What I did know in this draft was what Mia saw Angie doing at the dance: 

Out in the hall, tucked into the dark space between a corner and a bank of lockers, she is wrapped around a junior boy she called “sorta cute” a couple of times. Their faces press together joined with suction cup mouths. Angie’s arms twist high and tight around his neck. But his hands, fingers spread, move freely, writhing and sliding over her boobs, then slip down, down and around to hike up her short skirt…(“Peer Pressure,” 9)

I also knew that Mia’s response (as in the original bit in  “Faerie Games”) was to find the Edmo character, and rush into an ill-fated kiss that would make her “run to the bathroom and scrub…[her]…mouth over and over” (“Peer Pressure,” 10). These images were as clear to me as my memory of the actual event. What was not clear was where the progression would lead Mia. Ideas surfaced, but none gelled to an ending.

The unfinished story draft, now titled “The Alice Effect” (Mia’s initiation to high school seeming very like a down-the-rabbit-hole experience) went to my VCFA first semester advisor, Uma Krishnaswami. She suggested I read more stories with a second person viewpoint, advising me to “go a little deeper, think about your reasons for using…[second person]…, justify them and it will deepen the work” (Krishnaswami, Letter, 5/6/08). I followed Uma’s advice, and continued to revise.

The changes I made, however, were all about the first two of Kaplan’s revision definitions: style and structure. What I didn’t change about the story, and I believe it is important to note this here, was my instinctive feel that second person was the right viewpoint. Three other aspects of the story also did not change: Mia still watched Angie’s every move closely; Mia still had the brownie kiss encounter; and finally, Mia’s story still had no ending. What this—both what I changed and what I did not—shows me is that even though revision pushed me to get at the heart of Mia’s self-alienation, and even though her story did not have an ending, there were character and story elements that I didn’t change because deep down they felt right.

The next draft, still unfinished, went to VCFA as my fall, 2008 workshop submission, and I determined not to work on it again until I’d received comments. My writing journal shows, however, that the story was on my mind: “July 10, 2008…It freaked me out to hear…[two of my VCFA workshop-mates, pre-workshop]…talk about my YA short that way. It was like I had to get away from them fast” (Tipper, Journal).  During the encounter this entry details, I believe one of my workshop-mates asked me if Mia was gay, or possibly told me she was gay.  I remember being dumbstruck—as my journal shows—but later being curious.  Here’s the next day’s entry:

July 11, 2008…I thought about “The Alice…” and maybe my character will turn to her journal at the end—take back that I voice in writing that will reclaim her soul.  Is she a lesbian?  Is she worried about that? Will she gain a sense of humor?  Write a rap song? I’m not sure, but she will want to get out of the rabbit hole. …Is she in love with Angie? I don’t think so, but she is curious about her and where her head is. Why it seems so easy for her just to grow and feel and be, where she cannot. Mia stands back and watches. (Tipper, Journal)

The ensuing workshop discussion about the story was vivid, and often heated. People made the more expected comments: about whether the second person voice worked; about the structure; about wanting more of Mia’s feelings as opposed to her observations about Angie, etc. etc. But what really struck me was that many of my colleagues, including the two from that earlier encounter, talked about Mia in a way that was completely not as I’d thought of her. Like a window cracking open, I realized that something was going on with my character; something of which I, her creator, was very possibly not aware.   

Back home (and determined to find the story’s end) I turned to my next revision, again focusing on style and structure. I thought about the possibility of Mia’s being gay, but clung in the end to the belief that I would have known that about her at the beginning. This choice comes through clearly in the following passage from a letter Martine asked me to write from my protagonist’s viewpoint about the yearnings of her secret heart. I chose Mia’s letter to be to her best friend, now renamed Stacey:

The thing is I’m stuck in my head. I wish I could stop thinking about how weird everything is, how weird I am, but I can’t do that either. I’m this freaky eyeball who watches everything and everyone around me like I’m outside my body. I don’t want to be like that. I want to be like you and “just be”. You know, experience stuff without getting all twisted up inside. I just don’t know if I can do it. (“Mia’s Letter,” 8/28/08)

Choosing Mia’s letter to be to Stacey told me more about Mia’s fixation on her friend, but I chalked that element up to: first, the story being mostly about the two girls, and second, that it seemed a natural teen choice to confide in a best friend.

With the letter before me, I continued revising, still focusing on style and structure, and now including: the image of a scrutinizing eyeball dogging Mia; lines indicating how her parents’ divorce exacerbated her feelings of depression and isolation; and dialogue and narration to give the whole story a more active tone. I also found the following ending:

Snap—the night and everything that’s come before—tastes, smells, touches, Stacey, Mom, Dad, Alec—crowd in, all alive inside you. Makeup drips into your eyes and you rub at them, at your cheeks, until all that’s left is your face staring into the mirror, pale and shiny and clean.

Three girls you don’t know come into the bathroom. They smile at you like they’ve never seen you before. And, you realize, they haven’t. You smile back, looking beyond them to the door. Snap—Come on Mia!

Out. (“The Alice Effect,” 12)

This ending’s great revelation supported my initial presumption of the story’s meaning: that Mia, as a sexually awkward teen pressured by a newly sexy best friend, chooses in the end to stay on her own awkward path. Here’s part of Martine’s response, particularly to the ending:

I kept thinking that something big would be revealed at the end, something that explained this blue funk, this out-of-body eyeball thing. I really thought she was going to tell us she was gay! Because… because why does she act jealous when the boy shows up with Stacey? And why does she watch Stacey undress and get so affected by it? Why does she stand so long watching Stacey and the boy making out? And then… it ends. Are you sure she’s not gay? When I read the letter from Mia, I thought, maybe I just missed it and she will confess it in her letter… (Leavitt, Letter, 8/28/08)

Martine’s words surprised me. Not the part where she thought Mia was gay—after all, I’d heard that before—but how she focused on Mia’s actions. I’d described Mia’s observations as effectively as I could but hadn’t truly examined how Mia watched Stacey. Was she jealous when she observed Stacey in her new clothes the first day of school? Why was she focusing on Stacey being undressed? Or making out in the hallway? I’d thought Mia was both depressed and fascinated by her friend’s changes; what I wondered now though was, what was the true nature of this depression and fascination?  

Next week: find out what Mima discovers about Alice in the final installment!

Mima Tipper spends as much time as possible writing stories and novels for kids and teens, and recently had the tremendous good fortune to earn an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Along with being mad-proud that her YA short story “Waiting for Alice” is in the premiere issue of Sucker Literary Magazine (live now), she is thrilled that another YA short story, “A Cut-Out Face”, is live now as well in the latest Hunger Mountain online Journal of the Arts, Art & Insanity of Creativity issue. Mima lives in Vermont with her family, and can be found @meemtip on Twitter.

Writing my YA short story “Waiting for Alice,” the story-epiphany moment came as I stood in line at my local public library. Here’s what happened: I was waiting to check out books I’d picked specifically to help me with my revision of “…Alice,” and imagined having the following conversation with the librarian:

Her: “Are these for one of your kids?

Me: “No.  They’re for my character… (motherly pause)…she thinks she might be gay.”

A silly idyll yes, but one that in a single, astounding moment opened my eyes, or better my mind, to what my Alice had been trying to tell me for the almost year I’d been working on her story.

I walked home in a daze, imagining myself sitting with Alice at the kitchen table. Sitting with her, as I would with one of my children, her looking into my eyes in that hesitant way that asked if I was ready to listen.  When she did speak, there was no hesitation, “It’s true,” she said, “I think I’m gay.” Her words left me speechless. I hadn’t set out to write a story about a young girl’s first realization that she might be gay, but that’s where the writing path led. What held my hand, tugging me along until I could hear Alice speak (more like a remembered conversation than one imagined) was revision—a kind I hadn’t experienced before (Kaplan, 27).

My Alice-epiphany made me re-examine my knowledge of revision. David Michael Kaplan offers these words in his craft book Revision:

I think you revise for style (saying it in the most graceful way, which is often all people think revision is), and you revise for structure (saying it in the most coherent and dramatically effective way), and you revise—and here comes the way you might not have thought about it before—for meaning, for discovering what you really wanted to say in the first place, what the story’s really about. (10)

I was familiar with (and practiced heavily) Kaplan’s first two revision definitions. Regarding meaning, however, until “…Alice” I’d always presumed I knew the essential meaning of my stories before I started writing. So what had happened with my Alice?

To understand, I had to go back to the beginning.

The seed of “…Alice” came from one of my high school experiences. My best friend and I, tenth graders at an all-girl boarding school, decided to go to the first dance of the year, meet a boy each, and kiss him. Fueled by vodka-laced grape soda, off we went. There, each of us found a boy. By evening’s end, my friend had disappeared with hers, but I hadn’t even managed a peck on the cheek with mine. I watched him get on his return bus, and something in me snapped. I rapped on the bus window. He got off and, before I lost my nerve, I threw myself at him. He’d just had a huge bite of brownie, and well—yuck! Amidst raucous cheers from bystanders, both of us had a good laugh and, as the bus zoomed off, I forgot all about him and the brownie kiss.

Fast-forward twenty-some years to my fantasy novel “Faerie Games,” where in a first chapter draft, I drew from this memory to illustrate my fourteen year-old protagonist Selena’s sexual awkwardness at witnessing a friend’s behavior at a school dance:

And she had found her. Out in the hall, tucked into the dark space between a corner and a bank of lockers, wrapped around a junior she’d called “sorta cute” a couple of times. Their eyes had met over junior-boy’s shoulder, and for a long, drawn out heartbeat, Selena hadn’t recognized her best friend. It was like in that moment, Selena saw clearly that the Stacey she’d lived next door to and been best friends with forever had run away to a place where Selena wasn’t sure she wanted to follow.

But that night, Selena had tried to follow. Like a hound scenting a fox, Selena stalked around the gym until she’d spotted Edmo’s hunching back standing at the refreshment table. Without saying a word or even looking at his face, she’d grabbed his hand and dragged him out into the hall. In one swift, blurred move, Selena had pushed him against the wall and with no thought about what she was doing or how she was doing it, shoved her open mouth on his. (“Faerie Games,” 15)

I submitted the chapter to my first Vermont College workshop, and it was workshop leader Martine Leavitt’s comment “What did she see?” written in the margin next to the first paragraph quoted, that sparked me to explore in a short story what Selena saw Stacey doing.

As I began to think of this short story, I remembered Dennis Lehane’s short story “Until Gwen.” Lehane used a second person viewpoint, and I’d found the voice both disturbing and intriguing. Freshly out of prison, Lehane’s narrator was detached, yet watched himself with an intimacy laced with self-loathing. This viewpoint spoke to me as authentic for my self-scrutinizing, awkward teenager.

My story, now tentatively titled “Peer Pressure,” quickly took shape around the awkward narrator Mia and her newly sexy best friend Angie. With Mia’s second person viewpoint, her voice naturally came out full of observations about Angie’s blooming appearance and aggressive behavior; also natural was that Angie’s looks and attitude would be in stark contrast to Mia’s. Though the initial novel-flashback was morphing to a short story, the essential meaning—a young girl’s sexual awkwardness—still drove the heart of my writing. Then an unusual (for me) turn: I got two thirds through a first draft and didn’t know how Mia’s story ended.

Next week: Mima searches for the story’s ending!

Mima Tipper spends as much time as possible writing stories and novels for kids and teens, and recently had the tremendous good fortune to earn an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Along with being mad-proud that her YA short story “Waiting for Alice” is in the premiere issue of Sucker Literary Magazine (live now), she is thrilled that another YA short story, “A Cut-Out Face”, is live now as well in the latest Hunger Mountain online Journal of the Arts, Art & Insanity of Creativity issue. Mima lives in Vermont with her family, and can be found @meemtip on Twitter.

There hasn’t been a better time to be an author since Gutenberg figured out how to make duplicate copies of a single page without requiring clerks and scribes to hunch over desks with feather quills clenched in their arthritic fists. But just like in Gutenberg’s day, the one thing that is making the work of being an author more rewarding than ever before is technology.

When e-reading devices first became the literary It Girl back in 2006, critics called them a flash in the pan while supporters argued that it was finally going to be the end of paper. Everywhere, people either hailed or despaired of the death of the publishing industry as we know it.

As the dust has settled a little on digital reading, we are finally able to clearly see that digital and print are probably going to survive hand-in-hand. There are great reasons for both, as well as established reading audiences for both. But now, there are also writers for both formats, authors who have the know-how and desire to self-publish their works electronically, as well as authors who support the digital editions that come along as a way to reach out to a broader audience through their traditional publishers.

Something we can always count on wherever technology is involved is change: bigger and better equipment, flashier formats, new concepts to enhance our lives. And reading is no different. Enhanced ebooks incorporate unlimited full-color graphics and videos into a book, audio embedding means an author can weave a soundtrack into the book as it is read, even juvenile content now offers interactive features that teach reading and vocabulary while narrating a story.

And the technology hasn’t just taken over the books, but the work of being an author as well. Social media gives writers a share some of the work of building a fan base and promoting titles. Blog tours translate into greater access for developing an online presence. Even now, book signings don’t have to mean setting up a card table in a bookshop and waiting for fans to buy print editions of your works; now, a four-way recorded video chat allows fans to “meet” their favorite authors and ask questions while buying highly personalized digital copies and having them streamed instantly to their e-readers.

These changes have given authors so much more to do in terms of choice and control throughout their careers. The real benefit to the wealth of change taking place in the industry as a whole means the technology of books has made this era in publishing the best time to be a reader as well.

Check-out Mercy’s blog at LorcaDamon.com.

If you are interested in being a guest blogger on Henandinkblots, please contact info [a t] henandink.com

After reading Hannah R. Goodman’s bio, all I could think was, “Whoa! She’s the whole package!” Not only does she write full time, having self-published three YA novels (two award winners), and publishing her YA short stories on Amazon shorts, in an anthology titled Bound is the Bewitching Lilith, and in “Balancing the Tides,” but also she’s earned an MFA from Pine Manor’s Solstice Program, blogs regularly about the writing life, and offers writing classes (go to her site www.hannahrgoodman.com for more info about these.) With all of that going on (let’s not forget regular life stuff like wifing and mothering) it’s tempting to think Hannah could not possibly have time for more. That kind of thinking would be wrong. Recently, Hannah began a new writing/editing venture—a literary magazine devoted to YA fiction called SUCKER that debuted on January 23, 2012 (find it at: http://suckerliterarymagazine.wordpress.com/.)

Today she’s kindly agreed to share some of her SUCKER journey with me, her fellow coop-mate, in this Hen&Inkblots interview.

– Mima Tipper

MIMA TIPPER: Hi, Hannah! First off, huge, huge congratulations to you and your staff for bringing SUCKER LITERARY MAGAZINE into the world!

HANNAH GOODMAN: Thanks!

MT: Your Editorial Welcome in SUCKER’s first issue does a wonderful job of telling your story, but we’d love to hear it here: please tell us a little bit about your background and about what made you decide to start SUCKER.

HG: My background/story has been heavily self-documented on my blog: Write Naked http://www.hannahrgoodman.blogspot.com/p/about-me.html and then my writing journey http://hannahrgoodman.blogspot.com/2008/03/more-rants-on-not-getting-book-deal-yet.html… which lead me to go to Pine Manor College and get my MFA in Creative writing at the Solstice program. The supportive, non- competitive environment made me feel very self-empowered after a decade of rejection and near misses. Going to school made me remember why I write…and it wasn’t to get a book deal. It was for the cathartic release I need, it was to survive being human. (Sorry to get too heavy here). SUCKER was an idea that I had as a result of trying to get short fiction published and seeing there was no home for YA…my kind of YA, edgy.

MT: What has been most difficult about this venture? Most rewarding? Most unexpected?

HG: TIME! I work, have children, have to work on my own writing, husband, friends, family…
Most rewarding are the emails from those writers who submitted… saying how grateful they are to hear why their piece was accepted or rejected…also the mentoring we do has received tremendous positive feedback.  
Most unexpected was…can I say this? That Publisher’s Weekly interviewed me BEFORE I really had SUCKER underway…Also, Erzsi found me…an agent wanted to look at my work after years of the other way around. Truly a surprise!

MT: That’s awesome news on the PW piece and on signing with Erzsi—double congrats there! Back to SUCKER, I know my own experience working with you on “Waiting for Alice” (the final story in SUCKER’s first issue) was seamless and probably uncharacteristically low-impact editorially-speaking, and I’m wondering what it’s been like working with new writers, editors, readers, artists? Is it all you hoped it would be?

HG: Working with new writers and editors has been seamless— to use your word. I have a clear vision of what I want and can communicate pretty clearly that vision. They were all receptive and supportive. IT was a dream. MOST of the writers whose work I accepted went through a somewhat intense editing and revision process. I am a teacher by trade…and a bit of a perfectionist. I also saw raw talent that just needed a smidge of guidance. I enjoy the giving part of being a mentor. It feels nice to pay it forward. I’ve had generous mentors and know the value of encouraging but critical feedback.

Artists…we didn’t have many submissions and many didn’t seem to understand the vision, which is probably because as a person who sees only words in my head, I probably didn’t communicate clearly the VISUAL vision I had of Sucker. Luckily my BFF Alyssa knows me in that old married couple way–I make a few grunts and noises and she gets what I mean. She wound up doing most of the art work. One of my high school students did the cover…again, she understood my vision.  

MT: Getting more specific about this first issue (btw, it looks awesome and reads awesomer) how do you work with SUCKER’s staff? Describe the process of your dialogue with your readers and artists.

HG: We e-mail. I didn’t Skype once or make a phone call. I have a feedback form for my staff readers. All submissions went to them (I had a glance at them as they came in and decided which ones should be read and which needed to be rejected outright). The staff readers fill out the form (it’s very detailed and reflects my personal vision for the type of literature I want to publish). Readers return the forms to me and then I read every single one and make ALL final decisions about which are rejected, mentored, and accepted. The dialogue with the artists was all in person, except Sarah Tregay, who sent a submission.

MT: From the humorous to the dramatic to the heartbreaking, this first issue has an amazing variety of stories; how did you decide on story placement within the magazine?

HG: Instinct…Try not to have too many serious or dark ones in a row. : ) 

MT: What will SUCKER offer readers, particularly teen readers, that other literary print/online journals do not?

HG: Something different…something edgy and compelling.

MT: Could you elaborate on those concepts?

HG: The something different for me is not just “please no more vampires.” It’s about how the characters collide, connect, bounce off one another AND the situations they find themselves in. It’s about making the ordinary Extraordinary.  So take that vampire and put him on a skateboard (as I say on the blog) and then have him (literally) crash into a human teenage guy who happens to be on the sidewalk at the same time and maybe they fight and maybe the vampire loses. Maybe they become great friends. Maybe they fall in love.

Compelling is about relationships for me. What happens when two souls collide? I mean this in ALL ways…Friendship, parent-child, teacher-student…Boy meets girl, boy meets boy…Whatever, what happens when two people connect or meet and they feel something…love or hate or disgust, whatever. Now, go from there. 

Edgy means do not avoid sex, drugs, complicated friendships and relationships with parents. That being said, it’s not just about the subject. It’s also about language and voice. Make the characters sound authentic. Make the narrative voice reflect the tone of the story.

Also, DO NOT PREACH!

MT: Describe some positives in creating an online journal as opposed to a print journal.

HG: We have no budget because we have no money. So that was the major positive. Also, distribution is easier.  

MT: How many issues per year will SUCKER have, and how will you market the journal, especially to teens?

HG: I wish I had firm answers for these. Taking it one day at a time because TIME is my issue. I am aiming for one. Marketing is word of mouth right now. I work with teens and am counting on them and their schools. 

MT: Going a bit broader for a moment, what has your experience with SUCKER taught you about how teens read? About how we can keep teens reading?

HG: Write about things that are high interest…don’t shy away from “taboo” topics. Stay relevant and current. Listen to the teens around you and talk to them about reading and books. Treat them like regular people : ) 

MT: Let’s talk about submissions for a moment. When you read a sub, how many paragraphs does it take for you to know if a piece is a “Go”?

HG: Three sentences. : ) 

MT: What are instant turn-offs?

HG: Preaching…proselytizing…bigotry…prejudice…small-mindedness… Bad writing that uses cliched language and too many pop culture references. 

Also, when people don’t read about what we want. Our blog is so specific about what we publish.

MT: On a more personal note, I’d love you to describe your typical workday—how do you balance life and writing/SUCKER life?

HG: *laughs uncontrollably*
get up, get kids ready for school, exercise, get dressed, go to Starbucks answer emails of clients and students, read submissions and send off to readers, do some of my own writing go home and see students until around 6, make dinner with family, have some kind of family time (art work, dancing…etc..) bath and bed…Some days my little one isn’t at school so that writing and reading submission time doesn’t happen. I’d say 3 weekdays are like what I just described. Sunday mornings are a huge chunk of time for me to work too. 

MT: How has working on SUCKER changed/taught you as a writer? As a writing mentor?

HG: I feel more confident because I actually made this vision a reality and did it MY way! 

MT: What makes a good editor and how does your work as a writer feed your editorial work with SUCKER?

HG: I am a really good student to my own mentor and agent. I listen really well and can take all kinds of criticism and apply it as I see fit.  

MT: We’d also love to know what books are on your nightstand. Would you share three YA novels you’ve read recently that you would recommend to those wanting to submit stories to SUCKER?

HG: Almost Perfect
Tangled
Beginner’s Love (old school Norma Klein) 
Some Girls Are
The Duff
Some Day This Pain Will Be Useful To You

Totally more than 3! What I like about these books is that they are voice and character-driven with gritty, authentic teen language with solid, literary writing that isn’t overloaded with cliched language or lame pop culture references—they have both a current and timeless quality to them.

MT: Personal goals? Plans for SUCKER’s future?

HG: Yes, that writing and being an editor become my full time job so that I can live that dream exclusively. OR I win lotto so that I can do that and not worry about it as a paying job. 

I have a YA series that I REALLY want to have published with a big-ish pub house…or a house that will market me really well. 

MT: Anything else you’d like to share?

HG: Yes…I want to thank the fans and staff of Sucker and tell them that they inspire me to do this all over again! 

MT: Thanks for your time, Hannah, and best of luck with SUCKER!

About the author
Half-Greek-half-American, Mima Tipper and her writing reflect her heritage—a little bit old-country, a little bit rock and roll; one foot wandering through the dreamy realm of myths and faerie tales, the other running on the solid ground of fast-paced, contemporary story.  Recently she received her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and her YA short story “A Cut-Out Face” was a finalist for Hunger Mountain’s Katherine Paterson Prize.  Beyond devoting most of her time to writing, Mima is a member of SCBWI, and is committed to promoting literacy and to supporting the writing community.  Two items of which she’s especially proud are: helping create the Bakeless Writing Prizes offered by the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference; and receiving the VCFA Alumni Prize, awarded for outstanding support and encouragement of her VCFA colleagues.  Currently Mima lives in Vermont with her family; find her on Twitter and Facebook.

I close my eyes, and a fat black hen comes clucking. She wears wattles and a comb of scarlet.

Cerridwen?

This is your story, she says. It is the story of becoming.

It begins with a boy and a blind man being stolen by a witch to tend a magical brew that they must neither touch nor taste. But, on the very last day, as the boy reaches in to remove a dead fly three drops splash on his hand. He sucks his finger to cool it, and in an avalanche of sound — the screams of sky and stone, of wind and water, of bird and every beast — he hears the entire world telling him to run!

The fabulously powerful and now furious witch is enraged by his tasting of her potion.

The boy wishes for the speed of a hare, and in no time he is hare, leaping across the fields. But the witch takes the form of a greyhound and chases him.

The hare reaches a stream where he wishes for fins. The boy is suddenly salmon, swimming against the current and the witch, a starving otter diving after him.

He sees her coming and wishes for wings. He becomes a swallow shooting through clear skies. But the witch has turned hunting hawk.

The swallow sees a farm and on that farm, a barn. He drops from the sky as a single grain of wheat and hides himself amongst a thousand others. But the witch will not be fooled. She becomes a black hen and with her strong sharp beak, she pecks her way through the grain until she finds him and consumes him, husk and all.

This is my story? I ask.

The black hen glares, You have yet to hear the end!

In her fat stomach, the boy thrashes about his way and that until his husk is broken and he can move no more. In the nine months that follow he dreams of characters and settings, of words and plots. Understands the conflict of sun and shadow, the tension of lover and loved. He is fed by fools, led astray by heroes and sung to by imagination and dreams. After nine months he is full, and she spits him into the world as a baby she will not keep.

Wrapping him in the thin stomach of a cow, she sets him in a river where he floats gently into the arms of the man she has chosen to foster him.

The boy grows up to become Taliesin, the greatest bard of Britain.

He brings his foster father wealth and fame, but is better remembered for his songs, long passed down through bloodlines, and craft lines and lines linked to the lay of the land. Songs telling the power of revision and change, and the unexpected journeys such work takes us on.

The greatest bard of Britain I do not dream to be, but a bard on a bestsellers list would be good.

Cerridwen, are you there?

Mighty Goddess of inspiration, transformation and rebirth, send me a sign telling me how to make it happen!

I see a small black hen with a scarlet crest, a three feathered tail, and “Hen & ink” spilling from her side.

I feel a greyhound on my tail, an otter at my toes and a hunting hawk not far behind. I start to work and work fast and well.

With courage in my hands and hope in my heart, I follow the trail of grain to the home of the fat black hen, and hammering at her door (in the south of France), I ask her to thrash my words about, this way and that, so they find the form to win the perfect heart of the editor who will foster them into fully-grown books.

With two black hens and this growing sun I seek:

The house of becoming.

The editor who will.

And the birth of a brand new bard.

– Sandra Guy

Sandra Guy is a prize-winning poet and writer of articles, stories, short films and monologues but her special interest is in teen fiction. Her writing has appeared in books and magazines in the UK, France and the United States. After graduating with a degree in English from Bristol University, Sandra worked in advertising, ran a theatre production company, and worked with young homeless people. Sandra is currently studying Traditional Chinese Medicine with a view to specializing in acupuncture. She lives in Amsterdam with her son and two cats. You can check out her writing at: www.sandraguy.com.

We’ve all heard that when you try to analyze humor, it dies in the process.  But we writers and storytellers have to understand how humor works.  You don’t become a surgeon without dissecting some cadavers.

We also have to carefully consider, even study our end user—the specific reader. Humor is subjective.

How humor works is pretty simple, really. Comedy writer Brad Schreiber says, “Shock or surprise is the undergarment that holds in the unsightly flab of humor writing.”

Yes, humor, largely powered by SURPRISE, lives in the GAP between what a reader expects and what she gets. Even the simplest pun—HEN & INK—relies on twisting the expected.

Producers of the unexpected include incongruity, exaggeration, understatement, absurdity, embarrassment, and even recognition of the (uncomfortable) truth. They all fuel humor. The last is one of the most important. The truth at the core of most of what’s funny, is pain. 

Carol Burnett said, “Comedy is pain, plus time.”

Another great comedienne, Lily Tomlin, asked, “If olive oil comes from olives, and peanut oil comes from peanuts, where does baby oil come from?”

This is a perfect example of the power of three in humor: there’s 1) setup, 2) repetition, and 3) surprise.

Pairing two normal oil producers, olives and nuts, with a BABY is unexpected. Also, olive oil comes from crushed olives, peanut oil comes from crushed peanuts, and baby oil does NOT come from crushed babies. That’s sick.

OK, you see how dissecting it kind of kills it.

But the power of three, just like a pun, works because of an unexpected switcheroo.

Now, it’s NO surprise regarding humor’s subjectivity: its reception varies greatly across lines of age, gender, culture, education, etc.  To examine something foreign and surreal, let’s take a look at what makes seven to nine year-old boys laugh. I suspect they are predictable around the globe—into the absurd and potty humor. Not at all what makes a 50 year-old woman laugh (well, most of them).

Captain Underpants was a huge hit in our household when each of my sons was in that age zone.  So I analyzed what Dav Pilkey did to render my children helpless with laughter.

In The All New Captain Underpants Extra-Crunchy Book O’ Fun 2, in a section called “The Night of the Terror of the Revenge of the Curse of the Bride of Hairy Potty,” absurdity runs rampant. Pilkey also uses in addition to overstatement and exaggeration, the old comic trick of parody. Parodying J.K. Rowling’s venerable Harry Potter with a hairy potty is not just surprising, it’s so off-the-wall that it is difficult to discuss soberly.   

But I’ll try.  A female and male hairy potty (drawn just like they sound—toilets sprouting hair all over, with eyes and legs) run amok vandalizing signs, such as “THEATER: Now Showing, Bridget Jones’ Diary,” into  “Bridget Jones’ DiarRHEA.” That got my youngest son going, but he laughed apoplectically at the page that shows a sign reading first, “Please drive very slowly over the tracks. Children at play.” This is already absurd as children are generally not playing on train tracks. The male hairy potty zaps part of it, leaving a broken sign that now reads, “Please drive slowly over children.”

When asked why he found an invitation to run over kids so hysterical, seven-year-old George said, red-faced and gasping, “I don’t know. It just is.”

The shock that a sign might invite people to drive over children playing, astonished and delighted him, although perhaps appreciation of dark humor runs in the family. Pilkey’s books also rely heavily on the scatological that relies on the embarrassing. And anti-authoritarianism and plenty of rule-breaking are hard at work. The characters do nothing BUT the unexpected.

How could a reader possibly know what to expect from talking toilets?

Oh, I forgot. The male and female hairy potties fall in love, usually another source of hilarity to young boys. Throw on top of all this the threat of death or serious dismemberment and Pilkey had a huge winner.

When the unexpected touches on a truth, especially a dark one, the surprise and emotional response are all the deeper and more satisfying. Children’s worlds are full of bigger and more powerful people and institutions, and an infinite number of potentially frightening and humiliating situations. Is Hairy Potty’s vandalized sign to run over children getting close to the uncomfortable truth of the oppression and danger of the world? Perhaps. Regardless, it’s burlesque in spades and it rocks a seven-year-old’s world.

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Ann Jacobus
Recently returned to the US, Ann Jacobus lived for seventeen years in Europe and the Middle East. Her passion for stories, however, was nurtured by school librarians in Little Rock, Arkansas. She graduated from Dartmouth College, and earned an MFA in Writing for Children from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She writes YA and middle grade fiction, teaches writing for children, reads kid lit submissions for Hunger Mountain literary magazine and for the Katherine Paterson Prize, and presents at graduate conferences in the US and Canada. Ann’s story, “In Her Hand,” was published in the anthology, Lines in the Sand: New Writing on War and Peace. She blogs regularly at Readerkidz. She and her family and their dog, Louie, live in San Francisco.
http://www.annjacobus.com

I wake up to a rare New Orleans day without heat or humidity. The bougainvillea blooms bright orange in my backyard; the sweet olive scents the street; and the woman next door zips up her fleece and jumps on her bicycle.  I sit on my bedroom rug and meditate on happiness. And I mentally share that happiness with people who need it.

But at breakfast, I have a toothache, and my throbbing cuspid bites at my mood. I probe my infected tooth with my finger, and all I can think about is the money I’ll have to spend on another root canal. And how I can’t eat the chewy multi-grain roll I wanted for breakfast. I slump in my chair. “It hurts,” I keep telling myself, and nothing about the day feels right anymore, so I sulk.

How did I go from high to low in the space of an hour? My mind flits and flutters through moods as if I’m flipping through the Yellow Pages, searching but never finding what I want. But underneath my mental gymnastics, there is a spacious, unchanging, luminous and natural state of mind. How do I know? Because I’ve glimpsed it, or felt it, during meditation. I’ve had those fragmentary experiences when my skin, my flesh, and my bones peel away until I am nothing but nothing. No toothaches. No dental bills. No anguish. No Whitney.

And then just as fast, my mind jumps back in to define or describe the glimpse I just had. And it’s gone. I want it back. I claw at it. I yearn for it. I beg my mind to make it reappear. But it doesn’t. It’s not at my command. And the only thing I can do is wait. And meditate. Not just when the bougainvillea is blooming and my neighbor is out for a ride, but when my tooth is aching, and I am sulking. That’s as good a time as any.

MEET WHITNEY

Whitney Stewart is the author of GIVE ME A BREAK: NO-FUSS MEDITATION, a mini-ebook available at http://www.amazon.com/Give-Me-a-Break-ebook/dp/B004FGMT8G

Whitney Stewart grew up in New England and graduated from Brown University. She published her first award-winning YA biography after interviewing the 14^th Dalai Lama of Tibet, the subject of two of her books. For her next biographies, she trekked with Sir Edmund Hillary in the Everest region of Nepal; interviewed Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon, Burma; and traveled extensively in Asia to research the lives of Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, and Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. She is the author of three middle-grade novels and multiple middle-grade nonfiction books, including a picture book about an unknown tale of Abraham Lincoln and Francis Bicknell Carpenter based on her family documents. Stewart lives in New Orleans. Catch her on Twitter and Facebook and at whitneystewart.com

Actually, the first part of the story is the stuff that Misery Lit is made of. A three-book deal with a major UK publisher went sour after my editor left and my books received no marketing support. If this part of my life had a title it would be something like, ‘Please Publisher, No!’ or ‘A Writer Called It.’ But I went away and licked my wounds and continued to write. And run writing workshops for young people. Which led to me writing my first novel for young people; a novel made up entirely of emails, called Dear Dylan.

As my previous agent only represented writers for adults I sent Dear Dylan off to a handful of children’s agents. They all sent it back, most of them expressing concerns that the email format was ‘too risky’. I then sent it directly to a publisher and was offered a two-book deal within a fortnight. The commissioning editor commented on how refreshing it was to receive something so different and if another agent sent her a book about a wizard she was going to scream! Aha, I hear you cry, this is the part where my story turns from Misery Lit to Hollywood happy ever after. Not quite – after all, I hadn’t met Erzsi yet…

As soon as I was sent a contract from the publisher it became blatantly obvious that they were taking advantage of the fact that I was acting sans agent. Thankfully I had contracts from my four previous books to compare it with but the whole thing left a very bad taste in my mouth. I was so disillusioned with publishers by this point that I withdrew my book and decided to self-publish. Dear Dylan came out in April 2010 and, thanks to the wonderful network of YA bloggers, it was soon causing a bit of an online buzz. Emboldened by the lovely reviews it was receiving, I decided to enter Dear Dylan into a national book award. I knew that most awards didn’t accept self-published books but I thought, what the hell, it’s worth a try.

A couple of weeks later I received an email telling me that Dear Dylan had been accepted into the competition. A couple of months later, I received an email telling me that it had been long-listed. I was so excited I had to go and have a little jig around the toilet at work! In September last year I learnt that Dear Dylan had made it to the shortlist of six books. The other five were by writers I hugely respect and all from major publishing houses. That, to me, was as good as winning. This time I didn’t just jig around the toilet – I whooped and hollered too!

The night of the award ceremony arrived. I was so sure I hadn’t won I didn’t even bring anyone with me. When the host called my name I assumed I’d come sixth. It was only when she presented me with a beautiful award that it finally hit home. My self-published book had won a national award!

The next day it was as if the whole world had gone crazy. Literary agents were actually contacting me – including some of those who had turned down Dear Dylan in the first place. I had great fun returning the favour! And then I received an email from Erzsi. She explained that she was just about to set up her own literary agency (having dreamt of doing so for years) and would I be interested in being her very first writer. It was as if the paths of our dreams had crossed with her email and I loved the idea of helping each other make those dreams come true.

Since signing up with Erzsi at Hen&ink I haven’t looked back. She took Dear Dylan to auction in the UK and I ended up with a two book deal with Egmont. French and German rights have also been sold and she has several film companies considering my work. Being a Hen&ink author is a wonderful experience. As Erzsi’s coop has grown she has encouraged a real feeling of camaraderie amongst her ‘chicks’ – as well as a wealth of hen puns. It really has been clucking marvellous!

– Siobhan Curham

Siobhan Curham is an experienced writer and respected writing coach. As a freelance writer she has contributed to SHE, Daily Express, Bella, That’s Life, Pregnancy and Birth, Mother & Baby, Cosmopolitan, Chat, Daily  Mirror, The Mail on Sunday, with self-help articles being her specialty.  Siobhan currently works as a story deviser and commissioning editor for Hothouse Fiction. Her first novel for young adults Dear Dylan was winner of the YoungMinds Book Award 2010 and she has just finished a second novel for young adults. Visit her at: www.siobhancurham.co.uk