Kelly Barnhill's Blog, page 16

Do you want to see something pretty? (Of course you do)

I just got the go-ahead to share the new cover for the paperback release of The Mostly True Story of Jack. (It hits the shelves on September 11 this year. Mark your calendars.) And I’ll tell you what: I am over the moon for this thing. Over the friggin’ moon.

I’m going to show it to you in a minute.

Hold your horses.

It’s a funny thing about covers, just in general. As a reader, I can say with absolute conviction that a cover can have a massive influence on whether or not I buy a book – either for myself or for something else – as well as the relationship I have with the text at the outset of the book. Forget the truisms: I judge. And so do you.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that books with crummy covers are ultimately doomed. I read a book recently from a writer that I admire, and an excerpt of which I had already read so I knew it was good – and it had the ugliest dang cover I had ever seen. Would I have read the book if I hadn’t known it that the author in question was fantastic? Probably not. Did the cover ruin my experience reading? Well, no…..but I did go in with a certain amount of trepidation.

As a species, we came of age experiencing art visually and aurally. Reading art came way later, and it remains less primal. So covers matter.

Writers worry over them and fuss over them and have absolutely no control. What the cover looks like is almost entirely out of our hands. We hold our collective breath and cross our fingers and visit mediums and gurus and voodoo priestesses and friendly neighborhood witches. We light candles and whisper prayers to the Cover Gods, but in the end, we just have to wait.

I’ve been lucky. I loved the hardcover jacket art on Mostly True Story of Jack, and I had just assumed that lightning doesn’t strike twice, and that I simply wouldn’t like the paperback cover as much as I liked the original.

And oh! Heavens! I was wrong. I like it even more!

Little, Brown hired the same artist to do the pb cover for Jack and both the cover and the interior illustrations for Iron Hearted Violet (which I don’t have the go-ahead to share with you yet, but my word. Just. Wait.) His name is Iacopo Bruno and he is a genius, and if I was still in a child-bearing mode of my life, I would be sorely tempted to name my next kid Iacopo, because he rules.

Here is JACK. Isn’t he pretty?

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: lbyr, Little Brown Books For Young Readers, Mostly True Story of Jack, paperback writer

In Which Leo Composes a Christmas Letter. In May.

My son, deciding that one can never start too early for anything, has already composed his letter to Santa. In May. I’m pretty sure that, at seven, he’s already fairly cognizant that Santa and Parents are one and the same – a theory supported by the fact that his letter to Santa was sitting on the fluffed pillow of his perfectly-made bed (by his standards, of course; not anyone else’s). The note was written on large drawing paper, and then folded multiple times. On the top fold he wrote;

MOM. FOR SHURE DONT READ THIS. I LOVE YOU VERRY MUCH.

Then he wrote his name with a heart around it.

This is not, by any reasonable standard, a typically Leo-ish move. So of course I read the note.

Dear Santa,

(it said)

I am alreaidy planing on being a Good Boy. For Crismas I would like:

1. Star Wars Lego Sets (lots)

2. A real rocket.

3. A real racing car (with rockets)

4. A pet wale or dolfin or chiken.

5. A sack of gold. 

I hope you have been a Good Boy too.

Love,

Leo

Fortunately, I have been given enough time to seek out the best deals on the internet. So, there’s that.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized

Here is my desk. It is filled with rocks.

This is my desk. It is fairly new. Recently my darling husband took it upon himself to make me an office – with a door and everything. Shortly after, I took it upon myself to fill that office full of rocks.

Or, not full of rocks, exactly. But I put a pile of rocks on my desk. To play with.

And I do play with them. Every day. I spread them out, I make new piles. I balance them, one on top of the other. I make stacks.

I like the weight of the rocks in my hand, the variation in texture and heft, the cool solidity. I like the improbable ways in which they balance and lean. I like the delicacy in which they hold their wobbly structures before they roll off my desk and onto the floor. I like the fact that when I bring them to my nose, they still smell like Lake Superior.

Right now, I’m reworking the ending of a book I promised to my agent – oh, I don’t know. A year ago. I’m also wandering through the comments that he just gave me on another book. In one book, stones prevail – large stones, old stones, stones that talk. In the other story, the Great Lakes – though they are never named – are characters in the drama. As I work through both stories, I return, again and again, to my rocks. I think about the icy waves that shaped them. I think about the cold gray of the water as it stretches to the sky.

My rocks tell me not to worry so much.

My rocks tell me to give myself a break every once in a while.

My rocks care nothing for deadlines or reviews or Twitter or book sales or time-sucking social media. What is time to a stone? What is success to water? Granite holds no opinions and limestone carries no grudge. They simply are.

So here’s my question for you, dear readers: What’s on your desk? What is it, when you are in the fire of creativity or the smoke of self-doubt, what holds you down to the green, solid world?

 

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Lake Superior, rocks, Writing desk

Villainous Villains

We’ve been writing about heroes and villains in class this week, and, as was expected, the villains devised by my fourth graders are deliciously macabre and delightfully full of evil. Here are some examples:

A sinister police officer made entirely of boogers.

A sinister assistant principal with a necklace made of fingernails.

A mean old man down the road.

A very large chicken.

Octo-Man: part octopus, part man, all evil.

RubberMan: bullets bounce off of him; he cannot be punched; wants to bounce so high he cracks the world in half.

A diamond thief named Clive.

The Mathematician: because numbers are scary.

The Writer: a dreadful villain who discovers that every thing that he writes comes true. Naturally, he uses this ability to rule the world.

Mr. Gump: hooves for hands, and a general bad attitude.

The Meanest Pig: ’nuff said.

The Worm: A giant worm. It eats whole towns. It is bad ass.

The Zylons: sinister alien race. They eat children.

Bob: kid at school. Freckles, untied shoes, arsenal in the locker.

The Fairy Princess: as beautiful as she is sly; her tinkling laugh is a cover for nefarious schemes.

Giant ants.

Giant cockroaches.

Giant bees.

Giant Killer bees.

Dr. No-Good. Presumably up to no good.

The Teacher: turning students into minions. (Actually, this happens all the time.)

The Conductor: runs an amusement park that is also a portal to a forced labor colony. Cannot be stopped…..or can he?

The Butterfly: captured people and put them in cocoons, thereby turning them into butterflies.

Actually, now that I think about it, there are several people I can think of whose personalities and effects on the world would be greatly improved if they were transformed into butterflies. So I guess I’m Team Butterfly. How about you?

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: heroes, kid writers, teaching writing, villains

Heroes and Villains

It’s Day 3 in my fiction workshop at Chanhassen Elementary, and we are now studying Heroes and Villains. I’m ludicrously excited about what they come up with.

Yesterday, when I introduced the idea and told them to put their brains into high gear so that they’d be ready to go today, I told them a secret:

Villains are really, really fun to write. Maybe even more fun than heroes.

I also told them that every villain is a hero in his or her own mind. No one sets out to be the bad guy. And even good guys are interested in fame and glory and winning. Because really, who doesn’t like winning?

So today, they will be creating heroes and villains and putting them in action. And it’s gonna be awesome.

As we progress forward, I thought I’d put it to you, dear readers. Who are your favorite villains in literature? Who are your favorite heroes? And why on earth do they stick around in our heads and our hearts, long after we’ve closed the book, put it back on the shelf, and moved on?

Filed under: Uncategorized

First Lines

As I mentioned before, I’m teaching this week in Chanhassen Elementary through my work with Compas Arts. (For those of you who work in schools, I can’t say enough good thing about this program. The artists on the roster are some of the most passionate and talented artists that I have ever met, and all are deeply committed to their work as teachers. There is grant money available, and honestly, you could do worse.)

I love this part of my job. I love it a lot

Whenever I start the kids off in their week of working hard writing stories, I have them do a project writing first lines of stories. Stories that do not exist yet. Stories that they would like to read someday. I tell them to write as writers write, which is to say selfishly. Because we are selfish. We follow our own passions, quirks and compulsions. We write to entertain ourselves, and it is ridiculously fun.

I have the kids think about the kinds of stories they like to read. I ask them to think about what hooks them as readers. I read to them a long list of cool first lines, and then I set them to work.

Here is what they wrote:

I was the only one left.

The sun went down, and I knew it was time.

Late one night, Bruce came back from Buffalo Wild Wings and his house was a mess.

There once was a zombie named Trevor.

Close this book and burn it.

I’m not telling you nuthin.

When she went to live on the moon, she swore she would never come back.

School is a prison for me!

We all live in Garbage Town.

She was sitting in a large field where roses bloomed.

Her eyebrows never grew back.

He became the most popular kid in school after that day, and it was all because of one paper airplane and a miniature hamster named Morris.

I told them not to go; of course they didn’t listen.

I woke up and my room was warm. Warmer than usual.

The moment I walked up to the house, the lights went out.

My teacher screamed bloody murder.

When I woke up, the elephant was in my room. And he wasn’t happy.

Yup. I’m pretty sure this week is gonna rule.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Arts, Chanhassen Minnesota, fiction, story writing for kids, why I love teaching, writing residencies

And sometimes we are in the world.

Normally, I wake my children, feed them, make their lunches, wash their faces and haul them off to school, then return to the quiet of my desk. My house doesn’t speak. It doesn’t watch. It breathes and dreams and breathes and dreams, and I write stories in that quiet world.

Sometimes, however, I must expose myself. I must use my voice and my stories and my body and my face to communicate to other people what I do. I do this so that people can learn. I do this so that stories can be told. I do this because it’s too easy to forget that stories matter, that we were built for this work. We were born to tell stories and read stories and listen to stories, and believe in stories. 

Last weekend, I taught a class at The Loft in Minneapolis called What We Write About When We Write About Magic, and then I sat on a panel with Pete Hautman, Heather Bouwman, Sheila O’Connor and Kurtis Scalata and I blathered a bit about my writing process and my thoughts on how children read stories. I don’t know if I made any sense. I don’t know how truthful I was. But if it got one person at that conference to trust themselves and trust their voice and trust their work, then it was time well-spent, I think.

(The conference, by the way, was the Children’s and Young Adult Literature Conference, and it was awesome. And well worth your time for next year.)

Today, I’m powering up at the local Caribou Coffee and getting ready to spend a week teaching story writing to fourth graders at Chanhassen Elementary. I have no doubt that their stories will be magnificent.

This is an intergal part of my work, though teaching – by its nature – thwarts my work. Stops it in its tracks. Teaching is wonderful, but it saps me utterly. I will, at the end of the day, be spent, hollowed, deflated. I will be a dry, dry husk. Still, this is important because it reminds me that stories are primal, vigorous and alive. It is our birthright to tell stories. This is what I will tell these children, and this is what I believe.

And my desk, my office, my dreaming house will all be waiting for me when I return.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Sometimes I am hijacked by poetry

Apparently, I need to return my English degree. And I need to send letters of apology to Sister Margery and Sister Vera and Professor Everyone Else. Because I have learned nothing. Nothing!

I went to the noon Courtroom Concerts that the Schubert Club puts on at the Landmark Center to hear my dear friend KrisAnne Weiss sing. (And oh! She was magnificent! And Oh! That voice!) Among other things, she performed a cycle of songs by a local composer that used the poetry of Amy Lowell as their foundation.

And I realized that I have never, ever read the poetry of Amy Lowell. Indeed, I knew nothing about her. And those poems blew me the frick away.

Amy Lowell was one of those women – born in privilege, yet bound by constraints of narrow-minded American Aristocracy – who baffled the people around her. Denied education, so she vigorously pursued self-education. Bound by the conscriptions of femininity, and threw them off. Spoke in public when it was shocking to do so. She was short, brusque and loud – a wide woman. She was smart-mouthed, quick-tongued and abrasive. She pissed people off. She smoked cigars in public and spoke in public and embraced her off-kilter public persona, when it was taboo for a woman to do so.

And I’m kinda in love with her.

Here are the poems that did it for me. I hope they do it for you as well.

Pyrotechnics

Our meeting was like the upward swish of a rocket

In the blue night.

I do not know when it burst;

But now I stand gaping,

In a glory of falling stars.

Obligation

Hold your apron wide

That I may pour my gifts onto it,

So that scarcely shall your two arms

hinder them

From falling to the ground.

I would pour them upon you

And cover you,

For greatly do I feel this need

Of giving you something,

Even these poor things.

Dearest of my heart

 

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: lesbian poets, Music, poetry

I am large, I contain multitudes.

My daughter, at 2:45 today will become Walt Whitman. She has the hat. She has the rakish stance. She’s got the magnetic stare. Indeed, she’s had them all her whole life. I think, in the end, I can blame myself – I was reading “Leaves of Grass” obsessively when I was pregnant with her. Over and over again I laid down on the grass. Over and over I was the grass. And now she is Walt Whitman. So it goes.

In any case, at 2:45, she and the rest of her fourth grade class will don their outfits and become the Famous Americans that they have spent the last month researching, and explain to the hordes of adoring parents that will be crowding into the room why their person was famous and important, and it will be ridiculously cute. Also, there will be cookies.

This morning, as we were getting ready for school and Cordelia was going over her note cards one last time, she decided to quiz her brother. This is a time-honored tradition of big sisters (I confess to doing it myself, way back when) of quizzing their younger siblings on topics that they know absolutely nothing about so that they can feel deeply informed and awesome. Here’s how the conversation went:

CORDELIA: Leo. Quick. Who was Walt Whitman?

LEO: Ummmm. A garbage man.

CORDELIA: No.

LEO: A farmer.

CORDELIA: No.

LEO: A teacher.

CORDELIA: No. Well, yes. But only for a little while. And he hated teaching.

(That was true. Points to Cordelia. This is what he said about his time living in Long Island teaching school: ”Never before have I entertained so low an idea of the beauty and perfection of man’s nature, never have I seen humanity in so degraded a shape, as here. Ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit, and dulness are the reigning gods of this deuced sink of despair.” Ouch. Even I didn’t have such rough talk for the profession that kicked my butt, long ago. Though, in retrospect, I think I may have used the “sink of despair” line once or twice.)

CORDELIA: (after some consideration) Well, he had lots of jobs. But what job made him famous? Like for forever. What did he do?

LEO: He was a baker.

CORDELIA: No.

LEO: Building canoes?

CORDELIA: No.

LEO: Sewing?

CORDELIA: NO! He was a poet.

LEO: What’s a poet?

ME: A poet is someone who writes poems for their job. Just like a novelist is someone who writes novels for their job.

LEO: Is a bookie someone who writes books for their jobs?

ME: No, that’s something else.

LEO: (thinking) Walt Whitman writes poems?

ME: Well, he did. He’s dead now.

LEO: OH! I KNOW THAT GUY!

CORDELIA: You don’t know that guy. None of us do. Because he’s dead.

LEO: No. I know his poem.

CORDELIA: No you don’t.

LEO: Yes I do. O Captain, my Captain.

ME: (jaw drop)

LEO: (thinking) O Captain, my Captain our fearful trip is done! And….(eyes rolling to the ceiling) then something about bells.

CORDELIA: Nice work Leo. I see you’ve been paying attention.

LEO: I know all about poems. I am a poemer.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Leaves of Grass, Nerd mom, nova classical academy, parenting is poetry

ATTENTION TEENAGED ÆTHERNAUTS, SKYMINERS, AIR PIRATES AND ANACHROPOLOGISTS!

Like Steampunk?

Me too!

Have you ever wondered what an alternate Minnesota would look like? A steam-powered world of intrepid explorers, polished locomotives, bustles, spats, strict adherence to tea time, automatons and teleautomatic robot servants, and high altitude dirigibles? A world where every child knows the name of Nicola Tesla and has his daguerreotype image framed above their pillows? What would our state look like in a steampunk world?

Wonder no more!

This Saturday is Teen and Family day at the Minnesota History Center. The theme: Alternate history – Steampunk, Science Fiction, Magical Realism and other disruptions of the space-time continuum. And it’s gonna be awesome! There will be an interactive Steampunk mystery with the Red Ribbon Society, a steampunk fashion workshop with Leonardo’s Basement, and Bad September will be playing.

And I’ll be there too, along with writers Lyda Morehouse and Kelly McCullough for the Ask-A-Writer panel.

Grab your goggles and top hats, button up your duster jackets, tighten your corsets and be sure to holster your Vapor Particulator Ray Gun. It’ll be fun!

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: MHS, Steampunky goodness, writing