Geeking Out Over Collaborations

My love for both John Green and M. T. Anderson has led me to another dated discovery:

The hot-hot-hot themed YA anthology!

Collections of short stories by rockin' authors are popping up all over, and again I'm late to the party. But that's okay! Late to a party equals awesome! (NOT early. NOT on time. These, to a party, are not so awesome. These are tragic and send a gal home by 8:30 in tears.)

FIRST anthology is Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales published by Candlewick in August 2004. I'm putting this first even though I have no real idea if it has a predecessor. If you know of another first, let me know! This cool collection came out with authors like Neil Gaiman, Celia Rees, Gregory Maguire, and of course, M. T. Anderson. (no. not obsessed.)

SECOND anthology is Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd, published by Little, Brown in August 2009. Holly Black collected stories along with her friend and co-ComiCon attendee, Cecil Castellucci. Contributing authors include M. T. and John Green, natch, as well as Sara Zarr, Cassandra Clare, David Levithan, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Scott Westerfeld, Garth Nix, and Libba Bray.

Side-note: I ADORE 2009-LIBBA BRAY. I'm sure 2011-Libba Bray is just-as-if not-more adorable, but 2009-Libba Bray made this video promoting her Printz-winner, Going Bovine. Please watch, even if you never click on links. Three minutes of adorable in a cow costume.

I admit it: this is why I write. Not to write, but to write with friends like Libba who rock cow costumes in New York City. More on this thought in a second.

THIRD anthology is Zombies vs. Unicorns, collected again by Holly Black, this one published by Margaret K. McElderry Books in September 2010. This collection offers six stories pro-unicorns, and six stories pro-zombies. Contributing authors include Carrie Ryan, Maureen Johnson, Meg Cabot, and more fun from Cassandra Clare, Garth Nix, Scott Westerfeld, and Libba Bray.

John Green posted a vlog about this debate in 2007 and described unicorns as the "horned beasts of suck." Also, he questions, "What have unicorns ever accomplished? Providing transport for the Care Bears to and from the Forest of Feelings?" :)

LATEST collection is Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories. This one came out by Candlewick in October 2011. It was put together by Kelly Link, but Holly Black still contributes, along with Corey Doctorow, M. T., Garth Nix, Cassandra Clare, and Libba Bray.

(Afterthought disclamier: This list of four books is, of course, in no way exhaustive and is as extensive as my Googling skills allow.)

So--I want to say how awesome I think this is--writers consistently publishing together.

I mean, I'm not saying that all these writers got together and wrote their stories in one big house, sharing coffee duties and pizza runs. However, clearly the community--as John said in his vlog--had been discussing the topics for months. I don't know, but I imagine that the books came out of those discussions. So community created art, rather than art bringing together a community.

I love that.

But, as an extension of that thought, why not gather together in a big house and write? Why can't we do that? Percy Shelley did, at Leigh Hunt's, with John Keats. Some writers used to write together. Some said--Shelley certainly said--they needed the companionship for inspiration. So I say YAY anthologies! YAY communities of writers collaborating and inspiring one another. I cannot WAIT to join you. I will totally take the first pizza run.

So my friends, who would you want in your big writers' house? Who would be in charge of meals? Who would you borrow toothpaste from? :) Who would you love to toss ideas around with over slices of pepperoni pizza?

Harris Burdick Lives!

Joy, Joy, so much Joy!

So, for Chris Van Allsburg fans, the nearly unthinkable has happened. New stories have been written for the collection of enigmatic illustrations in his 1984 book, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.

Just released October 25th is AN AMAZING COLLECTION of 14 stories inspired by the original artwork. The list of contributing authors is stunning. Inside we will find works by

Sherman Alexie
Kate DiCamillo
Cory Doctorow
Stephen King
Lois Lowry
Gregory Maguire
Walter Dean Myers
M. T. Anderson
and more!

Check out this hilarious clip that shows some of the authors and the pictures they chose to write about.

Can you stand it? Are you running to the bookstore now? Wait! While you're there, check to see if Chris Van Allsburg is coming to talk about this new release. Because I discovered he and beautiful M. T. will be in Chicago on November 17. Check it out!

And cross your fingers that my lovely, giving, self-sacrificing, wonderful, gorgeous sister will help me drive down there to see them. (Talented, hilarious, kind, creative, generous sister. . . )

So my friends, whose story are you looking forward to reading the most? Which picture from the original are you the most curious about?

I Dreamed of My NaNo Last Night

So a student came into class declaring, today. “Did you dream of your story, or did you dream of you writing the story?” I asked her.

“Of me writing,” she said.

What happiness! A small sprawl of seventh graders swarmed my classroom floor and wrote this morning. Today we NaNo WriMo-ers are living our dream of writing. What propels us from our ‘such stuffs’ into reality? Or, a stiffer metaphor, what shots of inspiration are you knocking back? Here are a few of mine:

1) A practical, hilarious list of NaNo preps on Lola Sharp’s fantastic blog. Do read it; you’ll be so glad to learn that others stock freezers, warn spouses of hygienic neglect, and of course, avoid all hosting responsibilities.

2) Laini Taylor’s recent post on Creating Your Life. It’s pasted beside my kitchen sink, so I can remind myself not to shrink my dreams while I’m cleaning Clara’s breakfast dishes.

3) My kitchen. This is where the magic will happen. One of Laini's Ladies smiles down amidst a flourish of mirrored butterflies. The script on the side of the purple-winged fairy quotes Rumi: "I am so happy, I cannot be contained by the world. I have blossomed so much, I am the envy of gardens." So mote it be. :)

4) M.T. Anderson’s talk at the National Book Festival last year. Quite a bit of his talk here is the same I heard last month; the Dogtown anecdote is missing because it was new and therefore had, as he said, the vigor of the unrehearsed. Watching this clip, you will be inspired by his glorious romance with geography. Also, you will learn he is hypoglycemic. Terribly, terribly important resource material.

4 1/2) M. T. Anderson's talk on Place from 2007. As mentioned in my earlier post, it’s by my mirror so I can memorize it while coiffing. I’m up to, “I would like to speak of Stow, Massachusetts.”


Okay, now I'm off! I have seven pages to write before my girl gets up in an hour. :) Wish me the best of luck; I'm sending all my best loves and laughs to you. Happiest of writing, Dreamers.

Love and Magic

We partied at school today, students and teachers alike. Of course I had to try to coil a bright blue wig around a couple of paint brushes, wear my new favorite wishbone, and go as Karou. :)


I hardly do her justice, right? But I had to try. I carried my signed copy of Daughter of Smoke and Bone around the halls with me, sharing the good news of brilliant Laini Taylor to all who would hear. :)

Incidentally, the Queen of the Night there, beside me, is Becky, our science teacher. Becky is the smartest person I know. How can she be that adorable AND know everything about everything? It's not fair. Stars? She knows them. Volcanoes? Knows 'em. Fishes? Knows. Physics and spiders and electricity and turtle poop--she knows about it all. I love LOVE working across the hall from her. I hear the weirdest, most disturbing stuff through her open door, especially when gerbils die, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

And since I'm sharing things I love, I have to again say that I love M. T. Anderson. I read this speech he shared while accepting the Boston Globe/Horn Book award for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, and I've decided I'm going to memorize it. I'm hanging the speech beside my mirror so I can ingest its wisdom and vocabulary while curling my hair. That way, when he comes back, I can say so much more than, "Thank you for coming to Wisconsin." I can say things like "fatuous emotion," "vertiginously rapid," and "vernacular of Americana."

I also read this short piece about his telling a classmate about the color of dinosaurs, and I laughed so hard I cried.

And then I found this lovely, long interview from years ago. I learned others love the M. T., too, and also that he hates the word 'slacks' because it smells of thigh-sweat.

Just passing the good word tonight--there's so much out there to love. Halloween, and amazing coworkers and characters and creators. What are you just loving tonight?

M. T. Anderson Charms Sheboygan

Beautiful lake-side Sheboygan hosted its second annual Children’s Book Festival on October 14-16. I drove 90 minutes east on Saturday, October 15, to join 3 dozen teens and adults listen to Matthew Tobin Anderson speak on the mythology of American landscape.

We gathered at 1:00 at Sheboygan’s Mead Public Library. It’s a wide-windowed library, one clearly well-loved and well-funded. The third floor holds the children’s library as well as the Maas Teen Learning Center, a long conference-like room wrapped in aqua and cobalt blue. I studied the orange, green, and maize squares of the carpet while eavesdropping as a volunteer encouraged Anderson to order something to eat between sessions. He responded with gentle embarrassment, asking her often “Really?” and then joking of needing a filet mignon, medium-rare.

His voice, by the way, is as rich as James Spader’s. Think Steff in “Pretty in Pink.” Yet he’s funny and disarming. My god, it’s like he’s Duckie and Steff rolled into one—how’s a girl to learn anything when confronted with such a package? Especially when the package is wearing salmon-colored All Stars.

He began his 30-minute talk, and I did my best to pay attention. I was distracted by visions of my parents NOT having moved from Massachusetts when I was a baby. Then Anderson and I could have been next-door neighbors. We could have biked to the Carnegie-era brick library together and whispered among the pages of Conan the Barbarian, writing fake names in the yellowed check-out cards.

Clearly, I’m crushing on the M. T. Where is his fan page? I looked. Couldn’t find one. Seriously? No one is tracking his tours? What he had for lunch? (It was a ham sandwich.) Come on, cyber world. Start obsessing about quality, will you? There’s quality here, wearing pinkly-orange Chucks.

Okay—back to the conference room. Anderson began with a humble note that he’d had only one connection to Wisconsin—he had met our Butter Queen at a friend’s wedding. “I had expected her to be a greasier, more gelatinous creature,” he quipped, “but she was quite a lovely person.”

Landscape was his topic—our own rugged, revised American landscape. His devotion to landscape developed as a child reading adventure stories and histories that recorded folks doing on paper what largely is lost in the lives of the modern American: discovering vast, howling wildernesses. He was enraptured by the romance of geography and the mood of space.

How right and yet how surprising for me to consider America full of romance and mood. I fall into the spell—as he notes many writers do—of the magic of medieval Europe, of its henges and moors, its castles and lochs. But America is rich with its own witchery and lore. To that end, Anderson makes a point of collecting local ghost stories. Not only do they detail new, often private locations, but they poignantly display what he describes as the poetry of American emptiness—that loneliness that comes with night time walks in wide meadows and deep forests. The tellers of these tales, he says, are often more entertaining than the ghosts, themselves.

I have learned that author Linda Godfrey collected Wisconsin’s monster stories and is sharing them at the Neenah Library in a couple of weeks. My middle schoolers and I will be in the front row. How perfect an opportunity to experience local ghost stories with newly-opened minds. We will hear not only about UFO sightings and haunted locales, but we will hopefully see the landscape of our own state unfold ornately before us.

His presentation included layers of tales about a small settlement named Dog Town in Massachusetts. I suppose it would be rude for me to reproduce his notes, right? In brief, he showed pictures of the current location and told stories of the town from the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The stories built up: what did happen, what happened in reaction to what happened, what happened on top of that, and then Anderson’s own jokey bits added on top of that—all of the area’s history of sadness, all of the magic of human involvement and connection, and all of the loneliness of the trees and boulders that carry centuries of secrets—these things together build landscape.

Landscape should be a more emotionally potent force in our stories than even our characters.

Now are we all in love? Because we should be. A Harvard-educated, National Book Award-winning author just shared brilliant stuff that will change our books forever, and he did it with generosity of spirit and maybe even a twinkle in his eye.

During Q & A time, an enthusiastic teen asked how in the world Anderson wrote in such varying voices. Particularly, Whales on Stilts contrasts with the sober tone of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. Anderson revealed that he actually wrote those books simultaneously. Researching his 18th century story thrust him deep into that odd, stylized, gracious tone that referred to breeches, not pants, and required specific buckles on each shoe. Giving himself a holiday, he created the Pals in Peril series. Taking three or four weeks to write Whales on Stilts, he got his irreverence out, and he was ready to revisit Octavian’s sobriety.

His books were piled for purchase in the children’s library, and I picked up both Octavian Nothing and the latest Pals in Peril. I stood between a group of four teens, each holding a copy of Feed, and an area teacher carrying two or three plastic bags bulging with books. I thought it was fantastic how he so clearly delights readers of all ages.




This is M.T. Anderson NOT in Sheboygan. I have no pictures of him in Sheboygan because I was a bit too shy. But look at the socks. And read his books and website. And fall in love as you should and must.