Alumni Voices with Jane O'Reilly: The Notations of Cooper Cameron Cover Reveal!

I am thrilled with the cover for The Notations of Cooper Cameron. It was designed by the amazing artist,  Julie McLaughlin, who managed to squeeze just about the whole book onto one page.

The Notations of Cooper Cameron by Jane O’Reilly

Cover by Julie McLaughlin

Pub date: 10/1/17

CarolRhoda Books, A Division of Lerner Publishing

Excerpt from The Notations of Cooper Cameron

“Cooper,” his mother says. “I have just the job for you. Caddie and I will make the beds. Think you can bring in the groceries?”

The groceries are a big and important job. Food is sustenance. Food gives life. Yes, he can bring in the groceries. He will bring in the groceries to make his mother happy.

The cereal boxes and chips and cookies fit into place on the open shelves like puzzle pieces. Soup cans and salt and cinnamon and many other red-capped spices are stacked in perfect rows. The groceries are snug and safe, like ancient cliff dwellings packed into the mesa. Everything fits. And it is beautiful.

“Cooper, what in the world. . .?” His mother says.

“Geez, Cooper,” Caddie says.

His mother squeezes Caddie’s hand to keep her quiet. Smiles at Cooper. He sees her think he doesn’t know. Sees her pretend everything is okay and he aches with this lie. 

Summary from the jacket

Eleven-year-old Cooper Cameron likes things to be in order.

When he eats, he chews every bite three times on each side.

Sometimes he washes his hands in the air with invisible water.

After the death of his beloved grandfather, Cooper invented these rituals, believing he could protect those he loves from terrible harm.

When Cooper’s strange behavior drives a wedge between his parents, and his relationship with his older sister, Caddie, begins to fray, his mother’s only solution is to take Cooper and Caddie to the old family cabin for the summer.

Armed with his prized possessions—a collection of rocks, his pet frog and pocket-sized notebooks in which he records his observations of the confusing world around him, Cooper vows to cure himself and repair his damaged family. 

Jane O’Reilly is a 2009 graduate of the Hamline MFAC program. Her first book, The Secret of Goldenrod, which published on October 1, 2016, received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, and was named a Junior Library Guild Selection and a “Kirkus Best Book” of 2016. Jane is also the recipient of a McKnight Fellowship in screenwriting. Her forthcoming book, The Notations of Cooper Cameron, about a boy with OCD, was inspired by the childhood of her older sister, Catherine. Just like Cooper, the main character, Jane spent many summers at the family cabin in the North Woods. Although their children live out of state, Jane and her husband remain in their hometown of Minneapolis with their elderly cat and brand new puppy. 

Publication Interview with Jane O’Reilly: The Secret of Goldenrod

Author and MFAC alum Jane O’Reilly* talks about her debut novel, The Secret of Goldenrod. Learn about her writing process for this mysterious new middle grade masterpiece.  The images bellow are from the sold-out launch party at the Red Ballon, held earlier this month.

Tell us about your book.

The Secret of Goldenrod is a little bit of everything—mystery, fantasy and coming of age. The main character, Trina, almost eleven, travels the country with her dad, picking up odd jobs and house remodeling projects. When they are given a year to fix up an abandoned Victorian mansion named Goldenrod, in the town of New Royal, Iowa, Trina is excited. This will be the first time in her whole life she has ever lived anywhere long enough to make friends.

Do you have a favorite part of the book or a favorite character?

I love the chapter in which Trina goes to the library. It’s a massive, elegant library way too big for the town. But that’s part of the mystery. In addition to meeting wonderful Mr. Kinghorn, the librarian, Trina learns some secrets about the New Royal townspeople. Plus, something very special is in her pocket the whole time.

Did you ever workshop this story at Hamline?

I workshopped the first chapter at an alumni weekend at Hamline. I remember that Kendra Marcus, of Bookstop Literary, sat in on that workshop. I felt like Trina that morning—excited and nervous. Kendra made a suggestion that ended up in the book.

When did you first begin working on it? When did you finish?

I began working on the story in the winter of 2011 and felt I had a reasonable draft within a year and a half. Revising it, sending queries to agents, landing the marvelous Sarah Davies as an agent, revising twice for her, waiting as she found not one but two publishers (Egmont, the book’s first home, closed its doors just after I finished the first revision) and revising again for Alix Reid at Lerner, over a period of six months, added four more years to the process.

As the work progressed from inception to copy-edited version, what were the major changes? How did those changes come about?

Oh, man. The first draft had a prologue loaded with backstory. On top of that, because I always knew that the house was a character, the first draft handled the story in alternating perspectives—Trina’s and Goldenrod’s. Fortunately, I couldn’t keep that up. Better yet, very few people saw that draft. Once I started working with Alix at Lerner, all my effort to get an inciting incident into the first chapter went out the window and a major happening moved from page 12 to page 60-something. Alix suggested we see Trina more firmly in her world, dreams, problems, etc., before we saw her world change. I think her advice was spot on. Although that change was deemed by some as a “slow beginning,” plenty of stuff happens if you don’t know what’s coming.

What research did you do before and while writing the book?

Because of my real estate background and my childhood, I know a lot about old houses. Still, I was forever researching stuff from Victorian design elements to growing seasons— building codes, lights, radiators, girl’s clothing, and, of course, goldenrod. I also researched small towns in Iowa and distances between them and bigger cities. The first name of the town near Goldenrod was simply Royal. When I discovered there really was a Royal, Iowa, I changed the name to New Royal.

Where did you do most of the writing for this book?

In my writing room at the time—overlooking the garden. The revisions took place in my son’s old bedroom. So much time has passed from start to finish, our house has changed.

Any final thoughts you’d like to share?

The biggest, most rewarding lesson has been this: Don’t ever give up on your dreams. But sometimes you have to be prepared to change them.

*Jane O’Reilly grew up in a very old house in Fort Snelling on a Mississippi River bluff. She is the recipient of a McKnight Fellowship in screenwriting and holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University (MFAC 2009). Today she lives with her husband, cat and dog in a very old house in the Tangletown neighborhood of Minneapolis. The Secret of Goldenrod is her first published novel.

You can learn more about Jane on her author's website.  If you want to know more about The Secret of Goldenrod, check out this Kirkus Reviews post.

The Secret of Goldenrod: Cover Sneak Peak

This week we have an early look at MFAC alum Jane O'Reilly's upcoming book, The Secret of Goldenrod.

Story Summary:
When Trina and her father move into Goldenrod, an abandoned Victorian mansion, Trina hopes she will finally have a place to call home--and a chance to make friends at her new school. But school doesn’t go as planned and, and Goldenrod might be haunted.

Then Trina discovers Augustine, a tiny—and very unusual—porcelain doll that belonged to the little girl who lived at Goldenrod a century ago. With help from Augustine, Trina realizes Goldenrod is trying to tell her an important secret, one that may just change her life.

"I am thrilled to be able to share the process and the cover reveal among the Hamline community," says Jane.

The Secret of Goldenrod will be released on October 1, 2016 through CarolRhonda Books, a division of Lerner Publishing.

Faculty Voices with Jane Resh Thomas: Patience

Jane Resh Thomas

At the Hamline residency's discussion of the writing life in July, Laura Ruby and Claire Rudolf Murphy talked about the virtue of patience. Nothing could be more important to us as we learn the craft, write our books, and struggle to market them.

Writing is a lifelong apprenticeship, yet a woman telephoned one of my writer friends, wanting her to put the woman in touch with a publisher: in the few months since God told her to make books for children, she had written a hundred-odd picture books; the only thing holding her back from publication of these treasures, she assumed, was the right connection.

Writing is a lifelong apprenticeship, yet many people who enter MFA programs in writing believe that, by the end of two years, their work will be publishable, if not already published. Many writers send out their work way too soon, when it still requires several more drafts before an editor will read it all the way through.

The need for patience is borne out by several friends' recent experience. In the face of rejections by the dozen over the years, Cheryl Blackford, who spoke last winter at Hamline, found a publisher for her new novel, Lizzie and the Lost Baby (Houghton). Twelve years after Jane St. Anthony completed Isabelle Day Refuses to Die of a Broken Heart, she found a publisher who will bring out that book and paperback editions of her previous two novels (University of Minnesota Press). Several years after their graduation from the Hamline MFA Program in Writing for Children and YoungAdults, Maggie Moris found an agent for the novel that was her thesis, and Jane O'Reilly landed a two-book contract for her fiction (Egmont). All of these women kept on writing their fiction, despite incessant discouragement for years from agents and publishers.

The kind of patience these writers exhibited was prodigious. In the first place, they had the patience to develop their talent by learning their craft. They all write clear flawless English in distinctive voices. They know how to build an English sentence, a character, a theme, a chapter, a through line, a novel. They stay with a manuscript until they've learned what it wanted to say, what they wanted to say through it. They set aside draft after draft, until their writing sings like a choir, all of its parts working together. People who publish their work, in addition to native talent and skill, have to be drudges, able to persist in a project until it makes them want to flush it and cut their own throats. Then they go on again anyway.

People who publish their work also have given up publication as their reason for being. They've learned to live their lives in the world, not shackled to their desks. They've made writing one of their pleasures, independent of whether it ever sees the inside of a library. They've divided their creativity from the misery of locating agents and editors. They can play the hardball of publishing, where a rock flies past their noses at ninety miles per hour every time they raise their heads. Writing for them is a daily practice, however the world responds to their work.

Writing is a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer continues to develop, even as she markets the work of the writer she was last year. Patience, stubbornness, determination, if not the keys, are some of the keys to our finding joy in the work.