for a good closing night banquet. They gave us a rousing musical review and our amazing graduation speaker, Jane Yolen, joined in. I'm not sure I'll ever forget the sight of her sprawled on the grand piano, torch-singer style, serenading our graduates.

I leave for home--where apparently I have a husband and child-- feeling energized and inspired by my awesome colleagues--faculty, students, and staff alike. It's such a great privilege to call these people my friends.

Unwrapped

A couple of our inaugural Inkpotters have ended their terms, and we have two fabulous new bloggers starting soon, but it seems to be down to Marsha Q and me in terms of holding down the fort right now. This may be when things start getting weird. We've finished Day 3 of residency--or else it's Day 37--and there's some possibility that we've never left at all. Marsha's going to be doing a lecture on time in a couple of days and I hope she can make some sense of all of this.

We trudge around the snowy campus, wrapped up like puffy literary beetles. There's something convivial about it all, though, and something ritualistic as we take on and shed layers through the day. Our visiting editor, Wendy Lamb, said that she thinks magic is closer to the surface in the cold. There's certainly something in the air--I always spend residency marveling at my colleagues, but the lectures this time seem particularly marvel-worthy. The topic of setting has inspired some very personal reflections, from Liza Ketchum's discussion of memory and place to Jackie Briggs-Martin's exultation of the imagination to the inspiration Lisa Jahn-Clough found in the stray dogs of Puerto Rico. Claire Rudolph Murphy spoke eloquently of finding personal narrative in conjunction with our story's narrative and inspiration in our struggles. "Every challenge in my life," she said, "is about world-building."

We had our first two grad readings tonight--Andrew Cochran and Christine Hepperman. They were both outstanding, and I was so proud of the program tonight. Though I guess the students should get some credit, too.

Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More

We're about to enter our residency, some of us more well-coiffed than others. Twice a year, the Hamline students and faculty gather on campus for ten days of workshops, lectures, and lots of great companionship. My husband tells me there's a famously untranslatable German word--gemütlichkeit--the feeling of warm-heartedness and companionship that one feels for one's fellows, friends and strangers alike, while drinking gigantic steins of beer in the beer hall. Change "gigantic steins of beer" for "epically bad food" and there you have Hamline. It's a magnificent thing to be amongst other writers.

Residency is something like the first few days after you've been turned into a vampire--it's hard to focus on anything else. So the Inkpot might get quiet for the next week, or very weird, or filled with postings from Ron about how nice the weather is in California. I will try to file some reports, and I'll just apologize in advance for everything I say. Meanwhile, I'm getting my stuff together to go work in the Hamline library--I've got a lecture to write--and I raise a cafeteria-style, institutional-Diet Coke-filled glass to my fellows. See you soon.

'Tis the Season

Winter is here, as Marsha Q. reminds us, and I need to get cracking. My little boy’s birthday falls 5 days after Christmas, and given his large number of adoring relatives, that will mean an influx of presents. What he needs, really, is books—it’s getting to be time to put the board books away but that will seriously cut down on our nighttime selection, and while he’d be happy to hear the same five books every night, Mommy does like variety.

So, I’d love some suggestions of books to put on his list. The Hamline required reading list provided a nice guide for us to start building his library, and I’m please to say that he could now make pretty good headway into his annotated bibliography, if only he knew how to write. It’s fun to see him take to books like Make Way for Ducklings, The Snowy Day, and Madeline (Tonight I asked him if he wanted Where the Wild Things Are and he responded, very cheerfully, “No, it’s too scary!”)

I write novels because picture books are too hard, and watching what this almost-three-year-old takes to is an education for me. I’ve noticed how much he responds to language—both playful (Phyllis Root is definitely his favorite author) and lyrical, like On the Day You Were Born and The House in the Night. Unlike Ron’s garbage man, he’s not above a good llama/mama rhyme. Other favorites include Punk Farm (ask him what a cow says and he’ll reply with great convictions, “Boom, crash!”) The Best Pet of All, and Officer Buckle and Gloria.

The darker side of his library includes a vast number of Blue’s Clues books—I vaguely considered doing a lecture next residency on bad sentences using just these. We keep accruing more because we get so sick of the one’s we have. Somewhere, there’s a flaw in our logic but I can’t quite find it.

So, what other books should we have? We have to wait ‘til summer, after all, for One Pup’s Up.

Writing vs. Having written

I asked a Hamline workshop once how many of them actually liked to write and most of them preferred having written: the pride in finishing, the appearance at a local book store, the feel of the book or magazine in one's hand.


Only a few preferred the quotidian: sitting down with two or three hours, a cup of coffee or tea, the favorite pen, the notebook with its inviting blank pages. I know painters who love the paint over the painting and potters who prefer clay to bowl. Even my mechanic likes the wrench and the spark plug more than the sound of the tuned engine. And once Buddy the cat has patiently stalked the bird beside the avocado tree, once it's dead he just stares at it.


Ron Koertge