Local books: Author creates an alchemy of the simplicity of summer and the complexity of growing up

Picture it. A group of kids, who have known each other since kindergarten, are now 11 years old, maybe 12, and heading into middle school. But right now, it’s summertime, and they’ve taken to congregating in a neighborhood alley, having tacitly designated it as the place to be, the hangout where their days will play out.

Celebrated children’s author Anne Ylvisaker and her daughter, Maria, a visual artist, went out on a 4-mile walk through Skyline Forest, their destination to walk their way into a title for Ylvisaker’s newest youth novel.

“The title for a book can be an arduous journey,” Ylvisaker said. “I already had considered several different titles for my book, but I just couldn’t find the one that really was simple enough and also encapsulated what the novel was about. Since the story takes place in an urban alley over the course of one summer, I don’t remember who said it, probably Maria, ‘Why not, ‘One Alley Summer?'”

Children’s author Anne Ylvisake. (Contributed)

The novel portrays that one seminal summer between elementary and middle school, when kids are changing and their friends are changing and maybe they’re not changing in the same ways and maybe friends will move on or become, somehow, different. But, for that one summer, life is status quo, as they know it, count on it, expect it to last forever.

“I grew up in the alleys that framed our Minneapolis neighborhood, where we gathered,” Ylvisaker said. “Things happened, but these were not the gritty dark alleys we stereotype. This inspired my story.”

Ylvisaker, renowned for nearly 20 nonfiction academic books and now six middle-grade novels, understands that “One Alley Summer” can resonate with anyone who has felt at the core, that time of change when we are around 11 years old. Even the adult audience, reading to a child or to themselves, likely remembers that transitional time when we are forming, shifting into who we are becoming. Or will.

“When we become older,” she said, “we begin to understand that we will go through transitional times, over and over in our lives. ‘Who am I? Who can I be? Who will I be? And will I be accepted? How do I get there?’ This, certainly, has happened to me every decade of my life. So, in writing this youth novel, I was writing that piece of me that is still the 11-year-old who’s changing, which informs who I am today.”

Putting it out there

Sometimes, when an author writes a children’s book, audiences assume the story just spilled out until the author wrote, “The End.” Surely it’s simpler prose than an adult novel, so the process also must be simpler. That depends on the author. Which influences the outcome.

In the process of developing all the books she has published, Ylvisaker has not boxed her mind, framed it by how it will be marketed and who will read it. Instead, she has focused her attention on the depth and quality of her story as it unfolds. Rather than allowing herself to become distracted by the world of marketing, instead, especially in the beginning stages of writing, she gave herself the freedom to explore an idea and follow it through the storyline to see where it would go.

“The conventional wisdom is to think about your audience as you write, but it can be really confining during the writing process,” she said. “In this case, I worked outside the lines and wrote a ‘novel in verse.’ I started with a writing exercise, to write a scene without punctuation. I was playing around, without pressure, and what came up was a scene where kids were jumping rope in an alley. The characters who emerged and the particular feeling of summer delighted me, so I kept going, following these characters close behind.”

At first, Ylvisaker wasn’t entirely sure what she was crafting — perhaps a collection of summer poems, little story vignettes, a full novel — so she just kept following her characters, until she knew their arc.

“The voice that emerged,” she said, “is a first-person narrative, broken-line prose, which lets the words show, physically on the page, how the main character’s mind is working.”

Unlike traditional prose or written language, broken-line prose doesn’t adhere to strict grammar rules or conventional sentence structure. Instead, it plays with the visual and rhythmic elements of language to go beyond storytelling to create an impression. In “One Alley Summer,” the letters of the author’s words may run vertically, words may run together, words may be printed in different sizes.

“It has been fun to express myself in a different way, to tell stories in a different way,” Ylvisaker said. “To lift out of my verbal brain and be able to do something creatively different is so rewarding. As a visual artist and an author, each informs the other. Yet, while I engaged in a kind of creative play, I couldn’t burden my brain by worrying about the marketability of this approach. I needed to stay in my creative process and do something authentic.”

For a time, Ylvisaker tried to write the book in straight prose, but she found the style deadened the voice she wanted to carry throughout the story. While working in broken-line prose, she found it fun to look at a page and ask herself where cool words should be placed to invoke a sense of time. Since everything in the story is happening in present tense, she used broken-line structure to reveal how time had passed. It became such a creative outlet, she said, to solve problems on the page.

Still, it wasn’t an easy sell. For quite a while, the author put her book away and worked on other books, instead.

“It was a good exercise to turn my attention to other projects,” she said. “But, after about six months, my agent emailed me, saying she couldn’t stop thinking about ‘those kids,’ and would I consider giving it another go? This was one of those moments when I had reimagined a book so many times, I wanted to say I couldn’t reimagine it again. But, after a period of deciding I was done with it, I agreed to open it up to see if I could latch onto it and move it forward.”

After a year of reimagining her book, which included creating an entire illustrated diary to show the internal life of the main character, Ylvisaker sold the book to a publisher, she said, “who absolutely loves it.” Some of her diary even made it into the book.

“My process was actually more about expanding and deepening the story than reimagining it,” she said. “I wanted to be able to deepen it emotionally, expand the length of it, and still maintain the buoyancy of the feeling of summer. Particularly that summer. I hope readers are left with that.”

Locally, “One Alley Summer,” published on May 6, is available at River House Books in The Crossroads Carmel, at Pilgrim’s Way in Carmel, at Bookworks in Pacific Grove, and at Olivia & Daisy Books in Carmel Valley, which will host an author event for Ylvisaker on Friday at 1 p.m.