Lisa Jahn-Clough has been in the field of children’s literature as author, illustrator, and professor since 1994 and has published over a dozen picture books and three young adult novels. She has an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College and currently teaches at Rowan University. Lisa lives with her husband and their two dogs in a little yellow house in Portland, Maine in the summer and across from a cornfield in southern New Jersey in the winter.

Your new young adult novel, NOTHING BUT BLUE (Houghton Mifflin, 2013), doesn’t fit neatly into any subgenre. Shadow, the telepathic stray that acts as your main character’s companion, doesn’t help clarify one, either. How would you characterize the book?

I suppose I am still waiting for someone to tell me what type of book NOTHING BUT BLUE is. In my mind it is a mostly realistic story about a character who survives a tragedy, with occasional magical elements. One reviewer labeled it as survival fiction, and yes, Blue is a survivor, so that could be right. Another reviewer said it has touches of the spiritual, which probably is a reference to Blue’s connection to nature as well as to the stray dog.

The lack of obvious subgenre may have been a risk, and it may very well confuse and annoy some readers, but it was a risk I was willing to take. I’ve never liked labels to begin with, so a part of me is pleased that you find this novel difficult to pigeon-hole. My goal has always been to write the story that works, and not have to define it as a certain type of story. I leave that to my readers!

However, there were things I wanted to attempt in this novel that may help clarify a genre. I wanted to eliminate all superficial materialism, which is why Blue has literally lost everything she owns. I wanted my character to live in the absolute present, which meant attempting a style of present-tense that had little to no reference to past or future. I wanted my character to go on a journey—every story takes a character on a metaphorical journey, but I wanted mine to go on a literal journey as well.

I also wanted to exaggerate feelings of isolation, which is why Blue is (mostly) alone. She walks approximately 500 miles with no money, no food, no phone, no memory, in a state of shock with limited resources. At first she is completely alone, but that is not sustainable for a novel, so I had to give her something to interact with. She runs into a motley collection of characters, but she needed something more constant, even if only to give her some dialogue to break up the monotony of narration. I was wondering who that would be, when I looked up to meet the gaze of my dog lying on the couch in my office. He raised his head at me, and I said, “Of course, a dog!” My dog seemed pleased with that and went back to sleep.

That’s where the telepathic stray dog comes in. It’s not clear if Shadow (the dog) is literally or figuratively speaking to Blue, but Blue needs companionship so badly that she believes he is. This is what gives the novel its possible otherworldly element.

The dog-human bond is really quite magical, especially if you spend a lot of time together—you begin to read one another’s moods and desires, so the level of communication can sometimes feel very real. I mean, I talk to my dogs all the time and often get a sense that they are communicating back to me. I wanted to try to capture this type of relationship between Blue and Shadow, yet make it somewhat surreal. But it really depends on how the reader interprets it.

NOTHING BUT BLUE is told in dual narrative—sections alternate between Blue’s past and her present. What were some of the challenges of writing in such a complex POV?

A major tragedy occurs just before the novel opens. I wrote most of the present-tense “now” scenes first, not necessarily in order, where Blue has no memory of this event and can only focus on the absolute present. When I’d written twenty or so scenes, all in present tense from the point of view of a girl suffering from Acute Stress Disorder, I realized the reader would need more clues to sustain interest and to have an understanding of who Blue was in the past in order to compare her to how she is in the present. Blue is in the dark, but the reader shouldn’t be.

So I started writing sections in Blue’s past voice in the three months prior to the tragedy. Originally I thought they might be flashback scenes interwoven with the present, but for the sake of clarity I made them separate chapters. The story of the past and the story of the present eventually come together but not until the very end when Blue regains her memory in a final chapter titled, “Before and Now.”

One of the most fun challenges was to never reveal Blue’s real name in the entire novel. Blue is the name she gives herself in the present, but even in the “before” chapters I never once wrote her name. I do know what her real name is, but I won’t ever tell. In my mind, she leaves the past behind and transforms into her much stronger present self—named Blue.

Your previous YA novel, ME, PENELOPE (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), was the target of a 2009 book banning in Orlando, Florida. What’s the most valuable lesson you took from that experience?

In ME, PENELOPE, the protagonist wants to lose her virginity before going to college and ends up having safe and emotionally healthy mutual sex with a very dear friend. The thing that the banners took issue with was not so much that she has sex, but that she has a desire to have sex, and that when she finally does have sex it is enjoyable. Honestly, I think if sex was forced on her, or she’d ended up having a bad experience and “learned her lesson,” it would not have been banned. There’s nothing graphic in the book at all.

I feel as though I went through a rite of passage and have joined the ranks of those who have a banned book—it is quite good company. But in the scheme of things it was not that paramount. It was just one county, and although I have received several “hate” emails it is nothing like some YA authors receive.

The main thing I took away was to not engage with readers who yell at you. Do not defend your work to those who approach it with an ideology already in mind. At first I wanted to explain to the parents and school board why I wrote ME, PENELOPE the way I did, but after several attempts at unsent responses it became very clear that I would never be able to explain my character’s choices, and nor should I have to, no matter how tempting it may be. I wanted to retaliate by defending by explaining free speech and intellectual freedom, etc., but when someone is so mad at a book, the writer’s defense will be useless.

You’ve said that you’ve built your writing career around “a lonely character finding companionship through love or friendship”—and that falling in love with your now-husband derailed you for a few years. How did you move past the fear that “there was nothing else to write about”?

I am one of those writers that started in childhood. I liked people fine, but I never needed a lot of friends and I never liked superficiality (I still don’t). When it came to my work I was a complete loner. I need quiet in my brain, which means not being distracted or attending to anyone.

But the irony is that so much of my work, even as a young child, was about loneliness and finding connection. My melancholy drove my work. I wanted to connect with someone, but there was always this fear that if I did I’d have nothing left to write about. I thought if I ever had a serious partner I’d lose my creative self. I was also incredibly driven to have a career as an author and professor and a relationship was not my priority.

However, love is a strange thing in that it hits you at a time when you are both ready and not ready, and it happens both incredibly fast and painfully slow. And it wasn’t just falling in love that derailed me, although that was definitely a big change in my life and any big change, good or bad, causes a shift. At the same time, my editor retired after I’d been working with him for fourteen years. My now-husband, then boyfriend, took a job down south. I left my job and we moved together. [This] was a lot of transition. In fact I probably felt a bit like Blue—lost, confused and unsure of where I was headed and what I’d left behind. (Without the tragedy, of course.)

I was writing, but everything I wrote was crap that had no spark and no one wanted to publish. Was my biggest fear true—did love leave me with nothing left to say? Was it the relationship, or was it all because of my editor retiring?

Inevitably, after writing crap for a year, something decent will emerge. So I suppose I found my way back by writing. It just took longer than usual. The next picture book that found a publisher was FELICITY AND CORDELIA: A TALE OF TWO BUNNIES, about two characters who are friends from the get-go; their problem is how to balance being happy together with maintaining independent desires. It was definitely a different approach to my writing and it felt right, and it reopened the door to my career and paved the path to write NOTHING BUT BLUE.

In addition to a robust career as an author and an illustrator, you’re an assistant professor of creative writing at Rowan University, in Glassboro, New Jersey. Which idea or concept do you find the most difficult to teach?

I teach both undergraduate and graduate level courses in creative writing and writing for children and young adults. In the undergrad classes the hardest thing to teach is how to be imaginative. I can go over craft issues such as tense, point of view, character, dialogue but those are basic necessities. Those are all things that can be taught and learned. But my ultimate desire is to allow students to feel free enough to let go of their preconceptions of what writing should be, and especially of what writing for children should be, and to take risks and be a bit absurd. I think I’ve been getting better at finding ways to inspire and getting them to find ways into the absurd. But it is still a challenge.

Voice is also a challenge to teach, and this is often where originality and quirkiness begins. Some students have a very natural, easy style to their writing that is very much from themselves, even if the writing has nothing to do with themselves. Others are clearly trying too hard. It is very difficult to explain “trying too hard.”

So more and more I want them to be playful. Having them write in-class, having them write outside of class, and having them read interesting books is the best way to do this.

I think writing is a lot about being comfortable and confident—two things that can be hard to force—and it comes with practice, trust, and faith.

Download the discussion guide for NOTHING BUT BLUE here.



5 Questions With... Daniel Kraus (SCOWLER)

5 Questions With... Ruta Sepetys (BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY)

Rachel Shukert is the author of EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE GREAT, HAVE YOU NO SHAME?, and the Starstruck novels. She has been fascinated by the Golden Age of Hollywood since she was a girl, when she used to stay up all night watching old movies and fall asleep the next day at school. Rachel grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and graduated from New York University. She lives in New York City with her husband. Visit her at rachelshukert.com.

Your newest book, STARSTRUCK, is your first novel for young adults. What inspired you to make the switch to YA?

You know, it wasn't exactly a conscious switch. I didn't say to myself, I'd like to write a YA series, what can I think of that would work? It was more organic than that. I had this world in my head, and an idea of how I wanted the book to work and what I wanted it to be like and who I wanted it to be about, and as soon as I began to think of it YA terms, it instantly made sense to me.

I'm a huge old movie buff, and one of the things that has always struck me watching them is how young the performers—especially the actresses—were in those films. They don't seem it, since they're so poised and groomed to within an inch of their lives, but it's always sort of a shock to see, say, Lana Turner playing some totally-in-control femme fatale and then realizing, "Hey, she's only nineteen." Jean Harlow was sixteen when she got her first movie contract; Barbara Stanwyck was fifteen—and they weren't playing kid roles, either.

People really did grow up so much faster historically than they do now (I always think about European medieval history and wonder how different things would have been if everyone making the decisions about warfare and revenge and all of those things weren't, like, 22-year-old boys) but that was fascinating to me, to think of women that young having navigate this incredibly adult world. They're just in the process of discovering who they are, and then there are all these very powerful people saying, "We will make all your wildest dreams come true if you'll just be whoever we tell you to."

Now, that's something everyone goes through to some extent, everyone goes through, but in this world it's really writ large. What does that do to you? How do you handle that? What kind of compromises and sacrifices do you have to make? The conflict was just irresistible to me, as a storyteller.

And then, just in a stylistic sense, I knew I wanted the books themselves to feel as much like old movies as possible, and to me, there is something very cinematic about YA literature. They can have these rich, complicated characters, but the plots themselves really kind of gun forward; there's not this same emphasis on interiority that you get with a lot of literary fiction, where you can go on for about 200 pages with very little action. I wanted that for this, and I wanted to capture some of the longing for glamour and sophistication and escape and recognition that I had as a teenager, and really dig into that in an interesting way.

STARSTRUCK follows three girls seduced by the glamour of Hollywood in the late 1930s—a time period you clearly know well and reference often. Still, it seems apparent that the novel required a good deal of research. What was that process like?

Well, I had actually done a lot of the research without knowing I was doing it! As I mentioned, I was really, really obsessed with this period of history and classic Hollywood in general when I was younger. I read everything about it that I could get my hands on, I watched old movies pretty non-stop for a period of years.

So a lot of things—details about the way the old studios were run, the kind of movies that they made, the historical context of it all—I really had at my fingertips. And since Olympus, the studio all the main characters work for, is fictional, I didn't have to adhere to anything truly exact—I could kind of make amalgam of lots of different studios and a lot of different executives and stars.

The research I did wind up doing was all in the details—really tiny, everyday things, because that's what makes the world feel full and real and makes the reader taken care of. You have to get that stuff right, and then the setting comes to life and the reader doesn't question it. It's like that Japanese idea of making a building so perfect that the architecture disappears.

And that was all stuff that happens in the moment, because you can't exactly predict what you're going to need to know before you get to that part. I mean, literally, I'd get to someone needing to settle a bill in a restaurant. And I'd need to figure out exactly how much it would cost, but then I'd need to know exactly how that character would pay for it. Would they have credit at this place? Would they whip out some big bill and tell the server to keep the change? All of that tells you something about the time and place, and who the character is.

I wanted all the research to kind of do double duty that way. Margo's lipstick that her mother won't let her wear is a good example. I knew I wanted it to be the name of a real lipstick that was on the market at the time, but then I also had to think about which one she would buy. It wouldn't be from a department store, because that would have to be a special trip and she wouldn't go there by herself. So she bought it at the drug store, but a girl like Margo, who is used to having nice things, would want it to be special, she'd save her allowance, maybe. So it was like this math problem: what would be the fanciest lipstick you could buy at a drug store? And the answer is: _____.

But I did get a little compulsive about it all. In the second book, a character takes the train from Hollywood to New York City, and I had to stop writing for three days to figure out exactly how you'd do it, which stations it would leave from, where it would stop, where you'd have to change lines. And there was this point where I was making myself absolutely crazy because I couldn't find the exact time table I needed, of what time the train would leave on what day, and finally, I was just like: "Rachel, this has to stop. Nobody is going to know the difference." But I tried never to do that unless my own sanity was at stake!

Multiple reviewers have compared STARSTRUCK to VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. Do you agree with this assessment—and if so, where do the similarities end?

Look, obviously VALLEY OF THE DOLLS was a huge inspiration for me, and I take those comparisons as a huge compliment: it makes me feel like I told a good story!

Structurally, the books definitely have some things in common: the three main girls, who come from very different places, and I think you can see who their corollaries are. But they're different too. Margo is a lot more ambitious and driven than Anne Welles; Gabby isn't as much of a monster as Neely O'Hara; Amanda is a lot smarter and more self-sufficient than Jennifer North, and they will all change and grow even more as the series goes on.

But the biggest difference is that VALLEY OF THE DOLLS is essentially a cautionary tale, and STARSTRUCK really isn't. Yes, the world the girls are in is dangerous and populated with people who don't have their best interests at heart, and yes, bad things happen and they have setbacks and heartbreaks and make big mistakes. But it's possible to learn from your mistakes, to be smart and strong and resourceful enough to make it through. It may be a cruel world, but you don't have to let yourself be destroyed by it, and staying home your whole life isn't going to keep you safe either.

I don't want anyone—girls especially—to feel like they are going to be punished for having big dreams. To borrow a turn of phrase from THE WIZARD OF OZ, what Margo, Gabby and Amanda are looking for ISN'T in their own back yards, and that they all have the courage to try to find it is in itself a victory. They may be in over their heads, but they are also brave.

Much of your writing reflects on life experiences and mistakes you’ve made (not to mention your incisive observations about TV’s SMASH!)—but targeted more toward (for lack of a better word) grownups. What were some of the challenges in writing for a younger audience?

You know, it honestly isn't something I thought about a whole lot—I was just trying to tell a good story, and let myself do what I needed to do! But I definitely handled a lot of things a little more delicately and euphemistically than I might have otherwise.

Actually, I was really inspired by the source material in this! For most of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, Hollywood adhered to this self-enforced Production Code, this very complicated form of censorship that had all these rules about what you could show and what you couldn't show, what you could say and what you could only allude to.

So all the writers and directors of this time became masters of suggestion—you know, what can you say with a closed door? Or a cutaway shot? I thought about that a lot when I was writing. It's all about leaving things to the imagination.

You have accomplished so much at such a young age, and have already published two memoirs. Do you find it easier to write stories about your life, or to create characters of your own?

Oh, thank you! It doesn't always feel that way. As far as fiction vs. nonfiction goes, I wouldn't say one is exactly easier for me. I will say that nonfiction is faster. By the time I sit down to write a story about myself, I know what happened, I know what it felt like at the time and how I feel about it know, I know my characters.

With fiction, I have to take my time to get to know everyone, to find my way in to the world and all these other people's minds, to figure out the story, logistically and figuratively. It takes a lot more time and energy to imagine.

But once that happens, there aren't really any limits. With my first two books, I was constrained by actual events, you know? With this book, if something wasn't working in the story, I could just change it! And that was a big imaginative leap to make, but once I made it, I was like, this is amazing! The sky is the limit!

So it's different. But easier, no. Writing is never easy, that's the hard truth. But it's also what makes it so great.



5 Questions With... Ruta Sepetys (BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY)

Digging for Details that Make Historical Fiction Delicious

Daniel Kraus is a Chicago-based writer, editor, and filmmaker. His debut novel, THE MONSTER VARIATIONS, was selected to New York Public Library's "100 Best Stuff for Teens." FANGORIA called his Bram Stoker-finalist, Odyssey Award-winning second novel, ROTTERS, "a new horror classic." Upcoming novels include the Junior Library Guild selection SCOWLER (2013) and TROLLHUNTERS (2014), co-written with Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. Visit him online at http://danielkraus.com/.

Your new novel, SCOWLER, reads like a bit of a modern allegory (albeit one cloaked in horror). Can you tell us about how you conceived of the story?

It has been a long, strange journey. I had a nightmare in eighth grade, wrote a three-page story about it, and then thought about that story for, oh, 20 years or so. Along the way the idea picked up other little notions, like burrs onto cotton. But it was always the goal to write about a family that was scared, really deep-down scared, and what kind of extremes it would take to turn that family into something scary enough to fight back.

SCOWLER is written in third-person, switching from one character’s point of view to another’s. What led you to tell Ry’s story in this way?

As you suggested in your first question, I wanted this to have a bit of a lyrical feel to it, like a Midwestern gothic. Grafting that kind of style into the voice of Iowan farmers would probably feel disingenuous. Plus, there's a key moment in the book where I knew I had to pivot away from the main point-of-view. So it wasn't a difficult decision.

Many of your books focus on the strange relationship between father and son. Does your own relationship with your father provide inspiration for the characters in your novels?

This is kind of a no-win question, isn't it? I guess I'll say yes? But within limits? I mean, my dad didn't bury my homework to teach me to rob graves and he certainly didn't chase me through the forest for two days in order to kill me.

Traces of real relationships are all over my writing, but that's just how novels work. The question is why do father-son relationships in general intrigue me, and I don't think that's so hard to figure out. Historically there's rites of violence and toughness that mark the passage to manhood and that's good stuff for fiction, always has been.

You’ve said that good-versus-bad stories bore you. Do you ever plan on writing a novel that strays from your norms of dark and dangerous?

I think it's safe to say that the next three things I'm working on stretch outside what people are expecting from me, and in pretty major ways.

That said, that core idea that we're all bad guys when seen through the right person's eyes is not going to change. I'd like to think nobody gets off scot-free in my books.

You are co-writing your upcoming book, TROLLHUNTERS, with Guillermo del Toro. What’s it like authoring a book with an Oscar-winning filmmaker?

Serious fun. TROLLHUNTERS is a dark book but it's lighter than what I've done so far—how could it not be?—and I really needed that after SCOWLER. It also has a major fantasy element, something I've not dabbled in before.

Sitting down and inventing a monster—an actual monstrous monster-type monster—turns out to be a lot of fun, you know?



5 Questions With... Melina Marchetta (JELLICOE ROAD, FINNIKIN OF THE ROCK)

5 Questions With... Holly Black (WHITE CAT)