 20 years of Master Class to Masterpiece |
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III. ON A PERSONAL NOTE… Undoubtedly, you love many children’s books, both classics and contemporary. Please cite three middle-grade and YA favorites. What makes each unforgettable? I have so many favorites. Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence has been one since I was a child—her economy of language, her wit, and her uncanny ability to get right into the head of a serious, thoughtful eleven-year-old boy elevate this series above so many other fantasies. I’ve thought about Margo Lanagan’s The Brides of Rollrock Island every single day since I read it a few years ago. No one else has a voice like hers, and I love how she uses folklore as a foundation for her stories of longing and love, abuse and vengeance. My favorite contemporary YA novel, I think, is E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. It’s funny; Frankie is such an appealing main character; the culture at her prep school is gently insidious and thoroughly believable; and Frankie’s conflict—how do you stand up to sexism when you still want boys to like you?—is pertinent and poignant. I recommend it to everyone I meet who says they “don’t read YA.” How does meeting writers at workshops (or elsewhere in person) affect you, your perspective, your work? What do you enjoy? Working with writers in person makes such a refreshing change from the emails and phone calls that usually fill my days—I don’t get to do it often enough. Meeting authors gives me a sense of who they are beyond their writing, and that can often help me understand their work better. Having time to do that at the Pacific Coast Children’s Writers Workshop is a real draw for me. What would you like writers to know about you, the individual who scrutinizes (and may reject) their literary labor of love? This business is so subjective. There so many reasons an agent might decline a project: it’s not their taste; they already have a slightly similar book they’re working on already; they’re not really looking for a particular genre or age category at the moment, but they haven’t updated their bio on their agency website. Persistence is everything—I have a client who queried dozens and dozens of agents before I offered them rep, and I sold their book at auction. All it takes is one “Yes”—agents know that’s true, because we get rejected, too! |
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