Volume 257 Issue 25 06/28/2010

Spring 2010 Flying Starts
Spotlighting four novelists and one illustrator who had their debuts this spring

Jun 28, 2010

Lauren Oliver

Lauren Oliver may have just published Before I Fall (Harper, Mar.), but she's been writing for as long as she can remember—"every day since I was about five," she says. "I've had dozens of books in various stages of completion, and I wrote two full adult novels, one of which had absolutely no plot. It was in the YA world where I learned about narrative tension."

Oliver's entry into YA publishing wasn't deliberate, though—not at first. "I was working on adult stuff at NYU, where I was getting my M.F.A. in creative writing," she says. "But then I started working as an editorial assistant at Razorbill, and suddenly I was reading six to eight YA novels a week. That's when I thought of Sam."

In Before I Fall, Sam is a 17-year-old girl caught in a time loop, dying at the end of each day only to wake up and relive the same day again. To Oliver, the device of the repetition is secondary to Sam's character.

"I wanted to write about a girl who was selfish and disconnected from what is meaningful in her life—a character study," Oliver says. "I wrote the prologue and the epilogue first, and Sam's emotional, internal responses are very different in those two passages. Then I thought hard about what set of circumstances would allow her to experience that amount of change and growth in a very short amount of time, which ended up being through the mechanism of Sam reliving her last day many times over."

Oliver identifies a lot with Sam on a personal level, too. "I was definitely nicer than Sam in high school but not much, unfortunately," she says. "I acted out and a lot of my behavior and meanness was about feeling lost, so I wrote about that through Sam. But I connect to all of my characters in some way: to Lindsay, who hides her insecurity behind viciousness, and even Juliet, who feels she's too broken to re-enter the world." But, she adds, "I'm a lot nicer now!"

Oliver describes the road to acquisition for Before I Fall as "rather fairy tale-esque."

"I met my agent, Stephen Barbara, back when I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago—we were both students. He knew me as the girl he saw walking across campus with high heels always yapping into her cellphone," she says with a laugh. "When I told him about my manuscript, he agreed to meet, and honestly, he was the only agent I submitted to. I appreciated his vision and drive and knew he'd be an incredible advocate for my book. And he was—we had a pre-empt from Harper within three days."

While the acquisition process was smooth, Oliver did experience some bumps before publication. Though her book was originally acquired by Brenda Bowen, Bowen left Harper shortly afterward, so for a while Oliver's book was "orphaned." But then Before I Fall landed with Rosemary Brosnan, executive editor at HarperCollins, and she and Oliver clicked right away. "Rosemary is an incredible, meticulous editor—she pores over every word and cares deeply about language, which I love. And I can't believe how supportive everyone at Harper has been throughout."

Most unexpected is Oliver's sudden aversion to entering bookstores since her novel's publication. "I thought I'd rush to bookstores, but now I avoid the YA sections because it makes me nervous," she says. "The other day I actually saw a girl pick up my book, and I went up to her and told her that I wrote it, because I have no capacity to censor myself," she says, laughing.

Oliver writes every morning—on the subway (she lives in Brooklyn). "Writing is one of the few things you can do when you are underground," she explains. But she divides her day between working on her own novels and developing book ideas for the company she recently started, Paper Lantern Lit, with former Razorbill colleague Lexa Hillyer.

As for what's next, Oliver's fans not only don't have long to wait but will be happy to know that it's the first book in a trilogy. Called Delirium, it comes out next February from Harper. —Donna Freitas

Jacqueline West

Jacqueline West took many roads before landing in the world of children's literature, but she always loved stories with talking animals and magical worlds. While growing up, she was captivated by the work of A.A. Milne, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, and Kenneth Grahame. She now finds herself in their company with the publication of her first novel, The Shadows (Dial, June).

"I always read a weird and wide variety of authors and books growing up," says West. "I now love Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, and Annie Dillard, among others. I like to be broad-minded in my reading."

As an undergraduate, West majored in voice performance at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. She continued to pursue music in graduate school, where she added a minor in English. "I left graduate school, because I was very unhappy, to pursue an English teaching certificate," she recalls. "The crowds and pressure that came with voice performance were too much."

West then became a high school English teacher, adding it to her varied résumé, which also includes dinner theater actress, waitress, and barista. She is thrilled to now be living in the small town of Redwing, Minn., and to be putting all of her energy into writing. "Writing full-time is absolutely my dream come true," she says.

In The Shadows, the quirky Dunwoodys and their 11-year-old daughter, Olive, move into an old Victorian house. Exploring the house, Olive discovers that she can enter the house's paintings. With the help of a boy inside one of those paintings, she learns that the paintings are but one of the house's dark secrets.

"The idea for my book started with the setting," West recalls. "There was a crumbling old mansion in my hometown that I used to ride by on the school bus. The house fascinated me, and I wondered what kind of people might live in it. That led me to the idea of Olive's eccentric, intelligent family."

Once the book was completed, West sent a few query letters out, and it took a few years to find her agent, Chris Richman at Upstart Crow Literary. "I was so sure that this was never going to happen," says West. "Once I found [him], things happened incredibly fast. Even though the book was initially very short, Chris had some great ideas and publishers were immediately interested."

They decided on Jessica Garrison at Dial, and together West and Garrison fine-tuned the details and found places to add material. "Jess had so many in-depth suggestions," West says. "We worked on character development, plot arc, and right away she suggested making this into a series. I was surprised that people wanted to publish one! But maybe subconsciously I was planning for a series."

At the time the book got picked up by Dial, West was teaching high school, but when she learned that the series would demand one book per year, she quit to focus on writing. "It didn't feel like a decision to write a children's book," West recalls. "I was writing all kinds of things, including some graphic novels that never became anything, and once I finished The Shadows, I was just hoping that it would have a wider audience than my family."

In the sequel, readers can look forward to a new major character (a human friend for Olive) as well as an object in the house that is pivotal to the plot. Also, a character from the first book, who Olive thinks she knows well, has kept some big secrets. An outline for the next couple of books has been prepared, and West is enthusiastically working on new material not tied to the series (including a middle-grade fantasy novel and a young adult book). She tends to work on a lot of projects at once and reads five or six books at a time in order to avoid "getting stuck or being completely lost."

"What I love about writing is that the days when it's going well, I've time-traveled," the author says. "I look up at the clock and it's so much later than I thought, and I have visited a different world and been different people. Writing allows you to have more than one life." —Erin Lewenauer

Erin Stead

Had Erin Stead made a different decision in college, A Sick Day for Amos McGee might never have existed. At the beginning and end of her college years, Stead planned to be an illustrator, but for a period in between, painting was her artistic goal. "For a while I thought I would be a serious painter, the kind that smokes cigarettes and wears a black beret," she recalls. "But then I got back to illustrating. It keeps me honest, and I'm much happier doing it."

After college, Stead worked at several bookstores, among them Books of Wonder in New York City, and spent a year as assistant to the creative director at HarperCollins Children's Books. But despite having experience in the business, she found that working on Amos McGee, written by her husband, Philip Stead (author and illustrator of Creamed Tuna Fish and Peas on Toast, 2009), was difficult in unexpected ways. "I think the reason I wasn't prepared is because drawing for me is really hard," Erin says. "Not that I don't like to do it, but it requires a lot of courage that I don't always have."

Philip Stead wrote Amos McGee knowing his wife would do the illustrations—even before she knew it herself. "Before this book, I don't think I ever actually sat down with the intention of writing a story," he says. But with Amos McGee, "I sat down at my desk and thought I'd write a story for Erin. I thought of characters specifically for her."

From Erin's perspective, events came as more of a surprise. "Neal [Porter], my editor, had bought Phil's first book and he'd heard that I illustrate, too," she says. "Neal and Phil took me to dinner—I was unaware of the story at the time—and they both asked if I'd illustrate it. I just fell into it."

The story centers on Amos, a zookeeper who spends his days helping his animal friends—until one sniffly, sneezy day when his pals find that it's their turn to help him. Erin knew from the start that she didn't want to accompany her husband's narrative with pencil drawings, and turned to woodblock printing to make her illustrations "soft and flat, and have texture, and use a limited color palette."

While she worked on Amos McGee, Erin stopped looking at other artists' work. "I didn't want to be scared, and I wanted to be honest," she says. Her favorite illustrators are Maurice Sendak and German illustrator Sebastian Meschenmoser. But the only artist from whom Stead took even the slightest inspiration for this book was Evaline Ness, whose work she used "to get to how I wanted to think about color in my drawings."

There is one illustrator, however, whose work Erin can't help surrounding herself with. For her, swapping ideas with her husband, with whom she shares a studio, is a completely natural way to work. "There are actually moments when you can see us copying each other, sometimes on paper, sometimes not," she says. "Sometimes you're just sitting at your desk, and no matter what, you just can't draw a character design," she says, citing Amos McGee's rhinoceros, which her husband helped her get started on. "I often wonder how people do this without someone with them in the studio all the time," Philip says in agreement. "We're constantly passing things back and forth to each other."

Now that her first book, which was released by Neal Porter Books at Roaring Brook Press in May, is out in bookstores, Erin is already working on others. Her next project, And Then It's Spring, will be published by Porter at Roaring Brook in late 2011 or early 2012. "It's a poem written by my friend Julie Fotliano. And Phil and I are thinking about a story about a bear."

Philip Stead also has a few new projects. "In spring I have a story coming out with Roaring Brook that I wrote and illustrated, called Jonathan and the Big Blue Boat. It'll be very much in the style of my first book. And I've just completed the draft of a story that's probably for Erin, but I can't talk too much about that—my editor hasn't even seen it yet."

Asked what she'd like people to take away from Amos McGee, Erin has a ready answer. "It's up to the readers," she says firmly. "I want them to have their own experiences with it. Because I have mine." —Rachel Steinberg

Jandy Nelson

When Jandy Nelson started working toward her M.F.A. in children's and young adult book writing at Vermont College, her intention was to write picture books. But that changed the very first night of the program. cound not find photo nelson

Nelson, who already had an M.F.A. in poetry from Brown, read aloud her poems about growing up, and her fellow students encouraged her to write a verse novel. "It was that moment I said, ‘Oh my God, I'm going to do that! That is a fantastic idea!' "

She began with an image of a "grief-stricken girl who was scattering her poems all over a town," and even though she ultimately wrote her story in prose, poetry runs through The Sky Is Everywhere (Dial, Mar.), both in protagonist Lennie's lyrical narration and on the verses she scribbles on a paper cup or stuffs under a rock.

Once she started writing fiction, Nelson fell in love with it—and Lennie. "Really, she just overtook me," Nelson recalls of her narrator, who simultaneously struggles with the sudden death of her sister and the intensity of falling in love. "That was the thing with Lennie: at first I felt like she just crashed into my psyche with her clarinet."

Even though Nelson has worked as an agent for adult fiction and nonfiction for 13 years at Manus & Associates Literary Agency, she says she was overwhelmed when it came to choosing an agent for her YA book. She ultimately paired with her first choice—Emily van Beek at Pippin Properties (Nelson has continued working with Pippin's Holly McGhee since van Beek's departure).

She says the best part of her job as an agent is calling writers to say a book has been sold or is going to auction. Now she knows that moment is just as exciting for writers. "I just feel so lucky to be on both sides of that phone call," she says with a laugh.

Sky sold at auction to Dial in February 2009, and Nelson says it's been "smooth sailing" since. She says she "felt a deep affinity" with editor Alisha Niehaus, whom she calls "insightful." There was just a little more than a year between the book's selling and publication. "It was headlong," she recalls. "We were working quick."

Now that the book has been published, what does Nelson hope readers take away from Lennie's story? "I guess the fact that life is both breathtaking and heartbreaking," she says, "and that you just hopefully want to live it fully, and truly, and be true to yourself and true to your heart." She is touched by the number of readers who write to her, some of whom share their stories or tell her that Lennie has helped them through their grief. "I cry every time," she says.

Right now, Nelson, who is on sabbatical from her job, writes between three and 16 hours a day from her San Francisco home ("It's sort of an all or nothing approach," she says). She is currently working on the first draft of a new novel for Dial called The History of Luck/The Invisible Museum. The book intertwines two stories, each narrated by a twin, though "both stories revolve around their relationship with this very charismatic sculptor and how he changes their lives and they his."

Meanwhile, Sky will be translated into 10 languages and has already received several honors, including being nominated for YALSA's Best Fiction for Young Adults list. For Nelson, it has all been thrilling. She says, "I have to bite my lips from assaulting people at the bus stop, and saying, ‘My book is published!' " —Kate Pavao

Morgan Matson

Writing YA fiction was a goal from the very beginning for Morgan Matson. "I took a year off from college to work in the children's department at an amazing independent bookstore [Vroman's]," Matson recalls. "That was my introduction to YA. I loved it. I read everything I could. When I graduated I got a job as an editor, then saw that the New School had a Writing for Children's M.F.A. and knew right away it was what I wanted to do."

Scholastic editor and YA author David Levithan was Matson's thesis adviser for the manuscript that became Amy & Roger's Epic Detour (S&S, Mar.). But back then, it was a completely different book, Matson says. "Originally, Amy's story was one quarter of a four-character story, How I Spent My Summer Vacation. David was the first person that said to me, ‘Really—are you sure this girl who drives from California to Connecticut isn't her own book?' He was right."

That wasn't all Matson got out of her time at the New School. During her last year, another teacher, author Sarah Weeks, brought Justin Chanda, the publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, to class. Chanda liked Matson's story idea "even in its weird four-character format," Matson says. "So when my agent, Rosemary Stimola, went out with it, she sent it to him and he passed it along to Alexandra Cooper, who became my editor. When Alex got it, the entire thing was e-mails, blog entries, and receipts—there was no narrative to it. Alex told me I could keep all the ‘stuff,' but that it needed a voice."

The final story has two voices—that of Amy and Roger, though Amy's is primary. Together they take a rather circuitous route cross-country, getting lost, eating a lot of local food, and finding romance along the way.

The road trip part wasn't an accident—Matson adores them. "Before I wrote the novel I'd driven cross-country twice—I love to drive and I'll drive anywhere," Matson says. "I wrote the first draft pulling from these original experiences. Then I flew out to California, rented a car and drove back. I was by myself, and I was on the road almost a month. It was great."

Her most recent trip greatly affected the revision, Matson says. "I made the colossal mistake of driving across Nevada on the Loneliest Road in America," she recalls, "and it became a major part of the story. All the pictures in the book are pictures I took, and the designer used receipts I picked up, and things like the business card from Mom's Café in Silana, Utah. If you wanted to take a road trip similar to Amy and Roger's, you really could."

Matson began working on her novel back in 2005, sold it in late 2008, and took to the road in April 2009 to prepare for the last revision. "It's strange to have this thing in your head for so long, and then suddenly it's in the world and people are reading it," she says. "I can't really think of anything better than getting to share the things you love with readers, like road trips and music."

Currently Matson is back in California, getting a second master's degree, this time in screenwriting at USC. Right now she's just happy to have some time off so she can revise her second novel, currently untitled. "If all goes according to plan, it will come out next summer." And it includes a brief road trip, too—Matson says she couldn't help herself. —Donna Freitas