Penguin Random House account marketing v-p Ruth Liebmann described the Mountain & Plains Independent Booksellers annual trade show, which took place October 11–13, as “having this family reunion energy—if you come from a family where everyone loves each other.” That MPIBA members are a close-knit community certainly was evident at this year’s gathering, which drew to Denver’s Renaissance Stapleton Hotel 273 booksellers representing 67 stores, and 180 individuals staffing 122 exhibit tables, representing 500 companies.
Despite the wealth of offerings in the exhibit area, the big draws for booksellers this year—as it is traditionally with these booksellers—are the authors, as well as their colleagues who do business in a far-flung and diverse region that contains one of the country’s most densely populated states (Texas), as well as the most sparsely populated (Wyoming).
“For me, it’s all about the authors at Mountains & Plains,” Jeanie Costello of Maria’s Bookshop in Durango, Colo., said, “These panels, with the authors speaking in front of a captive audience—it’s the best party.”
Costello praised the speakers who took part in the Children’s Author and Illustrator Breakfast that kicked off this year’s show on Thursday: Mac Barnett, author of Mac Undercover (Orchard, Sept.); Ellen Hopkins, author of People Kill People, (McElderry, Sept.); Andrea Beaty, author of Rosie Revere and the Raucous Riveters (Amulet, Oct.); and Adam Gidwitz and Joseph Bruchac, co-authors of Unicorn Rescue Society: Sasquatch and the Muckleshoot (Dutton, Nov.). Costello noted that “they all spoke to today; they spoke of their books, which contain themes of diversity and inclusion. These are all the right books at the right time. And the authors had a great dynamic, as a group.”
This year, there were 85 featured authors at MPIBA, and a majority of them were children’s authors. While the Children’s Author and Illustrator Breakfast and Friday’s Young Readers Round-Up Speed Dating session focused only on children’s books, most of the other panels featured presentations by a mix of adult and children’s authors.
Two of the four speakers at the Authors of Future Releases Breakfast were children’s authors: one, a familiar name, Holly Goldberg Sloan, is the co-author with Meg Wolitzer of the middle grade novel To Night Owl from Dogfish (Dial, Feb. 2019); and debut novelist Ben Philippe, the author of The Field Guide to the North American Teenager (HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray, Jan. 2019).
While she has written five novels previously, this is the first time Sloan has collaborated with another writer. After meeting at a writers’ conference years ago, she and Wolitzer became good friends, even though Sloan lives in Los Angeles and Wolitzer lives in New York City. Disclosing that they both “like to be in control” and were warned by their editors that a collaboration between two authors “with such distinctive voices” might not end well, the two wrote the novels as emails between the characters—which actually were the emails that passed between Sloan and Wolitzer, as they assumed the voices of the different characters.
“We had to wait for the other person to respond before moving along,” Sloan said. “We may both like to be in control, but we weren’t in control.” She called their story of two girls, each with a gay father, “a gay Parent Trap.” After the two fathers meet and become romantically involved, they send their daughters to the same summer camp.
Explaining that she writes in the hope that her words on the page will change the way children see the world while entertaining them, Sloan noted that she and Wolitzer wanted to write about children who don’t have typical families, such as children with one parent—who is gay. “The gay theme is not so important as that two girls are forced together, who may become sisters,” she added
Though Sloan was a hard act to follow, Philippe wowed booksellers with the presentation of his debut novel, “the story of yet another black Canadian who moves to the U.S.” Philippe, a French-Canadian of Haitian descent who moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, said that the protagonist of The Field Guide to the North American Teenager, Norris, is very much like him, except that Norris moves to Austin from Canada and is enrolled in a public high school there. “And Norris is 5’11, while I am 5’8. This is crucial. If I were three inches taller, I’d be a monster,” he joked.
Philippe explained that he spent much of his teenage years watching American sitcoms set in high schools—and still watches such TV programs to this day. All that intensive television watching wasn’t for naught, he said, “I kinda cracked the American teenager. That human puzzle, I cracked it.”
There are “three golden rules that apply to every teen,” he explained: “One: Every teen falls in love. And it’s an all-consuming, obsessive love. Two: Teens like to put labels on other people and things. It’s their way of making the world smaller, of understanding yourself and everyone around you. Three: Teens push boundaries. Teens are kind of assholes, jerks. They’re supposed to be. They assume, by default, the world is going to keep them safe. So they push.”
Philippe’s talk turned serious as he described his upbringing in suburban Montreal, as the son of a single mother. He recalled how he pressured his mother into allowing a 2 a.m. curfew in his teens, and she responded by cautioning him that the suburb they lived in shut down by 10 p.m. and that he did not have a car; it would not be worth it. She was right, he said, but he could not admit it that first late night out, so he sat for hours at a bus stop—as a police car kept driving slowly by him, flashing its lights on him. “This experience stayed with me,” he said. “It’s called racism. By day I lived at [an address], but that night I was an unknown.”
Even though Philippe had watched so many situation comedies, he said, he never saw characters like himself in them. He wrote The Field Guide to the North American Teenager, he said, because he wanted to see “a black teen who didn’t come with any presuppositions. Norris is just a normal teen who wants to go to the high school prom with the girl he loves.”
While the children’s authors who spoke to MPIBA booksellers all noted that their goal is to expand horizons, and to open hearts and minds, Laini Taylor, author of the YA fantasy novel Muse of Nightmares (Little, Brown, Oct.) said so most effectively, creating a buzz among booksellers that continued through the next day’s events winding up the show.
Taylor, who spoke at Friday evening’s Author Banquet along with Valerie Jarrett, Tom Clavin, and Leif Enger, delivered pointed remarks about why she wrote fantasy fiction and why such literature is relevant, especially in a world where people too often allow each other to “agree to disagree,” even when it comes to the expression of opinions that should be deemed unacceptable in a civilized society.
“Racism and sexual assault are objectively terrible,” she said. “Stealing children away from their parents and throwing them in detention camps is objectively terrible. Destroying the planet for short-term profit is objectively terrible. Are people entitled to believe in and support terrible things? Yes. I guess they are. Are they entitled to believe in them and support them in peace, without challenge, with so much at stake? No. They’re not.”
“What fantasy books do, and sci-fi, too,” she noted, “[is] take the issues that divide us and divorce them from their familiar context so that we can see them anew, unclouded by our fixed beliefs.”
While providing an escape from the real world, fantasy literature also teaches readers an important lesson that can be applied to their daily lives, Taylor said. “Anyone can be a hero, and not just that. Anyone decent would and should be a hero, and would and should step up. If society is going to function, we have to protect human rights and dignity and decency, and we have to be willing to have uncomfortable conversations and maybe alienate people, if that’s what it takes to let them know that their beliefs and behavior cross that line.”
Claudia Maceo, manager of The Twig Bookstore in San Antonio, Tex., described the Author Banquet speakers, especially Taylor, as “so powerful,” adding, “Every single event has had standout speakers, but the energy [at the Author Banquet] was palpable. The voices were so different, but every single one made me want to stand up and cheer.”
