I have to say it

There is so much that tells me I am not supposed to wear my political beliefs on my sleeve. As a teacher and as a writer I am around young people every day and all the time, around those of you who are gathering information, understanding truths, forming your opinions, and that these truths and opinions and beliefs have got to be yours. And I believe that. I know that. But I don't think it can hurt to just say a little bit of what I believe. To tell you that each night as I walk home from the subway, the long stretched out blocks from Flatbush to Franklin, and these posters



illuminated by bedroom lights and dining room lights, framed by curtains and fingerprint streaks, in barbershops and brownstones, these posters, I can't lie, make me crazy with delight and, well, hope. Every night. Without fail.

When your book hits a brick wall

So I was thinking about this project I'm working on, called There Is No Happy Ending, actually, I'm thinking about this project most of the time... and what I'm thinking is. I lost it. I was SO in it and I lost it... what does one do now? It is in the hands, just now, of a reader who might breathe some life into it. But until then. I've never been one to work well on many projects at once. I think it might be time to start another. I feel guilty. But I have this idea. It's about journals and the year Kurt Cobain died. It's about the unexpected relationships that can only happen in secret... but I feel strange abandoning Jacob... can I bring him?

All at once

I have a fever and swollen glands and that kind of aching back that says no, this will only get worse before it gets better. And I am wrapped in bblankets on one of those wintery nights before NYC landlords turn on the heat... and Im drinking tea. And it occurs to me.

I have ARCs. (translation: Advanced Reader's Copy). I have a BOOK of my book. It is this neat little size. It has a cover with my name on it. It's not copy-edited or anything. It is used for reviews (this part I have yet to process. shhhh) Its sort of mind blowing. And in the same week the UPS man delivered these books to my door, I was interviewed by the amazing ladies here... which was my first real writerly interview. And so, although I am drowning in sick now, last week was pretty real as far as this writer thing goes.

I know I should take a picture of it and post it here... me on a bench reading my own book, my own book tucked on a shelf among other *real* books. And I will, maybe, but much like the dialogue I wrote in the book that is sometimes hard to distinguish from the inner monologues of Nadio and Noelle, the reality of this whole thing is sort of hard to distinguish from imagination. So I'm going to leave the photo out of it for now...

Or maybe I'm just feverish and so. A little delirious

Gypsy holiday

We all know I have some trouble sitting still. I get restless, anxious being in one place for too long.

I stop writing well.

Now it is official.

We



are going here



for this



What I mean is, that restlessness, those jumpy feet can still some. Because after much stress, an Alitalia flight fiasco, a desperate bank account, it is now official, I am going to Spain for the winter holidays, meeting Kira in Madrid, renting a car, maybe visiting Jaime in Alicante, maybe, hopefully meeting Jocco and Migi along the coastal way, checking out the magic of Sevilla and Granada, seeing Spain, who knows...

Ok. Deep breaths. Trip planned. I'm back.

In Words

What does graffitti look like in words?

I want to write this



so you can see it on the page, without SEEING it on the page.

But I'm wondering if I don't have it all wrong.

Or maybe I've just been writing the same scene for nine hours.

First Person

I haven't written here for a long time because I am having trouble balancing my school life with my writer life. I have this pact with myself that, for the most part, I'll keep these posts from being about the school life. I'm sometimes mildly successful... but yesterday I had a long awaited talk with my agent, who is not only a constant source of support and inspiration. She is also, and this I find to be the most important part, HONEST. We talked about There Is No Happy Ending (which, by the way, is a *working* title) She told me what is working. And it is the things I love. It is this crazy cast of characters with their bangle bracelets and jagged haircuts. It is the emotion of everything new and doing things you probably shouldn't. It is the feeling guilty that you get to do things your parents couldn't.

What isn't working? Well, the pacing. Slowslowslow. This I knew was true. I can fix this. And the narrator. Every character in this project is so real. Except Rory. Somehow I neglected to fill her out. And now, she stands at a cold distance from the reader.

What if, I whispered into the phone yesterday, what if I changed the narration to first person?

I really think that could work, agent affirmed. Which I was afraid of.

The narrator seems uncertain of her, agent went on.

Yes, I said. She is. I am.

So what if Rory were the narrator?

Ok. I don't have a good reason for making this story third person. I simply wanted it to work. I wanted to do it well because it is so rare that I read a good story about seventeen that is in the third person. So does this mean I can't do it well? Or does it simply mean Rory needs to speak to the reader, because it is her story being told, because without her voice speaking up she seems cold and flat and made of paper. I'll have to see.

Speaking of first person and COMPLETELY off topic. Please check out this blog. This is a project just beginning at my old job. I used to work with some of these students and I will talk until the end of time about how amazing they are. Look for yourself.

(ps, yes, that is me not keeping school life separate again... I try.)

One million kids

I went back to school today. Not back to school like pen and notebooks and listening to lectures, but back to school like I do now, on the teacher side of things. I'm at a new school this year. A beautiful brand new building with high windows and sun soaked floors and students from every borough and dozens of countries. Today we drew maps of our past and wrote stories about our names. And we wrote poems about the subway. I love my new commute. Its this long winding elevated ride through three boroughs. And I get to see this along the way...



this amazing place called Five Points in Long Island City. And you can imagine this sends all kind of electricity through Jacob.

Then today we read this fantastic poem called 'Night Subway'.

And we did some work imitating the venerable Katha Pollit. And I admitted that I too always wanted to write about the subway. I once wrote about finishing a book by Jim Lewis on the N train over the 59th street bridge, crying my first unstoppable public New York City tears as the book came to a close with the skyline behind me.

But today. O today. I forgot that one million students went back to school today. And tens of thousands of their teachers and aides and coaches. And the subway platform looked like this.



And the air conditioner in my car was broken. And the sneakers in my bag left imprints on my hipbone everyone was pressed so tight.

But we wrote some pretty fantastic subway poems today.

Because it's too late at night and I have too many lists

I do more than a few things to make a living. Mainly, I’m a counselor. In a high school. I teach English too. Sometimes I teach creative writing in an after school program. I also wrote a book. And, well, I guess I can say I write books. In the present tense. This week all of these things I do have been crashing together as I prepare to start a new school year at a new school and try to keep to a writing schedule. I spent four days in western Massachusetts last week, studying the theories and practices of a particular very familiar institute and it made me think (intensely, like it is two a.m. and I can’t sleep kind of think) about the way we build writing into our lives. In all of the things I do for a living writing is central. I do it not only to tell the stories that come to me at two a.m. but also to re-imagine the stories I pass on the street and bump into on the subway platform. I do it as therapy. I do it as a way of understanding myself, I teach it as a way of asking questions of yourself. I teach it as a way of understanding texts and making comparisons and digging out new ideas and explaining why you love or hate something. I do it because I can’t sleep and putting together the words to understand why makes my muscles relax and my brain slow slow slow down. I do it because something I’ve learned is that the stories people tell are the way we see the world. So all of these things I do, which sometimes seem to tumble and bang into each other, are actually inherently tied together by this truly simply act.

Then and Now

So I've been away for a long time. Not away, really but. I had some computer problems. And I moved. And I travelled. And I left one job and started another one. And I got sad. And I had some problems with words. And I want to tell you some stories. But tonight, I'm just going to tell you this one. I went to California.

And in California, I got to do this.



What I mean is, I got to spend 24 hours with some of my favorite people in the world. People who I lived in Rome with, traveled and taught with and wrote stories about and wrote stories for and missed and celebrated. It was 24 hours of laughing and then I thought of something. It reminded me of this.



Because two years ago I was on the deck or hiking a to a white sand beach from a cliff-side house with almost exactly the same people, laughing until too late at night and getting sunburned. We're a little bit older now and this time we read magazines and drank coffee in the silence of people exhausted by not having enough time to catch up, of people holding off the moment, just one more second until we break off in a million directions.



Two years ago we played board games in a house in Greece carved out of a hillside, in the quiet of people who have all the time in the world to spend countries and see island sunsets and whitewashed churches.



I can't help remembering that these people made the sunsets look like this.



And in California, after reuniting, and writing and walking through harbors and lying on beaches and eating tacos and watermelon, the sunset looked more like this.



The beaches were beautiful in California, in the morning, when it was still foggy and only me and the surfers were awake and I ran along the train tracks, but these days I'm sure missing some people.

I'm OK too.

Along with dozens of writers, YA and otherwise, this week, I want to talk about Margo Rabb’s piece in the Sunday Times Book Review. (and also say, if you haven't read, you should certainly read Rabb's Cures for Heartbreak, which is indeed heartbreaking, and funny and true and beautifully written)

My first instinct is to stand up for my genre, so to speak, to say that Rabb is perpetuating a snobbery that is not nearly so widespread as she thinks. But the truth is, I know exactly how she feels. The words of Mark Haddon and the defenses of Peter Cameron are scarily familiar. Apparently, if you write for an audience who is still in high school, your intellectual capacity is questionable, your literary merit dubious. You get funny looks and awkward silences and conversations come to strange halts. I was in a conversation last week in which an educator, referring to a series of books used for a particular course stated: “This one is a young adult title but I found it very valuable.”

But.

My editor, Andrew Karre, has an approach to YA Literature that is inspiring, comforting and frankly, makes a lot of sense. He believes that “young adult is a point of view, not a reading level.” I can't help but want to ask the YA critics of the world about the novels they've celebrated that were narrated by a child or a teeanager--just not marketed to them.

I had never set out to write a young adult book before I wrote THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO TELL YOU. In fact, it began, as I’ve said before, as a book about the twins’ mother, a very dark and grown-up story. But the more I wrote, the more it changed. What I wanted to write about was intensity and passion and first times and an inability to not tell the truth. I wanted to write a story that was specific about an experience that was universal. And what, I thought, was more universal than adolescence, the raw pain and joy and experimentation. Apparently, this makes me a certain kind of writer.

And whatever kind of writer this is, maybe the kind that won’t be reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement or excerpted in The New Yorker or blurbed by Nathan Englander or Andre Aciman (I note these two authors, not because of anything they’ve ever said about YA Literature, simply because they wrote my favorite books this year), it is the kind of writer I am. I’ve found an actual home in the stories I write now. I may have to defend the literary merit of my books from here on out, but I’m hoping my audience can speak to that.