The Alternative

THE ALTERNATIVE was a newspaper that I started in the 12th grade, with my friends Jeanmarie Condon and Mark Kerner because we were frustrated with the official school paper and wanted to make something better.  Something that students would WANT to read (as opposed to the main rag which trafficked in the passive voice and whose favorite phrase was “a good time was had by all.”  THE ALTERNATIVE would cover issues that (in our opinion) students REALLY were talking about — whether the administration was legally within their rights to search their lockers…why student-teacher relations were so awful…why certain sports got funded and others didn’t…what the reinstatement of the draft might mean to the student body.

Of course it was egregiously flawed, but we really did our best, and I’m proud of those teenagers we were.  We commissioned Mark’s father to design the masthead, which I still think looks cool.  We laid the whole thing out ourselves. BY HAND. Cutting out black tape to make the lines between columns and laboriously trying to make them even (and rarely succeeding.) Working with REPRO (the text of the articles printed on sticky paper that could be cut and fit into the columns.) We sold ads to make money for paper and printing.  We sold subscriptions, and then hand-sold the rest.

But before that, of course, we had to commission all the content (which we didn’t refer to generically as “content” but rather merely thought of as the stuff that would be cool to have in each issue.)  If we came up short, Jeanmarie or I (or, best of all, both of us together) would simply write up new articles, captions, etc., under our own name or assumed names.

I really think the best of our stuff came when we were manic, sleep-deprived, and desperate.  The caption to the photograph of the woman below (I don’t remember where the photo came from, but I assure you it was NOT our principal, or anyone we knew personally) STILL makes me laugh after all these years. Can you read it? Or is it too small?

Just in case you can’t zoom in, here’s what it says:  ”Principal Claudette Majors speaks out against juvenile delinquency. Addressing a chronic problem at Elmont Memorial, Miss Majors expressed a radically new approach, ‘It’s not that they don’t read enough or that there’s a lack of parental interest. I never went for all that intellectual baloney.  The problem is that most kids these days are simply using the wrong Creme Rinse.’  The hard-hitting Majers presented her plan for a kind of ‘mass-Sassoning of our school systems’ at a luncheon with the board of education last Friday.  Later (as shown above) she proved that the new principal practices what she preaches. Rumor has it that all next year’s chairmen will be required to get the Bo Look.*”

*For those of you who are too young to remember, the “Bo” look, was the haircut sported by model Bo Derrick in the movie “10″ and it involved cornrows on people who…well let’s just say who could not carry that off.

What do I take from all this?  Maybe that it’s Creme Rinse that will keep us all from the Fiscal Cliff (though it’s way too late to help ME)?  Maybe I wonder if I still have a sense of humor buried in there somewhere, waiting for the right combination of time, pressure, and a good, funny friend to bring it out?

What’s my Alternative now?

You Know You Haven’t Blogged Recently Enough When…

a) You’ve actually forgotten where on the web your blog IS. (I had to ask Google to remind me.)

b) You’ve completely forgotten both your username and password.

c) You are convinced that even if you begin blogging again, there is no longer anyone out there in the blogosphere who will read your missives.

Well, this is the time of year to just put on your shoes, head out the door and start walking, right? Even if you don’t know where you’re going. Even if you think you’ll probably get tired after a block or two.

After all, didn’t I just cram a full year of calories into my mouth between Hanukkah and Christmas? And didn’t I JUST log my food intake into the new app I downloaded after reading the NY Times article about apps that help you get your eating back on track?

This right here is the literary equivalent of diet redirection! Here is a small burst of good intentions.  Maybe this year I can find a way not only of walking through the door, but of sustaining the walk a bit further down the road.

<Raises a mug of decaffeinated coffee>

Paying Attention to the Numbers

I am thinking of New Years, Anniversaries, and Birthdays.

My father’s birthday falls during the first week of January. This year he turned 82. A fragile 82. But 82 nonetheless. I know he never expected to be around this long, but here he is, the birthday giving me and the rest of our family a moment to think of him. That’s the way with a birthday once you get past the age where it’s a moment to be the star in your elementary school classroom — to go first to recess, maybe, to be the first to eat the cupcake your parent made for you, or to hope, hope, hope for a particular present. Once the concept of mortality actually enters one’s awareness, though, birthdays become an opportunity to think of what we’ve done with our lives, how far we’ve come, how much more we want to accomplish. When it’s the birthday of someone I’m close to, I always think about what that person’s life has meant to me; I flip through the mental, emotional scrapbook of the time we’ve had together and think of how that person has affected my life. I’ve got a birthday coming up February 27^th, which puts me at a nice, round number.  I’ll be doing some emotional scrapbooking of my own soon.

New Year’s celebrations turn that reflection inward. As a Jew, in fact, I do this twice a year, looking back on what I had hoped to do to be a better father, husband, friend, writer, publisher. Inevitably I have fallen short, but I try to use that knowledge not to let myself off the hook, but to remind myself to keep striving. My big brother Dan sent me a postcard once when we were in college (pre-Internet, obviously!) with the quote: “Life is a series of surfaces; the key is to skate over them gracefully.” (That’s at least how I remember the quote now.) I think my experience would add a few things to that quote: Yes, life presents surfaces, but if you don’t look down through the top layer and see what’s below those surfaces, you’re missing the point. Also, when you’re skating you’re bound to fall on your butt repeatedly, so you have to keep getting up and moving even if you’re sore.

Which leads me to Anniversaries.

2012 marks the fifteenth anniversary of Arthur A. Levine Books. Holy Moley!!

At this time of year in 1997, I was working with Norma Fox Mazer to polish the text of WHEN SHE WAS GOOD, a novel with a main character — Em Thurkill, who was so tender, her innate sweetness folded into a tiny nut that was somehow protected from the brutality of her circumstances — that I read the entire book with a lump in my throat. It was the kind of novel that reached out to the part of you that feels battered by life, that acknowledges our deep bruises by fearlessly showing us those of its protagonist. But it did so with an undeniably beautiful, luminous prose that came straight out of the emotional core of Em Thurkill. I wanted the part of me that was like the best part of Em to survive, and reading that novel, PUBLISHING that novel, made me feel as if it might.

By the end of 2012 we’ll have published more than 200 titles at Arthur A. Levine Books. Other survivors have joined Em Thurkill — Thomas Klopper in Guus Kuijer’s The Book of Everything, Marley Sandelski in Lisa Yee’s Warp Speed, Re Jana in Anne Provoost’s In the Shadow of the Ark, the unnamed immigrant in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Marcelo Sandoval in Francisco Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World, and Lida Wallace in Erin Saldin’s The Girls of No Return, to name just a few.

Oh, it hasn’t all been “survival”! We’ve had our laughs (read Andy Rash’s The Robots Are Coming: And Other Problems with a straight face — I dare ya!). We’ve had our explorations of nonfiction (from masters like Russell Freedman no less). And sometimes both at the same time, as in the work of the genius biographer for young people, Jonah Winter (could anyone else make you laugh at Pablo Picasso??).

Over the course of this year, I hope to be celebrating many of the aspects of our publishing program at Arthur A. Levine Books. Every month, we’ll feature a different interpretation of the Lantern Logo as our profile picture, created by some of the brilliant artists who’ve contributed to our list; this month’s lantern is from the delightful Steven D’Amico.  (All you artists out there: Feel free to post your own Lantern Logo interpretation and share it with us!!)

But here, just post-Valentine’s day, close to the start of the year, celebrating the start of our imprint, it seems only fitting to give a special note of thanks and appreciation to all the authors and artists whom we were so proud to introduce to American readers with their debuts (or their debuts in English!):

Leah Bobet
Erin Bow
Deborah Bruss
Elizabeth C. Bunce
Neil Connelly
Kate Constable
Carmela D’Amico
Steven D’Amico
Kevin Emerson
Laura Gallego Garcia
Silvana Gandolfi
Quiara Alegría Hudes
Ana Juan
Guus Kuijer
David LaRochelle
Erin McCahan
Martin Mordecai
Martine Murray
Sally Nicholls
Joanna Pearson
Guillaume Prévost
Anne Provoost
Andy Rash
Trent Reedy
Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich
J. K. Rowling
Erin Saldin
Dan Santat
Karlijn Stoffels
Nahoko Uehashi
Lisa Yee
Linda Zuckerman
Markus Zusak

Thank you for trusting us to bring your work to an American audience with the passion it deserves.  I hope that you all will take our Imprint Anniversary as a chance to think of your own beginnings, as I am doing now with gratitude.

Yours,

Arthur

Community

There’s nothing like sitting alone in an airport full of people to show you the difference between being NEAR and being connected. An airport can be the loneliest place in the world, filled with families squabbling as they make their stressed ways toward or from a vacation, friends together on an adventure, lovers flushed from their time alone.

 

As a writer one spends a lot of time alone too.  Usually for me, it’s sitting with my laptop, trying to make progress…. the world going on without you.  Connection can strike you as purely an Internet term, a virtual possibility, attractive, yet remote.

I wrote the above two paragraphs, waxing melancholic because I was in what I call “Post-Play depression” on the way home after the National SCBWI Conference in Los Angeles, this past summer.  PPD was a phrase I had coined when I was in high school (I’m sure thousands of others used the term independently), in the cast of school plays, where months of work and camaraderie would lead up to one or two performances, intense excitement, exhilaration…and then let down. What do you do the day AFTER the play, when there’s no rehearsal to go to? No performance to anticipate?

I find myself thinking the same thing after a terrific SCBWI conference in Austin, Texas this past weekend. This was, of course, a much smaller, “regional” conference. It lasted one evening and a full day. But it was, in miniature, what the National Conference is writ large. As I sit on the plane home I can close my eyes and hear the friendly, Texan accents. I’m smiling thinking about the generous authors who took time to pick me up at the airport, take me to lunch, allow me to consider myself one of them as I read from MONDAY IS ONE DAY with Julian Hector my co-creator (whom I met for the first time this weekend, and is as sweet as he is talented!).

It’s amazing to me that some people actually used to be a bit snide about SCBW (as it was called many years ago.) Let’s face it, there was a pervasive idea that in its early days the organization was for folks who were just beginning to pursue the idea of being writers, and whose learning curve was steep.

Well, there are still plenty of newcomers at every conference, thank goodness. (After all, wouldn’t literature be like a dried out river bed if new people weren’t always deciding that NOW would be the time to start adding their stories to the stream?) But the SCBWI has become much, much more than a source of information for “newbies.”  At the Austin conference, in typical fashion, I would move from a conversation with Kimberly Willis Holt, a Newbery medalist, to a conversation with a group of writers who’d met at the Vermont College MFA program, to an exchange with a Librarian who’d been on every award committee sponsored by the ALA, to lunch with a brilliant picture book author whose book had won a Caldecott Honor.  Over here in once corner would be a thoughtful newcomer trying to parse the difference between an Imprint Head and a Publisher. (I think perhaps if I still had hair I might wake up with Imprint Head. Sigh.) And in another corner would be Carolyn Coman, Printz Honoree, National Book Award Medalist, and one of the finest writers working in our field, talking to Caldecott Medalist David Diaz.

Furthermore, we’re ALL learning something. In the Austin sessions, I gained some powerful insights, and even a bit of optimism from listening to Stephen Roxburgh talk about the electronic future.  I got hints from social-networking Guru Greg Pincus on how I might help get the word out for MONDAY IS ONE DAY.  And, as always I met writers who I am sure I will be publishing some day. (Especially given my determination to pour my energies into working with people who are as nice as they are talented!)

It feels like a blessing to take five seconds to REFLECT on what I’m doing as a publisher and actually think about how I might do it better.  And it feels great to get out and do some teaching and some sharing of information to a group, when my day job is often taken up with the logistics of working effectively in a large organization.  (It feels great to be appreciated for doing this sharing and teaching too, which I almost always do feel at these conferences.)

So, no wonder I’m feeling a bit of PPL right now. But I’m also feeling inspired. The bookselling landscape, the financial formulae underlying corporate publishers, even the format in which books reach their audience…these things may be changing rapidly.  But what hasn’t changed is the love of writing and storytelling that binds so many of us together.  And what hasn’t changed is the power of community – the reassurance and the support of people with shared goals and passions, coming together.

Thank you for that, SCBWI Austin! And thank you to author Chris Barton, who, as he dropped me off at the airport, gave my writerly tush one final kick: “Think you’ll write another blog this year, Arthur?” he asked.

“I’ll try!” I said.  It takes a village.

It’s not much, but it’s somethin’

Today I figured out (I think) how to add “links” of some other bloggers. And so I added them.  Now back to the grindstone….

Overwhelmed but unbowed

Well, maybe a little bowed.

I cannot believe how much time has passed since my last blog. And I cannot believe how much time has passed since the last time I worked on my novel. And I cannot believe how much work is due YESTERDAY. And I cannot believe how many things I am obligated to read for the grant I agreed to administer and the literary award I agreed to help judge. And I cannot believe that I have two hours of volunteer work for my synagogue scheduled tonight.

I am so tired just typing that. LOL.

But this, my friends in the blogosphere, was not meant to be a whiny, complainy, pity-party blog. It was meant to be a promise that I will get back to writing this. I will get back to all of you. Hope you’re still out there!

Cheers,
Arthur

Well, I have to say I’m blown away by the thoughtfulness restraint and generosity of the conversation about my post “Inclusion.” Folks were willing to express their opinions when they were uncertain of what the response might be – that’s bravery. And when people disagreed, even when they felt that such a disagreement spoke to opinions they held dear, everyone maintained a high level of decorum and respect for the opposing point of view. That’s civility.

So thank you to everyone who made the discussion of “Inclusion” so entertaining and thought-provoking, so brave, and so civil. I have to say that it was way more than I’d imagined when I put down the Horn Book and started to type!

Thus I am learning about blogging. And doubtless making mistakes as I go. So thanks for not only bearing with me, but carrying me along on the currents of discussion.

All of which (now that I’m done being intimidated by it) has me thinking about Ambition and Goals and the relationship between the two. Goals seem like rooms unto themselves: they can be relatively small, clear, and easily defined. Ambitions seem like larger constructions with roofs expanded by things like hope and idealism, their pillars carved out of flawed veins of confidence. Their foundations often erected without conscious thought.

I don’t think I knew enough to have a capital “A” ambition for my blog, beyond opening up a line of conversation with folks who share my interest in writing and thinking. Plus, the fact is that I had an “Arthur’s Blog” button on my website for YEARS without actually writing anything. And what got me going, finally, was narrowing the scope for myself to a goal: to write something once a week. (Oops, off track on goal already!!!)
I am exploring the idea in my head (and through my fingers as I type) that one is most effective when there is a balance between these two things – Ambitions and Goals. And that each endeavor one might want to do in life calls for one or the other to be more prominent.
I’ve always wanted to play the guitar, for instance. I mean, I’ve wanted to play the guitar since I was ELEVEN. And I even took lessons at camp that summer, learning “Eleanor Rigby” and “The Times They Are a Changin’”. But for some reason, I guess I wasn’t satisfied with my progress at the time. And I felt that I’d already sworn my allegiance to the clarinet, on which I was a grizzled two-year veteran. So I decided that it was “too late” to start playing a second instrument, and I dropped it. Remarkably, I have been able to make this same absurd mistake half a dozen times in my life without ever learning anything. Including how to play the guitar.
Finally, I am learning again. And I think the key for me has been to lessen the Ambition (“I want to play WELL. I want to be like those wonderfully soulful, shaggy, guys who can transform a campfire or a party.”) And to focus on a GOAL.
The goal now is to practice every day. Another goal, just behind that, is to be able to change from the D-chord to the C-chord without hesitating.
The ambition was stifling me; even for something as private and inconsequential as learning to play the guitar.
On the other hand, I think my inability to finish the novel I’ve been wanting to write for fifteen years may have more to do with a LACK of ambition on my part.
I have tried many techniques for writing this novel. I had a terrific writers’ group at one point; the other two members have gone on and published the wonderful projects they were working on. For our monthly meetings I would dutifully produce some new material, taking various writers’ good advice and shining my headlights a few yards in front of me, meeting my short-term goals, having faith that eventually I would reach my destination, even though I’d spent the entire trip in the dark.
Instead I ran out of gas. Repeatedly.
I made another leap of progress last summer at the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Conference, sitting in a workshop led by the writer Linda Urban, who was talking about figuring out what the SPINE of one’s novel was. I was sitting next to my pal Ben Watson and he was dutifully scribbling notes and I thought, oh what the heck, let me try this, and BAM! I’d written the “spine” of my novel down on paper and in fact had outlined the whole flippin’ thing! In 45 minutes!!
If I ever actually write this durned novel I’ll have to thank Linda. But so far…well, nothing much has gotten done. It just feels too big, too hard, too overwhelming. And the idea of driving in the dark with my headlights, trusting that I’ll get the whole distance a few yards at a time? Well, that just feels like…driving in the dark with my headlights. Only I’m driving, with a splittin headache, on a wildly twisting, narrow mountain road with no guardrail and a treacherous rocky gulch yawning on my right. And since I don’t know where I’m going, really, I might find that the road ends suddenly. At the edge of a cliff.
I just have this suspicion that I have to psyche myself up to an AMBITION of some sort if I’m ever going to get over this terror. And I don’t think the ambition has to be: “I want to win the Pulitzer Prize.” But it might have something to do with having some Ambition to be a writer at all. At all.
Maybe if I find an ambition for this novel (or for myself as a novelist) that feels reasonable, I’ll be able to construct goals that lead up to it, and which don’t feel futile. Maybe. I’m trying this train of thought out. (Publicly. LOL.)
Is Ambition the thing that gives one confidence and energy? Or the thing that allows you to persevere when you have neither? Or do we working writers simply need something to push writing high enough on the priority list so that it gets done after wage-earning and parenting, attending to friendships and physical issues – all the (other) needs of the heart and the body?

I do think this relationship between an appropriate ambition and well-thought out goals is key in so many endeavors. Once I talked to a fitness trainer about an ambition I had to become someone who could take his shirt off at the beach unselfconsciously. He wisely told me that the part of my body I’d have to change to accomplish that was the brain, and he probably couldn’t help me with that. Ironically, he did. When I focused on a more attainable Ambition I was able to attach smaller fitness goals to it, and make progress.
As an editor and publisher I also have both Ambition and Goals. The Ambition is to leave a legacy of great books for young people that I’ve helped shepherd to their readership. The goals? Those are clear too when I step back from them: Find great authors and illustrators. Read their work. Give them feedback. Meet production deadlines. Inspire the rest of my company to get behind those books. Yet, to be honest, very often the actual workday is too hectic and out of my control to beat it into a shape that supports those goals efficiently.
Which may just mean that in the case of my work as a Publisher, I need to define my daily goals with greater vigor and rigidity.
It’s worth a shot!
And now…I have an editorial letter to finish! (My goal for the day!)
Cheers.