Flying Starts
Four fresh children's book talents make their 2007 debut
-- Publishers Weekly, 12/24/2007
Jenny Downham
When you ask writers how they came up with the idea for their first novel, some might say that it came to them in a flash. Or that they based the main character on someone they knew. Not Jenny Downham, the 43-year-old British author of Before I Die, a luminous story about a feisty 16-year-old girl who is dying of leukemia. She, in fac
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Photo © Rolf Marriott |
But Downham isn't delusional. As a trained actress, she often gave the characters she played free reign over her body—including the ability to voice their opinions—so that she could completely inhabit each role. The more these characters talked to her, and the more she understood what it felt like to be someone else, the more authentic each performance became. Little did she know that this technique would translate so perfectly onto the page.
Downham started writing when she quit her job with a touring theatre troupe after the birth of her second son. Reluctant to take up a nine-to-five job and sacrifice more time with her children, she applied what she learned in the theater—character development, storytelling, conflict resolution—to writing.
In 2003, she submitted a chapter from the young adult book she'd been working on to the London Writers Competition. To her shock, she won first prize. By 2005, she had finished the book, and although it was never published, Downham was determined to keep writing and honing her skills.
That's when she “met” Tessa. What started out as a nagging voice inside Downham's head evolved into a full-blown character whose dire yet life-affirming story demanded to be told. Downham started keeping a daily journal for Tessa—a tool she had used as an actress to help her get into a role, which proved fruitful in writing as well.
“What would begin as my walk or my day in the café, would end up being Tessa's. I saw the world and the changing seasons through her eyes,” Downham recalls. Little by little, the pieces of Tessa's personality—her terminal illness, her list of 10 things to do before she died, and her determination to accomplish everything on that list—started to emerge.
After two years of living inside Tessa's head, Downham says she felt relieved—and a little saddened—when it was time to send her out into the world. Not to mention her fear that no one would be interested in hearing her story.
She needn't have worried. David Fickling at Random House fell in love with the book and crashed it onto his fall '07 list. In the three months since publication, Before I Die has received glowing praise from the likes of the New York Times Book Review and Entertainment Weekly, garnered three starred reviews, and is a finalist for the Borders Original Voices program. Foreign rights have been sold to 19 countries and counting, and Blueprint Pictures has bought film rights.
When asked about her burgeoning success, Downham admits to feeling pleasantly surprised at how quickly the book took off—and how the applause doesn't seem to be dissipating. So what's next for this rising star? Although Downham didn't give away any major details, she did mention the presence of another voice murmuring inside her head—perhaps that of the main character in her next YA novel, currently under contract with David Fickling. —Alexis Burling
Jake Wizner
At Manhattan's Salk School, a prestigious public middle school for the scientifically minded, the best-read book this fall has nothing to do with physics. It's Spanking Shakespeare (Random House, Sept.) a bawdy, faux memoir about a high school senior in search of a sex life, written by Jake Wizner.
“The staff has read it, the book club has read it, actually, I think just about everybody in the school has read it,” says principal Rhonda Perry. “Jake is a big star around here.”
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Photo © Kira Wizner |
“What they all want to know is, 'How much of this is true?' ” Wizner says. “We've had a lot of conversations about it being a work of fiction.”
The eponymous hero is Shakespeare Shapiro (his brother is named Gandhi), a Hemingway High senior who is required to write a memoir. The idea sprang from an exercise Wizner annually gives his own students, since Salk requires its eighth graders to produce a major English “exit piece.” When the idea of a memoir was first proposed, Wizner thought it ridiculous, but now admits, “Consistently, the most amazing writing I get is from the memoir unit.”
Writing as a career was not something he had considered, having come from a family of educators. Both his parents worked at Yale, his father as a law professor, his mother as a residential dean. Like those of the hero of his book, Wizner's own parents were “ruthless editors,” he recalls. “They shredded everything I wrote.”
Outside the house, Wizner got more encouragement. A high school teacher thought his essay about a rabbi who loved pork was hilarious. He majored in English at Wesleyan University (Daniel Handler was a classmate).
While working at Salk, he took the Gotham Writers' Workshop children's writing class three times (“because I loved the guy who taught it,” he says of Alex Steele, the program's dean), producing a middle-grade manuscript about the world's most disgusting sandwich. He pitched it to agent Marcia Wernick who asked, “What else have you got?” Wizner had nothing but ideas, and the one Wernick liked best became Spanking Shakespeare.
“I didn't even show the book to [my parents] until the galley came,” Wizner says, “because of the huge amount of anxiety involved. My mother is very much the type who will say, 'What will people think?' ”
So what did they think, after reading it? “They really, really liked it. They cackled,” Wizner reports, although at his book party, when he introduced his father to his editor, Jim Thomas, his father responded, “I'm not at all the alcoholic my son portrays me as in the book.” (“This would have been more convincing if he didn't have a drink in each hand at the moment,” Wizner notes.)
Wizner has turned in a second YA manuscript to Thomas, about three kids at a Yale summer arts program who are collaborating on a musical, which has the working title Castration Celebration. “When I told that to my mother,” he says, “she put her head in her hands and said to my father, 'We might have to change our names.' ” —Sue Corbett
Jonathan Bean
In 2002, when Bean was a senior at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, he had an idea that he wanted to be an illustrator. A professor there, Stephen Fieser, who taught illustration, put him in touch with Wes Adams, an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “I sent him some illustrations,” recalls Bean, now 28, “ which he politely rejected. But he wrote me a really long email critiquing them.”
Bean went on to pursue an MFA at Manhattan's School of Visual Arts. His thesis project, which began as a sketchbook image of a bed on a roof under the night sky, caught the attention of a guest editor critiquing students' work. That happened to be Frances Foster—of FSG. Foster was intrigued, and mentioned the pro
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Since leaving grad school, Bean has supported himself on newspaper and magazine work, but all that has recently changed. This summer, Bean harvested a bumper crop of good fortune. At Night was just one of four children's book projects released within a few months of each other (the others are The Apple Pie that Papa Baked, written by Lauren Thompson (S&S, Aug.); Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat, written by Lynne Jonell (Holt, Aug.); and Mokie and Bik, written by Wendy Orr (Holt, June); two of them have been named to several year-end “Best of 2007” lists, including PW's. Warm reviews have compared Bean's work to that of some of his biggest influences. “I grew up with my mom reading me Virginia Lee Burton books and later I discovered Wanda Gág,” Bean notes.
In addition to having two more books in the works, Bean starts a teaching gig at his undergrad alma mater this January. “When I was living in Pennsylvania and sending things to publishers in New York, it seemed like a black hole,” he says. “But when I came to the city and saw that they were actually people and that they had seen—and in some cases even remembered—my work, I knew it hadn't been in vain.” And it appears publishers aren't likely to forget his name anytime soon.—Shannon Maughan
Katherine Marsh
Though 2007 held a notable first for Katherine Marsh—the publication of her debut novel, The Night Tourist (Hyperion, Oct.)—next year will likely prove at least as thrilling, with her first child due February 1. “It's exciting because this is who I'm writing for,” she says. “I'm creating my audience.”
Born in Kingston, N.Y., Marsh moved with her family to Westchester County outside New York City when she was five, and has ever since felt the pull of the Big Apple. “It was always a sort of a destination for us,” she recalls. “My grandparents had a bar that's now called the Life Café, but was a Russian/Ukrainian bar just after the war years. My parents met [in New York], my father went to Cooper Union. I had a lot of connections to the city.”
Marsh describes her book, a reinterpretation of the Orpheus myth about a teenager named Jack Perdu who explores the New York City underworld, as nothing less than a “love song to New York.” She wrote the book partly beca
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Photo © Patrick Andrade |
After graduating Yale, where she studied English literature, Marsh taught high school for a year, and then moved to New York in 1998. “It was this booming time,” she says. “The city was doing really well, everyone had Internet stocks, and it was an exciting time in magazine journalism, which I was working in. And that sort of ended with 9/11.”
Marsh feels that New York has itself gone through a “sort of seismic shift” since September 11. “I wanted to memorialize the city that was in my head,” she says.
Currently on maternity leave from her job as managing editor at the New Republic, Marsh wrote The Night Tourist over the course of four years, squeezing in writing time whenever possible, which generally meant an hour or two maximum each day. She notes that her editorial work and her writing “appeal to different sides of the brain,” but she has found areas of overlap as well. “I've always been interested in narrative journalism,” she says. “In the stories I edit, I'm always looking for how to make them more dramatic. So in that way the two things play off each other.”
The year she spent teaching helped her decide to write a book with a 14-year-old hero. “I really like that age, because it seemed it was this sort of cusp,” she says. “You're sort of an early teen, and there's a lot of emotional awareness. But you still have this accessibility to this world of wonder and magic, and there's a lot of drama.”
And although she jokingly describes awaiting her baby's due date as “domestic imprisonment,” she has kept busy editing the manuscript for the sequel to The Night Tourist, due next September, which will reinterpret another myth. (Universal Pictures optioned rights to The Night Tourist this past fall, so fans may see Marsh's ghostly vision of NYC on the big screen one day.) But Marsh has no plans to stop there. “I definitely would like to continue with Jack's story,” she says. “I don't think it's over yet.” —John Sellers
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