The Week in KidLit by Michael Gettel-Gilmartin

It's been quite a week in the KidLit world. First, the good news: the American Library Association awards (among them the Newbery, the Printz, and the Pura Belpré) were awarded. It's always an exciting event, made even more thrilling by live-tweeting. I guess that the winners are contacted on THE MORNING itself--so their reactions are always fun to read about. ("I was making my bed when...")

The big prize is the Newbery. This year it went to Erin Entrada Kelly for Hello, Universe. I have to admit I have yet to read it, although I did read her debut, Blackbird Fly, when I was a Cybils judge in 2016. (And you can read my thoughts here.)

Erin Entrada Kelly is of Filipino origin, and it is great to see the number of diverse voices being featured in MG and YA. In fact, the Newbery winner and all the Newbery Honor books were by writers of color. Another star in the firmament is Angie Thomas, author of The Hate You Give, which is rightly being touted as a great and important book. Angie won the William C. Morris Award for a debut book published by a first-time author writing for teens; Odyssey Award for best audiobook produced for children and/or young adults, available in English in the United States; and was an Honor book winner for both the Coretta Scott King Book Awards recognizing African American authors and illustrators of outstanding books for children and young adults; and the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature written for young adults.

I mentioned the Cybils Awards above. This is an award given by book bloggers, so it's more meat and potatoes than foie gras, but I can attest that it's fun to be part of a judging panel, and that the books chosen, though maybe not as high profile as the ALA's, are always tremendous reads. As luck would have it, the awards are announced on Valentine's Day. This year's Middle Grade Fiction award went to Alan Gratz for his novel Refugee, which is very timely.

The dark part of the week has been taken up with the reports of sexual harassment and abuse in the kidlit world. On February 7th Anne Ursu, best known as the author of Breadcrumbs, wrote a piece on Medium titled "Sexual Harassment in the Children's Book Industry," which was a call to action to combat such abuses. (Required reading, in my view.) The piece was picked up by the School Library Journal, which wrote a companion piece, and in the comments names were named--several high-profile male writers and illustrators were called-out for their treatment of women. As of this writing, Jay Asher and David Diaz have been banned from the SCBWI, and several have lost agent representation. I hope this means that our industry does mean business in rooting out this abuse and preventing it from happening again.

One thing I really hope is that our conversations remain respectful, even when they are difficult. And may we have many more wonderful books to celebrate in the future. Keep the faith and keep on writing, friends!

Awards? A Letter About Being Kind To Yourselves, Oh You Lovely Longlisters, by Anne Nesbet

Dear friends who have ever hoped-against-hope for something wonderful to happen,

Yes, it's true: another awards season is upon us! Not just for children's book writers, but oh definitely for us, too: The "Youth Media Awards" (which include the Newbery Medal and the Caldecott Medal and a number of other lovely honors) will be presented at 8 a.m. Mountain Time next Monday, February 12th. 

Many of us set our alarm clocks early every year so we can follow the livestreaming event--it's so exciting! A morning when children's books get to be cheered and adored! A morning when a few talented and hard-working and creative and fortunate writers get phone calls that mean their lives will change. Their books will live (approximately) forever. They will be allowed to write more stories for more children. It's that moment when hungry Charlie Bucket peels the wrapper back on his chocolate and there, unbelievably, is the golden ticket, after all: his life is going to be magical now. He will not be hungry, ever again.

[NOTE: In the real world, we know, even a golden ticket does not actually guarantee happiness forever; Newbery medalists--being lovely, vulnerable human beings like the rest of us--still have all the ups and downs of life to wade through; we send them love and fortitude.]

But right now I want to hold a hand out to a pretty large crowd: the future also-rans. You do not have to 'fess up to being in this demographic, but I know you are out there in surprisingly large numbers, and perhaps feeling surprisingly Alone.

Let's start with the people who have had the uncomfortable spotlight on them for a while. These are the writers whose books have benefited from all sorts of buzz, who have the curse of being called "frontrunners" by people with clout--I'm sending courage and compassion to you, dear frontrunners. It's wonderful to have created books so powerful and eloquent and beautiful that many readers are willing to say out loud: THIS ONE SHOULD WIN! But expectations are a jacket with a very scratchy lining, because here's the thing: even most "frontrunners" don't actually win. Those beloved books will still be as absolutely marvelous on February 13th as they were on February 11th, but it's hard to come that close to awards glory and miss. Yikes! Of course it is.

And guess what? I will share a secret truth: It's not only frontrunners who find themselves putting on that Scratchy Jacket of Hope. Human beings being what human beings are, there are many other people suffering right now from unreasonable hopes that (believe me) they are trying very hard to ignore or to repress.

My heart really truly goes out to you, too, whoever you secretly are:

Maybe your book made it onto some long "awards prediction" lists--or a couple of schools put your book on their Mock Newbery bookshelves--or someone mentioned your novel in the comments somewhere as "a book I wish had a chance, even though I know it probably doesn't." My friends, it doesn't take much to infect us with hope.

And if you have ever been infected with hope for something unlikely but life-transformingly amazing--you know how much pain is involved.

Let's say you are an utterly rational person (or mostly so). Let's say that you figure, in your utterly rational way, that you have a 1% to 5% chance of being called with good news in the wee Monday hours. Let's say that you are rather proud of how rationally you calculated those odds, and how well your rational brain did the follow-up subtraction sum that tells you that in 95% or 99% of possible timelines in the multiverse, your book does not win a thing.

Odds are, my dear, rational friends, that more than half of you will still find yourselves awake at four in the morning, listening to the silence--

and perhaps you will even be *despising yourself* for being awake--

because perhaps then you will find yourself not merely feeling the ordinary, understandable disappointment of not winning something that really would have changed your life, but also feeling the extra pain that we can inflict on ourselves, as punishment for hoping. It was so STUPID and UNCOOL to have hoped for a moment (we think)! And then we beat ourselves up! And then we suffer more!

And to whom are you going to confess that you're in pain? The people who love you but aren't in the writing world won't entirely understand what this thing that didn't happen would have meant--and it's downright embarrassing to confess to people in the writing world that you hoped for.....--no, aaaaaaaaargh, you're ashamed even to say it! THE OTHER BOOKS WERE ALL SO WONDERFUL! You know that! You read them all! You don't want a single one of them dethroned! You just wish the list could have magically expanded an extra inch to include--oh, ugh, you can't say it----------and so you writhe on your own.

Dear involuntarily hopeful friends! This is what I promised myself exactly a year ago that I would come here today to say: It is not your fault. Also: you are not alone.

It is not your fault. You are a good person, despite accidentally hoping for something unreasonably wonderful to happen.

And you are not alone. The reason this unreasonable hope took hold of you so hard (despite your trying SO valiantly not to let that happen--I know you really tried) is because this whole business of writing books is deeply unreasonable, in certain respects. You dream of a sticker on your book, because then your book will live! And you will be able to treat this writing career as an actual career, which is probably something you long for.

Why, after all, should it take having your book officially termed the Best (or one of the three or four or five Best), for you to have a career as a writer? I actually had an argument with someone in a dream the other night about this problem. I said, in my dream, "The children's books business is so weird! Let's think of it in terms of Mechanical Engineering! Wouldn't it be absurd if only FIVE or TEN Mechanical Engineers in this country could actually make a living doing Mechanical Engineering, and all the rest of the Mechanical Engineers had to have other careers (or sources of support) to pay the bills, while they do full-time Engineering on the side for almost no money???"

(When I woke up, I thought that was actually surprisingly logical, for a dream argument.)

I'm saying, dear longlisters: your unreasonable longing for something wonderful to happen for your book and your writing life is actually completely reasonable and understandable.

Don't beat yourself up for hoping.

We're people, and hope is one of those things people do.

Your hope is a symptom of loving the work you do and loving the children who need books to read, books that can reach out to them and comfort them and challenge them and show them new worlds or reflect their own wonderful, sometimes difficult world back at them in a new and loving light.

You are not alone, and your stories help others feel less alone.

Thank you for what you do, brave writers.  You weather so much, and you work so hard. Even when despair or hope get their claws into you, you keep plowing on and keep writing.

What can I say? You're all winners in my book--whether or not your books are officially "winners."

your fan,

Anne

Growing With Middle Grade -- or Out of It? by Kell Andrews

Sometimes a series outgrows the middle-grade category, but more often, readers do.

I finally read Megan Whalen Turner's Thick as Thieves, the fifth book in the Queen's Thief series. Immediately upon finishing, I ran to the library to check out the rest of the series and begin again.

My library shelves the first book, The Thief, in the middle-grade section. Written in 1996, Turner's twisty tour de force won a Newbery honor, forever anchoring the series as a work of children's literature. The rest of the series is shelved in YA.

Before the American Library Association launched the Printz Award for young adult literature in 2000 (concurrent with the flowering of the YA genre), the Newbery Awards more frequently recognized YA books. In the 21 years since The Thief was published, the series has grown, not just into YA, but to an adult series in terms of complexity, theme, and the age of the characters. The Thief's Gen is recognizably a teen boy, but he's the only character in the series who is. The age of Kamet, the main character of Thick as Thieves, is unspecified, but could easily be over 30. He is no boy. And with the series' publication spanning than two decades, neither are Turner's original fans. A 10-year-old who read The Thief is 31 now.

Not many writers have the luxury of taking five years to write a sequel and finding themselves still with a publisher and fans, but even if authors match the book-a-year pace publishers prefer, readers may age out of a series before the last book is published, even for relatively short series.

Middle-grade readers love series. Series drive the industry, but a flaw in the publishing model is that kids want the whole series now. But while they figuratively "can't wait" for it, often they literally won't. But writers can only write so fast, and publishers have only so much patience for series that shed readers with each concurrent title -- something they tend to do in all age categories, and may do even faster as those readers move on to other interests. Middle-grade may be intended for ages 9 to 12, but readers who start a series in 4th grade may put it behind them before it concludes in 7th.

When do they outgrow it? When do maturing young readers follow a series? JK Rowling's readers assuredly did, following wide-eyed 11-year-old Harry from his middle-grade debut to his grimmer YA conclusion. More often the durability of reader interest depends not just on the progression and maturation of the series, but the orientation of the reader. My 7th grader is still salivating for the next book in Shannon Messenger's Keeper of the Lost Cities series, but a 12-going-on-20 friend who started the series with her can't be bothered.

An advantage of reading middle grade and YA as an adult is that I'll never grow out of it. If it hasn't happened yet, it won't. When Thick as Thieves comes out in paperback, I'm planning to buy the whole set with matching covers. And then I'll read it again. 

The 90-Second Newbery

Hey parents, teachers, librarians, and actual middle grade aged readers of this blog (a.k.a kids)--have I got a great project for you!

Ever heard of the Newbery award? I thought so. It's when everybody interested in books for kids blows horns, bangs drums, and jumps on the bed to show their love for the very best kids' books of the year. This year the great big winner was THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN, which is gorilly great!

2013 Newbery Award winner, The One and Only Ivan

Well, once the winners and the honor books are announced, there's something sweet and special and awesomely creative you can do. Grab your friends and a video camera and condense your all-time favorite Newbery book (winner or honor) into ninety seconds. Sound like a challenge? You betcha.

Now, I wish I'd been the originator of this great idea, but I wasn't. That honor goes to the zany James Kennedy, the author of THE ORDER OF ODD-FISH, which Cory Doctorow has called "an extraordinary and delightfully weird romp that’s one part China Mieville, one part Lemony Snicket, with trace amounts of Madeline L’Engle and Roald Dahl." (Since pretty much all of those mentioned are my favorite authors, it goes without saying that I am currently speeding my way to Powell's bookstore to snap up a copy.)

But I digress. Here are the rules for the 90-second Newbery, from the pen of Mr. Kennedy himself.

1. Your video should be 90 seconds or less. (Okay, okay: if it’s two minutes long but absolute genius, we’ll bend the rules for you. But let’s try to keep them short.)

2. Your video has to be about a Newbery award-winning (or Newbery honor-winning) book. Here’s a list of all the winners.

3. Just to be clear: we’re not looking for book trailers. We’re looking for full-on dramatizations, with mostly child actors, that manage to tell the entire story of a book in an ridiculously short amount of time.

4. Upload your videos to YouTube or Vimeo or whatever and send me the link at kennedyjames [at] gmail [dot] com. Make the subject line be “90 SECOND NEWBERY” and please tell me your name, age, where you’re from, and whatever other comments you’d like to include, including whether you’d like me to link to your personal site. You can give an alias if you want; I understand privacy concerns.

5. Sending the link to me grants me (James Kennedy) the right to post it on my blog and to other websites where I sometimes post content (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and to share at public readings, school visits—and hopefully the “90-Second Newbery” Film Festival screenings!

6. The deadline for the second annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is December 10, 2013 

The winners are shown in Chicago, New York, Portland and Tacoma. The Portland showing is on Sunday February 24th, 2013. If you want to meet me, I'll be there, as my son and his friends entered the festival with their version of THE MIXED-UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER, which you can view on my Middle Grade Mafioso blog if you're curious and have time on your hands.

And here's a guide on how to plan and film your entry: 

Curriculum for Creating a 90-Second 

Newbery Film.

I'll leave you with one of the videos featured on James Kennedy's blog, the Aurora Public Library Eola Road Branch, entry for 90 Second Newbery film festival. A silent film adaptation of Crispin: Cross of Lead by Avi.