Flying Starts

A Step from Heaven (Front Street, Apr.), An Na's absorbing first novel, chronicles Korean-born Young Ju's life from the age of four, when she emigrated with her parents to California, through her teenage years. The heroine of this book is torn between her new life as a student in an American school and the daughter of parents who insist she speak Korean at home and adhere to many of her homeland's traditions. As a result, Young is thrown into a tumultuous acculturation process that the author describes in poignant—and entirely credible—detail.

And for good reason. An (according to tradition, the surname precedes the first name when it appears in print), too, was born in Korea and moved to California at the age of four. This fact sets up the logical first question: to what extent is the novel autobiographical? "It is—and it isn't," responds the amiable, unassuming An, who explains that "there are definitely vignettes in the novel that were triggered by my childhood memories, but there are differences between Young's life and my own. The dynamics of her family were not the same as those of my own, yet I, too, felt that I couldn't be fully American given the expectations of my family, which was definitely a traditional Korean family. I drew upon that same experience of the duality of two cultures and the pull of trying to be a good daughter while absorbing the American ways I was learning at school."

The characters in An's novel are more extreme than in her own life, she reports, a fact that her father found gratifying. In the novel, Young's father is a controlling man who becomes increasingly disillusioned, dependent on alcohol and physically and emotionally abusive to his children and wife. "I was initially afraid to show my father this book, because I knew that he would ask, 'Is this how you perceive me?' " the author recalls. "But I didn't have to worry, because he got it exactly. He knew that my story was fictionalized, yet he said that he could see where it all came from. And my mother loved it. She is so proud of me that it is amazing. She can't stop toting the book to all my old schools."

An's schooling plays a major role in her new role as author, which was hardly a long-held dream. "Being a writer was never even in my scope," notes the 1994 graduate of Amherst College. "Coming from an immigrant family, I knew it was expected that I would become a professional—a doctor, a lawyer or perhaps an academician. I had always been a voracious reader, but it wasn't until my last semester in college, when I took a course in children's literature, that I realized I wanted to create my own stories."

Her next step was enrolling in the M.F.A. program in children's literature at Vermont College, during which she began writing short pieces that were the stepping-stones to A Step from Heaven. "I started with one single impression from my childhood—the memory of my mother taking me to have my hair curled shortly after we arrived in California, since she realized that this was what most Americans looked like," says An. "And the story just took off from there as I added vignettes from my memory and was encouraged by people's positive response to what I was writing."

One of An's appreciative readers was author/illustrator Brock Cole, an instructor at the college, who wrote the soon-to-graduate student a note saying he would be happy to send her manuscript to his editor Stephen Roxburgh, publisher of Front Street, when she was ready to take this step. She eventually was, Cole did and Roxburgh called An within days, expressing interest in the novel. The author praises Roxburgh for helping her find a focus for her story and helping it "take its final shape."

Now writing full-time, the Oakland-based An is working on a new novel that she describes as "a Romeo and Juliet–type love story that centers on a Latino and an Asian character." One of the greatest rewards of being a published author, she reports, is meeting her readers face-to-face. "I just made my first school visit," she says, "and it was an incredible experience. I went into the classroom of a friend who teaches sixth grade, and the kids had all read my novel. And it was amazing how much of it they actually got—and what great questions they asked. And then they came up to me with scraps of paper torn from their notebooks, asking for my autograph. Some of them even wanted me to sign their baseball hats! It was my 15 minutes of stardom."

I consider myself a visual problem solver," says freelance artist Laura Ljungkvist. "I get faxes every week with problems I solve for clients. But making a book, I have to solve my own problem, and that's new for me."

For her debut picture book, Toni's Topsy-Turvy Telephone Day (Abrams, May), Ljungkvist wrestled with sequential imagery and storytelling. "I have never started over so many times on a piece of art, never lost so much sleep, never been so insecure in my process," she says, with mingled dismay and appreciation. She settled on a unified design in which a fluid black line twirls across every spread, resembling a phone cord and outlining characters' facial features as well. Although the line literally connects the speakers, they misunderstand one another's spoken messages.

In Toni, the pictures are done in Ljungkvist's signature style, a vibrant op-art array of lines and shapes. She communicates in abstract, ultramodern symbols (she calls them "advanced traffic signs") on a flat, opaque plane. Not surprisingly, one influence is J.otto Seibold: "Mr. Lunch is my idol," she says, referring to Seibold's dog hero. But where Seibold renders in Adobe software, Ljungkvist painstakingly mixes and applies gouache. "I could just click a mouse and make it happen," she says, "but there are imperfections that you might not see immediately. Subconsciously, I think you feel them."

Artistic success came quickly to Ljungkvist, who left her native Sweden for Manhattan in 1993. "New York welcomed me with open arms," she says happily. Her first assignment in the States was for the New Yorker, and gigs with the New York Times and Harper's Bazaar followed.

The book business was less receptive. Ljungkvist created a picture-book dummy (not Toni) in 1995. Because her agent is not in publishing, she pursued editors herself. "I didn't know the politics or the people, and being an impatient person, I found it frustrating," she says. There were no takers.

Ljungkvist might have abandoned this direction if not for a traumatic turn of events. In 1997, she suffered a brain injury in a horseback-riding accident, and spent three months in the hospital and six more months recuperating. During her rehabilitation, she refused to paint. "I was afraid I had lost my problem-solving skills," she recalls. When she found she could work again, her first goal was paying the rent; her second was making a picture book. "It took a hit on the head to make me decide, I'm going to do this again," she says.

On her second foray into publishing, Ljungkvist met Abrams editor Howard Reeves, who rejected her first pitch, but wanted to see more work. Cautiously optimistic, Ljungkvist consulted a friend, freelance editor David Colbert. "He sat down and taught me to conceptually understand what makes a children's book sing, and what makes you want to turn the page."

Ljungkvist found the germ of an idea in an old assignment for Mohawk Papers, in which she had painted two people connected by a phone line. As Toni took shape, she drew thumbnail sketches of a party host who calls six guests, unaware that the invitees cannot hear clearly. Then "I sat down with a dictionary, went through from A to Z," and wrote down like-sounding words; one guest mistakenly brings "cats and baboons" instead of "hats and balloons."

At Abrams, "Howard took two seconds to say, yes, we'll do it," Ljungkvist remembers, with evident relief. She hesitates to get specific about her next book project with Reeves ("It's full of patterns and fun things to look at"), but she anticipates more picture books and perhaps a line of "toys and other products." Whatever these objects might be, Ljungkvist wants them to be meaningful for young readers. She takes painting as a serious responsibility. "I have no complaints, no complaints!" she says, in the voice of one who takes nothing for granted. "I'm extremely fortunate to make a living at this—it's my 'hobby.' If I had to go to an office from 9 to 5 every day, I'd do this at night."

Nora Raleigh Baskin has been writing about the same character, "a sad, motherless little girl," since she was in the sixth grade, but it took the 40-year-old author almost three decades to find the right "story" for her heroine, who, she admits, is a younger version of herself.

It wasn't until 1999, after many unsuccessful writing attempts, that Baskin began transforming her sometimes humorous, often painful childhood memories into the novel What Every Girl (Except Me) Knows (Little, Brown, Apr.), which traces sixth-grader Gabby's quest to discover the "special knowledge" about being a woman that girls with mothers seem to have. Like her protagonist Gabby, Baskin (now married and the mother of two boys) grew up in New Paltz, N.Y., with a father and older brother, and like Gabby, she sorely missed having a mother to guide her through her adolescence.

Acutely aware of past mistakes she'd previously made in autobiographical writing, Baskin approached her new manuscript with a fresh attitude. "This time, I was going to write what I wanted to write instead of trying to please an audience," she says, explaining that in a former (unpublished) chapter book, she made her characters too "generic" and avoided addressing any "real issues" because she was trying too hard to reach all children.

"I realized I could use my life but I didn't have to be tied to it. This was a huge breakthrough for me," she says, noting how, nearly 20 years ago, when she was a student at SUNY Purchase, her writing teacher told her she could "choose and edit" what she wrote and she "didn't necessarily have to tell the truth." Not able to fully appreciate his words, she "burst into tears" at the time, but now she was ready to apply his advice to her writing.

"When creating What Every Girl (Except Me) Knows, I was able to alter my life, make it turn out the way I would have liked it to be," Baskin states. "It allowed me to let go of a burden [her mother's death] I'd been carrying all my life. I gave Gabby knowledge it took me years to learn—that all people suffer insecurities." One of the more touching moments in her novel is when Gabby, struggling to come to terms with her mother's suicide, discovers she is not the only one feeling isolated and vulnerable among her friends, two of whom also carry sad family secrets.

Since Baskin was already well acquainted with her protagonist (variations of whom had already appeared in her college creative-writing thesis and previous chapter book), she was able to complete her novel in only five months' time. While she wrote, she kept a copy of Ruth White's Belle Prater's Boy by her side for inspiration, hoping to mirror White's ability to "write about a tragic incident with insight, humor and hope."

When she finished, Baskin showed the story to her good friend and staunch supporter, novelist Elinor Lipman, who, Baskin says appreciatively, "really stuck her neck out for me." Baskin considers what happened next to have been an "act of serendipity." Lipman found the name of an editor, Maria Modugno, whom she contacted by phone. Coincidentally, Modugno had just read one of Lipman's books and was therefore well acquainted with the author, and more than willing to read her friend's manuscript. She asked that it be sent to her through overnight mail. The only problem was that the book did not yet have a title. Lipman offered a list of suggestions; from that list Baskin chose What Every Girl (Except Me) Knows.

"The first clue that the title was going to be a hit came at the little post office in my town [of Weston, Conn.]," Baskin says wryly. "As the postmistress packed the book up to mail, she glanced at it and said, 'What a great title!' "

As it turned out, Modugno and her colleagues at Little, Brown were as enthusiastic about the novel as Lipman had been, and agreed to accept it for publication. Baskin and Modugno worked on the manuscript together for the next year and a half. "I trusted her [Modugno's] opinions and she allowed me to be the one to make final decisions in revisions," Baskin states. "You expect editors to be hard-nosed, but Maria was always kind and generous."

Having people actually read her book after its publication was the "icing on the cake" for Baskin. She's had a chance to talk to some of her readers at book signings and local schools, and has also heard from many fans through e-mail. The positive response she has received makes her even more grateful that Modugno "took a chance" with her. Mulling over the positive aspects of her writing and publishing experience, Baskin concludes, "It's magical how writing about a tragedy in my life has allowed my greatest dream to come true."

A few years ago, Alex Flinn came across an alarming statistic: 26% of high school and college-aged young women admit to having been in an abusive relationship. A little searching uncovered a surprising dearth of information on the subject, especially in light of the attention the recent O.J. Simpson case brought to the subject of abuse. At the time, Flinn, who lives in Miami, was working as a certified legal intern with the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office in a misdemeanor court, where a large portion of the cases concerned domestic violence. It was a topic close to her heart, and she felt compelled to write about it.

She began with research, talking to a woman who works in a domestic violence advocacy program and reading several books on abuse and counseling. Then, taking advantage of an 18-month maternity sabbatical, she began putting the story of Caitlin, a young woman who finds herself in an abusive relationship, to paper. In the midst of it, though, she had a change of heart and decided that the story that she really wanted to explore was that of Nick, the abuser, so she started the novel over from his perspective.

It wasn't Flinn's first foray into fiction, nor was it Caitlin and Nick's debut. In college, she began writing a young adult fantasy novel in which Nick and Caitlin featured in one of the subplots. She never finished that work. "Life got in the way," she recalls. This time, to prepare herself, she read several YA novels and was particularly impressed with the work of Richard Peck. When she saw that he was leading a writing workshop, she jumped at the chance to attend. He steered her toward the work of other YA authors, including Chris Crutcher, Rob Thomas and Francesca Lia Block. Flinn found her agent, George Nicholson, via another writing workshop, when workshop leader Joyce Sweeney referred her to her own agent.

Back at work, Flinn snuck time in mornings and on lunch breaks to finish her manuscript. After a rejection from Simon & Schuster, her novel, Breathing Underwater (HarperCollins, Apr.), was placed with editor Antonia Markiet.

Making the transition from lawyer to YA author was a natural adjustment for versatile Flinn, who started out with a college major in music and dreams of being an opera singer. The mother of two children, six-year-old Katie and two-year-old Meredith, she now stays at home, writing during nap and school time and at night after everyone else is asleep. "I had a lot more time to write when I was working," she says with a laugh.

Like Breathing Underwater, Flinn's second novel, slated for release next spring, is lifted directly from the headlines. Blown Away is about a teenager who plants a bomb in his prep school.

Since Breathing Underwater was released, Flinn has received a certain amount of local attention, including articles in the Miami Herald and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. A gratifying result has been that people come to her book signings specifically because of the dating-violence topic. "There was a woman who came from an abusive relationship who bought the book for her son. She was worried that he showed signs of becoming abusive himself. It's very satisfying to see what influence I can have."

Flinn admits that the whole process of becoming a published writer has been thrilling. "Sometimes I feel like I should be the one paying [HarperCollins]! It's just been so exciting."

Susanna Vance says she's always been a daydreamer. "I had a hard time paying attention in school because I was always thinking of things and thinking of stories," she says. "And that all of that has become okay is sort of amazing to me. I am really enjoying that it is a good thing and not something to overcome."

Vance says she has enjoyed writing throughout her life, but she's only been a full-time writer since about 1994. She worked for five years as a commercial photographer in St. Croix before moving to Tennessee and becoming a feature writer and photographer for a small newspaper called the Buffalo River Review. At that point, she still felt stronger as a photographer. "But as I started writing for the paper, it was so easy for me that I started writing books," she remembers. Once she began a novel, she says, she wrote about two more articles for the paper, then quit.

Now living in Oregon, Vance says she continues to write all the time. "I write seven days a week, morning 'til I am really tired in the evening," she says. "Life just falls to the side while I am doing this. I write very, very fast once it begins, because I feel like I am going to forget the details, so I try to get them down as quickly as I possibly can. It's very intense once I catch fire with it."

While Sights (Delacorte, Mar.) is her first published book, she has published short stories and written other novels, some incorporating magical realism. That's something she embraced in books even as a child. "I was raised on Hans Christian Andersen, and that was just a very big thing for me," she says. "It becomes more and more difficult as you get older to capture that feeling that there really is that possibility of something unknown that can happen out there—something beyond. And I like that state."

In Sights, Baby Girl is an untrustworthy but likable narrator who believes she can see the future. She flees from her abusive father with her mother, settling in a small town full of odd characters where Baby Girl feels awkward and isolated for the first time in her life. It's through playing the accordion, starting a band with other misfits and her genuine good nature that she is finally able to carve out a place for herself.

"I think the lesson is that through individual means you can rise above things," Vance says. She knows this probably isn't true in all cases, but on a small scale it can be an inspiring message for teenagers, for whom all problems loom large. "You can find your own stride in the way that Baby Girl did through the accordion and the band. I do feel you can succeed in that way, that if you become good at something or you stay true to yourself, that things will fall in place for you even if they weren't what you had in mind."

Vance says that one of the difficult tasks in writing for young adults is making sure the material is appropriate. That is something she and her editor, Diana Capriotti, worked together on. Vance calls Capriotti "a steadying hand" and says she appreciated the way that Capriotti would raise questions, but leave the decisions up to her.

"I am in some ways undisciplined and untamed and can go off on the primrose lane with my writing," she says. "I think that working together with her was very important, to give me perspective in tightening the story and making it a more even product in the end."

Vance is now working on a new young adult novel about a strong but emotionally distant girl who, after her sister dies and her family falls apart, takes the family's boat on her own adventure. Even though she knows her sister is dead, she has conversations with her and seeks her guidance.

While Vance has the plot worked out, the writing has come in fits and starts, she says, largely because she's still "walking Baby Girl around." And she is finding all the attention for Sights affirming—including positive reviews from her three granddaughters. "When you write, you have an audience in your mind, and when I write for young people that's who my audience is," she says. "They really loved this book, and that's huge to me."