Look what showed up in my inbox . . .

Dear Ms. Solod,

My name is Sage Cooley and I am 6th grade. You met my mom, Carol Cooley who is also an author, at the VCCA in September. She gave me a book you wrote called Coyote Summer. I just finished reading it and I thought it was really inspiring. It exampled the characters personalities strongly; it almost felt like I knew them myself. I thought Jessie’s discovery was so unique. The fact that she went out of her way to save Lancelot (that's so cute by the way) and the pups to replace a bad memory is heartbreaking. I got so involved in this book I refused to go to sleep.

I used your book for my English report. I matched all the main characters with animals that fit their nature. 

Lara = Deer

Susan = Koala

Jessie = Coyote (of course)

Mrs. Silva = German Sheppard

Susan’s Dad = Bear

Daniel = Rabbit

Amanda = Dolphin

I look forward to your upcoming books and I think you’re really talented. (Thanks for the autograph in the book 😊) 

Thank you so much for the amazing story,

Sage Cooley

and now for something completely different . . .

New Fictional Holidays: Literary Dates to Add to Your Calendar

Daniel Lefferts

May saw geeks and sci-fi-lovers celebrating not one but two fiction-inspired holidays. First, there was May the Fourth and its flood of Star Wars-themed memes and GIFS on Facebook and Tumblr (get it? “May the force…”?). 

Next, there was Towel Day on May 25, on which fans of the late Douglas Adams carry around a towel in honor of the author and, in particular, a characteristically strange passage from his novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the towel is praised as “the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”

We at Bookish love these holidays and think fiction-inspired celebrations are far too rare a feature of the calendar. So, below, we’ve proposed five more literary dates of note, from ‘On the Road’ Day in July to a day in April on which you’re allowed to feel as paranoid about government surveillance as you see fit. I

1.Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated)

Mrs. Dalloway Day: A beautiful Wednesday in June

Virginia Woolf’s classic novel takes place on a Wednesday in June of 1923. Given how beautiful the weather is in the novel, this one can be a TBD—pick whichever Wednesday in the month will be, according to weather forecasts, the loveliest. How to celebrate? By buying flowers (yourself!) and hosting a party, of course. In general, celebrants should, in the interest of preserving their health and sanity, follow Clarissa Dalloway’s lead on this one, and not poor Septimus Smith’s.

2.    

2.The Hunger Games

Reaping Day: A dreary day in winter

The Reaping is the name given to the day on which, in the world ofThe Hunger Games, boys and girls from each district from Panem are chosen to compete in the annual Hunger Games competition. Though emissaries from the Capitol, such as Effie Trinket, try to inflect the occasion with a celebratory spirit, the event effectively means, for 23 of the 24 people chosen, certain death. Hunger Games fans can have fun with this holiday (on whichever day they end up choosing to celebrate it; given the constant dreariness of District 12, perhaps a date in February or March will do). “Winners” of the lottery can buy drinks, go on bagel runs, serve as DDs, give foot massages, etc. I’ll stop there before my suggestions get any weirder.

3.On the Road

'On the Road’ Day: July 15

“In the month of July 1947, having saved about fifty dollars from old veteran benefits, I was ready to go to the West Coast.” So begins Sal Paradise’s multipart peripatetic adventure across America—a trip that will take him to California, Mexico City, Louisiana, and back to New York, all the while showing him (and us) the unsettled and invariably engrossing milieu of mid-century North America. A day in July should be devoted to the commemoration of his journey; it’ll also serve the secondary purpose of inspiring celebrants to set off on their own road trips. So as not to collide with Independence Day weekend fun, we nominate a day at the dead center of the month, July 15.

4.     

4.Seize the Day

Day of Moral Reckoning (or, ‘Seize the Day’ Day): Whenever the mood strikes

A good book causes us to reflect on our own life, with its string of various success and failures, and a good literary-inspired holiday gives a specific time frame in which to complete such heroic acts of contemplation. Though it’s unclear on which day Saul Bellow’s novelSeize the Day takes place, pretty much any day of the year will do. Like the protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm, celebrants can spend the day wrestling with their own demons, character flaws, and ill-considered decisions and, just when all hope seems lost (let’s say around seven p.m.), finally come to accept what Bellow calls the “burden of self.” A few cocktails in the evening should round out the holiday quite nicely.

5.1984

Surveillance Awareness Day: April 4

With the NSA intercepting packages and tracking the phone calls of the entire population of the Bahamas like it ain’t no thang, the gap between the world of George Orwell’s 1984 and ours has become sliver-thin, if it exists at all. April 4, the day on which the novel begins (it’s the “bright cold day in April” when the “clocks were striking thirteen”), should serve as an annual day of heightened awareness of government surveillance and its consequences for privacy, quality of life, and the political health of our country.

Back to the story . . .

When last we left our heroine, she was waiting-

To keep from going crazy that first week I sketched a rough outline of changes that needed to be made in books two and three.

The second week I swore off writing altogether and read thrillers, 

 took long walks with the dogs,

 and pretended to be social. I hadn’t gone anywhere or seen anyone for more than a brief hello for the past month.

Except, of course, for my sacred Wednesday clamming date with one of the Paul’s or with Arnie. I freely admit it, I am a clam slut.

 I will with go to Nashweena pond any Wednesday with anyone who has a boat and is willing to go at low tide, whether it be 6 a.m. on a foggy cold June morning or a scorching noon in August.

But I digress. I digressed a great deal during those weeks.

I made lists of other publishers who might look at the book without an agent.

I made lists of people I knew who might know agents who might look at the book.

I made lists of things to be done once I got back to Virginia. And lists of dog breeds I liked, and old friends I hoped to see again.

Books I wanted to read. Sheet and towel colors.

I read more thrillers, and worked on the second book in the series.

Finally, what seemed like thousands of years later

but was actually about three weeks, ( I can digress a tremendous amount in three weeks), I received a reply.

Brandylane would like to see the rest of the manuscript.

I think it took me four minutes to attach the book and send it back.(three and a half minutes were spent jumping up and down.)

I won’t make you wait again. They accepted Coyote Summer for publication.

Then the real fun began.

My cousin wrote me the other day . . .

"When's that coyote girl book coming out?"

 “Coyote girl.” Sounds like it should take place somewhere in the southwest and involve a young Native American woman and some kind of ceremony.  Sort of a Lois Lenski Strawberry Girl vibe.

(For the record, I am NOT comparing myself to Lois Lenski.) 

It’s got a nice ring, though.  Maybe I should let my cousin name all my books from now on. 

Coyote Girl.

  Ghost/thief Girl.

Hurricane Girl.

Hmmm . . .

Well, it's too late for this series.  This is the Summerhood Island series. 

Coyote Summer, Ghost/Thief Summer, Hurricane Summer. Each book takes place over the course of a single summer.

And this first book, it’s not really about the coyotes. Just like the second is not really about the ghost/thief, and the third’s not really about a hurricane. 

Although all these things are integral to the stories.

photo n. brodeur

You see, these books are really about the girl, Jessie Silva. 

Coyotes, ghost/thieves, and hurricanes are what involve Jessie, but they aren't really what the books are about.  

The summers of a girl who lives on an island, an almost magical place where kids can still wander freely, still have adventures, still go off on their own and be safe; a place where a young girl is free to make choices and deal with their consequences without fear of predatory adults, or drive by shootings, or muggings; the feelings of a girl who grows up in those summers- that’s what the books are about.

photo matt lovell

photo a. hinson

Jessie Silva: a girl who can live the childhood you had, or wish you'd had, depending on your age and situation. A childhood most kids reading these books will never have a chance to experience. 

Because the world has changed. And maybe it never was as safe as some of us thought. Maybe the freedom we had as children was an illusion. 

malia. photo m. shaver

But not on this island. Here, in these books, in this place, even in this day and age, a girl can wander. And have adventures. And live the childhood we wish we had, the one every child should have- but can't. 

Except in books.

So I’ve been reading . . .

a book about the New Bedford docks by Rory Nugent, and it started me thinking about my time on Cuttyhunk Island again.  Nugent’s book is called Down at the Docks, and it’s basically a history of the New Bedford waterfront through the eyes of a number of different people.

Although Cuttyhunk:Life on the Rock was first person anecdotal, many of the things I learned on the island I learned secondhand.  Sometimes third or fourth hand.  Way too many stories to put into one book, and of course there are always stories within the stories.  I’ve often been accused of telling a story by starting with the stories within the stories within the stories, which some people find much too time-consuming to listen to. 

I realize it is difficult to believe people such as these exist.  I have trouble believing it myself.  I mean, if you don’t know the back story and sometimes even the back story’s back story, how can you ever really understand what went on?  Of course, these are probably the same people who skip to the back of the book to see how it ends.  Heathens, I call them.

But I digress.  Astoundingly unusual for me, but it does happen.  

Back to the point – those stories that don’t get told.  What happens to them?

I can’t answer that from a philosophical point of view.  I didn’t take those classes in college.  

In my world the stories that didn’t make it into the book still get told to anyone who asks, some of them in conversation, some in letters or emails.  They used to make their way into poems, often slipping in without my knowledge or permission.  That happens a lot with poems.

But I don’t write poetry anymore.  

So where do the stories slip in?  Right now they’re sliding into my new series of middle readers.  Not the way they are told in my memoir, but pieced together like a quilt; a fragment from this story, a snip of that memory…

THE AVALON

 photo A. Hinson

WINTER HOUSE

 photo A. Hinson

THE ALLEN HOUSE

 (For example, in the book I'm working on now, 2nd in the Summerhood Island series, all three of these buildings have been morphed into one- The Sea Inn.)

A memoir should tell the truth, at least the truth as far as the author can remember it.

But fiction is made of a different cloth.  It can stretch in any direction, start out with a name or a place and weave more names and places from other times and other memories onto the beginning, into the middle, at the end, around the edges until you have something that resembles a place you have known, or a person you have met The end result is not like any place or anyone real.  Sometimes it's a quilt. Sometimes it's just a raggedy mish-mash. This is fiction.  This is what I’m writing now.  And I have to admit that the freedom  to invent, and re-invent - is lovely.

Yes, it’s true . . .

 We are way overdue for a recipe blog.

 But until a couple of days ago my recipes had been kidnapped and were being held hostage. And the worst part is the kidnapper wouldn’t even contact me about a ransom.  

And yes, it was irresponsible of me to send my only copy of my recipe file out into the world alone, a print copy at that, so faded and old as to be impossible to scan.  Mea culpa.

But who could know? And anyway, the crisis is over, and they are back safe and sound, with a backup file to boot. And you still aren’t going to get a recipe blog.

 At least not this time.

 Because I promised on Facebook that I’d write a quick book review. Even though Geoff Herbach’s  I’m with Stupid is a YA novel, and if I am going to put book reviews instead of recipes or anything else  on my blog I should be writing reviews about middle readers since my first one (Coyote Summer, remember) comes out this fall. Although I guess this is not really what you’d call a review.  So maybe that’s ok.

I’m reading YA novels lately because I happened upon one (Beautiful Music For Ugly Children) in the library and it stunned me. So I wrote Kirstin Cronn-Mills (the author), and during our brief correspondence she’s given me several other author’s names. And they have all been wonderful and truly amazing.  Amazing in that they speak to such universal truths, to the real problems you face growing up and the even realer problems you encounter trying to deal with them, that I found myself saying yes, yes! (sometimes even aloud) as I read.

Because up until lately, you see, it’s only been Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And now you are really beginning to wonder. Buffy? Where on earth is she going with this?

You know how some comics, like Ellen Degeneres, start out with a topic and seem to wander all over and then suddenly Bam! - there they are back where they started having tied everything up neatly?

Yeah.

 Well, that’s probably not going to happen here. But bear with me.

Buffy. The show that used vampires and demons and witches and odd reptilian creatures to tell great stories that just happened to touch on all of the problems high school kids face, sometimes providing solutions but even when there wasn’t an easy solution you came away from the show feeling ok about being different, or liking girls instead of boys, or not having a parent around, or having scales and a tail because that one made you a natural for the swim team?

Until recently, it seemed to me that with a few notable exceptions, Buffy was it. And when YA literature started to become popular again, it was full of dragons and vampires or it took place in the distant past or future or on another world.

These people, though, this latest crop of writers, the Kirstin Cronn-Mills’s and Geoff Herbachs and A.S. Hyatts and David Levithans, just to name a few, they write these raw, powerful stories with problems like the ones you had growing up, or people you knew had, and the endings aren’t always all happy but there’s usually at least a few answers and a lot of hope because that’s what you need when you are a teenager.  These are the stories I read and my heart tightens and then opens and oh, I wish I’d had these books when I was a teenager because they are my life.

That’s what I’m With Stupid did for me.

Take a kid who was bullied when younger, give him a terrible early memory he hasn't dealt with and a parent who's not really there for him. Throw in the fact that now he's a popular jock and a heck of a football player, partially because he's got this anger inside that he deals with by crushing the competition. How does he cope? Where is his life going? What happens when he decides to use his power for good instead of evil (sort of) ?

What happens is a piece of your life. Somewhere in this book, and others by the writers I've mentioned above, is a piece of your life. Doesn't matter who you are or what you were in high school. You're going to go - ""Wow. Yes." at some point. 

Guaranteed.

So, no. not really a book review. But what I wanted to say. 

And thank you, all of you YA writers out there.

Keep going.

If you write it . . .

I often get asked if I think kids still read adventure stories.  Stories, that is, that take place on this world, in this universe, roughly within the last hundred years or so, and don’t involve werewolves, vampires, or swordplay.  

 My immediate response is either a slightly sarcastic (I know, those of you who know me personally are stunned that I would be even slightly sarcastic), "Well, if they don’t the last, six hundred pages, eight drafts, and ten years of my life have been wasted!", or a wide-eyed “Geez, I sure hope so!”

I have actually wondered about this, though, as I ran my eyes along the new book shelf in the middle grade section of our local library.  It sure seems as if the majority of titles for kids in the age group I’m writing for involve some sort of unworldly creature that must be vanquished.  Which is not to say that that is not in and of itself an adventure, and thus an adventure story. 

 But while I admit to having an extremely vivid imagination, it tends to stay grounded on earth.  And while I did enjoy the occasional fantasy like Madeleine L’Engles’s A Wrinkle in Time, or Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, I tended to prefer My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, the Misty of Chincoteague series by Marguerite Henry . . .

I asked our local librarian if kids still took out the books I loved in my childhood and the ones I continued reading through adolescence and into high school whenever I needed the comfort of the familiar - the Lois Lenski series including Strawberry Girl, Blue Ridge Billy, and Bayou Suzette, Katherine Paterson’s  Bridge to Terabithia, Kin Platt’s The Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear. (Okay, I admit I was a bit morbid back then.)

She assured me adventure stories were still popular with both boys and girls.  Gary Paulsen’ Hatchet, The River and others, Ben Mikaelsen’s, Stranded, Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me; books that take you out of yourself and  away, but not so far away that you don’t think, yeah, I could do that.  Or, I wish I’d been able to do that.  Or even, I wish I’d grown up there.  

 So that’s the kind of books I’ve written.  The sort of if-I’d grown-up-there-I-could-have-done-that books that I loved to read.  Now, will kids these days want to read them?

Geez, I hope so.

Just to show you I haven't changed, here's a few shots of my bookshelf now-

Yeah. Like that.